Ivan on Tech analyzes Bitcoin's bear market trajectory, AI sector risks, and crypto industry news
Ivan on Tech presents a live stream covering Bitcoin's bear market timing, AI sector vulnerabilities, Tether's EU regulatory conflict, Solana fundamentals, and several other crypto industry developments.
Summary
Ivan on Tech (Ivan) hosts a solo live stream in which he argues that Bitcoin is in the final phase of its bear market — historically lasting about one year from October — and that a further drop to the $40,000–$50,000 range remains the highest-probability outcome before a recovery. He notes that the growing consensus around lower prices actually makes him slightly nervous, since the most reliable contrarian signal he experienced was the intense backlash he received in April and May when he called the rally fake. He also covers the Palantir CEO's critique of frontier AI labs as untrustworthy for enterprise use, arguing this signals a coming rotation back from AI stocks into crypto. Additional topics include Tether's rejection of the EU's MiCA license, MicroStrategy's STRC dividend sustainability, Solana's record transaction activity, the Robinhood chain launch, the rise of influencer coins, Venice AI's $65 million equity raise and the resulting token-vs-equity loyalty conflict, and USDC CEO Jeremy Allaire's response to the emerging OUSD stablecoin consortium.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin Bear Market Timing and the Case for Lower Prices
Ivan: Welcome to another episode. We do have the beginning of the end of the Bitcoin bear right now. It's looking very, very nice. We are now in Q3 — Q3 is here, the second half of the year. We are moving along so fast. Remember, in October the bear market started and we said it's time to be risk-off. Now it's already Q3 of next year, which means we're a few months away from Q4. That's a year — a year from the beginning of the bear. And you normally have a year. The bear is normally a year. So it's the beginning of the end of the bear.
Now, the end is the crescendo. The end is where all of the action is. And that's why I think there is a very high likelihood that we go lower — into the 50s, maybe even into the 40s. But as you know, we have no crystal ball. We're not Baba Vanga. We're not Nostradamus. There's no way to know for sure anything in crypto. If this is news for you, I'm sorry to disappoint you. We're dealing with probabilities. And while the highest probability is that we go lower, there is simply no way to know exactly how low it's going to be.
That's why we have this beautiful green shiny buy zone. It has been our guiding light for this whole bear market. We're now really in the buy zone — we're below the 200-week moving average. So DCA here makes sense because you're getting a cheap deal regardless. But remember, Q3 is now here. Q3 will likely lead us even lower, and you see that as more discount.
The Danger of Consensus Bearishness
I like what Scott Melker is saying here — that the overwhelming consensus today is that Bitcoin is headed lower. Well, not much lower, but a bit lower. I think 50K, 40K. It's not much lower, but still, many people now actually support the view that it's going to go lower. Which is why what I'm seeing here does make me a bit nervous. I don't see a lot of hate against my position that we're going to go lower.
I told you back in April and May that this pump was fully fake. You guys remember — we said don't trust it, don't trust it, don't trust it. I got so much hate on Twitter. People were so angry. They said I want to dump the price, that I'm an influencer trying to dump a trillion-dollar asset. My character got attacked. I got spat right in the face. Now when I say 50K, people are like, "Yeah, I think we're going to go to 50K." That gets me a bit nervous. When I say 40K, people say, "Yeah, you're correct." I get a bit nervous. Why are you so agreeable?
In April and May I told you we had the premature bull jaculation — it was too early for the bull market. One of the biggest factors I could point to was the emotional response from Twitter. When I said it was fake, the reaction was crazy. I don't see too much emotional response now. So guys, we are in the green zone. Maybe Bitcoin surprises us and just pumps from here — everything is possible at this point, we're so late in the bear. But still, if we get to 40 to 50, don't get surprised, don't get disappointed, don't get angry. Many people are going to get angry if we go there because they think now is the bottom.
A Bearish Long-Term View on Bitcoin's Risk-Reward
There is an interesting view making the rounds — a bit bearish. This guy, we actually watched an intro with him the other day. He's saying why he is not that bullish on Bitcoin anymore. He said he bought his first Bitcoin in 2013 and is the last person who wants to rail on Bitcoin, but he said:
"Unfortunately I owe it to myself and to my followers to just be realistic about the future. I often get it wrong, but I try my best to think things through. The base premise is the risk-reward for it has radically changed. Anyone saying that it hasn't is likely lying to you or has an ulterior motive and is trying to sell you something. When an asset grows into multi-trillion status, gets co-opted and integrated into the banking system, and is also driven by a single name — Saylor — you should probably start to question whether it offers you the same risk-adjusted returns as it did in the past."
Now guys, as a bottom signal, I love this. I love it when everyone is giving up. This is the guy we covered a few days ago who said he sold in 2025 — but he only said it now. I got all of the hate. I got the whole industry against me because I said risk-off since October. People hated it. Why did he only say now that he sold in 2025? Now everyone has a long thesis about why Bitcoin is bad, why they sold. But he did not say it in real time.
He continues:
"Questioning your priors is a key part of being an investor."
Yeah — when you have all of the results already revealed. Why didn't he write that in October when we were at the top? There is no risk in being bearish now. Everyone is bearish now. The reputational risk was being bearish in October. That's the real risk. Now? What investor are you when you turn bearish at the bottom?
He goes on:
"We have the world genuinely developing technologies that are going to radically reshape our future. Perhaps Bitcoin is not the best place to park your capital."
The only thing I agree with in his argument is that it seems the markets don't really care about rate cuts. That is a problem for Bitcoin, because we still have high rates but the stock market moves anyway. The Fed may just take a long time to cut rates because they don't have to. We have so much technological improvement — especially with AI — that there's no need to cut rates. The markets pump because of fundamental progress and bullishness about the future of AI. You don't even need monetary policy.
AI Parabolas and the Coming Rotation Back to Crypto
But things can change fast. Today everyone is super happy about AI. All of the parabolas are super green and we love the parabolas — we're making a lot of money with them. But at some point they also end. They go into bear trend. Sanisk, for example, peaked at $2,300. Now it's $2,000. Alab is still very bullish. So these parabolas are extremely bullish right now. But at some point parabolas break, just like gold broke down. We said at the beginning of the year to stay away from gold. AI parabolas will also break — not because AI is bad, not because AI isn't going anywhere, but because the disappointment will be based on how fast AI gets adopted. I don't think it's going to be as fast as everyone thinks. There's always disappointment. The internet was so great in the 90s, but then people got disappointed because it was too slow to adopt. The same thing will happen with AI.
We're seeing some signals. Look here — the Palantir founder is actually saying that he doesn't like AI in the current way it's being shipped, and that fixing the issues he's outlining may take years. What's going to happen to all of these parabolas while those issues are being fixed? They're going to break. They're going to go down a lot. And suddenly everyone will remember, "Oh man, Bitcoin — it was super great. Now the Fed is printing again."
Alex Karp on the Problems with Frontier AI Labs
Let's focus a bit on the AI issues. Let me play Alex Karp here.
The interviewer introduces Palantir's co-founder and CEO and asks about the Nvidia deal.
Alex Karp: Because I have so much respect for Nvidia and Jensen Huang, I'm going to try to keep this more adult than I usually do. But the truth is, if you want to know how this came together from my perspective — there are a lot of technical issues. Who controls the models? Who controls the weights? Who controls the value of your business? We're sitting on critical infrastructure across America, Ukraine, Israel. Everyone who uses LLMs on the battlefield runs on top of our ontology. And our clients — to say they're unhappy with the frontier labs is to say I'm welcome at the Berkeley faculty. There's just a level of discomfort and loss of trust.
Interviewer: Okay, unpack that. What do you mean by that?
Alex Karp: When you're using large language models, everyone technical realizes they're like a critical resource. To make them valuable in an enterprise, battlefield, regulated, or manufacturing context, you have to have what's called an application layer. We have this thing called ontology that now everyone's copying. It takes a large language model and makes it safe and useful and precise. Safe because it doesn't touch your underlying data. Safe because it prevents the large language model from caching your data and replicating your business. Safe because it doesn't transfer your IP — whether that's how to fight, secret data, top secret data, or in a clinical context. So the general way these things were sold — and again, Sam and Dario, there's nothing more fun than debating Dario in private, so I'm not throwing shade at them — but something has gone completely wrong. The basic view among enterprises in this country is: I'm going to waste my time with tokens, get no value, and they're going to get my IP.
Ivan: Did you hear that? The CEO of Palantir is staring down the AI labs. What he's saying is the frontier labs are not structured in a way that makes sense for enterprises. We don't trust them. We don't know what they're going to do with the data we give them. We also think they're very expensive and the economics simply don't make sense. That's why many companies are not really adopting AI at the rate needed for all of these different parabolas to sustain long term.
Now, maybe they still continue — a bull trend is a bull trend. But at the same time, there will be a switch from AI back to crypto, likely later this year. That's at least how I see it, and we don't act on it before they flip bearish. Many of them already started. If we look here — Google is already looking bearish, Meta already bearish, Amazon already bearish. All of these companies doing AI at the consumer end are not doing really well. Nvidia itself already bearish. Then you have all of the smaller ones like Sanisk and Alab still having the parabola, but the bearish trends are starting to propagate more and more throughout the AI space.
The pushback may get quite violent, just like with gold. Everyone loved gold. Then the beginning of the year happened, the bear trend started, we said get out of gold. What happened? Massive parabola up, then a bear trend. Classic. I literally know people who thought the economy was going to hyperinflate, the dollar was going to hyperinflate like tomorrow. So they bought a bunch of silver. Then it went down 50%. Literally 50%. That's the hyperinflation that happened in their portfolio.
So guys, all of these narratives are strong. We are riding them. But to turn bearish on Bitcoin because of the existing narrative — when it seems so convincing, literally at the bottoms, in the buy zone — that's not my style. I haven't seen this guy be bearish in October. The time to be bearish was in Q4 last year. Most people were not bearish. We were. Now everyone is bearish because that's the narrative, and everyone loves AI right when the parabolas are starting to break.
Tether, MiCA, and the EU Stablecoin Problem
You know that USDT is not in the EU. We have to speed up. Let me take some coffee.
So you have BitGo being a reserve bank with 100% of assets. This whole topic is about why USDT didn't get the MiCA license. As you know, the MiCA license is required in the EU for stablecoins — exchanges need it to list your stablecoin, and so on. Your stablecoin has to be MiCA licensed. Here, Paolo Ardoino, the CEO and one of the founders of Tether, is saying the license is horrible and creates a big danger for stablecoins that get it. Listen to this.
Paolo Ardoino: The problem I had with MiCA is that the MiCA license is very dangerous when it comes to stablecoins, and I believe it is even more dangerous for the small and medium banking system in Europe. I think what will happen in the next few years is that a few banks in Europe will go belly up because of the requirements of the MiCA license — 60% of reserves has to be kept in uninsured cash deposits in European banks.
Imagine a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. You have a stablecoin of 10 billion euros. You have to keep 6 billion euros in European banks — multiple banks. And the big banks, like UBS, are not banking stablecoins. So you have to turn to small banks in Europe — at least five small banks — in order to keep those reserves, because there's also a constraint on how much you can keep in each bank. So you have to find five small banks in Europe that will keep 6 billion euros.
What will happen is that these banks, as uninsured cash deposits, will take these euros and lend them out because they can do fractional reserves up to 90%. So 5.4 billion euros will be distributed to people buying a car, a house, starting a new business — and only 600 million euros will be kept by the banks. Now imagine you have a 20% redemption. You need 2 billion euros back. You go to the bank and they only have 600 million euros. The banks will go bankrupt because they cannot fulfill your request, and you as the stablecoin issuer would also go bankrupt.
So I think it's very poorly thought-out legislation. I'm all for legislation, but it should be intelligent and carefully designed to protect consumers. So yes, I decided not to apply for the MiCA license because I need to protect the 400 million-plus users that we have around the world.
Ivan: Very interesting stuff. Basically, MiCA requires them to put money in European banks, the big banks don't want them, so they'd need to put it into some small regional bank — and the risk of those banks going bankrupt during a redemption event is very high.
The good news is that on-chain you can use USDT anyway. So practically, for you as an EU resident, MiCA doesn't really matter in terms of your self-custodial wallet. You can still hold USDT in your wallet. If you need to deposit into an exchange for trading, you can swap into USDC or other MiCA-compliant stablecoins and trade using them. Self-custody USDT is still here, still available. And it's good that they're thinking about it. They use BitGo instead, and USDT nowadays is super stable and super compliant in the US. In the EU, they don't even want to be compliant because of this problem. You basically now have two reliable parties — USDC and USDT — and reliable is all relative, obviously. Still fiat, still connected to fiat, you understand.
MicroStrategy's STRC Dividend Coverage
Moving on. Saylor doesn't like that everyone is bearish on STRC. He says he has a lot of money to pay the dividend. Let's listen.
Interviewer: If Bitcoin stalls for a serious period of time and you are required to pay out the dividends on a monthly — or now bi-weekly — basis, what is the risk for STRC? And at some point, if Bitcoin is not providing the yield you're looking for if it stays sideways for a long period of time, what is the purpose?
Michael Saylor: If Bitcoin stalls for the next 40 years — for the rest of your life — then somewhere 30 to 35 years from now we'll run out of money. We have about 30 to 40 years of dividend coverage. So if Bitcoin stalls, meaning goes up 0% a year for 40 years, then sometime in 35 years or so — by the way, if we do nothing — if we do nothing for 35 years and Bitcoin stalls, then in 35 years we wouldn't be able to pay the dividend. We wouldn't do nothing, right? We would refinance or adjust. So practically speaking, we probably have 40 to 50 years if Bitcoin stalls. We've published that number on our website — the years of dividends, the cash and Bitcoin coverage.
Ivan: This is interesting because I think the market is a bit confused. I also don't really understand it fully, because their cash reserve is not even a year — it's less than a year. The market is not buying it now. He says 40 years if they sell Bitcoin. Maybe if they lend against Bitcoin they'll have to figure stuff out. He is trying to explain it, but the market says no — the market only reacts to higher dividends. If they increase the dividend, the market reacts with a pump back, but not even to $100.
So if you are following STRC, let us know whether you're still in it or what's happening. Saylor says he has 40 years of dividend coverage, but his cash balance is less than a year. So if he sells Bitcoin or sells MicroStrategy stock, he can get more cash balance. Let me play more.
Michael Saylor: We also calculate the Bitcoin break-even rate. If Bitcoin appreciates about 3% a year — and this number is updated every 15 seconds on the website — if it appreciates 3% a year, we can pay the dividends forever without selling a single share of common stock. So the machine finances itself forever, indefinitely, at 3%. It finances itself for the rest of your life, or about 35 to 40 years, at 0%. If Bitcoin appreciates at our stochastic cost of capital — our probabilistic cost of capital over the next 20 or 30 years, call that somewhere between 8 and 10% — then the equity outperforms Bitcoin.
Ivan: Some hope for you guys in STRC. Hopefully it does recover to $100. Let us know where those 30 years are coming from, because he will probably have to sell Bitcoin — that's what he means. He needs to sell Bitcoin because his cash balance is below a year. Anyway, let's see. Be careful, guys. Be careful.
Bitcoin On-Chain Data Debate vs. Quantum Safety
If you are in Germany, big shout out. The German government is now profitable on their Bitcoin sale at $59K, which was in 2024. Actually, they're at a loss again because we're above that — but just for a few days they were in profit.
We have a discussion about BIP 110. There's one guy who asks me every day whether we're going to speak about BIP 110. BIP 110 is all about limiting how much data is put on-chain, because Bitcoin got an upgrade where more data can be put on it — NFTs, all kinds of stuff. Within the Bitcoin space there are a lot of debates about whether this makes sense.
The motivation stated is: in order to protect Bitcoin's intended function as internet-native money, the Bitcoin community has historically treated techniques for embedding arbitrary data into Bitcoin transactions with antagonism. Such data embeddings must be resisted at all times in order to ensure they don't become load-bearing.
By the way, I agree — currently, just keep Bitcoin as it is. Don't mess with it too much. It's good as is. But here's my message to Bitcoin devs: make the freaking thing quantum safe. That's what people care about. You guys are arguing about this data stuff — make the thing quantum safe. We are missing out on a lot of capital, a lot of inflows into Bitcoin, because investors simply don't understand what's going to happen with quantum. Yes, Bitcoin maxis are saying don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. But even non-technical people in the world understand that technology moves this quickly. Two years ago there was no AI. The ChatGPT moment was 2022, 2023. Three years ago there was no ChatGPT, then boom — the whole AI space is here, the whole AI industry, stocks pumping. It goes so fast.
In three years there is no way we can update Bitcoin to be quantum safe. It takes at least 10 years. So please, for the love of God, focus on the correct thing. There's so much passion, so much energy focused on should we put more data or less data. To me, that's a non-issue in comparison to quantum. You can read more yourself — just make the freaking thing quantum safe.
There's like a civil war over should we put data or not data. There's Bitcoin Knots, there's a whole movement where they remove this extra data. It's great. But it feels a bit off because we just debated this for years in 2017. This was the big blocks debate. Why are we having the same thing again? We need the quantum guys. Quantum. My opinion: stop with the data stuff. Don't touch Bitcoin. If you touched it, go back to where it was. Not too much data. And don't speak about the data stuff — speak about quantum. Quantum, quantum, quantum.
These geeks do stuff the customer does not need. That's why ETH failed in terms of competing with Solana and other fast chains — the geeks go in their own direction, they dev stuff no one asked them to dev because it's interesting to them. You need clear tech leadership. I'm telling you as someone who was a full-time dev in the past, a computer scientist — I know what happens if devs don't have a clear connection to KPIs and what the client needs.
The main client for Bitcoin is the capital allocator. Let's get that clear. It's not someone transacting here and there. Bitcoin is used as a store of value. Focus on that. What do you need for store of value? Capital inflow. To have capital inflow, whether we have data or no data is a bit secondary. It's a rhetorical discussion. But what actually matters a lot is whether we have quantum resistance or not. If we don't have quantum resistance, we're capping the growth a lot.
Big respect to everyone debating this data issue — Matthew Kratter, big shout out, he has a YouTube channel, I respect the hustle, he's trying to protect against spam and all of that. But where's the quantum, man?
Matthew Kratter: People should understand this is the last stand. If BIP 110 fails, this is really bad for Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is then on the path where basically the miners — the large mining pools — can say how it's supposed to be, and Bitcoin Core gets to make up the rules for the network. And there are a lot of Bitcoin affinity scams like Citrea which we talked about, who are preparing to put loads and loads of data on the blockchain for all their stupid tokens and things that don't even scale Bitcoin.
Ivan: I agree with all of this. It's just that the whole discussion is not the key issue for me. That's why I'm not super engaged on it. Should we have data or should we not have data — fix quantum first. Fix quantum, please. Then you can debate your data. Can someone do that? Let's do quantum, guys.
Robinhood Chain Launch
Moving on. We have the Robinhood chain. Another corporate chain, but they're launching with a bang. Robinhood is saying they're going to have the Robinhood chain. They now have all kinds of integrations — BitGo, Alchemy, Alium, Orbitum, Block, Blockdaemon, DeFi Llama, Bitget, CrossMint, Uniswap — bam, bam, bam, bam. All of the integrators.
This is very important because this corporate chain may remove some action from Solana and others. We obviously have to monitor it. I don't like the corporate chain, guys. I don't think it's a good idea to have a lot of corporate chains. It's corpo chain. If you want to benefit from it, buy the Robinhood stock. I don't think there's a native token — you have to buy the stock.
Here's the thing. If Kim Jong-un starts using Robinhood chain, imagine the media. They're going to say, "Oh no, the scammers are using Robinhood chain." It's going to be so bad for their brand. They will have to start censoring transactions and wallets. They say permissionless by design — but watch them panic when Kim Jong-un starts using it and the media says Robinhood is aiding Kim Jong-un.
There's going to be so much incentive to FUD the Robinhood name. As soon as there's some kind of shady stuff on the Robinhood chain, they're going to short this. That's what the market is going to do. As soon as you have the smallest reason to spread FUD about Robinhood, they're going to put a big fat short, then go to CNBC and say Robinhood chain is aiding Kim Jong-un and all the scammers. You have to understand the game theory here in financial markets.
The ticker is Hood. Let's short it. Probably the shorters are going to deploy Ponzi schemes themselves and then go to the media and say, "Oh, look at the Robinhood chain — no KYC." There's going to be all kinds of potential legal attacks here. All of the DEXes on Robinhood have no KYC. Then Democrats come into power, they hate crypto — anyway, let's see, guys.
I will change my tune if they do a coin. I don't think they have a coin. Look here — Morpho is everywhere. This is like the infrastructure for getting interest. Kraken is using it. Now also they're going to be inside Robinhood. That's why we keep an eye on the coin. The coin is holding up quite okay. Morpho — keep an eye on it because they are literally everywhere. All big exchanges are using them.
Robinhood chain adopts Chainlink as its official data and cross-chain oracle. Chainlink is now powering Robinhood stock tokens and unlocking access to the on-chain economy for millions of users.
Let me give you the bull case for the Robinhood chain. If they take all of their assets from the app and bring them into the chain — so you can basically use Robinhood but without KYC, because it's on-chain — they take all of the features they have in the Robinhood app and put as much as possible on-chain, so everyone in the world can use it without having an account with Robinhood. Obviously that's good. Obviously that's good as a use case. But bullish for who? You need the Robinhood stock.
Robinhood stock looks quite good. They just broke a big bear trend and have a bit of resistance here. But if they have a run until all-time high, you have a very nice 40% pump here. Let me know what you think — there are bullish and bearish ways to see this. But personally I'm not a big fan of corporate chains. I would rather this be on Solana. If you want to bring all of this on-chain — all these stocks on-chain — do it on Solana. You could have done it. Now Robinhood chain claims they are four times faster than Solana and ten times faster than Base. Yeah, but it's a corporate chain. You can have a server — it's going to be fast.
Solana Fundamentals at All-Time Highs
By the way, before I tell you more bullish things about Solana fundamentals, let me clarify that we're still bearish on the Solana price. We're going to be bullish at $93 or at $30. Here we're still bearish — it's still just retesting this support.
Some people are like, "But Ivan, why don't you buy here? It's cheap here. Why do you wait until $93?" Because it's all about having a repeatable system. It's not about buying the very bottom or selling the very top. It's about over and over and over again having trades that win. That's why we wait for the optimal condition. It's not about capturing the very bottom because you're desperate. If your view is "let me buy as cheap as possible, this seems like the bottom" — and you don't understand the chart — in many cases it goes lower. Be honest with yourself: most cases when you thought something was cheap and low, it went lower, because you don't understand simple things about risk management and how markets work. For us, we need the best risk-reward. Best risk-reward is when the trend is bullish here, or when it's stupidly cheap.
Now that you know the situation with the Solana price chart, let me tell you some bullish things about Solana, because all of this is going to come into effect once Solana either flips bullish on the money line or goes low enough for us to be interested.
Truly on-chain prediction markets are finally on Solana. This is the competitor to Polymarket. World is now launching on Solana — they're excited to announce that World is live, bringing crypto and World Cup predictions to Solana, available to trade in Phantom with Chainlink as primary oracle infrastructure.
Solana is at an all-time high when it comes to transaction activity — higher and higher and higher. People are trading on Drift, which got hacked on Solana and is rebranding to Velocity — probably a good idea if you have a bad brand. People are trading on-chain with Pump.fun. This guy is saying he's been having fun on the new Pump.fun app flipping low caps. You can get wrecked very fast, but bullishness is coming back. People want to speculate. People want to go nuts, get wrecked — all of that good jazz. You need that for a bull market.
James Invest summarizes all of this: Solana users and fees explode.
Something important about the fees, guys. When Solana gets activity, the fee increases only for the app where the activity happens. It's called a local fee market. If you have a stablecoin with normal usage, the fees for your stablecoin transfer will not increase just because someone is piling into some shitcoin. That's the beauty of the local fee market — if you have a contract that has a lot of demand, fees for it will increase, but for you doing a normal payment for coffee, it's not going to increase. In contrast to the version one of smart contract chains like ETH, where CryptoKitties gets a lot of use and now your stablecoin transfer costs $100. Very important — local fee market.
Solana now has 10x the users of ETH — 5.51 million daily active versus just around 2,000 on ETH. People are saying, "But how do we know it's not bots?" There is automated activity — that's part of efficient financial markets, when you can automate you can do arbitrage. But it is legitimate activity, meaning it is financially motivated. You can see how much the apps are making. Solana is number one when it comes to apps making money. So if you are a developer, a founder, you do your app on Solana, if you get users, you're going to make a lot. It's a signal that there's genuine economic activity, not just wash trading to make a picture.
Solana fees hit a 30-day high, up 60% this month. More activity. DYDX is now the leading DEX on Robinhood chain — they had their own chain, but now they're on Robinhood. Maybe they got a grant from Robinhood chain. Again, I don't want to be too negative, but — corporate chain.
Venice AI Raises $65 Million — Token vs. Equity Questions
Look here — Venice, the company by Eric Vorhees, just raised $65 million led by Dragonfly. Here's where the token goes up, but it's a bit strange. Many people are pointing out that the investors are investing in the company, not necessarily the token. Now Eric needs to deliver the return for the equity investors, not for the token investors. So it becomes a bit weird — who is the number one priority?
The investment was into the equity, which means whether the token does well or not is a bit secondary for them. At the same time, if the token is really part of the ecosystem, maybe it does make sense. It's hard to say. We just have to follow the trend. It could be that it doesn't make sense and the token is going to be more or less slowly rugged. But if they have a lot of token on the balance sheet — I don't know, maybe you guys know — for this to make sense, they need to have a lot of token on the balance sheet. If part of the valuation of the company is the valuation of the token, maybe it does make sense.
For now, it's a bull trend. As soon as it goes bear trend, be careful, because there is a question mark: where's the loyalty? Is it with the equity investor or with the token investor? Why didn't Dragonfly just buy the coin? You can buy the coin. Why buy equity? Is it because there's going to be some extra business that goes to equity and not to the coin? Many questions, guys. Many questions. Just keep this on your radar.
USDC vs. OUSD — Jeremy Allaire's Response
USDC's Jeremy Allaire comes out and speaks about OUSD, which is the stablecoin we discussed yesterday — the one where hundreds of banks and hundreds of companies are coming out and doing their own stablecoin. He's saying:
"We've had lots of questions from our investor community looking for thoughts on OUSD, so I thought I would share my direct views here. Stablecoin networks are platforms, and network effects matter. USDC stands from strong network effects — we have thousands of integrations."
Yeah, but OUSD launches with all the integrations. OUSD's idea is like free mint, burn, full yield sharing, and consortium governance. His risk argument is under-funding infrastructure.
Basically, they say they have committed to full revenue share — all of the yield — because when you hold OUSD you're going to get the full yield. And this means you have commitments which may make you slow to innovate. But what are you going to innovate, man? It's a stablecoin. It just needs to be nice and pay yield like a bond. What are you going to invent?
USDC handled 80% of dollar stablecoin on-chain transactions in Q1. Yeah, but this changes all the time. USDT was once the king, then USDC. So basically no super strong argument. Number one — OUSD has all integrations from the start. Number two — what are you going to innovate? It's a stablecoin. Number three — this changes.
I would give Jeremy's arguments about 5 out of 10, because when you have all these integrations coming out and they all work together and they co-own the coin, it's just tougher. If you have an integration but then the company you integrate with now has their own stablecoin that they're a co-owner of, they're going to use it. It's like Visa and Mastercard being co-owned by the banks.
So I think that USDC as a stock — I would be careful here. Let's check Circle. It's straight down, and I would say for a good reason. People are worried. The situation drastically changed. I would not touch it until bull trend. For now, it's in a bear trend for a good reason. Here you have potential support, and here you have potential support. But I know many people are like, "Oh, buy the dip." I don't know, man. Wait either for support here, or on the way up just get in when it's a bull trend again, because then it has proven that it has some momentum.
Influencer Coins and Personal Brands in Crypto
The final stretch for us here is the whole influencer coin phenomenon that's now taking place. You know, for example, Ansem — we discussed the other day. The lesson from the Ansem coin isn't that you should find a more creative way to beg. It's that building a personal brand in crypto will be one of the most powerful things over the next 5 to 10 years. That's true, guys. That's true.
If you are watching this, turn on the camera, start making content. How do you get subscribers nowadays? You need to do the TikTok dance. I don't know. I started in 2017 — the world was simple in 2017. You came on camera and started speaking. Now I don't know. You need to shake ass. But on a more serious note, the good thing with crypto is we use Twitter. Instagram — I feel like you guys don't use too much Instagram or TikTok. At least when I post on Instagram, it doesn't do much. Maybe I should do a bit more. Maybe I'll do that in the future. But personal brands on the internet are going to matter.
Maybe there is a use case. Let's say we're not planning to do a coin, but if we did a coin, could we blow up this channel even more? Probably, because then we could give coins out if someone does clipping and gets a lot of views. We have such great content here in the stream and I still don't have nice clipping of it. Maybe there's a way to incentivize you guys to share the streams everywhere because you get an airdrop. I'm not responsible for the price of the coin — it can and will go to zero. Maybe it does make sense.
I think the biggest problem is just the pressure on the coin's performance, because that's the last thing I want to have to worry about. But if the community is still excited, they're bullish on their own, and they understand it — maybe it does make sense. Because imagine now the Ansem coin is very high and then it goes to zero — people are not going to like it. And by the way, it has no way but to go to zero at the end of the day if you don't have a well-thought-through ecosystem. I don't see any benefits with the Ansem coin. At least have some kind of use case for it. Trump at least had a dinner.
So guys, let me know what you think. Maybe there is a way in the bull market to make it interesting. I think now it is too early. But if there's enough benefit, enough something — let's see. The more I look at the Ansem coin, the more I'm convinced that people themselves will become an asset class. Actually, sooner than most people expect.
And it's not super new, by the way. We did see something like this already with the streamer coin — remember the streamer coin? Like five months ago, end of last year. Even Asmongold did some kind of streamer coin. Alex Becker did a streamer coin. It went to zero.