Arjun
@clipsofcrypto
crypto clipping | working w @scottmelker @laurashin @LoganJastremski @_choppingblock and @touchgrass_pod
128 Following 939 Followers
Qiao ranks the AI leaders on trust, Demis, Elon, Zuck, Dario
"The most trustworthy person for me is Demis Hassabis. Unfortunately he stepped back, the former CEO and founder of DeepMind. He's now chairman, so he's stepping back from day to day to focus on his own project."
"Probably for internal political problems, or because Google is a public company, they have to make money, whereas Demis, his interest is curing cancer. So he's stepping back from the profit driven business to focus on intellectual curiosity. I'm okay with that."
"The way he speaks, he's just a nerd. He might have some God complex too, but who wouldn't at that level? The way he speaks is very likable."
"And then after that's Elon, of course. After that is Zuck. And at the bottom is Dario. My last one is Dario. I don't trust that guy at all."
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"Nvidia is now the Federal Reserve of AI"
Qiao and Imran on the financing moat Nvidia is building around its own chips
"There was news of Jensen working with BlackRock and Wall Street banks, trying to turn the Nvidia chips into collateral so that the neoclouds can pledge the GPUs as collateral to get financing. Because right now it's hard for the neoclouds or the new data centers to get financing to build the data centers in advance of the demand."
"Because the thing is, the hyperscalers, they're able to do it, like Google, Amazon."
Imran: "They have infinite funds, they can issue debt."
"Their balance sheet is so big that they can build ahead of the demand, whereas the smaller neoclouds and data centers, they can't."
"So how do they do that? Well, they can use the Nvidia chips as collateral to borrow money for all that build out. So now the Nvidia chips, or at least Jensen, hopes that the Nvidia chips are going to become a new asset class to use for collateral.
Imran: "I mean, it's in his best favour, then he reigns supreme, like Nvidia chips are trading publicly, like no one can compete with that."
"Because if you're a new data center, if you want to build ahead of the demand, the only chips you can buy to do that is Nvidia chips, because no one else will give you the kind of financing."
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All Eyes on AI. Where Does Crypto Fit? | EP 77
00:00 Intro
02:17 We're back!
04:11 Where Are We in the Cycle?
05:24 Retail Speculation and Launchpad Wars
06:24 The Tokenized Stocks Race
08:05 Crypto Alchemy: Pairing Memes with Stock Tokens
09:49 The AMC and Vlad Drama
11:37 Robinhood vs Solana vs Base
13:39 Coinbase's App and Culture Problems
15:52 Why Robinhood is Winning
17:16 The Four Chains and Where Hyperliquid Fits
18:14 Hyperliquid's Revenue Decline
19:45 The "Verticals Will Win" Thesis
21:39 Hyperliquid's Competitors
24:10 Zcash: The AI/Privacy Thesis
27:20 Zcash vs Monero
28:18 Zcash: A Bitcoin That Can Change
31:40 Zcash's Origin Story
32:53 Solana's Embrace of Zcash
34:19 Zcash Price Targets
37:38 On-Chain Front Ends as the New Browsers
40:50 The Mag 7 Durability
43:14 Why P/E Ratios Don't Work in Crypto
46:00 Social Layers on Trading Apps
47:58 Could Facebook Build a Trading App?
48:52 Grok, Muse, and AI Agents in Daily Life
51:54 Computer Use as a Step-Function Change
54:52 Jobs, Doom Narratives, and Regulatory Capture
56:13 The Dario Manifesto
57:32 Ranking the Tech Leaders: Zuck, Elon, Sam, Dario
01:00:16 Qiao's Marvel Analogy
01:03:07 AI Agents "Escaping" Sandboxes
01:05:02 The 10% Doom Probability
01:07:49 Have We Created Consciousness?
01:08:32 You Can't Do Pure SaaS Anymore
01:09:46 AI-Native CRM
01:11:27 Compute as a New Asset Class
01:14:12 New Data Center Form Factors
01:15:39 "Energy is the Biggest Bottleneck"
01:16:42 Bringing Energy On-Chain and Chip Brokerages
01:18:55 Batteries, Solar, and Energy Arbitrage
01:21:11 Nvidia Chips as Collateral
01:22:43 Nvidia's Customers Building Their Own Chips
01:26:20 Microsoft's Closed-Loop Strategy
01:27:29 Chinese Open-Source Models and Regulatory Pushback
01:29:08 Imran and Qiao's Bags
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Built for holders. Built for Conviction.
Haseeb on why letting users blow up is bad business, and why social trading is here to stay
"Anybody who runs one of these businesses knows that customer churn is the most important metric to keep an eye on. If you're just allowing your customers to incinerate themselves by making bad decisions, your business is going to flame out very quickly. You're not going to be able to replace people fast enough into your funnel."
"Whether it's a mobile game or a casino or a social trading app, you have to make sure your customers are going to survive, stick around and keep having good experiences. If you consider fomo to be financial entertainment, fair enough. Make sure people are spending an appropriate amount of money on their financial entertainment and not going bust with their entire bankroll in the first week. If that's what's happening on your app, your half-life is going to be not very long."
"I do very much agree that memecoins are not going away. They may not be the final form. There may be other forms of social trading that follow, people buying regular tokens or stocks or productive assets, who knows what the future iterations are."
"But the social aspect of trading is very deeply ingrained. Once upon a time that social graph was on Twitter or in group chats. Now it's clearly extending into fomo and some of these other places. That feels sticky and almost intrinsic to the behavior."
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Haseeb says earnings calls are bifurcating, a document dump for the agents and entertainment for everyone else
"I like the take of stockholder communication bifurcating. At the moment of your earnings release, there's a document dump for the agents, for all the trading firms and hedge funds and anybody doing really sophisticated trading. You ingest that all immediately in some PDFs."
"And then for the humans it's like a TV show. You get on your Twitch stream and it's entertaining and it's colorful."
"We're moving to a world where the old school literal conference call is going away, because who is that for? Professional traders are not going to be using that anymore. So it's either financial entertainment for people who are vibe trading, like, I think it's time to buy, I like the CEO's confidence. And then you've got the agents making all the actual high frequency, large money financial decisions."
"There's nothing in the middle anymore for these very serious conference calls. They'll basically become an artifact of the past pretty soon."
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fomo co-founder Paul says they hate copy trading, and everything on fomo is built to hold longer
"We hate the idea of copy trading, and we've never built that. The whole point of fomo is that you get full information, and then you can learn by doing. You could follow people, take an educated guess, and figure out how to become better at predicting trends."
"Everything built on fomo is built to hold longer. Think of the concept of a thesis, a long-term thesis. We reward people for holding longer, for putting theses out. We have average hold time as a stat. Whereas if you're tied to a launchpad, your incentive is to create coins as fast as possible, because that's how you earn money."
"Before we had the launchpad game, you saw Harambe. Say someone was trying to convince me to buy Harambe coin sitting at 200 million. He's like, I'm going to hold this thing for four years, because that thing could sit at a few hundred million and go to a billion market cap. There were so few memecoins, you needed deployer teams."
"This is why I'm so confident in the translation of this to longer hold social graphs, such as equities and other types of products, whether it's perpetuals on a real world asset. Everything built on fomo is built to incentivize people to actually have real theses, hold longer, and separate signal from noise."
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Grok Bot product lead Roman Ugarte on the two early decisions that made Grok Bot work:
"It was two early decisions that at the time definitely did not feel obvious, but in hindsight are critical to what makes Grok Bot work for people."
1. Everything runs in the cloud:
"You should never have to think about local and cloud, where are these workflows running, does my computer have to be awake, if I kick it off from my phone does it need to be tethered to my computer back at home. There's so much jank happening right now when people try to conceptualize where this runtime lives. We made a really early decision that this should all be in the cloud. If it's this persistent colleague that has its own computer, it has the same state everywhere you interact with it. This is its own entity and it lives separately from your device."
2. The bot gets its own computer:
"There are a bunch of tasks that don't have well supported MCPs and APIs. We as humans don't do our jobs via MCPs and APIs, we use a computer and click on pixels and type in input boxes, and your bot needs those baseline capabilities too."
"We're in a really weird moment where you're onboarding these super intelligent new colleagues and asking them to share the same computer you have. It's crazy. If you were onboarding someone to your team and said, you don't have your own laptop, you're going to sit next to me and share this laptop forever and constantly trip over each other, you'll have access to my credentials and I'll have access to yours. There's a good reason that's not the way people operate."
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a16z GP Anish Acharya and Lenny Rachitsky on why "Hey Claude, make me a million dollars, make no mistakes" doesn't work:
Lenny: "Agents will help you hill climb and reach some new plateau, and then you need a human there to think about a bigger idea and unlock it. Then it keeps going and going, this agent to human back and forth."
Anish: "What really illustrates that is if you've ever tried to have an agent come up with a business idea for you. Hey Claude, make me a million dollars, make no mistakes. Why doesn't that work?"
"It's because you sort of need to set it in the right direction. And nothing in the technology has shown us that that is not needed."
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a16z GP Anish Acharya reveals his top three personal agent products right now:
"The three big products that I love here, Grok Bot totally nailed it, and the model underneath it is awesome. They came out of left field. I know a lot of the good work the Cursor team did."
"ChatGPT's Work is kind of buried in the UI, but it's really, really good. It's one of the best products they've released."
"And then there's a startup that's really getting some buzz called Instinct, which has made some more aggressive and interesting trade-offs, but all in the same domain."
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"If you are relying on AI to write for you and to generate ideas for you, you are putting yourself at sea level"
Silicon Valley's go-to comms strategist Lulu on why templates and AI writing rob you of being better
"When you use a template, you are giving up on the possibility that you could be better. And I say this sometimes about AI writing, AI is a wonderful tool, I use it all the time"
"But if you are relying on AI to write for you, you're putting yourself at the level of anyone else in the population who wants to pay fractions of a cent for a token to get similar output from the same shared brain. So if you are far below average, you should do that, because average is better than you. But if you believe you can be even a little bit better than average, you would be robbing yourself"
"Ralph Waldo Emerson calls it a form of suicide, because in imitating others, which is what a template is, you are killing your own ideas. What are we if not a unique combination of beliefs, ideas, feelings?"
"If you take that and you mute it, you are killing a really sacred part of yourself. So using templates is robbing yourself of the possibility that you could ever be better than the last thing, and that's a shame"
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"This creates a zero chance that they choose Ethereum"
Mike Silagadze from EtherFi emphasising no nation states will choose Ethereum if Ethereum's rules can be changed by a vote
"There's a reason El Salvador chose Bitcoin as their national reserve asset, and that reason was largely because it's ossified, we know what it's going to do whether you like it or not. It's very predictable, we can trust it. There's not going to be some rug through some governance process that's going to suddenly dramatically change Bitcoin's properties. The founder is long gone and dead, this is a system we can rely on"
"The way this process was run with Ethereum is the opposite of that. Imagine you're a nation state considering, should we go all in on Bitcoin or all in on Ethereum. Ethereum already has the credibility that among smart contract platforms it is the most secure, the most stable, the most credibly neutral, but this is a way to undermine that"
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Pumpfun co-founder Noah explains the treasury split between Pump Foundation and Baton Corporation
"There's a big differentiator here. There's the Pump Foundation, which owns this money, and the UK development company, Baton Corporation, which invoices upwards. So when we talk about the money, it's inside the Pump Foundation"
"The money invoiced by Baton Corporation is around $100 million a year right now, spent on development costs, tech costs, all this stuff. That's all publicly available, it's the amount raised in the ICO and the amount raised from revenue. The foundation has close to 2 billion in treasury assets, I'd say"
"Baton Corporation invoices the foundation about $100 million a year for dev costs. This depends, because marketing costs might increase so the burn might have to go down, different stuff affects the yearly burn. So the best guess is around $100 million right now"
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Rachit from Sunrise on whether we will see companies with tokens list on the NASDAQ in the future
"In the next 10 -15 years if we do our jobs correctly, the right way to IPO and raise capital will be onchain"
"The goal is to get more people on Solana. The goal is to get more people onchain and have that be the place for capital formation"
"We don't want to go back in trend and be available on NASDAQ, when we are already on Solana"
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"Right now the L2s are almost like a NATO security alliance with their own sovereignty. This would bring them closer to a state in the union of chains"
David and Ryan react to Steven Goldfeder's proposal for Ethereum to adopt its biggest rollups
"He says Ethereum should adopt its largest rollups, in the sense that a critical bug in Arbitrum, Base, or Robinhood chain should be treated as an Ethereum vulnerability and trigger an L1 fork just like an L1 bug would. Do you remember during the EigenLayer days when Vitalik wrote that article, don't overload Ethereum consensus? So Steven Goldfeder is proposing to overload Ethereum consensus"
"Any layer 2 ecosystem that is of sufficient critical mass, we get the protection of the Ethereum layer 1 because we are big enough. And in exchange, we as L2s would be willing to pay more rent to ETH holders. Instead of the 0.15% you're getting today, maybe we'll do 10%, maybe 20%, because the service is worth more to us, we no longer need a security council. We accept the sovereignty of Ethereum L1"
"Under the sovereignty of the L1, in exchange they'd pay higher taxes. This is closer to the united chains of Ethereum vision"
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Onchain Finance vs DeFi
Rebecca on why we need to start making this distinction
"Hyperliquid is more like onchain finance versus DeFi. I think we have to start making that distinction in a meaningful way"
"Onchain finance has the onchain part, a lot of the non-custodial aspects we'd expect, but you have closed source code, a narrow set of permissions. That's different from the hallmarks of what we've long talked about as DeFi"
"Are you just a coder doing a GitHub commit or are you creating a much larger onchain transparent market? Everyone's going to hate on me on Twitter. They already do. It's fine"
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"The number of people who care enough about crypto to buy a phone from a crypto company is somewhat finite. But the audience who cares about self-custody is massive"
Emmett Hollyer, Head of Solana Mobile, on why they're putting their stack on other Android phones instead of just selling their own
"Android OEMs are under a ton of stress. Unless you're Samsung or Google, you have zero R&D budget, very limited margins. You're selling a commodity"
"Almost all of them already have digital assets on their roadmap but they don't have the R&D budget or expertise to execute. That's a perfect opportunity for us to step in"
"Buying a phone is a very personal decision. They might not come to us for their next phone. So tackling the existing distribution and hardware already out there is the best use of our time"
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