UpOnly: Chats with Crypto Experts

Latest Episodes:

The regulatory landscape for crypto post-FTX, with Rebecca Rettig and Peter Van Valkenburgh Dec 01, 2022

Cobie & Ledger are joined by Rebecca (Chief Legal and Policy at Aave) and Peter (Director of Research at Coin Center) discuss the regulatory landscape in the wake of the FTX failure.

Mt. Gox's Mark Karpelès on Navigating Crypto Exchange Bankruptcy Nov 29, 2022

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie & Ledger talk to Mark Karpelès, the former CEO of Mt. Gox, at the time the world's largest crypto exchange that failed and went through Bankruptcy. He talks about that process, and his thoughts on today's iteration of a similar situation with FTX.

FTX wallets drained while we're on air with FTX team member Nov 12, 2022

Cobie & Ledger talked to Zane Tackett, who directed institutional sales at FTX until just a couple days ago, and was working to help find solutions for the gap directly with top team members. And while we're getting the story of what's happened the last week, wallets start getting drained. We streamed for three hours and didn't always say a lot, but here's the whole thing.

UpOnly + Bankless Nov 10, 2022

Cobie and Ledger join Ryan and David of Bankless to cope together and try and put some of the pieces back in order.

FTX is liquidated Nov 08, 2022

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie & Ledger talk the rapid downfall of FTX and acquisition announcement by Binance. We're joined by the CEO of Wintermute, Jim Talbot, Gainzy, Do Kwon, and Martin Shkreli.

Crypto bear market updates, with Cobie & Ledger Nov 02, 2022

Thanks for listening :)

Will crypto make new all time highs, and will Ethereum topple Bitcoin post merge? Aug 25, 2022

Presented by FTX: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Crypto Narratives with Cobie & Ledger Aug 04, 2022

Presented by FTX: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Zooko on privacy and crypto history Jul 28, 2022

Presented by FTX: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Crypto Cope with Cobie & Ledger Jun 30, 2022

presented by FTX: https://uponly.tv/ftx

How to cope during the bear market May 26, 2022

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie & Ledger talk to Keyboard Monkey and Flood Capital about what to do and how to manage through the bear market.

Down Badly May 20, 2022

Presented by FTX: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Crypto Narratives with Frank Chaparro Mar 31, 2022

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Why Shave Mustache?

– “It’ll come back”

– Cousins getting married, doesn’t wanna steal the show

The Block

– Scoops has been there since 2018

– Soon to be 4 year anniversary

– 100+ people

– Have data, research content, consulting/ advisory

– Subscription products for all these legacy folks

Venture Capital

– Last year there was 32B that poured into crypto VC

NFTs

– Bored Apes/ Larva Labs

– Some people outside of crypto may not think apes are impressive from an art standpoint

– “this price is ridiculous!”

– But there are so many things that are like that, handbags for example

Environmental Impact of NFTs?

– There is a lag between what we know in crypto vs what the outside world knows

– Even when there are changes to make it better, it takes a long time for the public to accept a net narrative

– It’s just a viral narrative

Larva Labs Deal

– Scoops was surprised

– He never expected M&A among NFT entities

– Might even be a bit of a risk arbitrage

– Mike Dudas talked about how LinksDAO was in the cross hairs of regulators

Crypto Politics

– “If it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, then its a security!” -Franky Scoops

– People will likely get voted out of office if they take an anti crypto stance

– Ryan Selkis potentially running

– There are a few other crypto natives thinking about running

– Free market resonates with the right

– Protect the power of the dollar pushes away the right

– “Banking the unbanked” resonates with the left

– Environmental concerns pushes away the left

– Ted Cruz will do anything for a vote

– Ledger: “I think we need to get Dan Matuszewski to run up there in Boston”

– “He’d hate it so much that he’d be a good politician”

– Frank: “He’d be a great politician”

– Ledger: “Can you imagine Dan up there getting grilled by congress”

– “He’s start grilling them back give them the Boston treatment”

Exciting Trends

– Excited about NFTs moving separately from the other markets

– Interest rates in crypto

Insane Wealth

– SBF and CZ just have unheard of money

– More scared of normal multimillionaires than crypto billionaires

– The crypto billionaires have just been super humble – SBFs story is classic

– Scoops: “Comparison is often the thief of joy”

– Why can people not hang on to their Bored Apes?!

– Just targeted much more often

Terra and Do Kwon

– Do Kwon is very relaxed

– They want to make UST the largest stablecoin across various different chains

– Sometimes he wakes up, puts on pants, and just buys $1B worth of Bitcoin

FINAL ALPHA

– When prices are going down, just remember to count all of the blessings that you have in your life. Things could be a lot worse 🙂

Notes by Kevin and Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Jump Crypto President Kanav Kariya on the Wormhole hack, market making, and crypto outlook Feb 10, 2022

Introduction

- Kanav is the President of Jump Crypto (@JumpCryptoHQ)

- Jump Trading is one of the largest quant trading firms in the world and moved into crypto ~6 years ago

- Grew into what Jump Crypto is today with 140 employees

- Jump Crypto has been trading, building and investing in the space

- Ledger: Who wins in a cage match, Alameda or Jump? Kanav: Depends on the rules!

- Crypto was a trading problem to solve at first, sandbox environment for people to play with without messing up existing systems

- As the space started to grow and as DeFi emerged there was a similarity to traditional environments and they got more involved

- Own crypto on the their balance sheet not just when making plays

Intern to President

- Jump is a very flat organisation usually three levels at most away from the top

- A lot of freedom to work on things and push it further with more resources for what works

- Kanav worked early on crypto projects that performed well and it led to getting his position and still building out the team

- All in, all of the time. Always looking for engineers and ops people

- Recently brought on a CMO

Sophisticated Competition

- Jump and most traders are playing on different time horizons e.g. seconds to minutes

- Smart contracts and aspects of DeFi are less competitive as firms are still apprehensive

Trading Systems

- Some are highly automated others have more manual intervention. Alpha building process to build prediction models then plug it into an execution system

- However there are things about the markets the models aren’t aware about that someone with pulse on the market would know

- Mature risk management is in place taken from Jumps historical experience. A lot of it is hard coded in to prevent people putting on over sized positions

- Not a lot going on with options markets, much smaller than everything else. Just because it hasn’t worked in the past doesn’t mean it won’t so will continue to watch

Narrative Surprises?

- Built the first highly electronic OTC desk but the narrative didn’t play out to the expected extent. Institutional narrative was slower to play out - a lot of red tape to get through for institutions and waiting for regulatory clarity but believes it’s still going to happen

- How long Uniswap V2 has continues to be incentivised continues to be surprising

Wormhole

- CertusOne built the V1 and they were acquired by Jump. Wormhole connects 7 chains now transferring a lot of different information. Governed by 19 guardians, of which Jump Crypto is one

- Wormhole had a 120K ETH hack recently

- Developer noticed some discrepancies and they all jumped on a call to confirm the vulnerability then it was all hands on board to deal with it

- Jump Crypto made the decision to backstop the funds

Hopes for the future

- Phantom and Solana pay type stuff

- You see the uses on twitter, looks great

- No on knows what a seed phrase is! We need better UX

- On the gaming and metaverse side - i just want to have fun and be able to play a game

- On the research side - ZK seems promising would like stuff there

FINAL ALPHA

- Harness the power of asymmetric upside

- If you can see asymmetric upside and then place a lot of bets, you gmi

Untitled Crypto Podcast Episode #2 Feb 10, 2022

Cobie, Zion, Meltem, and Avi talk about nothing for two hours, again.

Untitled Crypto Podcast, Episode 1 Jan 29, 2022

Cobie, Meltem, Z, & Avi

Michael Saylor: Bitcoin is the Best Property in the World Jan 26, 2022

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Bitcoin Journey

– First tweeted about Bitcoin in 2013, was skeptical

– Would comment on early tech, very unknown at the time

– Would tweet about Bitcoin and people find his old tweets

– Learned about Bitcoin through poker and online gambling

Diversifying

– DON’T DIVERSIFY

– Diversifying is selling the winners to buy the losers

– Amazon wins

– Walmart kinda treads water

– and 15,000 companies lose

– It’s nearly impossible to beat a digital monopoly

Banking Experience

– Lost $1M in a bank rug

– Lost $1M in an Argentina rug as well

– Banks wouldn’t let him move his money around

– He got crushed by Argentina inflation

– Kept getting smoked – “can we buy a yacht, float it to the US, then sell it here?”

– Couldn’t do that, eventually gave up

Current Bitcoin Experience

– Then had $1B company with $500M cash on balance sheet

– Knew it was gonna get inflated away

– Saylor: “It’s like losing half your body – like amputating your left arm and left leg”

– Now has like $5B worth of Bitcoin

– If you’re on main street you had the worst year of your life

– If you’re on Wall Street you had the best year of your life

– First Bitcoin buy in August was defensive

– Bought first amount at like $11k BTC ($250M buy)

– Then got $600M loan at 1% interest…and just bought Bitcoin lmao

– Saylor: “All time high is just the all time high to date”

Business and Bitcoin

– Cobie: “Given the cyclical nature of crypto, I’ve seen life ruining bear markets and pre up only euphoria bull markets. Will you keep buying bitcoin forever?”

– Saylor: “Yeah” LMAO

– Devaluing currency is crushing basically every small business

– Saylor: “It’s like you’re rowing 7 knots, but the current is moving against you at 7 knots”

– Michael Sailor! *credit to CryptoCred*

– Saylor: “It is true that if I deal you double aces, you have an advantage in the poker game. But if I put a gun to your head, you don’t have that advantage anymore!” think he’s saying zoom out, think bigger lol

– More war/ poker/ boating analogies

Bitcoin vs Other Cryptos

– The others are very complicated, there’s likely a crypto economy in the future

– Bitcoin is not like them it is simple

– Once a sovereign wealth fund owns $5B of it, then its OK for big companies to own $5B of it, and there’s a domino effect

– One regulator could wake up tomorrow and put out a press release that doubles the market

– There are 10,000 big institutions that can start to pour in and that tips everyone in

– Saylor: “If you’re Apple, you can take your market cap up $2 trillion. Do you want $2 trillion???”

– The real Bitcoin bond – borrow $1B at 1% interest and buy Bitcoin

Countries Buying Bitcoin

– Cobie: “So El Salvador did it and now there are rumors of Honduras doing it – I do think the second person to follow is a strong form of leadership”

– Ledger: “Your top job as a large holder of Bitcoin is to convince others to buy Bitcoin to increase the network effects”

Bitcoin Maximalism

– Ledger: basically asked if there is any chance Saylor buys anything besides Bitcoin?

– Satoshi disappeared, price was a penny, there’s no pre-mine, its PoW, there’s no yield

– Basically, it’s pure

– Saylor: “Every proof of stake coin is a security”

– If you are a person of any fame, you cannot endorse a security

– However, you can endorse property

– “Saylor Coin, Saylor Moon Coin, Son of Shiba Moon Coin”

– China could create China Coin (only legal to mine in China)

– There is risk in property, but its heavy and sound

– You want property to be heavy and durable

Crypto Future

– The first decade of crypto was off shore, entrepreneurial

– The second will be on shore, institutional

– We are in the middle, and will be there for 3-5 years

– Cobie (summarizing): “you buy Bitcoin because you know what Bitcoin will be in 50 years”

– Other coins not so much

Life Advice

– Saylor: “Stay in your lane”

– You start trying to express a nuanced opinion and next thing you know your debating a nobel prize winner in that field

– There are black swan tail risks that can crush everything so can’t worry about them much

– If you think there’s a 95% chance Bitcoin goes to 0 then alright put 5% of your money in

– Misc. good quotes:

– “Bitcoin could be a $100 trillion asset without L2s without Lightning Network or anything”

– “The block of granite under Manhattan doesn’t move. It still has value”

Do you own Bitcoin as well personally?

– Yes, Michael Saylor owns 17,732 BTC

FINAL ALPHA

– “Focus.”

– “Just because you can acquire a thing doesn’t mean you can maintain a thing, and just because you can maintain a thing doesn’t mean you can enjoy a thing” referring mostly to a boat

– “The hardest thing is to compete forever, profitably”

Notes by Kevin and Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Vitalik Buterin on Ethereum and immortality Jan 20, 2022

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Wdyd Besides Crypto?

– Vitalik reads a lot

– Fascinated in how languages have evolved

– Vitalik: Like you know how gate used to mean a structure that lets things in and out…now “gate” means a media scandal!

– Ledger: “Favorite high fantasy?”

– Vitalik: “Early Game of Thrones were great. Early high fantasy was very much good vs. evil, like in Lord of the Rings Elves and men are good, and Orcs are evil”

– It’s possible Vitalik would run a book club in the future given Cobie would want it

10 years ago what’d you see yourself doing?

– Wasn’t thinking too deeply

– Then Bitcoin came along and turned into something

– Vitalik was the first writer for Bitcoin magazine

– Cobie: “Did you at one point apply for a job at Ripple?”

– Vitalik: “Yes”

– Jed McCaleb said yes, but Visa trouble prevented him from joining

Ethereum Beginnings

– Too many co-founders at first (there are 8 for those of you who just pretend you like crypto)

– Some coding changes too

– Vitalik: “Sometimes I wonder how things would’ve turned out if Ethereum had different distribution”

– Cobie: “Do you see Ethereum now as your life’s work or is there a future where you don’t work on Ethereum?”

– Will be a large part of future

– Might do some writings and other stuff in the future

– Vitalik: “There’s a part of me that just wants to troll the market and repeat that stunt again [faking death lol]”

Family

– Vitalik’s dad is like a crypto influencer

– Mom getting involved in crypto, optimistic rollup

Proof-of-Stake

– When did PoS become obvious as the path forward?

– Vitalik: “2014” holy chad

– Eventually had a proper understanding of the tradeoffs and got convinced it was the way forward

– ZEC and DOGE also switching to PoS

NFTs

– Why are they so good at onboarding and what’s the future?

– There are huge desires for inclusion and collectibles

– Vitalik: “Even like 10 years ago privatejet.com was more valuable than a private jet”

– Virtual property is a thing

– NFTs could be the big first use cases for crypto besides currencies and DeFi

– Its an easy way for artists to get money

– Vitalik: “Sometimes there is certain value in trading of things being hard”

*Vitalik cuts out*

”He needs to pay more gas!”

Research

– Most research prob already done

– zk is really amazing technology but needs to be improved til we can use it

– MEV could use some more research

Wallet Improvements

– Wallet security and multisig

– Most wallets just have 1 password, can be dangerous

– Alternatives:

– Multisig – 3 keys, need at least 2 to transfer funds

– Social recovery – on Vitalik’s cold wallet there are 6 individuals who have power, 4 out of 6 needed to move funds

Most likely to be Satoshi?

– Craig Wright, Charles Hoskinson, Elon Musk, Loomdart

– Vitalik: Blueberry

– Cobie: “If you had to choose someone who’s your best guess?”

– Vitalik: “If I had to choose someone I’d guess Hal Finney… between 1-20% chance it’s Hal Finney”

Vitalik Memes

– Vitalik has replied to deranged vitalik memers hahaha

– Vitalik: “FTX – does that stand for FiTalik Exchange?”

Multi-chain but not Cross-Chain

– There are too many risks with bridging

– Can just create same assets and use on 1 chain

– In single chain, you can always revert chain and everyone gets assets back to at least initial state

– With multi-chain, if stuff breaks, the problem is way larger (double spending etc)

Ethereum Roadmap

– Goal is still to have $0.05 per transaction

– Hard to scale without sacrificing on security or centralization

– With Rollups and sharding Ethereum can scale immensely

– Within a couple of years Ethereum fees will be back under 5 cents

Future of Ethereum

– Progress on zk EVM is going very well

– Most nodes won’t store full chain

– There will be a few who do

*wifi cut out 5 min miss*

Privacy

– Blockchain isn’t “true privacy” just pseudonymous

– Regulators ok with that

– Once its on ETH… where do we go?

– Vitalik: “People are really underestimating the risks/ downsides of no privacy”

– Ledger: “I want to know the craziest thing Vitalik ever bought with crypto”

– Vitalik: “Metformin probably”

– Anti-aging drug

Anti-aging

– Ledger: “How long do you think someone born today will live?”

– Vitalik: “I think more than a 50% chance someone will see the year 3,000”

– SIR!

– How does equality come into play? Just the rich live forever?

– Vitalik: “I think it will shortly evenly distribute”

– Not just billionaires get to live forever

– Anti-aging stuff should be part of the plan for countries that have universal health care

– Vitalik: “COVID vaccines should have been offered as a choice for those who wanted it in summer 2020”

– More towards very conservative for mandates, very liberal for choice

– Vitalik: “If people start to live to be 500 years old psych will be bad – this is a fair critique”

– Not all tech solves all problems

World Stuff

– It will take a long time before we actually populate Mars

– Think about Antartica…we aren’t there yet and its way easier

Non-crypto Area of Investment

– Biotech

– Really thinks there will be a long arc of progress over next 70 years

– Same way computers had a long arc of progress over last 70 years

FINAL ALPHA

– Vitalik: “Come out of every day a better person than when you went into that day”

– Vitalik: “Whether its math or cryptography or working out, whatever it is do something”

– It puts you in a frame of mind of progress which is really good for mental health

Notes by Kevin and Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Tetranode on being an activist whale for Ethereum projects Jan 14, 2022

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Cobie Dec 17, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

UpOnlyTV Notes

Introduction & Early Days

⁃ Bought Bitcoin first in 2012 but really down the rabbit-hole through 2013 onwards

⁃ Only other original CT person still active is Bob Laxative (formerly KingBTC)

⁃ Being early turned people into survivors. Cryptsy, MtGox etc hacked. Everything going to zero, only self custody BTC felt safe

⁃ Started with £200-300 ($500) and didn’t put any more fiat in other than one investment in 2020 (that went to zero)

⁃ Got shilled QuarkCoin by Bill Still on cryptsy and accidentally sold the top. Got a DM from Jebus911 about another coin that went 70x

⁃ Up significantly in BTC early but down in USD in bear market. Lost a lot of BTC on things like BTCBuilder

⁃ Sold Cryptsy listings via API for months while at uni for free multiples before the alpha got leaked

⁃ Saw BTC as the solution following the financial crisis and levels of corruption and incompetence

MtGox

⁃ Gox was the main exchange and allegedly had a bot to buy back BTC that had been lost

⁃ Constant buy pressure caused the price to run

⁃ Unsure what the outcome would have been on the state of the market if it hadn’t happened

⁃ Some friends got completely wiped by Gox

⁃ Psychologically put a lot of people off BTC having to consider the cost of buying the BTC they had lost

Trading & Making It

⁃ Wouldn’t consider ever having been a full time trader

⁃ It was more of a hobby or side hustle. Decisions mostly based on instinct and prior cycle behaviour

⁃ It’s become much harder to call cycle bottoms and tops

⁃ People create narratives to rationalise things it’s easier to learn from your own mistakes with time looking back

⁃ Above average at most things when actually trying, except League of Legends

⁃ Deep down believed he would eventually be a millionaire. Without crypto this would still have happened from acquisitions/startups

⁃ Opens you to being more risk tolerant in other areas of life e.g. taking stock vs salary

⁃ Easier to have conviction when you don’t sit through large drawdowns and can gauge risk. “HODL is for poor people” unless disciplined you’ll let your gains evaporate and might become a forced seller at the bottom

⁃ Tries to estimate probability of it being over on every dip. Wants to sell as close to the top as possible, can buy back higher if wrong. Won’t work if you do this on every dip

Supercycle

⁃ Idea of a Supercycle described by Su in earlier episode is probably right

⁃ If crypto becomes integrated into society and BTC becomes the store of value then it’s the only thing that makes sense

⁃ Thinks it’s not the right time for it to happen, integration is tertiary

⁃ If crypto disappears now how many lives are actually impacted

⁃ Unless you run …say a crypto podcast? (pls sir my family)

⁃ Maybe it is now but maybe it needs another boom/bust first before it reaches that level

⁃ Top 10/20 assets on CoinGecko right now – are we really ready for a supercycle??

ETH

⁃ ETH DAO hack, ETC fork, ICOs put off. Didn’t buy more ETH because conviction was low with all of this. Still held original ETH but could have rotated into buying much more

⁃ Instead of focusing on ponzification it’s best to focus on change in products available e.g. genuine use case like lending on chain being built

⁃ Building blocks add value to the ecosystem because they enable future building blocks. OG DeFi protocols and things like MetaMask responsible for leading that change

Founding Lido & ETH 2.0

⁃ Co-founded Lido but says Konstantin and Vasily are the real brains behind everything along with the core teams. Fought to not call it dPool. (Fought with Ledger to not have UpOnly called TokenTalk)

⁃ When PoS was created there was no real concept of DeFi

⁃ Staking Ethereum is just a better form of wrapped Ethereum and risk free yield is the bottom brick of DeFi

⁃ Thinks merge will be Q2/Q3 or later. Beacon chains have been live for a whole

⁃ People will think it’s bullish but $35B on the beacon chain will become unlocked too

⁃ Wider ETH community attitude to scaling is bad in level of acknowledgement it’s atrociously bad right now. Optimistic roll ups have felt like a disappointment so far and ZK aren’t EVM compatible yet

⁃ Misaligned incentives between people who got rich holding ETH and the usability of the network

⁃ Equally sceptical of alternative L1s. Fragmented liquidity and most will fail to sustain ecosystems without incentives

⁃ Easier to trust that ETH will be around in future vs a coin flip on some other L1s. Max 5% survive and likely still struggle. Maybe new L1s just keep getting funded forever?

Identifying the Meta

⁃ Used to be buying things before it got listed on exchange, playing on APIs

⁃ Moved to buying when it listed on smaller exchanges before it hit the bigger exchanges

⁃ Shifted again to how to get coins before they hit any exchange and people would monitor BitcoinTalk and cloud mining was popular

⁃ 2017 was ICO meta trying to get in before main token sale

⁃ 2020 was DeFi farming

⁃ 2021 was BTC -> ETH -> DeFi complacency -> meme coins -> NFTs -> L1s and OHM forks

⁃ What’s next? There is no crystal ball, you can guess the narrative that makes sense or watch what’s happening and being aggressive when you spot it

⁃ Short term playing the meta it doesn’t have to make sense a lot of the time it’s just a game of chicken anyway. Narrative just needs PMF

⁃ People assume they’re already late rather than factoring in if the narrative really takes off

⁃ Narrative can drive both supply and demand and people underestimate how it can get out of hand

⁃ Figuring out the meta game is the most important thing and how to make money in crypto. Avoid things like YouTube they’re good at content marketing not crypto

⁃ Have to avoid maximalism and accept these trades and rotations

Bear Market Predictions

⁃ Metaverse and GameFi have crazy valuations but a couple with war chests that will enable them to keep building in a bear market

⁃ Main goal can possibly become preserving the treasury vs delivering

⁃ Meme coins all to zero

⁃ Anything with a constant token emission requirement all to zero

⁃ Regulations could cause decentralised in name only projects to disappear

⁃ Young hungry teams will keep building

⁃ 60% of people who made life changing money this cycle will lose it all

Working in Crypto & DAOs

⁃ Shift recently between keeping a normal job alongside crypto to now. It’s become much more mainstream and more risk effective to now join a crypto project or protocol. In crypto it can be better to be an early employer vs founder which is quite different to traditional tech

⁃ DAO currently a type of regulatory arbitrage which operates worse but can have a token. There are examples of very good and very bad DAOs

⁃ Best DAOs won’t be the ones people like in a bull market, maybe even those with concentrated ownership like 15 addresses vs retail owners getting angry at teams over token economics

⁃ DAOs will demand a new type of VC. More contributor type VC involvement e.g. what Paradigm and Delphi are moving towards

Finding a Crew

⁃ Early days had a TG group called 27 club to talk about the markets and probably wouldn’t have made it in crypto without it. 70/80% of the members did not make it in crypto

⁃ Most people who make it have a group like this to share alpha. Essential to have people in your life who are all in

Maximalism

⁃ Picking a group and hating an opposing group is historically quite common for humans

⁃ BTC and ETH maxi people are very similar people that would be friends irl but project hatred at each other online instead

⁃ BTC maximalism used to be people speculate on new things while quietly all knowing that BTC was the only thing really worthwhile but could experiment to see if there was value elsewhere

⁃ Fees similarly now except it’s expanded beyond just BTC to a small number of other coins

⁃ Maximalism now has changed similarly to political influencers and become inflammatory and toxic

⁃ See it a lot now in BTC and ETH with the same talking points, it’s counterproductive

⁃ Staying open minded is only positive for you as a person within this space. On a long enough timeline all maximalists are wrong at some point

Future Prediction

⁃ Most probable future is maybe a KYC country chain with DeFi, but without governance tokens, with the base currency being a CBDC

Risk Management Pyramid Changes

⁃ Reason it’s wrong is that if you take a 5% entry in something risky that performed really well, by constantly taking off the position to keep it at 5% you’d ruin your upside

⁃ Pyramid makes sense as an entry tool and rebalancing once the trade actually ends makes more sense

⁃ There’ll be an updated version coming soon

Final Alpha

⁃ “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance” – Albert Maysles

⁃ Be wary of anyone intentionally removing or ignoring nuance from a conversation as often they have an agenda

⁃ Being a structured critical thinker is probably the most important thing going into 2022 and the following decade

Notes by Kevin and Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Ethereum co-founder and ConsenSys founder Joseph Lubin on the inevitability of Ethereum Dec 09, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Introduction

⁃ Joe co-founded Ethereum and ConsenSys

⁃ Worked in robotics, machine vision, AI. Moved into the financial space and became depressed by that, the economy and geopolitics. Saw centralised systems as bankrupt politically and financially

⁃ Read the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2011. Met Vitalik in Toronto in 2014 and read the Ethereum whitepaper that night and it became clear it was the way to build a system better, faster and more expressive than on Bitcoin

⁃ Web3 vision resource: polynya.medium.com also /u/liberosist on Reddit

⁃ Vitalik did a great job of setting an intellectually honest tone of integrity along with the power of the ideas held them together vs differing opinions

Metamask

⁃ Metamask has a decentralised future ahead of it (Token confirmed?!)

⁃ Metamask is already an ecosystem and it will be more explicitly an ecosystem

NFTs

⁃ Astonishing to see how many people are affected by the NFT phenomenon. Major crossing of the chasm – use of the technology without a real understanding of the underlying

⁃ Cobie: It converted a lot more people but it’s also there is huge hostility to NFTs starting with the climate narrative

⁃ Joe: People with entrenched or vested interest trying to slow things down. Can’t worry too much about naysayers, try to stay patient and educate

⁃ Ethereum and others have a solution for the energetically expensive PoW. Bitcoin energy burning is almost a religion but with renewable energy they may be able to stay the course

Institutions and CBDCs

⁃ Multiyear agreements with financial institutions to enable Ethereum technology

⁃ NFT pipeline is also really big for projects right now

⁃ Regulation and liquidity along with matured technology the movement will be unstoppable

⁃ Nation state money is declining, looks like the end of a 80 year debt supercycle moving into a new era

⁃ Cobie: Governments have realised this, spinning up CBDCs per country. Not sure what they mean by it but they’ve accepted using these systems as the future

⁃ Joe: Depends on the country, China CBDC won’t be very decentralised. CBDCs will take a long time to figure out, don’t want to mess with systems billions rely on. ConsenSys have worked on multiple CBDC projects

⁃ Real time economy would shrink the duration between value creation events and be a growth driver for the economy

Multichain

⁃ Seen a multichain future for a long time

⁃ Security is dominated by BTC and ETH. More projects are focused on Execution

⁃ Alt L1s are more like competitors to Ethereum L2s

⁃ Solana are spending a huge about for security, fees are an order of magnitude less than what they’re paying. May look to ETH rollups in future for a solution

⁃ Ethereum has a massively unfair advantage with the size and speed of the development of the ecosystem

⁃ Cobie: How does Ethereum retain the ability to make changes while people become more reliant on it?

⁃ Joe: Not a new problem, Vitalik and others have spoken about simplifying the lower layers. Need to continue to improve the chain and sharding. Can see Palm as an ETH L2, Gnosis as a L2 and L3

Memes & New Economy

⁃ Everything is a meme now

⁃ Budweiser tweeting gm and wagmi

⁃ Moving from a previous economy which is very physical to an economy that is essentially all about creativity and living in virtual worlds

⁃ Things are going to get wacky and interesting in a creativity economy

MEV

⁃ Didn’t specifically think of MEV back in the day but recognised fee mechanisms would have sophistication come to it

⁃ Wallet Extractable Value is also being paid attention to

⁃ Continually evolving set of systems designed to make communities, users and organisations happy with given choices. End up paying the users of the system out of the MEV

Identity

⁃ Wallet is your digital authority

⁃ MetaMask moving towards enabling increasingly granular security

⁃ Able to have multiple personas and bring them together e.g. personas may need to be brought together for a better loan

⁃ Identity has been worked on from the start by ConsenSys and others from the start

⁃ As DAOs become increasingly politically important there will be a forum in which identity starts to ramify significantly

⁃ Thought DIDs would have been adopted quickly but it’s a deep set of problems

Final Alpha

⁃ Be kind to the people around you, take care of them

Notes by Kevin and Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Macro crypto narratives and investing via first principles, with Jordi Alexander Dec 08, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Crypto Intro

– Started off as a professional poker player

– Then was working as a trader

– Was in San Francisco during 2016, impossible not to hear about crypto

– Was trading bonds and gold

– Then went 80/20 gold/bitcoin, then 50/50, now just 100% Bitcoin

– Gold is just always $1800 lol

DOGE Debate

– @gametheorizing debated Su Zhu on if Doge could be real money

– main take – the centralization of ownership just makes it impossible

– Liquidity has been a huge reason for these meme run ups

Liquidity

– Low liquidity changes everyones hopes

– Once we’re in a bear market, everything will likely make more sense as low liquidity drives shitcoins way down

– There will be backlash to extreme wealth inequality that’s created from crypto wealth

– Like trillionaires based off of a new internet will not sit well with people

Cobie Wealth Talk

– Humans create more wealth over time

– Bitcoin creates a fixed supply of money

– In the end, won’t people be incentivized to not work or invest and just hold?

– game: “Cobie is absolutely right, in the end we’ll likely get something like inflation around 2%. Bitcoin will have to change”

– game: “We have a saying in poker that a sucker will soon be parted from his money”

– Cobie: “It may be a bit cynical but I feel like wealth always centralizes”

– game: “You’re absolutely right. The wealth inequality is huge now and its growing. Something’s going to have to change”

Regulation

– Ledger: “It would be simpler if you could “call a spade a spade” and let these tokens be a security if that’s their best use case, instead of making founders pigeon hole their tokens utility into something that makes less sense”

2022 Theses

– game: “If you have any dog coins you should sell them”

– “Come January we still have a bit more of a bull run”

– “Only time the bull run stops is when there’s no more QE, rates get raised, which is maybe later next year”

– so basically all this money gets sucked out, rates go up and holding cash feels better than it does now

– The mid tier NFTs are not keeping a bid

Ponzis

– Back when this started, people would say “Bitcoin’s a ponzi”

– Some things are more ponzi than others

– Basically, need real value creation for something to not be a “ponzi”

– Cobie: “Can you explain how OHM works?”

– game: “OHM is also a ponzi. The tokenomics is much more complex which hides it, so like it was a ponzi but now holds all these other coins”

– Ledger: “Is governance enough?”

– game: “absolutely”

– Cobie: “Can you explain how HEX works?”

– game: “HEX was ahead of its time. It’s a very complex ponzi.”

– Cobie: “If you are early to a ponzi then its great right… what would you say to people joining ponzis now?”

– game: “in a liquidity crunch, the ponzis go away, and they get closer to NAV valuation. There is real value in community and people will pay for that, so that’s an end game for some of them. Same with NFTs”

Web3

– Feels like there are a bunch of random VCs coming up

– You don’t just “decentralize” everything like “decentralized Uber”

– game thinks we get something more like web2.5 where celebrities and others start using NFTs as pfps and stuff

– game: “crypto is the best casino. Like we have Bitcoin store of value, L1s with smart contracts, then casinos”

– Web3 is kinda like companies just having tokens to incentivize and provide rewards

– game: “Once you have an NFT world where you can use them it’s not a ponzi anymore”

– Ledger: “Tokenization of communities, with VIP access and other stuff, is a good use of tokens and NFTs”

Trading

– Ledger: “There are people for whom this year has been absolutely stupid, just chasing the pump, marrying now bags and not holding any Bitcoin”

– Shitcoins up or down by end of 2022?

– Cobie: “idk. if it tops in march or may then maybe up, if it tops in january then probably down”

Scenario That Extends Cycle?

– realistically probably not

– will likely trickle down to smaller caps

– only thing that pushes it is if Fed keeps printing/ rates low

CT Drama

– Su Zhu super dunking on Ethereum then buying it, using followers as liquidity, basically become a super villain – is this a pro or con for Three Arrows Capital?

– game: “Completely depends on founders. Reminds me of Bobby Axelrod on Billions”

Feds in Crypto

– game talked with Su Zhu in depth about future of ETH if it was a $10T asset

– it will become very political, countries forcing votes that benefits them, etc

– only makes sense Feds are in crypto now lol

ETH as Money

– Who cares what you call it?

– The “ultra sound money” meme is awful

– Why would you want deflationary money?

– *insert various examples of why it doesn’t matter if you call it money e.g. if you buy a million dollar house is your house money? who cares!

End Game of USD?

– It’s honestly super strong

– If there’s no geopolitical power change it just stays in control

Blow Off Top?

– Thought there was gonna be one

– Used to be 60% chance, now more like 20% chance

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Trader Stream with ISO, SZ, and Abe Dec 02, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Trading

– abetrade – making case for leverage if you’re at least decent at trading

– Cobie: “Is there a reasonable path for someone who’s new to crypto to becoming profitable within 6 months to 1 year?”

– abe: “Yeah I mean I started on legacy markets…took me like 2-3 years before I became reasonably profitable”

– abe just sticks to BTC and ETH

– SZ traded 10 years of FX, but then 1 alt run can just make him more

– SZ thinks the dollar top is in

– iso used to leverage trade a lot

– thinks everyone should go through that phase to figure out what they’re good at

– did mostly TA, trying to catch bids on the pain points in the market

– now mostly buy and holds, finds good projects and invests in fundamentals

– saw this coming for metaverse and gaming tokens

Metaverse

– ISO has a strong thesis there and is holding a lot of metaverse and gaming tokens

– iso sees that the metaverse already exists – his nephew spends so much time on Fortnite and Roblox. That’s where he hangs out with his friends and trades things in game

– saw that crypto had an obvious intersection there and the assets would be on chain

– sold AXS way too early lol

– but has a long term thesis that crypto gaming will be HUGE

– ISO: “This is inning 1 of crypto gaming”

– Much more narrative trading now

– Cobie: “Adam, do you think the metaverse is a real thing?”

– Adam: “No I think it’s gonna be huge…I think its the next step”

– Cobie: “ISO – how do you position for these trades?”

– mostly relative trades based on users/ large caps and small caps

– ISO: “Video games transitioning to p2e will make people see that this is not a waste of time, and its a source of income”

Moar Trading

– “I think we go higher”

– the alt L1s never pump at the same time

– gotta catch the rotation

– Cobie: “Bitcoin culture is almost cringe within crypto now”

– it used to be cool and dangerous and Silk Road and stuff, but now its just cringey

– Cobie: “I think I’m philosophically against EIP 1559, economically for it”

Macro Outlook

– Ledger: “You gotta look for ways to justify your positions so when price action goes against you ya need macros to justify it” lol

– by the time everyone’s saying it its priced in

– some stocks talk and macro somethings

– SZ thinks 52k then maybe 60k

Personal Max Pain

– Ledger: “Zcash under $200”

– Sam coins are absolutely crushing Barry coins

– Sam coins just go up, Barry coins get crushed lol

Back to Metaverse

– ISO: Wilder World had great fundamentals and kept hitting their milestone

– Next wave is potentially gaming on AVAX

– Also, NEAR protocol has an $800M fund pushing their ecosystem

L1 Rotation Trade Dead?

– Tough to tell, def not going to 0, but maybe relative momentum

– Cobie: “I mean SBF might literally have infinite bid for Solana with like a few bps of FTX”

– Bullish unlocks?

– Cobie: “People get scared of unlocks, but with the ‘bullish unlock’ meme, most of the locked coins are sold OTC on a trust basis, so the people holding aren’t up 10,000x, the new holders are really only up like 2-3x”

– There are bearish unlocks when FDV is high, volume is low, investors are up, etc

FINAL ALPHA

– ISO: “Really important to keep an open mind – a lot of success in life will come from surrounding yourself with the right people”

– SZ: “Take somebody less fortunate that’s in the space and try to change their life. 1 at a time”

– Adam: “There are so many things you can do – spend less time arguing about what is the best way to make money and spend more time following your own curiosity”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Hentai Avenger and Ansem on trading, trends, and market cycles Nov 30, 2021

Links

https://twitter.com/blknoiz06

https://twitter.com/HentaiAvenger66

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Intro

- Ledger refusing to say Hentai Avenger

- Will go with “Bob Avenger” for the stream lol

Hentai Avenger

- “From last year to now made like a good sum of money. Then idk how I got here”

- Sold the top and bought the bottom this year

- Scaled account from $20k to $50M over last 5 years

- 21 y/o

- Started crypto back in 2017

- Best trade was Solana at $1.50

- Went on a hot streak with alt L1s

- AXS —> AVAX —> SOL —> Harmony

- “If you just buy in and wait then you can get stuck being in old bags”

Avenger Before Crypto

- Avenger was an esports Rocket League pro

- Summer 2016 made $20k in Rocket League, threw it into biotech stocks, made a little over a mil in 3 years

- Then 2020 came and made it all back on the covid bounce

- First intro into crypto was DeFi summer

- Has a lot of money in metaverse shitcoins atm

Z’s Crypto Experience

- When he’s hitting a lot in a row he gets cocky, then when he gets cocky he’ll make a wrong call and slow down

- Leverage? Not worth it because he doesn’t wanna blow his account up

- Leverage keeps all your focus so you miss the gems that are coming up

p2e Gaming

- Z: “When I was young I’d play WoW like hours and hours a day”

- Hadn’t found a fun p2e game yet

- Really liked DeFi Kingdom

- TSM partnered with Aurory to play pro esports there

- Cobie: “I have some thoughts”

- Ledger: “I was gonna try to set up here for you lol”

- Cobie: “So I dunked pretty hard on this first person shooter game that I thought looked like shit”

- This was my (https://twitter.com/cmsintern) tweet last night

- Thinks that these games aren’t good but people only wanna play them to earn and that’s a bad strategy

- The really good games that come where you play to own will be the best

- Z: “I actually haven’t made any money playing DeFi Kingdom yet I’ve prob spent more than I should have on heroes” lol

- Ledger: “Cobie do these games have to be better than traditional games?”

- Cobie: “If they aren’t as good then its not a game its a job. If it’s primary salary then it just turns into like serfdom”

p2e Gaming (cont’d)

- Ledger: “I don’t know I take the reverse. Like if I kinda like a game and I get paid to play then I’ll probably choose that game over the slightly better game”

- Ledger: “Like if I can play Halo 1 and get paid, vs Halo 3 and not get paid, then as the every man I’ll probably take Halo 1 and earn a few bucks”

- Ledger: “Like I saw CMS Intern’s tweet and was like holy crap I didn’t know they had 1st person shooters as p2e I thought it looked cool”

- There’s an incredible future for fun games that can incorporate the p2e element

- Ledger: “Do you think there will be a crypto game that’s top 10 or top 20 games in the world in the next 5 years?”

- Z: “I think so”

- Cobie: Cobie had some good points here, but I have to cut them out as a 1-time clap back for publicly dunking on me last night

- Jk here is basically what he said:

- Cobie: “I think there will be a game that’s really good, and then it will transition to an NFT-based game with an in game currency”

Current States

- Avenger: “We’ve gone from DeFi to GameFi to some metaverse plays, but we are not close to the top for these metaverse coins until like Gary Vee is dumping all his money into these”

- Ledger: “FLUFs are my back door metaverse play”

- Ledger: “Theres some like metaverse stuff like AI”

- Cobie: “AI!!! lolllllllll”

- Avenger: “Most bullish thing is inversebrah tweeting the same coins as me”

- Avenger: “Any metaverse play listed on KuCoin is like an easy 10x from here”

- IT IS KUCOIN SEASON

- Z: “All the alts that popped off in November were on KuCoin”

- Avenger: “Basically anything that gets listed on KuCoin immediately does a 2-3x”

ETH/BTC Chart

- Z: “It’s going to infinity bro”

- Does ETH/BTC get to 0.12 ?

- Cobie: “If it gets to 0.12 then you get the flippening” (happens at .165)

- No reason it will stop if it takes .12

- January 2018 ETH/BTC got to 0.105

- Cobie: “0.1 is the last line of defense”

Bear Market Scenarios?

- Z: “I don’t think we get a multi-year bear ever again”

- Avenger: “Yeah I don’t think we do either”

- Cobie thinks we could have another 4 year bear market

Next Stops

- Avenger: “Metaverse coins!”

- Z: “What did Sandbox do like a 6-7x in a month?”

- Ledger: “CMS Intern shilled that live on air when he came on UpOnly last summer”

- Cobie: “I think there are a lot of reasons to be cautious right now”

- Ledger: “I can see if there are a bunch of Hot Ball of Money rotations shoutout Dan Matuszewski for that term” whaddup CMS leggo

Chat Qs

- How’d you get in early on all these runners?

Z: For Axie, finding higher lows when everything else bottomed

Avenger: built out own risk signaling metrics

Avenger: “StunLikes on twitter, he’s like some private billionaire, I think he sold an algorithm to the government for like a couple million dollars”

Positions

- Avenger: “After $100k [BTC] I prob sell it all and I’m set man”

- Avenger: “You think we get to $100k BTC Cobie?”

- Cobie: “It has undeniably been the year of smart contract platforms. Been the year of SOL and AVAX and AXS more than its been the year of ETH”

- Ledger: “Are you diversifying at all?”

- Z: “Yeah I’m not as risk on as I used to be”

- Avenger: “I have a lot of real estate in Lithuania”

- Z: “Bro wtf” lmaooo

- Z goes on to shill Cosmos pretty heavily, kinda sounds good tbh

-Cobie says he’ll get some now

Anyone Smart Long-Term Bearish?

- Avenger: “Light?”

- Cobie: “He’s like short term bearish tho he’s just a trader”

- Avenger: “Then idk anyone”

- Z: “Yeah idk anyone smart that’s macro bearish”

- Cobie: “I have a few trad tech co founders who are smart but macro bearish”

Moar Chat Qs

-Is college a scam?

Avenger: “I like college I think college is cool”

“Where else can you find groups of fatherless women just roaming around?”

- AVAX top target?

Z: “$200”

- SOL top target?

Z: “0.1 ETH”

- BTC top target

Avenger: “$180k”

Z: “I think 69k for Q1 2022”

Ledger: “2022”

- Best airdrops

Avenger & Z: “zkSync”

- Flippening (within 12 months)

Avenger & Z: “yes”

FINAL ALPHA

- Avenger: “Be very careful who you tell good news to”

- Z: “Maintain a balance between crypto and the other parts of your life – will help your real life and also help your crypto trading - and also journal regularly”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Haralabos Voulgaris on owning Bitcoin and the value of self sovereignty Nov 24, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Betting

– Big betters work hard to conceal how and where they are betting

– You don’t just roll up to MGM and place huge bets usually

– You do it through a bot that places bets on different websites instead

– Then hope they pay out lol

– Got rugged heavy in 2009 for like 7 figures then the guy made off to Panama or wherever

– Books will refuse really good gamblers, but will accept “fish” as long as they sign that they aren’t addicted lol

Crypto

– First saw it on Wired magazine when Bitcoin was around $1

– Didn’t jump in at first

– Started using Bitcoin in 2012 to get paid

– Ledger: “Did the process in how you thought about gambling transfer over to crypto?”

– Hara: “Yes I think the fact it was governed by math”

– Could insulate yourself from idiotic government policies and ideologies

– Gotta think about how the dollar gets manipulated since Bitcoin will remain constant

– Hara thinks at some point people will decide to increase the supply of Bitcoin

– This is a flaming hot take sir – I respect it

– We’re gonna be old bags of dust and these kids are just gonna be living in the metaverse

– It is so native and built into these kids

– Ledger: “We’re just gonna go away its gonna be like the blow off top of humanity”

Metaverse

– Cobie: “How do you think about NFTs?”

– Hara likes 2017 era NFTs

– Loves CryptoPunks – all about the narrative and the story

– Likes the old stuff, some of the new stuff is just super out there

– More of a Bitcoin maximalist even though Hara finds Bitcoin Maximalism super toxic

Bitcoin Maxis

– A lot of them might’ve gotten burnt in 2017 and now just think everything is a scam

– Calling anything that isn’t Bitcoin is a shitcoin means that mentally there is something wrong with you

– Cobie: “Part of the toxic maxis is that they missed out, then they join a cult and they have friends now and chant the same words and chant shitcoins and say “Udi you’re wrong!” and then go somewhere else”

– Hara: “The bullish case for me is when nations put Bitcoin on their balance sheet – they aren’t gonna put Ethereum or Solana on there”

Next Steps

– Ledger: “What’s next in your life?”

Hara: “I think its about sovereignty”

– Has always been an individual, wants to be protected instead of looking for gains

– Crypto is the #1 way to preserver your wealth

– Goal before was always to buy a basketball team (need about $1B) but once he got close he was like “idk i don’t really wanna sell my Bitcoin for a basketball team” lolllll

Basketball and NFTs

– Ledger: “How’s it feel to see these guys getting into NFTs? Does that worry you about where we are in the cycle?”

– Not at all

– Thinks that’s not indicative of a top, we are nowhere even close to euphoria

– People are out here protesting racism and other things

– Thinks people might/ should be protesting the dollar, is surprised its not bigger yet

– Hara likes the penguins! LFG

– Hasn’t bought NFTs in a long time

– These athletes aren’t buying punks cause they’re always looking for a deal!

Twitter NFT Integration

– Cobie: “How is this going to go down with the furies”

– Ledger doesn’t get why these are so controversial

– Hara wants to create an NFT project for all these furies

– Ledger: “They already exist they’re called FLUFs – I can give you a good deal on some if you want”

– *Cobie and Hara making fun of FLUFs

– Ledger: “Y’all just aren’t gonna make it”

Constitution DAO

– Hara didn’t do it, didn’t get it

– Thought it woulda been cool to get in then like burn it

– Ledger: “That’s a really good way to get regulators to pay attention to crypto” lol

Forks

– People trade on FOMO so hard

– Like there’s some random ass ohm fork people ape into

– ETH can get myspaced, all of this stuff can probably get replaced

– Bitcoin can never get replaced

– Bitcoin Diamond and Gold and Cash and all that stuff just no chance at all

The Flippening

– If ETH gets to like 0.08 I’m probably a net seller of ETH

– I don’t like to say ahead of time because its so hard to know the context for the move

– It probably signals a time to be cautious even when people are dancing in the streets

Chat Questions

Sports world guys we need?

– Steven A Smith

– NFTs are the gateway drug of crypto

Anon account?

– No

Bitcoin volcano bond?

– Interesting, can just buy El Salvador bond or Bitcoin though, don’t need this although it is cool and interesting

– Saylor will end with fireworks either way

*The Winklevoss are the only people to ever refuse coming on UpOnly. What an outrageous decision.

If you’re 25 with 100k what do you do?

– Would do crypto, trying to build something, tracking different wallets

– Prob not Bitcoin would do something more aggressive, L2s, track engagement, wouldn’t do leverage

FINAL ALPHA

– Hara: “Success = responsibility. Think about what is truly valuable and finite which is your time. Be mindful of your time and what you want to accomplish.”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Debate: The morality of decentralization in crypto, with Udi and David Nov 23, 2021

In this episode of UpOnly, Ledger hosts a charity debate between Udi Wertheimer and David Hoffman about decentralization and moral prerequisites in blockchain design. CMS Holdings very kindly donated $300,000 to the development of Bitcoin to sponsor this debate.

https://twitter.com/cmsholdings

Presented by FTX: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Udi & David:

https://twitter.com/udiWertheimer

https://twitter.com/TrustlessState

Paradigm founders Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang Nov 18, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

How’d You Meet?

– Coinbase pitched Sequoia

– Fred pitched the basis of the metaverse on the blockchain when Matt was at Sequoia

– Then Matt and Fred emailed back and forth, then the rest is history

– This was 2017

Metaverse

– Fred: “People don’t yet realize that crypto is the metaverse”

– It’s not just some VR world

– Cobie: “How do you think this plays out over the next 15 to 20 years?”

– Matt: “To state the obvious people are spending more time in these digital worlds. As people spend more time there they are also spending money”

– Blockchain can enable property rights in the metaverse

Next Levels of Crypto

– Crypto will not be fully decentralized at every level that is the wrong way to think about it

– Think gaming companies might be able to make the jump to crypto

– Social media probably not

– Matt: “all monarchies are dictatorships” (quoting someone else)

– Network effects based businesses have a chicken and an egg problem

– Overcoming is hard

– Crypto presents the first real solve to potentially getting new network effects

Play-to-earn

– Play to earn has been around for a very long time

– It’s just been under the table

– Play to earn games present it in a transparent way with an open economy

– People see work as purpose – this could fall into line with play to earn games

– Cobie was skeptical, but what made it click for him was thinking about old Halo gameplay when he spent ages trying to earn a special helmet

– Cobie bullish on interoperable assets for p2e gaming

– Fred: “I played WoW for thousands of hours and all i cared about was how my character looked”

– To the parents who always say you’re wasting your time playing video games – the founder of Paradigm did the same thing!

– You can have multiple identities in the metaverse

Paradigm Now

– In 2017 all the big internet companies had already be built

– Crypto felt like the next frontier

– Tried to make Paradigm a place where brilliant, curious people would want to spend their time

– Didn’t care about roles just wanted the best talent

– Talented young people are the people that actually create the future – 20yrs ago it was Goldman etc., 10 years ago it was Google etc., today it is crypto

– FOLLOW THE TALENTED YOUNG PEOPLE

– The quality of crypto investors has gone up

– Crypto will be a powerful movement that takes over the world

How to Keep Talent?

– Help the most ambitious people keep building

– Getting to work on multiple projects at once is very attractive

– How many anons on Paradigm?

– At least Samczsun and Hasu, another joining soon

DeFi

– Matt: “I think we’re super early. If we’re building a financial system from the ground up there is still so much left to build”

– Cobie: “What takes us from 100Bs to multi-trillions?”

– Matt: “I think it just takes time”

– This is the progression of new tech

– Institutions will like a middle man at first to help use

– Ledger: “It reminds me of when elevators came out and there was an attendant just cause it made people feel safer”

– Laughing thinking about Ledger being 190 years old and around when elevators came out

Smartest Person Bearish Crypto?

– Struggle to think of an example of someone who is very well informed and still bearish

– Only people who are worried about regulation

– Ledger: “What about Charlie Munger?”

– Matt: “I mean he also missed the internet”

– DUNK!

New Paradigm $2.5B Fund

– “We are looking at the growth over the next 10 years”

– Trying to orient vision out there instead of shorter term

– Cobie: “It makes it easier if you think in 10 years – if you’re thinking 10 years from now you might be seed investing in the main L1 today lol”

– Fred: “We’re finally getting to a place where people can build and create mainstream applications with crypto”

– Matt: “We are wired as humans to underestimate what exponential growth looks like”

Future of Web3

– Top level framing – there’s an iPhone bundling moment that’s happening with crypto

– Fred: “The same way the iPhone put all mp3s, email, a telephone, etc into one thing, crypto is bundling all of your internet identity into your wallet”

– Ledger: “Can we do this and maintain any type of financial or personal privacy?”

– Fred: “Zero-Knowledge Proofs.”

– Privacy will be really important

Quickfire Qs

Punks – overvalued vs. undervalued?

– Fred: “So we don’t give out investment advice”

Biggest mistake/ worst investment?

– Prediction markets

How to work for Paradigm?

– Always interested in thoughtful/ energetic people

– “Send us something cool you made on the internet”

FINAL ALPHA

– Matt: “It’s easy in life to sweat the small stuff. Zoom out and find the 1 or 2 things that really matter (for life, investing, etc). If you get those right everything else works out”

– Fred: “All the people that do things that really matter think through things for themselves. They think from first principles and think what makes sense for them”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Looks Rare Episode 1: Art Blocks CTO & artist Jake Rockland (Purphat) Nov 10, 2021

This is the first episode of the Looks Rare miniseries, hosted by Fitch and Deeze. Today, they interview Art Blocks CTO Jack Rockland (known as Purphat) about his journey into NFTs, Art Blocks, tech, and more.

Presented by FTX: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Deeze: https://twitter.com/DeezeFi

Fitch: https://twitter.com/Fitchinverse

Purphat: https://twitter.com/purphat

Artblocks: https://www.artblocks.io/user/0xd6dd6961d3224958fcd306b76a991ab974ec1ebc

Ari Paul of Blocktower on maximilism, decentralization, and investing Oct 14, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Introduction

– Ari bought first Bitcoin in 2014

– Really dove into crypto 2016

– Friend emailed him in 2011 asking to check out crypto, Ari said it won’t retain value, not backed by guns like fiat

– Ari: “For crypto you kinda gotta know a little bit about a lot of things”

– Got involved with crypto through crypto twitter

– Cunningham’s Law – “The fastest way to get an answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to state something wrong”

Ari’s Headspace

– Long term mostly thinking about the future of crypto

– BlockTower bets on where the world will be in 1-3 years, not 10-20 years

– Fascinated by the big picture

– Huge believer in giving people defensive tools for overbearing states

VC Stuff

– BlockTower is a trading firm by nature, so they invest in projects that they can actually be power users in

– Ari: “Evaluating seed stage teams is its own skillsets, very different from evaluating something like Microsoft”

– Cobie skeptical of a16z’s success in crypto, followed like 4 deals they did and got crushed

– A lot of the time, timing is much more important than vetting skill

– Ari: “If you were trading NFTs 2 years ago, it almost doesn’t matter if you were good it just matters that you were doing it”

Privacy

– Ari: “There’s a whole tech stack for privacy that’s missing”

– Countries can control the internet very easily

– People think the internet is super hard to control – there is literally a bundle of wires that delivers the internet to an entire country

– Ari: “zk-rollup chains where you can shield the mempool… there is some super cool math we’re building into the system now that could change everything”

– You could fork Ethereum and add it as a rollup chain to Bitcoin

– Ledger: “Is there really a market for that?”

– Ari: “It seems likely in the next 2 years that we’ll get a soft fork to implement this”

– Ari: “There are bitcoiners who are pitching this as humanitarian technology but against adding privacy technology that exists…borderline unethical”

Making ETH Maxis Mad

– Ethereum is a risky startup competing on tech

– The odds it is a market leader in 10 years is under 20%

– Facebook didn’t need a single Friendster user or dev

– If you have an industry that’s going to 20x, you don’t need to take existing users

– Ari: “Solana has something like more than 10,000 active developers now”

– Ethereum does not have much of a moat, it has a little bit of brand recognition, a little bit of regulatory head start, some dev moat, but largely the moat is very small

– Ethereum cannot move as fast, cannot take as much risk. It’s hard to maintain its lead

– Cobie: “Do you think Ethereum should have a canary network, kind of like Kusama?”

– Ari: “(pause) I actually haven’t thought about that”

– Seems to be a real, good idea

Solana

– Ari has been recommending Solana for the last 2 years

– Well intentioned team, real project, very cool innovation at the communication layer

– *Ari still has a long Solana position to be clear*

– It’s quite centralized, depends on the team to stay up, has a real path to decentralization

– It’s a highly speculative early stage bet

BNB

– Exchange coins are basically sold as equities

– There are tons of regulatory actions which could likely be negative for $BNB

– Would not hold the coin

Cardano

– Ari: “Cardano I actually know very little about”

– The only thing he really believed would stick around for 5 years was Bitcoin, DeFi and NFTs

– Ari: “I worry that in 5-10 years the winning metaverse will be Facebook or Fortnite, some centralized entity, which scares me because I want a decentralized world”

– Ledger: “so Cardano” lol

– Ari: “I am deeply skeptical of Cardano”

– Ledger: “Dump it”

2017 Bull Market

– Ari bought $50k calls in 2017

– Did it to maintain upside exposure while not keeping material risk on

– Went onto CNBC to talk about it, they mid-curved his thinking

– Ari: “Options are a bet on volatility, not the direction, because you can always hedge the direction with the underlying”

– Ari: “If you can’t define skew and kurtosis then you probably shouldn’t be trading options”

Crypto Investing

– Ari: “If you’re investing with a lot of small bets in alts, it almost acts as a call option”

– Ari thinks vol is about fair today

– Basically every time Bitcoin vol gets below 60, Ari buys it

– Ari: “The crazier the bull market the crazier the retrace”

– Ari: “My basic thesis now is DeFi 5-10x’s here and then retraces 80-90%”

– Ari: “The biggest value add from crypto over the next 12-18 months is connecting DeFi to real world lending”

FINAL ALPHA

– Ari: “It doesn’t matter how much money you make, if you don’t keep yourself healthy you won’t enjoy it”

– Focus on your health!

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Tokenomics and Ecosystem Growth with Tom Schmidt of Dragonfly Oct 12, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Tom Intro

⁃ Partner at Dragonfly Capital (@dragonfly_cap)

⁃ Owner of elusive Gauntlet x Nike hoodie

⁃ Formerly product at 0x and PM at Instagram

Dragonfly Capital & Tokenomics

⁃ East/West focus. Crypto is very different from Web2 in that you can’t really launch locally, you’re global from day 1. Dragonfly help bridge the East/West gap for teams and products

⁃ 2019 was harder to do deals remotely, people would meet snd pitch in person. Not really a thing anymore – your reputation precedes you online

⁃ Day to day work is 25% team calls, 25% portfolio support, 20% research and staying on top of what’s going on in the space

⁃ Cobie: How much of your previous product experience has helped in your VC Role? Tom: It was a bit of learning curve from IG to 0x. A lot translates over but the token aspect changes how you think about product, it can be the growth mechanic, the same product but with different tokenomics can have a huge difference in outcome

⁃ Cobie: Even having a token as a defence mechanism is a requirement now

⁃ Tom: Prefer the method of building a great and sticky product then adding the token on top of that otherwise you run into leaky bucket theory once the incentives run out

⁃ Dislikes revenue to token holders early on, ideally it should be used to make the product better and grow but treasuries have gotten so big that teams probably don’t know how to spend it

Airdrops & Sybil Attacks

⁃ Divergence Ventures farmed 10% of RBN airdrop

⁃ Returned following being found out and the following drama

⁃ Tom farmed it personally long before the airdrop email, continued to farm after that point and so has since voluntarily returned all farmed RBN from his account

⁃ An individual exploiting via sybil isn’t as bad as an investor that then also dumps day one

⁃ Teams are experimenting with different ways to achieve fair distribution but there’s still a lot to work out, it’s a really interesting design space

⁃ Need to hold people to a high standard to self-regulate in the industry

Trends in the next 6-18months?

⁃ Product structure

⁃ Derivative products

⁃ DAOs & DAO tooling

Ethereum Scaling

⁃ ZK-rollup maximalist

⁃ For some applications and purposes even the rollup won’t be cheap enough and so maybe there will be room for other chains

⁃ You can also rollup a rollup e.g. Mina. Cobie: “Inception was a warning, don’t go too many rollup’s deep or you’ll get stuck there forever”

⁃ Heterogeneous blockchain future but unsure what path it will take

⁃ Cobie: Should L2s have tokens? Tom: Decentralising the L2 could rely on having a token and also it’s a case of trying to protect against forking or a competitor

⁃ There will be a fee for L2s but unsure who will pay it, token holders, users, maybe the L1?

⁃ Solana has been surprising with the amount of developer activity happening there

⁃ Cobie: When chains are EVM compatible you get a lot of copy-paste projects to grab money over and over. Potentially means that the teams are less sticky, opportunity over legitimate drive. Solana is more novel, the product designs maybe aren’t all novel but there’s a lot of work there being done to make things sticky. Those ecosystems that do that are much more likely to perform in the next cycle

Why won’t my 0x go up? (– Ledger)

⁃ It’s structured as a gas rebate which doesn’t really scale proportionately to the size of a trade

⁃ Reworking a token is a sensitive topic

⁃ 0x we’re extremely early on a lot of things like governance

Bitcoin Projects?

⁃ Lightning network seems like a real path forward for Bitcoin, they’re building a real developer network

⁃ It’s not incentivised the demand to use it is natural either by need or by people who love Bitcoin

Working in Crypto?

⁃ It’s a great time to be a founder, raising funds is super competitive right now

⁃ Passion about the space and research is desired when hiring

⁃ Crypto is much more exciting and intellectually interesting than traditional tech jobs

⁃ Taipei is a solid place for crypto in Asia alongside Singapore

⁃ 2017-2019 had SF as a central crypto hub but it’s not really the case anymore and teams are becoming more geographically spread out

Final Alpha

⁃ Invest for strength, not for a lack of weakness

⁃ Focus on your sleep and getting high quality sleep

Notes by Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Path on NFTs, the metaverse and crypto cycle price predictions Oct 08, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Introduction

– Path has never had a job

– Ledger: “You basically went from being a child, to retired”

– Ledge wants to bring Teen Executive back on to teach him a lesson

– Path bought Bitcoin on the run up in 2013 around $100

– Went to $250 then dropped to $50 in 3 days

– Largest red candle ever? 80%?

2014 Alt Coins

– Feathercoin, BlackCoin

– Ledger bought BlackCoin in 2017 lmao

– BlackCoin was the best pump cause it ripped like 10x, then WhiteCoin pumped right after

– Do not hold something longer than the 1st pump

Path’s Convictions

– Had a lot of ETH back in the day but sold early

– Then built a large position in the 2019 bear market

– Path: “High fees are bullish”

– For Ethereum, you’re paying for the security

– A lot of volume will shift to layer 2 in the coming years

Zcash

– Path was high conviction ZEC early on

– It has really been down only since then

– Zooko (Zcash creator) mentioned in the white paper

– Military very interested in Zk-SNARKs

– for 60 IQ newbs, Zk-SNARK = Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge

Tezos

– Path fudded Tezos a bit for NFTs back in May

– The founder quote-tweeted him and got pissed

– Path: “Tezos as an investment isn’t great really”

– Path: “Tezos is definitely the second best chain for NFTs after ETH”

– Chat: “How can you say Tezos is the second best NFT chain when Solana exists?”

– Path: “Tezos has actual art!” he likes the art

NFTs

– CryptoKitties took off 2017 peaks

– Rare Pepes were even before that

– CryptoPunks prob still a great buy

– Axie Infinity is paying people more than minimum wage in their countries

– Path: “Axie Infinity is only the first one of these metaverse games”

– Path: “Save your money and wait for the big collections to come along”

– Path: “Eventually all artists will come to NFTs, even if they hate it now”

– 1/1s have performed very well

– MekaVerse is the biggest NFT drop maybe ever, comes out in 45 min

NFD

– Path fractionalized the fiesty DOGE picture

– Now has a market cap of 8,700 ETH ($31M)

– that’s a very profitable day

– PleasrDAO fractionalized the original DOGE picture

– Bought for $4M, now worth $250M

– Cobie: “Why is dog money a thing at all?”

– It shows that memes have real value

Path soothingly talking and Ledger casually charting in the background

Cobie: “It’s pretty cool how Sam is the richest person under 30 and he just replies to your DMs and tweets”

Trading

– Cobie: “Do you still trade or are you just a collectooor?”

– Path: “I’ve been trading still, mostly NFTs”

– Still likes Bitcoin, longer ETH

– ETH will go sideways before $4k, then in a month or two you lever up on a dip and watch it rip

– Bitcoin probably runs first, then others after

– Path: “ETH chart looks good… going to $20k easy”

– Path: “This is the supercycle I don’t think these bleed out anymore”

Urbit

– Been in development since 2002

– Your ID is locked to a planet or star

– You can buy planets, stars, and galaxies

– It’s all about decentralizing everything and not being at the mercy of Microsoft or Apple or anything

– Path: “It’s a great idea, it’s a really interesting idea”

– Path: “This is the next big thing after NFTs and metaverse and stuff, you guys will be on this in like 5 years”

Asset Name Tops

Bitcoin – $250k

Ethereum – $80k

Solana – $500

Cardano – $20

Chainlink – $400

Zcash – $5000

LUNA – isn’t that a stablecoin?

AAVE – $1000

BNB – $2000

FTT – $300

TSLA – $0

GME – $1000

UK Gas Prices – ???

Floor Punk – 300-400 ETH

XTZ – $50

XRP – $3

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Cobie & Ledger <> Haseeb Qureshi

UpOnlyTV Notes

Haseeb Intro

⁃ Managing partner at Dragonfly Capital (@dragonfly_cap)

⁃ Formerly a professional poker player then learned to code and became a software engineer at Airbnb before moving into crypto

⁃ Full time crypto in 2017 doing security research, worked at 21/Earn, a stable coin startup and then into the investment side

Poker & Crypto

⁃ Cobie: Why are there so many poker people in crypto? Haseeb: They’re willing to do weird things to make money, predisposition to it. It rewards being a little bit obsessive

⁃ Very few poker players in VC roles much more that are traders

⁃ Poker has also been getting worse as an economy and harder to make a living from it

Dragonfly Capital & Investing

⁃ Multistage firm, will invest at all stages of a project, doing both equity and token deals

⁃ Ledger: Is one easier than the other when it comes to making decisions? Haseeb: Equity liquidity is decided for you, the rest of the time you’re along for the ride which makes things easier

⁃ Long term investments in tokens and will have lockup’s 2-4 years but tend to hold beyond that even when liquid. Sometimes things run quicker than expected and it makes sense to exit but still holding most things today

⁃ Crypto markets aren’t efficient so even knowing marginally more than the average trader is enough to make money

⁃ When it comes to project performance: Winners keep winning

⁃ If Dragonfly buy tokens that are already live they’ll negotiate with the DAO or OTC

⁃ Ledger: Do you give any weighting to revenue back to token holders tokenomics? e.g. Uni vs Sushi? Haseeb: Markets are forward looking, lack of revenue to holders right now is less important than them being the market leader and future developments

Biggest Misses?

⁃ Uniswap. Hayden wanted Dragonfly in the round but it didn’t seem sustainable and completely missed it

⁃ Has seed round memos for Solana @ .04 but they didn’t act on it (~4000x) as well as for Terra

Making It & Diversification

⁃ Haseeb: Multicoin Capital became a titan from leading the Solana round

⁃ Cobie: Great example of only needing one big win to make it. People come in with too low of time horizons and have losses leverage trading trying to play catch-up.

⁃ It’s like making 10 high conviction thesis driven investments and watching them carefully to see if what you expected to happen, happens. Am I right, am I wrong, and why?

⁃ Haseeb: Diversification is powerful. If returns are power of law distributed the optimal strategy is to be maximally diversified

⁃ Ledger: I used to mock the idea of keeping moon bags but I’ve seen enough that’s just kept going up so much more than anticipated

⁃ But, you also can’t put your fate into something that continues to underperform

Multi-chain Future & L1 vs ETH vs L2

⁃ Line of sand is between EVM chains and non-EVM chains

⁃ The EVM is the lingua franca , all of the tooling has been built with one ecosystem in mind. Equivalent to JavaScript, it wasn’t the best language but it became the thing you had to write in

⁃ Thesis has been broadly that the L1s end up winning over L2s due to L2 constraints e.g. security model

⁃ L1s have more flexibility

⁃ Cobie: What about Bitcoin? Haseeb: Bitcoin is digital gold, it’s been around long enough and held up – so it’s strength now is in not changing. Ledger: Feel like it will underperform in emerging bull markets but hold up better in bear markets

What’s Next?

⁃ Synthetic assets still feel under-explored and under-appreciated

⁃ Grandmother is old-school and was buying gold instead of relying on the Rupee. The reason people aren’t buying other assets is due to a lack of access

⁃ Crypto is about global permission-less access and it’s not about being able to offer it in the US but elsewhere

⁃ DeFi has evolved less and not grown that much since DeFi Summer ended. There aren’t enough people that are technical enough to build it out

⁃ Vast majority of people in the world are living month to month and not concerned about interest rates

Final Alpha

⁃ In crypto it’s really easy to overthink things and the obvious thing is usually right

Notes by Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Building Compound and deep diving Defi, with Robert Leshner Sep 30, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Introduction

– Founder of Compound Labs

– Investor at Robot Ventures with Tarun Chitra (@tarunchitra)

– Reads solidity, doesn’t write it

– Interested in chess and the opera outside of crypto and investing

– Chess ELO is 15/20

Compound Bug

– Exploitable by past borrowers to claim unearned rewards

– Took hours for anyone to discover the root cause

– There’s no risk to COMP positions and only affects distribution, worst case is that tokens reserved for future user incentives is now somewhat depleted

– Please return COMP to the protocol if you received more rewards than expected (especially if you’re doxxed) Send 90% back!

Compound Governance/ DAO

– Kinda created the standard for ETH governance models

– Rob would design it differently if he were to do it again today

– Rob think she has medium power outside of on-chain governance (i.e. actual community sway)

– He has been on the losing side of a few votes already lol

– Has some sway in other DeFi communities as well

– Like + a few reputation points for being Compound founder lol

Compound Treasury

– http://compound.finance/treasury

– Being offered clearly and directly as a security & compliant with US law

– Huge appetite to get offline insurance for the product

Compound L1 & The State of ETH

– Compound launching its own L1 chain that is still in development

– Act as a series of bridges to other blockchains with a simple application at the centre that looks and feels like Compound

– Can import assets from all L1s to use as collateral to borrow on other L1s

– Currently on test-net but has been in development for almost a year, all open source

– Ridiculed when the whitepaper was launched as there was no demand to get off ETH but now it’s become a pain point

– Current ETH fees are not usable for typical users

– Robert is most excited about ETH2.0 as it may negate the need for L2 if successful. In the short term L2s and EVM forks are amazing but are only short term solutions

Robot Ventures

– Investing in a lot of different projects, the current website is very out of date

– Most of the investments are in DeFi and across different chains

– Value in interacting with tonnes of founders and learning from them what works and doesn’t can also lead to some value flowing back into compound

– Being an investor can help with the signal to noise ratio

– Usually not arguing on valuations, as low friction as it gets

– Advises to start with an equity based business and not worry about having a token too soon

Robot Ventures Investing Decisions

– In general, if one of them (Rob or Tarun) says no, they don’t do it

– Cobie: “What’s the exit plan?”

– Rob: “In general, we’re ultra respective of teams and lockups. If something is up like 4-10x, we’ll sell like a quarter so we can invest in other companies”

– It’s a fund, they have their own money, also outside investors

Bitcoin Maxis

– Rob: “Typically when I think of a Bitcoin maxi i think of like Pomp, or like Dan Held”

– Rob: “Like this is Bitcoin and this is how it works!”

– Ledger: “Deflationary ETH will create some fireworks dynamics in the future”

Cryptopunks

– Hayden (inventor of Uniswap) said Unisocks are the best NFT

– Rob and Kain bullied Hayden into buying a white-haired cryptopunk

– They all made it their twitter pfps and everyone thought it was collusion

– Rob: “Everyone views NFTs differently – people will freak out about $100 on a dinner then spend so much money on these NFTs”

– Rob minted 26 cryptopunks on the initial release

– Gave away 15 punks for Christmas to compound labs guys last year LOL

Interesting Investing Areas

– 1. Utility NFTs

– NFTs that are memberships, tickets, XYZ

– Also NFT finance

– How to do complex deviates on unique things

– 2. Crypto UX

– The user experience right now is just so bad

– No one can use this stuff

– Wallets, products that extract away crypto, experimental plays here

Working for a Protocol

– Nowadays you can work for a protocol!

– Compound labs is always hiring

– 0x4C (LUKE) is looking for a job, maybe he can work at Compound!

Not Exciting Areas

– Generic DeFi

– Buzzword heavy products that are not distinguished

FINAL ALPHA

– Crypto is more welcoming than you think it is – get involved!

– There are more options sellers than options sellers – most people are naturally short gamma. Buy gamma and hedge it!

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Hasu on Crypto Fundamentals & Narratives. Sep 25, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Hasu Twitter Day

– Everyone has become a Hasu on twitter today

– pplpleasr became Hasupleasr lol

Hasu’s Day to Day

– Basically thinks about stuff and writes it down

– Has been getting back into the dating scene

– Uses his actual photo, not Hasu anime pfp

– It’s been 18 years since Ledger has been dating

Background

– Joined crypto January 2018 at the absolute top

– Played pro poker for a decade

– So many people who used to play poker are now in crypto

– Gambling addicts?

– Not very competitive anymore because bad players lose interest, good players keep getting better

– Fully dove into crypto in peak bear market

Starting Crypto

– Everyone always feels behind when they start

– Doesn’t take very long to actually catch up

– Hasu worked on himself to keep learning for 2 years

– Bear market best time to learn – only people who really care are studying then

– Su Zhu and Hasu started talking and writing together every day

– Now they run Uncommon Core Podcast together

Bear Market

– Developed 2 strong beliefs: Bitcoin & DeFi

– Had a thesis written out like 1.5 years before DeFi summer but still didn’t recognize DeFi summer as DeFi for awhile

New Guys

– Cobie: “What would you recommend new guys do in this market?”

– If Hasu had derisked every time his gut said to he’d be worse off

– Ledger: “Santiago says time in the market, not timing the market”

– Cobie: “For 95% of people, just holding and forgetting is the best strategy”

Leverage

– Hasu’s 2 pieces of advice for the 100 IQers – pay attention to fees and taxes & don’t use leverage

– Cobie: “Everyone who comes on this show that made it said don’t use leverage”

– Hasu: “If you use leverage, trade on a platform with sub accounts and one that has partial liquidations”

Interesting Problems in Crypto

– The security of public blockchains

– MEV and protecting people from leaking money to miners if they don’t intend to

MEV (Miner Extractable Value)

– Common example of MEV is a sandwich attack: miner sees order with 5% slippage, sneaks in trade before to frontrun, cause max slippage then sell right at the end

– Locked in guaranteed profit for miner and loss for trader

*Hasu connection rug followed by OOOOOR meme breakdown by Cobie and Ledge*

MEV pt. 2

– Ledger: “Does MEV really exist for other chains?”

– Hasu (in short): “Yes but it takes on a different form”

– If there is value to being behind or before orders in a block, people will always spend up to that amount to extract it

– Actually isn’t always bad – resembles mining to a certain extent and makes the market efficient

Moar MEV

– Flashbots/ Eden kinda like the infrastructure

– Flashbots is like a soft fork of ETH with a new transaction time where transactions go into a private pool

– These transactions are private until they land on chain

– Then it doesn’t matter until what your slippage is set it

– Punk floor got swept with MiningDAO, executed all at once without allowing anyone to frontrun

Guest Question

– I’m not going to pretend to be able to take notes on this answer

MOOOOOAR MEV

– Eden is faster than flashbots since they forked

– Flashbots required much more technical knowledge to be able to submit a transaction to them

– Eden is much easier to use

– Chainlink is in the position to extract a lot of value

– Lending markets could do a better job

– Wallets are in the best position to protect users from MEV

– Could run local simulations to see if it would create MEV, and if it would, you could bundle the transaction with the MEV and give the V back to the user

Bitcoin Security

– Udi said it’s 100 years away, false moral panic

– It’s so cheap to reorg ETC that it takes like 2 weeks to get finality

– If Bitcoin security drops too low, you need to increase the amount of wait time for finality

– It’s agreed that there is some amount of security fee we should pay to miners

– But how much that is is still up for debate

– Lightning network liquidity is tough

Game Theory of the Future of Bitcoin

– Looking at the long-term is important

– Always struck Hasu as very obvious that Bitcoin would run into problems

– Miners making less fundamentally weakens Bitcoins security and will need to be solved to get and keep a bitcoin standard

– Bitcoin on exchanges might be the play in the future (per Gavin’s article) even though it goes against the HODL meme

– Ledger: “If Hasu wants to debate Udi CMS holdings will likely pay 6 figures for you to do it”

– Hasu: “I think Bitcoin is going to get hardcore greenwashed over the next 5 years”

Alternative L1s

– Hasu mostly out on them

– Feels like they release incentive programs, create coins and pull in money

– Environmental critique of Bitcoin is more legit than it is against Ethereum

– Tezos had a potential value add there, but now Ledger is not impressed

– Hasu sees Avalanche potentially falling over a bit like BSC

Young People in Crypto

– Crypto is full of very young people

– They should use their time to do things that they won’t be able to do later

Regulations & Stablecoins

– Feeling some afterglow after recent events

– Thinks its one of the biggest events in crypto in 2021

– Crypto having a real impact in politics is very positive

– Hasu: “It seems like Gensler does not have a lot of power”

– Hasu: “I hate ripple but I’m hoping they win their case because it will be very important for crypto… it is such an obvious security”

Final Alpha

– Hasu: “There are a lot of important skills out there but the most important is learning how to learn. There are a lot of really good mental models for how to learn well. Check out “The Art of Learning”. You learn it once then everything else will come easier to you”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Sushi CTO Joseph Delong on building defi protocols Sep 17, 2021

Show Partner

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Show Notes

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

State of the Market, with CMSHoldings, Jason from Telegram, and Jim Talbot Sep 02, 2021

Show Partner

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Show Notes

Cobie & Ledger <> Dan Matuszewski (CMS Holdings) <> Jason from Telegram <> Jim Talbot

UpOnly notes

“How do we feel here?”

– Ledger: “We have 1/2 of the true up only bull maximalists on here, if we get Kaleo on then we’d have the powerhouse”

– Dan: “There’s so much money pushing in here… you hear about like a 3, 4, 5 billion dollar equity raise in this space every week”

– Dan: “Like even if people sold… where’s that money gonna go? Like you can only buy so many houses and boats right”

– Jason: “We could go up or we could also go down”

– Jim: “I’m a mechanical trader – I watch the tape and the order book and trade off imbalances and things there”

Derivatives

– Ledge: “Dan where do we sit with financing stuff right now?”

– Dan: “It’s rich. Financing is high right now, not great not a super bullish thing, september expiry coming up too we’ll have to make it through these next few months”

– Cobie: “You got a lot of people waiting to just wait and buy the ATH breakout on ETH”

– Dan: “I am of the opinion there’s a lot of margin in the system right now”

HOT BALL OF MONEY EFFECT

– Cobie: “AVAX blew up, and then Fantom had an announcement, and AVAX stuff dropped like 85% and Fantom tripled”

– Dan: “Everyone got it this time, it was like the most pure hot ball of money effect”

Bullish Unlocks?

– Dan: “A lot of times it pays to know what’s going on in the OTC markets”

– Dan: “We bought a lot of Solana before the unlock, and it was so hard to get your hands on demand was super prevalent. So it was easy to say the unlock would be bullish”

– Cobie: “Have you been playing in these new ecosystems?”

– Dan: “Yeah we play in them as much as we can we have a high risk tolerance”

NFTs

– Jason: “I’m pretty new to these I’m like Sam” [Trabucco]

– Jason: “I got pitched this super convincing narrative of pixel dicks and hit up Cobie and was like yo what do you think? and he was like… nah mate”

– Cobie: “You hit me up and were like “Dick drawing is historical and monumental, dick drawing is part of human history we’ve been doing it since the caveman times, it’s memetic”” LOLLL

– Jim: “I get the sense there are gonna be some great buys over the next few weeks”

– There are gonna be huge applications for these in the metaverse

Ledger’s Marriage

– Cobie: “You ever show your wi-“

– Ledger: “No.” hahaha

– Ledger: “One time I showed her my meebit… she was not impressed” lmao

Dog Money

– Everyone’s fractionalizing their dog NFTs, there’s so much dog money

– Pleasrdao fractionalized the original Doge picture and raised $50M @ $250M val

– Dan: “You can’t see this stuff and get bearish”

– Jason: “Thoughts on people slowing this down?”

– Dan: “Really don’t think it’ll happen, no one wants to be the guy to come in and end this era of free money everywhere”

Crypto Getting Weirder

– Dan: “It’s gonna get weirder and weirder, and when you flush the whole world with all this money it’s gonna find its way into really weird corners. New money is just gonna keep pushing in”

– Cobie: “I don’t wanna live the next 6 months cause I came from a crypto class where once shit gets weird you wanna pull out – i gotta go into a coma”

– Someone asked Dan about NFTs

– Dan: “A couple junior guys on the desk [shoutout the other CMS guys] are really into it and I’m pumped for them cause they’re crushing it, but I just don’t have enough time I’m getting older”

Art

– Jim: “I’m really bullish on NFTs cause I think the art world is gonna join and it might become less pure crypto market”

– Cobie: “What’s the Mona Lisa of NFTs then?”

– Jason: “Why is the Mona Lisa the pico top of all traditional art?”

– Cobie: “idk…name 5 art pieces”

– Jason: “…Mona Lisa”

Other Chains and NFTs

– Ledger: “Dan what’s the role of on-chain activity in NFTs, like Solana and stuff”

– Dan: “The main thesis is that Solana has won spill over because ETH has been successful. But in a practical way the marginal losses of ETH are gonna price out large amounts of people. A lot of people wanna do this and they can do it on Solana (and other L2s)”

– Dan: “If you’re a buyer that net demand of block space is going to increase then you wanna be long both (ETH and SOL/ L2s)”

Normies into Crypto

– Dan: “My real world experience has been that bringing new guys on with MetaMask [is tough] because of fees, cancelled transactions and others”

– Ledger: “You cannot have a $5,000 bankroll and transact on Ethereum”

– Cobie: “Do you think L2s should have a token?”

– Dan: “If you have one that doesn’t have a token, someone will just fork it add a token and beat you”

– Cobie: “Gotcha so you need one defensively”

Options

– Ledger: “Last week we talked to Sam Tabasco and he said options are not very relevant for crypto”

– Dan: “We do trade options, we have a dedicated head that just trades vol, but I agree its not important. But it does make money and makes sense as a business” s/o Ryan probably drinking a stroller beer rn

– Ledge: “Do you keep that person because it will become more important?”

– Dan: “Its optionality on optionality. Eventually there will be an ETF and that will live on options”

– FTX just bought LedgerX, only place US retail can trade options

Cobie: “How long do you reckon until Pfizer and FTX partner to increase vaccine adoptions in the crypto community” lol

*Dan has to jet* good bye sir

FOR THE RECORD dan was chatting internally and made 2-5 trades over the course of this podcast, SBF vibes

Price Predictions

– Cobie: “If we break ATH here – $20k ETH, $150k-$200k BTC end of October”

– *Someone in chat said Cobie hates Solana*

– Cobie: “Solana is the only project episode we’ve had and like my 3rd largest position. Nice try mate”

Biggest Crypto Regret

– Ledger: “this podcast I talk to people every week who made it”

– Jason: “no regrets I see nothing but opportunity”

– Jim: “I’m a low time frame guy so I always sell early”

– Cobie: “2014 I lost a chunk of money and BTC Drak (?) said you haven’t earned your stripes til you’ve lost 100 Bitcoin”

FINAL ALPHA

– Jim: “If you don’t know when to buy or what price, average in. Then if you get a lower low, the trends broken”

– Jason: “Trust yourself, if you don’t trust yourself then just fucking trust yourself. The only mistake is not knowing how to handle yourself”

Ledger outro with Dutch accent

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Sam Trabucco of Alameda Research: Find what you’re good at and do a lot of it Aug 26, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Sam Trabs Intro

– Sam Trabs is now co-CEO of Alameda Research

– promoted from “trader” lol

– Last time Trabs was on Bitcoin had just dropped to 30k

– Thought it was “predictable” and then buying the bottom was also an easy trade

– Right now there’s a “temporary round number effect” – people will sell at resistance for big round numbers

– Seeing it now with 50k

– “NOT LONG TERM RESISTANCE” – Trabs

– Trabs: “We’ve done quite well at getting long at the bottom and not selling it at all”

New Highs?

– Trabs: “If there continues to be good news I could see it continuing to go up”

– Rally to 65k was very liquidation based – very likely to get undone

– Same the other way [on the way down to 30k]

Positioning In Uncertainty

– The 10 strongest trades make up all the real P&L

– Doesn’t really waste brain power on focusing on smaller, lower conviction trades

– Most days don’t put on big trades

New Ecosystem Plays

– Very quantitative

– Less thesis driven investing, more soaking up APYs with new DeFi plays

Analysis for Wrong Trades

– Cobie: “How do you do postmortems when things go wrong?”

WiFi cutting out, robot overload

Ledger: “I think Sam has an alpha overload filter that makes the WiFi cut out if he drops too much knowledge”

Poor Employee Performance

– If someone has a few bad days, talk to them about their thought process

– Cobie: “Imagine you’re at Alameda, you’ve had a few bad days and a meeting just pops up 9am meeting with the Sams” lol absolute NIGHTMARE fuel

NFT Trading

– Trabs: “I feel remarkably ill equipped to be handling this NFT craze”

– You can use data to learn about trades… you can’t really with NFTs

– Trabs: “There are elements that remind me of DOGE in January”

– Trabs: “Its fairly plausible that its correct to buy most of these things – there is just so much upside”

– The rocks really got in Sams head

– Cobie: “Alameda is coping just like me”

– Trabs: “It is +EV to participate in these because the upside is so high”

– Ledger: “Have you seen the scissors? (in relation to rock, paper scissors NFTs) they are only like 3 ETH, a bargain”

– Cobie: “A bargain relative to rocks? because compared to anything else in life its absolutely ridiculous” lol

Options

– Trabs: “People really overstate the importance of options in crypto”

– In tradfi, options can influence prices

– In crypto, really doesn’t happen

Alameda

– 2019 was a difficult time

– It has since gotten very easy to hire

– Now team is about 30 guys

– Sam can now focus on game theory trading and shitposting on Twitter

co-CEOs

– Cobie: “If you and the other co-CEO took a standardized IQ test, who would win?”

– Trabs: “I took a MENSA test once… it was very easy. She’s better at trivia than I am though”

– For operations, you want to pick one thesis to go with and stick with it

– Trabs: “If someone feels very strongly about something, we tend to just let them do it”

– Trabs: “If we were ever at a true stalemate we’d honestly probably flip a coin”

Alameda Jobs

– Trabs: “We are always hiring”

– Cobie: “What about internships?”

– Trabs: “Hiring interns is our most +EV play we do”

– jk not a real quote but we can dream

– Trabs: “First couple months people take away value, then eventually start to add value”

– Ledger: “In regards to pay, how do you incentivize people to stick around?”

– Mostly copy traditional institutions, based on P&L

Potential Future Scenarios

– Trabs thinks either new highs or crab

– Cobie: “Do you think that Bitcoin dominance can run again?”

– Trabs: “I have an unsatisfying answer that both are plausible”

– Thinks Bitcoin dominance will remain, but could happen like 5x or more from here

– Taxes may cause a liquidity crunch on NFTs by year end, but also maybe not

Ethereum Dominance

– Is EIP-1559 priced in efficiently?

– Trabs: “I don’t think the crypto market does anything especially efficiently”

– ETH rallied in a very inefficient way once burns started

Overcoming Decision Paralysis

– How to make a decision with 10 scenarios that are plausible?

– Trabs: “If I believe I have a good framework, I can picture the expected value of each scenario by weighing probability distributions and bet on that”

– If we nuke and you incorrectly buy all the way down, how do you unwind?

– Trabs: “I believe the term is, ‘slurp the diperino’” TRABS!

– Basically will cut the sunk cost and see how to extract value moving forward

– Trabs: “We are looking for coin flips that are 53/47 and you lose 47% of the time”

When Trabs gets tilted he just goes and buys things, bought a watch once and literally was in a fugue state and doesn’t remember it

Leverage

– Mostly tries to stay unlevered

– Trabs: “We aren’t risking every dollar we have… it’d be kind of a challenge to anyway” lmaooo good flex sir

– Tries to keep maximum bullets available for days that are extreme

Hypothetical Bear Market

– DeFi bear market?

– Trabs: “A lot of the DeFi tech that has popped up is super exciting and there’s no reason to think it won’t continue to grow as a global force”

– Trabs: “We will never see the prices of March 2020 ever again”

Trabs Without Crypto

– Cobie: “So say it all goes to 0 what do you do with your life”

– Trabs: “I like to play interesting games. I think the crypto markets is the most interesting game I’ve ever found”

– Cobie: “Alright no money making allowed, what do you do”

– Trabs: “Probably play like Magic The Gathering”

Q&A

Chance of Bitcoin to 100k by EOY?

– 10%

How can we make it?

– Identify what you’re good at figuring out what to buy

– Bet on the macro-longer term stuff

Do you have anon account?

– No

CMS thinks he is CMS dog

– Cobie thinks I am CMS dog… in classic Trabs fashion I can neither confirm nor deny

– but no I’m not CMS dog unfort

Trabs: “Dan from CMS should write the crypto history book”

FINAL ALPHA

– Trabs: “Everyone has some things they’re good at and things they aren’t good at. Find the things that you are good at and absolutely go nuts at them”

– Trabs: “Identify your edge and try to blow your edge up. Bet as big as possible there”

Gigabrain pod ty Trabs

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

How to make it in NFTs, with Keyboard Monkey. Aug 24, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

The Very Beginning

– KMonkey almost degened all of his money away pre-2020

– Was getting yelled at by risk managers at work

– Had $250k around the covid dumps in 2020

– Now is deep 8 figures

– Monkey is now “diversified”, meaning stocks, real estate, private equity, etc.

– KM: “I don’t wanna go to 0 again” lol me 2 m8

– Mostly traded stocks in 2020

Wen NFTs?

– Started really getting in in Feb 2021

– Started with Hashmasks

– KM: “I had a guy writing algorithms for me to find rarities, staying up all night to trade these things”

Trading NFTs

– Keyboard Monkey often will go all in then panic and dump all bags but it has worked so far lol

– Whenever Kmonkey panics new huge buyers come in, like recently he was selling and some Saudi Arabian fund came in and scooped a Fidenza for 1000 ETH

– *Cobie spots Fluf in KM’s portfolio*

– Ledger: “I’ll buy that”

– Monkey: “The ROIs you get on NFTs in such a short amount of time is really ridiculous”

– Trading is a blend of flipping and buying long term art that KM really likes

– Cobie: “If you mapped some of these on a chart they’d basically go straight up” lol very true

– Very good for momentum trades

– Kmonkey: “If you could short NFTs I’d be ruined”

How to Pick NFTs

– Ledger: “What makes them stand out? What makes them special?”

– KM: “If you look at a Fidenza, there are no shitty Fidenzas. Same with Penguins there are no shitty Penguins”

– KM: “It’s a narrative spiral mixed with good art mixed with who’s buying them”

– ‘dino pals’ selling for 6 figures!

– Cobie: “wtf are we doing hahaha”

NFT Betas

– KM: “You can look at mid tiers… when floor price is rising and the project is gaining traction, picking off mid tiers can be a great play, there’s a little alpha for ya”

Trading Style

– Cobie: “Is it fair to say you take a small loss that you punt right away, or you get a winner and let it ride to a homerun?”

– KM: “Absolutely, I kinda take losses like a death by 1,000 cuts but when I find a winning trade I pile in with size”

– Without diversification a blow up can obviously be devastating

NFTs Growing Crypto

– Ledger: “There are a lot of people who never clicked with crypto but now are all in on NFTs”

– Ledger: “We really underestimated NFTs power of collectibles to bring in normies”

– KM: “Cyclical booms definitely the next phase of NFTs”

– KM: “Can be a big hot potato game until bigger money comes in, which historically it has been”

Information Flow

– Have 3 screens open: Twitter, Telegram, Discord

– KM: “Its all just information coming in and keeping your ear to the ground”

– Cobie: “100% that’s a key for crypto”

*@RookieXBT just live bought the red dino… great speed sir

Turnkey NFT Trades

Art Side

– Wouldn’t buy a Fidenza

– Would go to Art Blocks (~50 ETH)

– Then Fuzy Squigles (~20 ETH)

– Then for a higher end piece, a Ringer

PFP side

– Bored Apes

– Pudgy Penguins

– Forgotten Runes

– Then the pedo rabits, FLUFs

– Hashmasks

Projects With Roadmaps

– Cobie: “I don’t like the roadmaps as much because with Penguins and Punks it’s like you know what you’re in for, with roadmaps you still gotta rely on team execution which has risk”

– KM: “I think you nailed it, short term roadmap is bullish but if they fall through on that its hyper bearish”

Question From Luke

– Luke: “What would you do for someone with less than 10 ETH?”

– Kmonkey: “Look for volume and liquidity in PFPs, wait for momentum then flip them into bigger projects”

– Minting typically won’t do as well

– FIND MOMENTUM TRADES IN PFP

– AKA Penguins, Bored Apes, Degen Apes (SOL)

Anything You Keep Forever?

– Kmonkey: “I keep saying yes and then someone pays astronomically for it”

– Cobie: “DC Investor (@iamDCinvestor) has never sold anything and his portfolio is around like 8 figures or 9 figures”

– Cobie: “They have a level of conviction I respect – similar to traders who try to flip every coin vs. investors who find long term value”

How To Value

– KM: “Typically price follows rarity, sometimes its a personal connection though”

– KM: “Looks like all of the punk buyers are guys sitting at their computers wearing hoodies” lolll great insight sir

NFTs on Other Chains

– Degen Apes on Solana

– PARIS HILTON JUST GOT A DEGEN APE

– *full disclosure I’m all in degen apes

– KM: “The other chains do offer the opportunity to be super early”

NFTs For People Who Hate Everything?

– Gaming stuff

– $AXS for example

– RARE and other NFT coins

COBIE GENIUS IDEA

– Cobie: “An NFT project called Noah’s Ark where there’s a male and female of each animal and like 10,000 total”

– Ledger: “It’s like FLUFs breeding” lol ledger!

FINAL ALPHA

– Keyboard Monkey: “Be patient. Once you find the project, ape first and ask questions later”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

OBJ on his journey into crypto, investing, NFTs, and more Aug 20, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX (formerly Blockfolio). Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

*Ledger flexed OBJ guest appearance to young neighbor

*And OBJ shouted him out! legend

intern note – given this is crypto, worth pointing out that OBJ is maybe the best wide receiver in the world

Football & Intro

– OBJ’s in training camp rn (Cleveland Browns)

– When OBJ made “the catch”, it changed almost everything in his life

– OBJ now playing with his best friend Jarvis Landry

– They’re hazing the new Auburn WR

Journey into Crypto

– OBJ: “The world is evolving and this is where you got to be, this is the space”

– Ledge: “You have teammates that talk crypto?”

– OBJ: “Yeah it’s locker room talk like people always saying Bitcoin, Ethereum, Doge, all that.”

– OBJ: “You gotta get with this world or get left behind”

Finances

– NFL money’s not gonna last you a lifetime – you gotta be able to invest

– Cobie: “How do you find someone u can trust with ur finances?”

– OBJ: “It’s family man, you know they got your back”

– Pro athletes get paid so fat so early… gotta invest in order to make sure you got $ when you’re old

– OBJ: “You gotta inform yourself and be able to continue to catch up and learn”

Athletes Paid in Bitcoin

– Messi going to PSG getting paid some in Bitcoin

– Trevor Lawrence talking about getting paid FULLY in Bitcoin!

– Cobie: “Why do you think this is happening?”

– OBJ: “Bro you gotta tell me!”

– Saquon Barkley putting all his promotional money in Bitcoin

– OBJ asking Ledger if he thinks u should just get paid in Bitcoin or invest in Bitcoin after getting paid?

– Ledger: “You should get an FTX partnership like Tom Brady”

Quick game: what’s Cobie drinking?

Cobie: “Classic British Cider from the west country”

NFTs

– Cobie: “How’re NFTs perceived in the locker room?”

– OBJ: “We were all wondering if we missed the wave, has it cooled off, what should we do”

– Cobie: “It’s popping off now”

– Big crypto hedge funds just bought a ton of NFTs

– OBJ (just bought a crypto punk, legend): “Am I late?”

– Ledger: (in many more words) “No”

– OBJ: (on NFTs) “Feel you 100%, feel like it’s gotta be authentic to me. I gotta care”

– Cobie: “What made you wanna get a crypto punk?”

– OBJ: “The guys who were ahead of the curve were saying these are gonna be it so I gotta rock with them”

FLIPPED SCRIPT OBJ ASKS THE QUESTIONS NOW

OBJ: “If I gave you $1 million right now, where would you invest it?”

– Ledger: “There’s a lot of upside with the majors (BTC, ETH) – take half of it and put it in there”

– “Take the other half and spray it out – seed investments, potential growth projects, NFTs but not just for art”

– Cobie: “Alright, I would buy a bunch of Ethereum killers (Solana, Avalanche) and stake it – take 33% and put it in Ethereum and stake it (using Lido) – then NFTs and DeFi, mostly betting on teams”

– Brooooo OBJ just made Ledger and Cobie spill their positions and alpha more than any other crypto native guest before

– OBJ: “I still got a few questions”

OBJ Q&A for Cobie & Ledger

– OBJ IS RUNNING THE SHOW LETS GO

– OBJ: “How much money have you made with this”

– DUDE!

– Cobie: “To all the agencies watching, I have finally made it to 1,000 Pounds”

– OBJ: “What’s the best trade you ever made?”

– Cobie: “I followed this YouTube guy and made like 100x all my money in a month, into a -70%, which taught me how to really understand this space”

– Cobie: “When Mt. Gox crashed this guy made an options protocol to see if the coins would come back and that was majorly inefficient”

– Ledger: “This organization called Pancakeswap gave me $100 and it turned into like $8000…I had $5000 in and sold at break even. That woulda been $600k”

OBJ just turned the whole podcast into a Q&A to learn and get free alpha off Cobie and Ledger

Final Questions

– Cobie: “Can we do an NFT collectibles?”

– OBJ: “Bro you hit me up after this” lmao lets go

– Ledger: “Tell people to take it slow, don’t think this is gonna blow up overnight” not a question but sound advice nonetheless

FINAL ALPHA

– OBJ: “There are times in life where you wanna give up… don’t ever let anything deter you from your dreams or where you believe you belong in life”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Avi Felman of Blocktower: Crypto is mid-cycle Aug 05, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX (formerly Blockfolio). Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

*Cobie is coping HARD today, very hungover and may leave at any time to be sick

Intro

– Co-PM of BlockTower investment fund along with Ari Paul

– Anything in crypto they’ll touch it or flip it if it can make money

– Providing access to the crypto space for investors

– Cobie: “So you provide punks for institutions”

– Avi: “No comment.” lmao SER WE KNOW U DO

Avi Background

– Worked at a bank for 6 months before realizing he needed to get out. Brought up crypto to them, they literally said in a decade..

– Started out in 2017, then ran his own fund for a while, then another crypto company (check this again), then on to BlockTower

– Ari trades over longer periods with conviction. Avi changes his mind every few minutes. Was hard to find a balance for such different trading approaches

– Unlikely to trade meme coins over 5% of portfolio but they do trade them! Need to be willing to be flexible

– Currently watching Grayscale, thinks we need premium to go positive again for BTC to go to 6 figures

– Reasonable that it will go positive again, no shares created since it was locked down in March so should get pushed to at least par

Learning Options

– Cobie: “What learning tools or process would you recommend for learning options?”

– Avi: Gap between retail and professional options traders. Not really worth it for retail to learn, but get comfortable with the idea of implied and realized volatility. Beyond that in this market there’s not much needed because things are frequently mispriced

– A lot of people over-estimate the effects of gamma on the options market

– It exists but it takes a lot more money to move this market than most people imagine – you could buy $100M with only a few hundred dollars of slippage over an hour or two

– Right now the most edge on large moves is trying to monitor option flows

– Book rec: Option Volatility & Pricing by Sheldon Natenberg

NFT Boom

– Avi: “I’ll preface this as I know very little about NFTs in general”

– “This is the one area of crypto that all of my friends that aren’t in crypto are hitting me up about”

– Just super easy to understand

– CL was right!

– “I would assume that 98% of these collectibles go to zero at some point”

– Cobie: “NFTs are just like DOGE coin where its a meme and people just ponzi it up”

– Super illiquid but that also means they can just skyrocket

– Avi: “They’re probably not securities too”

Complacency Bounce?

– Avi: “I think they bottom has been printed”

– This is a completely different set of market participants

– There are $100M checks being written for crypto every week now

– Avi: “From my perspective $30k will be the bottom”

– “The patient buyers waiting to buy $35k will become very impatient if we don’t trade there for 2 weeks”

– No one knows where to park their money – Bitcoin and crypto is a great place to park your money

– You wanna bet asset prices are going up and you wanna bet on the fastest horse

BTC vs. Shitcoins

– Ethereum is gaining market share in peoples minds

– Once people are in, they start moving down the risk curve

COIN vs MSTR

– People are still trying to bet directly on BTC

– They (huge institutions) aren’t really trying to bet on other cryptos

– MSTR == BTC, so people use MSTR as equities crypto exposure

– People might start to park in COIN on a longer timeline

– Even based trading is the last horizon of alpha in the crypto industry

– Pick 15-20 DeFi assets, read their medium posts and just play their events

– Wow it really is that easy

New Retail

– Retail this time got onboarded through like TikTok straight to BSC

– If stuff comes back, do you think they choose value? or same as last time?

– Avi wants to make sure we know – he is the most bullest bull

– We are going to 144k

DeFi

– Avi: “I think it’ll outperform a little bit”

– The large caps likely won’t return huge huge multiples

– DeFi actually has cashflows… which is a detriment LOL

– You can actually value these things, prevents mega moon pumps

– There are other shitcoins which will 15-20x, DeFi just likely won’t

– DeFi will be a huge industry that will morph a ton in ways that we probably don’t understand yet

– But if you want to trade euphoria, you want to trade this market… its other assets

– In the next 3-4 months, we’re going to see a huge battle between a multi-chain universe and a single chain universe

– THIS BATTLE SOUNDS INSANE ITS SOLANA COSMOS POLKADOT ALL THESE CHAINS VS ETH AS MASTER CHAIN LFG

– Lido is something that could get stupid euphoria

FINAL ALPHA

– From Ted Lasso – “Have the memory of a goldfish” lmao lfg

– If something goes wrong, don’t dwell on your mistakes

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Regulatory deep dive with crypto lawyers Aug 03, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX (formerly Blockfolio). Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

Gensler Comments

– Everyone is saying its incredibly important

– Cobie: “Are we all gonna die or are we all gonna make it?”

– Lex: “probably somewhere in the middle” FACK lol

– *extremely complex jargon talk*

– Cobie Summary: “So basically, maybe, they might actually do something here”

– Summer 2017 very similar to summer 2021

– 2017 new group of leadership coming in, ICOs very hot – same as 2021 new group of leadership coming in, DeFi very hot

– ICOs were super complex for legal red tape

Some More Gensler

– Gensler saying now the SEC doesn’t have the man power to really go after these big DeFi projects

– Shannon: “Gensler said he looks around and basically 99% of these assets are securities”

– Gensler taught a course at MIT on Bitcoin/ crypto

Gensler’s Speech

– Starts with Bitcoin thesis (Nakamoto, double spend, peer-to-peer cash, etc)

– Gensler is in like the 1% of guys who fully understands the tech and isn’t crazy bullish

– nerd

– He’s “technology neutral” – crypto is a market and all markets need regulation

– His speech is unrelated to the Infrastructure Bill tryna get passed now

– The tax provision is an existential threat

– “Though there is a lot of hype masquerading as reality in the crypto field, Nakamoto’s innovation is real”

Money Laundering FUD

– Said Bitcoin is basically only used as a medium of exchange when used for money laundering

– Sarah: “Well like if a tired wife beats her husband to death with a mop then we’re not gonna outlaw mops as a weapon of mass destruction”

– Money laundering seems to have a lot of sticking power in the public legal talks even though the stats don’t back this up

– Marc: “Dollars are easier to use and better to use for illicit activity”

– Gensler finds crypto interesting and thinks it could be a catalyst for real change

– Is the right way to reduce the risk of crypto to make sure as many transactions as possible flow through intermediaries?

– “crypto is mostly looked to for speculation rather than medium of exchange”

– Ya cause you get taxed if you actually spend it jfc

– Sarah: “Fix the tax issues there and maybe we’ll see it fulfill that use case more” YES Sarah

US Red Tape

– *on WSB phenomenon* Cobie: “I like how when a small amount of people have info its insider trading and its wrong but when the entire world knows somethings happening and its on reddit, its like everyone knows, its outsider trading and that’s wrong too” lmao

– dYdX airdrop today didn’t go to any US residents

– Ledge: “If its worth like $20k one day I can thank the regulatory system for protecting me from that $20k”

– These laws are really preventing the little guy from climbing the ladder to financial freedom

– Gabriel: “The core of this tech is to help civil disobedience – to help free those living in an authoritarian regime. But the same way it protects from bad types of laws it also protects from good laws.”

Centralized = Security, Decentralized = Not

– Howie Test: almost all cryptos are securities because most people are betting on their price going up with a small group of central entrepreneurs building the value

– Cobie: “There’s not really a clear distinction between what is centralized or decentralized” (decentralized would mean not a security)

– If the SEC gives a clear definition of what’s centralized then people would game it, nothing would be securities and fraud would still happen

– ETH not a security, Ripple is a security

Summary: Our stance on this stuff hasn’t really changed, but we’ll probably do some stuff now cause it seems bad

DeFi

– Under the gun – trading platforms, lending platforms, and DeFi platforms

– These platforms can implicate securities laws, along with banking laws and others

– There are unregulated foreign exchanges that allow US residents using VPNs

– Gensler does have a tough job cause teaching new people how to use this stuff… you’re always 1 step away from getting rugged or fraud lol

Stablecoins

– There are stablecoins that have been around for a long time

– Tether, USDC name dropped

– Stablecoins are embedded in the crypto ecosystem, 30% of trades

– Gabriel: “I think most stablecoins are securities”

– Gabriel: “I don’t personally think Tether is a scam” YES Gabriel u get it

– Gabriel: (paraphrased) “But if it rugged then it would likely be deemed a security”

– Gabriel: “UST (open) or RAI (backed by ETH (not a security)) likely not securities”

Conclusion

– Money markets, DEXs, DeFi, exchanges all going to be in the sniper scope in the future

– Gensler specifically mentioned SEC registration, so maybe there is a path for compliance

– Tough to see how there will even be DeFi moving forward – it wouldn’t be open access, it wouldn’t be irreversible anymore

– So what will happen?

– Any front end that is controlled by a centralized party will be increasingly scrutinized

– They will need to increasingly comply with regulatory regimes

– Maybe: users start to actually interact with the smart contracts

– People get MORE DeFi savy

Consumers vs. Government

– Ride sharing & Uber paved the way for consumer preference and profitability beating out entrenched products

– However, Taxi unions are very different from banks

– At the end of the day, banks are the ones whispering in these regulators ears

– These regulations won’t necessarily stop the innovation but it will stop the use of these innovations by Americans which would be a huge bummer

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Doug Polk on crypto, poker, and epic scams Jul 29, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by FTX (formerly Blockfolio). Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/ftx

Show Notes

FTX?

- Ledger nailed new intro

- UpOnly sponsored by FTX now!

- Blockfolio is now FTX (as everything soon will be)

- Doug was watching an MLB game and saw FTX on an umpire

- So wild

LEDGER DRINKS EVERY DAY

- *one beer*

- *has cravings if he skips his beer*

- *in a weight-loss competition with Primo to lose 10% of body weight*

- Doug: “That 1 beer per day is costing you 16-17 pounds per year!”

Doug’s Crypto Journey

- 2012-2013ish

- Got in because of poker - online poker caused onboarding

- Doug: “the asset appreciation element kinda made sense to me” lol us too sir

Bitcoin v Banks

- People complain about bank fees and then Bitcoin fees spike lol

- Block time also kind of a hassle

- Cobie: “Nowadays if an Ethereum block takes like a full minute I’m pissed”

- Cobie: “Solana is fast enough and if you use it you can afford to live in New York”

Zoomers & Internet Native Generation

- Ledger: “How many people bought SafeMoon and bridged to BSC? Like how did they do that???”

- Cobie: “We had an interview with Teen Exec and he just understands the internet way better than I do”

- Also have the YouTubers who can show you step by step exactly how to buy the top

- Cobie: “Every time a project comes on UpOnly its the exact top of their thesis”

- Light - super bearish at the bottom

- SCAM and CUMROCKET - top tick on the episode

- Charlie Lee even top ticked Litecoin

Coping

- DOGE founder is coping so hard that he won’t come back

- People would easily donate like millions to this guy

The B Word Conference

- Cobie: “I think Cathie Wood is fking phenomenal”

- “Elon just kept talking about Tesla chargers”

- Doug: “I think Jack needs to have a better idea of how Bitcoin can actually be implemented to fix these issues”

- “Also Elon has a firm belief in ‘Bitcoin has to be 50% renewable’ for someone who’s dad was an emerald miner”

- “His Bitcoin takes felt not extremely researched”

- Ledger: “At some point do you stretch yourself a little too thin if you’re trying to create Mars money and [xyz other stuff]”

Doug’s Challenge

- Poker career focused on 1v1 poker

- Challenged a rival troll guy who was after him to a 1v1 for $1,000,000

- This guy was a major underdog

- He said yes LOL

- $40k buy in, any time you dropped off you bought back in with $40k

- Doug won $1.2M off of this guy lol

- Now they are boys

- Ledger: “you had a lot of reputational tie into this as well - like if you lost it’d be like me losing to Cobie in a trading competition”

- Cobie: “you’ve had some anthropologically bad trades that should be on wikipedia” lmao

Poker & Crypto

- Is it banking the unbanked? Or math, trading, etc. stuff?

- Doug: “Poker guys understand having an edge and are used to losing”

- “Today 200 guys played, 15 paid, so 185 lost” fack

- “Can’t handle losing, can’t do poker”

- “Some edge/ trading aspects, some keeping your money off the books aspects… some of the poker community is DEEP in crypto”

No More Poker 4 Doug

- Basically turned from an art to an exact science that you need to memorize

- Doug: “The reality is the guy who spent 2x the time is going to be better”

- Online vs. in person is the same *at the higher levels*

Doug’s Journey

- Just moved to Austin TX

- Was part of the mass migration

- Left Vegas, “I wanted something idk less stripper-ey” lol

- Nashville would also be great

- Doug: “The ‘Keep Austin Weird’ signs need to come down like that is so far gone, its a tech hub now!”

Ledger’s Fame

- Going to give Doug some Alabama BBQ places off air to not dox his micro location

- Cobie and Doug start laughing at the exact same time

- Cobie: “We have the same joke don’t we”

- Doug: “Ya Ledger you wouldn’t want anyone driving 700 miles out to see you” lmao

- Ledger got recognized 2 weeks ago

Scams

- Doug called BitConnect like a week before it happened

- Everyone knew him as the guy who called it lol

- “Save The Kids Token”

- Fake charity token that was somehow supposed to save the kids

- FaZe & some youtube guy Sam Pepper

- creep

Tether FUD

- Doug: “I actually don’t agree with any of the Tether FUD” YES DOUG

- Doug: “Like pretty much people won’t be happy unless they have $60 Billion in a checking account”

- based

ETH 2.0

- If/ wen ETH2 happens, are people still rushing to send their money through MATIC? prolly not

- Probably won’t be a scaling benefit until sharding

- Cobie - prolly rollup-centric solution to scaling when it all works out

ZK-Rollups

- Created down only tokenomics of ZCash *disclaimer: this is FUD*

- Uses security of L1 w/ cheaper scaling

- Vitalik said it’d take like 5 years of optimistic rollups before ZK rollups but now looking like straight to ZK rollups

- More gigabrain Cobie

Top Scams Ever

- 1. Poker guy knew the guy in god-mode and won legit every tournament

- Won like $250k

- 2. Joshua Tyler - installed a trojan on Doug’s computer and could see his cards

- Got investigated and Doug got his money back!

FINAL ALPHA

- Doug: “In life, you should always bet the biggest on yourself”

- “No one is going to work as hard as you or be as honest as yourself”

- “When you get opportunities to bet big on yourself, take them and you’ll never regret it”

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Teen Executive on the Game of Investing Jul 22, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Show Notes

Kicking it Off

– Real name is Adam – 14 years old

– Not taking outside noise into his trades

– Just holding unless there’s something really clear cut to signal a temporary sell

– ALWAYS FALL BACK TO HOLDING

Trading

– Cobie: “you’ve been selling the top and buying the bottom how are you doing this?”

– Sold ETH at $3800, watched it rip to $4300 and everyone

– Everyone roasting him for selling “too early” (they’ve been very quiet since the drop)

Start of Investing

– Grandfather inspired him to get into stocks at AGE 8 sheesh

– Bought Amazon, Google and Liberty Global

– Still holding Amazon and Google 6 years later

– His grandfather got margin called a few years ago and lost a ton of money (not sure he should be saying that)

– Cobie: “sounds like he might need a loan from the bank of teen executive”

– At a stage now that he’s almost ready to buy a house!

– Has time to wait if need be, 14 y/o

– Thinking an Arizona house but only for investment purposes

– Landlord at 14 “All of the tenants are going to be so sad” lolll

No stress trading by Teen Exec: “If I lose it all I’m 14 I’m still good like I live at home in my parents house I’ll be fine”

How do you find your coins?

– TE: “I just go with what people are talking about like XRP Cardano whatever it may be”

– what’s your favorite?

– Exec: “Ethereum.” v bullish ETH

Crypto Cycles?

– “I care about cycles just cause I’m super impatient and don’t trust myself to hold”

– “My dad thinks its a ponzi scheme he wouldn’t let me buy it so I had to accept it for promotions, sold some, reinvested that” LOL zero cost basis he can’t lose!

Technical Analysis

– Started using TA about a year ago – crypto application about 6 months ago

– What are the charts telling you right now?

– Exec: “Inconclusive”

– Fundamental analysis + TA for entry?

– TE: “Yes exactly – fundamental analysis tells me if I should invest in a stock and TA tells me when I should invest in a stock” actually very good alpha there

Cobie: “If I have any advice its to not listen to Ledger’s advice”

Teen Exec: “Thats good advice” LMAO he’s electric!

Exec: “UpOnly is mine now I’m taking over!”

How’d you become an influencer?

– “What motivates me is that making money is fun”

– “I follow the money”

– 10 days in I made a video called “How I Made $5000 Instead of Buying a Gucci Wallet”

– was gonna buy a Gucci wallet for $500, instead bought Tesla and a year later it was $5000

– I was in a state of shock on my couch watching my video go from 5,000 views to 20,000 to 30,000 views

– TE: “Ya people really liked it but also really hated it” LOL “and they’d comment which really helped the algorithm”

– “I’m going into high school next year and have been working on my comebacks and I know when they’re good cause Ill ratio the guy”

– “This one kid was making fun of me saying my videos are annoying and his parents just bought an $8 million dollar house and I said how’s it feel to be a maggot living off of your parents for the rest of your life and he walked away crying”

– Ledger: “You are ready for a job at Goldman” LMAO

Cobie: “This is like the only time the chat hasn’t been toxic”

College

– “My parents would prob disown me if I didn’t go to college”

– Planning on econ at UCLA then MBA at Harvard

– Not gonna go to a corporation – gonna always do his own thing

– Ledger: “You’ll learn more through the internet than an MBA”

Heros

– Mr. EXEC: “Jeff Bezos”

– Cobie: “yup going big just the richest man ever” lmao

– Teen Exec: “Warren Buffett”

– “He’s kinda like me he likes making money cause its fun not to buy nice things”

– Cobie: “Mine is Mark Cuban – he lives such a baller life. Built a company, sold it, built another company, sold it, now he just owns a sports team – fun life he got his priorities right”

ALPHA LEAK Cobie is 31 y/o don’t know if we knew that

Ever Been Recognized as Teen Exec?

– Exec: “All the time every day”

– “I was on on vacation and got recognized 8 times in 5 days”

– “Whenever I’m at the beach with friends and stuff get recognized there”

– “People try to bully me cause I’m short and do stocks but they don’t realize that I wreck people”

Things TE Doesn’t Like

– Sneaker reselling

– Just very boring

Teen Exec Viral Advice for Cobie & Ledge

– For TikTok, the first 3 seconds are KEY

– Who’s gonna skip on “HERE’S HOW I’M GONNA BUY A HOUSE AT 15”

Ledger’s kids are 6 and below w/ 100% net worth in crypto CHADS

Teen Exec Question for Cobie

– “What go you into making money?”

– Cobie grew up middle class with hardworking honest parents to provide for him, learned the value of money went to university with trust fund kids, motivated, then started shitcoining and now he’s here!

Chat Q&A (Part 1)

– NFTs? “nah”

– First car? “Tesla Model 3”

– Cobie: “Just get a Jaguar F type” very fresh car

– Biggest lost? “the $3000 from Robinhood options”

– Videogames? “nah”

– Handling golddiggers? “I don’t buy anybody nothing and girls don’t like me so if she’s out of my league and flirting I know she’s a gold digger”

Chat Q&A (Part 2)

– School? “i’m 2 years ahead in math, 1.5 years ahead in science, everything else just honors”

– Music? “i like music” – “Duke Ellington” (jazz musician from the ‘40s)

– Ledger: “that fits right in with your country club vibe” LMAO

Books

– “I haven’t read books for fun for 5 years… my parents resent me for it”

– Cobie: “I think reading intelligent authors can often be +EV”

– Cobie’s only advice – reading fiction is fun

TEEN EXECUTIVE FINAL ALPHA

– “Everyone that says something negative about you 100% of the time is either jealous or unhappy with something deep in their life, so don’t let it get to you”

Ledger ends the show with a Canadien accent legit incredible maybe best part of the show keep doing different accents bls

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Doom & Gloom with Light Jul 21, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Full shownotes: https://uponly.tv/?p=230

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Cobie’s Back: State of the Market with eGirl Capital Jul 15, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Notes by Kevin

Music by GiovanniPickle

Trading wisdom from CryptoCred, DonAlt and CMSIntern Jul 09, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Show Notes

cmsintern Intro

⁃ Cold called Dan (@cmsholdings) for 2 minutes during a break and got grilled by Bobby (@robertjcho) for a whole 20 minutes

⁃ Started a blockchain club in college

⁃ Didn't Study memes in college despite popular lore, STEM stuff

⁃ Got liquidated in November (ONE OF US) makes < 10 trades a day now.

CryptoDonAlt Intro

⁃ Brother worked in IT, told him to look into it but couldnt figure out how to buy it. Moms credit card was a gating factor here

⁃ Watched the run up to $1k in BTC & the bear market and was interested, felt expensive at $200 so bought DOGE

⁃ Held until 16/17 because he loved the community, 16-17, sold it to buy BTC and started swapping around

⁃ Became a bear on Twitter and farmed all the clout

CryptoCred Intro

⁃ Got lucky to be in crypto before 2017 and survived and now he is where he is

WAGMI?

⁃ Don: Thinks we have another crash before we go up and will eventually in future make it. 24K -> 40K -> 20K -> MOON

⁃ There are still people left to panic sell even though leverage is lower. Fine buying back in higher if the market turns but doesn’t feel great about it here

⁃ Cred – Asked to disagree but he doesn't, reinforces Don’s points. Zoom out, trend is broken

⁃ Retail free money trades are rekt TikTok / Doge / BSV? , predatory markets BARTS!

⁃ Cred: Trend followers say lower MAs, no opportunity cost to be out of market here

⁃ cmsintern: Blind optimism and asks for more bullish sentiment

⁃ Don: Long term fine just dont want to be panic selling

⁃ Ledger: Drawing tonnes of lines seems like too many lines now

⁃ Cred: Despite all of the bad news BTC is still over 30K which means someone is buying & news effects are more muted now. Not high conviction bearish, not high conviction anything – hanging in stables, not even farming, lending, or short

CMS Alpha & Axie Infinity

⁃ cmsintern: CMS have a couple of different thesis being worked on but cant talk about them or will get fired. Believe in a future MultiChain universe

⁃ Personally waiting for the Axie fork on SOL to go all in. First report he ever did as an intern was for Joe on Axie

⁃ Don: Axie is a pretty good game compared to most other blockchain games which are terrible

Trading

⁃ Ledger: Charlie Lee on UpOnly was the pico top for LTC this cycle

⁃ cmsintern: brought up TA and charting at CMS 2 weeks in and got laughed at for what he said

⁃ Cred: would not only trade charts long term, will look for fundamentals for conviction

⁃ Don: Making judgement based on what the Bitfinex whale is doing isn’t going to be beneficial. People will use it to confirm their pre-existing position

⁃ Worth watching if a pump is led by spot or by futures

⁃ cmsintern: Dan says funding rates isn’t part of the game, it *is* the game

The Flippening

⁃ Don: you can make an infinite amount of alt-coins and even if you pick right even your choice can be overtaken too, it’s just the way it is for emerging tech

⁃ Cred: Considering it counter-factual, what would Bitcoin need to not be doing for something to catch up, something gnarly would need to happen to BTC and that might be net negative and bring down everything else with it

⁃ Ledger: BTC has the primary network effects in crypto. POW negative narratives is maybe most likely to cause ETH to have a chance to take over. Agree with Don, BTC flip likely drags down the whole market

⁃ Don: Market is way too immature for it right now and BTC won’t go to second place but maybe that changes in future, who knows

Fundamentals

⁃ Cred: The decentralisation of hash-rate is long term bullish as well as the loss of less environmentally friendly miners in China

⁃ Don’t be caught on the wrong side, be it up or down. Don’t manage a bad position, wait for the right one and take it from a position of strength

Final Alpha

⁃ Cred: “Conformation is for Christians”. If you wait for confirmation you have to be right, if you trade at the extremes you can be wrong and still make money or at least lose less

⁃ Don: When you’re making excuses for losing trades you are taking away an opportunity to grow. The only thing you should be ashamed of is saying it isn’t your fault because you won’t get better. Accept your mistakes and ask yourself how you can do better next time

⁃ cmsintern: Use FlipMetrics & TheDailyApe. Understand asymmetric upside and look for domains outside of crypto where you can also find this

Notes by Luke

Music by GiovanniPickle

Exit Scams & Crypto Economics with Taylor Monahan, Aaron Lammer, & Allison Reichel Jul 02, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Show Notes

Ledger & Allison Reichel <> Aaron Lammer <> Taylor Monahan
LedgerOnlyTV notes

Exit Scam Podcast Story
⁃ Quadriga (large Canadian exchange) had a decent reputation
⁃ The Quadriga wallets did not lead to any cold storage – it was a ponzi scheme
⁃ Founder Gerald Cotten goes to India and dies, holding $280M in users funds locked on his laptop
⁃ Going to have to listen to Exit Scam Podcast to hear the rest

Crypto Market
⁃ It is easy to make it in crypto by not doing anything… so it’s really hard to get people to work when you don’t have to do anything

MyCrypto
⁃ Using an ETH wallet as a Web3 login was a wow moment
⁃ In 2015 Taylor imagined everyone would use a smart contract wallet
⁃ Smart contracts require a certain confidence level – Taylor thinks the billions of dollars running through them daily might be getting ahead of ourselves

Technical Question: CEXs
⁃ When you see “5 ETH in wallet” there’s no wallet with your ether in it lol
⁃ CEXs have a huge mush pot of everyone’s coins
⁃ Why can’t CEXs actually just give everyone a wallet? ETH wallets are free
⁃ Kraken used to have an audit feature to check

Aaron Background
⁃ 2017 newb —> 2021 farming expert
⁃ “It’s all just plagiarized from my chats”
⁃ “not a videogame person but am bullish the metaverse”

Allison Background
⁃ Goes to an Austrian economics school (although not an Austrian economist herself)
⁃ Writes a newsletter “Inflated Expectations”

“The only way to guarantee good content is to send them to UpOnlyTV” facts

Is Gerald Cotten Dead?
⁃ Taylor: “idkidkidk….dead”
⁃ Allison: “alive”
⁃ Ledge: “alive but wife is innocent”

EIP-1559 Bear Case
⁃ with DeFi miners can choose which order transactions are in
⁃ “ultrasound money, deflationary, number go up” feels like too much hype
⁃ devs getting over-optimized where users don’t need it

Inflation/ Deflation
⁃ Narrative is always inflation is so bad
⁃ Hyperinflation is a symptom of bigger problems
⁃ Crypto is almost cheering for inflation… you gotta understand:
⁃ With revolutions and regime changes comes mass destruction + global financial ruin
⁃ Inflation of ~2% makes people put their money to work and can sometimes be good…fack

Chances of Going to 0?
⁃ Bitcoin: 0.0000%
⁃ Ethereum: 0.0%
⁃ All others: non-0 chance

Notes by @cmsintern

Music by GiovanniPickle

Justin Sun addresses market crash rumors, talks collecting & creating in crypto Jun 24, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Show Notes

Beeple NFT Auction

– Justin bought Jack’s first ever tweet, was second highest bidder on Beeple’s huge auction

– Justin’s a traditional art collector

– Also believes in 10 years all of our collections will be on the internet

– The gvt doesn’t get it… the younger generations were raised on some of these games, this stuff is worth more to them than physical art

– Justin: “A % of my net worth is in NFTs, and I’m buying more”

– Jack’s tweet purchase? More of a souvenir

– Justin: “I think in the future there will be an internet museum with all the old relics… the tweet can go in there”

Market Macros

– Justin: “July and August will be much much better for market”

– Cobie: “so 1 month consolidation then we resume Up Only” lol

DeFi vs NFTs

– Insiders like DeFi, public likes NFTs

– Justin: “DeFi will be much larger”

– DeFi market cap will be much bigger, but NFTs will grab headlines and stay in the news

– Which crypto product is worth most? The one everyone uses

– Which NFT is worth most? The one everyone has seen

Crypto History

– Joined in 2012

– Studying Eastern Asian Studies at UPenn, wanted to join law long term

– Saw NYT article on internet money

– Justin: “I bought lots of XRP in the early days at like centralized decentralized exchanges”

– Justin: “Early days I felt like Poloniex was a scam”

– Ledge: “Now you own it” LOL

Tether on Tron

– The vision is to send money like email, in 2 seconds you can guarantee you got the money

– Everyone in crypto needs a settlement solution – stablecoin

– Ledge: “Ripple’s big mistake was taking crypto and going straight to legacy banks – tether was good because they got crypto native buy in then they you start to bleed into more innovative banks

Crypto on Pornhub

– Cobie: “So you mentioned Pornhub as your example use case for these payments… do you use crypto or do you just use your credit cards?”

– Justin: “I am a Pornhub subscriber”

– Crypto has brought revenue to this industry – people like the hidden aspect

Other L1s

– TRX is still focused mainly on usage and ecosystem adoption

– ETH killer competition is important to push ETH development

– BSC is leading through Binance popularity, doesn’t think they took users from e.g. Uniswap

– Helps the DeFi narrative to show adoption of average retail

ETH

– Does not believe that ETH should move to POS

– Thinks it should stay POW

– They will lose their competitive advantage as a POW settlement layer – there are already POS settlement solutions that scale better than ETH

National Adoption

– Everyone will get into crypto eventually

– Governments who don’t adopt or ban, lose a lot of opportunity and value just like the internet

– More small countries will follow El Salvador with adoption

– Countries banning crypto will run into problems in future as adoption increases

*Paid $4.5M for a meal with Warren Buffet in January 2020* sheeeesh

Bad Investments

– Most stupid thing he has spent money on was stock in an early mining company by Friedcat

– Around ~1000BTC worth stock went to zero in around 9 months

– Friedcat vanished in 2015

– Didn’t go into Titan, too risky – be cautious using new DeFi products

– Cobie agrees, exit scams are happening as the market goes down, review your permissions and approvals, revoke where needed

Learning Crypto

– If anyone asks about crypto, Justin tells them to buy first then ask questions later

– Someone will be interested in their investment and become an expert later by following news

– His mother is now very involved after doing this and is sending Justin news now

Justin’s Mom

– Sends him crypto news after she bought in

– Tries to downplay any influence, especially the wife thing

UpOnly

– Will Justin buy UpOnly for $200M?

– He just wants to make NFTs

– Cobie: “Just pay Ledger $200M for the podcast and you can make as many NFTs as you want” lol

Final Alpha

– The world is more focused on the result, but you yourself need to focus on the process

– Everyone else in the world is focused on how much money you make in crypto, but just focus on people who are building here and putting effort into growing this space

Notes by @cmsintern

Music by GiovanniPickle

John Bollinger, Creator of Bollinger Bands Jun 23, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Full show notes

Solana founders on why the Solana ecosystem will thrive Jun 17, 2021

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie & Ledger chat with the founders of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, discussing Solana, what makes it different from other L1s, why they think it will last, and more.

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Show Notes

Marketing Solana

– It’s hard to even define what Solana is in English so that normal people can understand what it is

– Very strong product market fit with Solana and developers

– Next step: how do you get people to understand how to custody their own assets and why that’s important?

Intros

– Anatoly: “been an engineer most of my life, started at Qualcomm, was working on optimizing AR, was aware of crypto, started mining with GPUs not being used and pulled into crypto”

– Anatoly: “had 2 coffees and 1 beer (LOL), stayed up til 4am then it hit – thermodynamics isn’t only measurable, you can measure TIME”

– Anatoly: “Figured out you could trustlessly encode the passage of time then I was manic for a week… then talked to Raj and it all started”

– Raj: “I spent 7 years in healthcare, started a company there, then was introduced to Anatoly camping and knew it was the biggest swing I could take in my lifetime”

Who’s the Core Market?

– We don’t even know

– “Solana might be the go-to network to bring finance onchain in a way that finance people get”

– If we engineer and optimize well enough, Solana will be able to move as fast as news through fiber optic cables (~speed of light)

– Was introduced to Sam – 4 weeks after he tried out Solana they had built Serum

– Everyone thought it was dumb to even try DEXs…

– “but we knew if something was gonna work with blockchain, it’s probably gonna work A LOT”

– Cobie: “I’d treat Solana as if it’s a developer platform with the core KPI as user traction”

Developer Experience

– Rust (coding language) acts as a moat

– If you have enough conviction in the vision, you eat glass to build it

– “The kid who built synthetify built it during his finals”

– THAT’s grit

– C++ people do well with Rust, and tradfi devs do well with C++, so acts as a good bridge

Engineers

– “at a certain point these guys don’t see themselves as a “rust” engineer they see themselves as a “get shit done” engineer”

– Should we support Solidity? Should we support EVM?

– NAH. If you’re that good then learn rust.

Preventing Shit Projects

– Gotta just use common sense

– Lots of community review

– These guys who came out of capture the flag winners, they just destroy everyone’s code

– Free audits on Solana! These guys check your code lol

Solana Timeline

– How to balance timeliness with quality?

– “Shit, that’s a hard question”

– Our goal is through these hackathons, find coders that will code, no sleep, ship products, XYZ and just unblock their potential

How’s a Founder Raise Structured?

– Need the lawyer to say anything

– Cobie: “per year of lockup there is some percentage discount from the market e.g. if you lock up tokens for 4 years then you get like a 20% discount or whatever”

– Your tokens are the main thing you have in your war chest

Is having a central planner, even if it’s a DAO, counterintuitive for crypto?

– When you delegate your stake to the node you don’t change custody

– but the node has full control over it

– With ETH, you kinda relinquish custody to LIDO

– On Solana you don’t have to relinquish custody

Solana Community

– SBF obviously huge

– Bahamas test – if you went to the Bahamas, how well would the project do on its own?

– Read “how to start a startup” but like how useful is that lol

– I’ve learned you gotta ship quickly, and only focus on fires when you’re steering the ship

– Optimize for shipping

– Very important that the way the chain works is as optimized as possible (speed, security, decentralization)

– It’s really hard to build tho lol

– first time we booted it up it ran for like 20 min then crashed

– Then next time ran for like an hour, then a week, then we were like holy shit it works haha

What’s Broken rn

– Rn we’re just working on optimizations mostly

– Just blood sweat and tears to make it better the core structure is good

*Solana guys sent Ledger a beanbag without any fluff inside thought it was a body bag LOL*

SOL hackathon

– $1M of prizes and seed funding

– Last one, 11 teams got funded with over $1M each tho… so the money isn’t even to attract people lol

– Idea is to attract developers and forces everyone to come together at the same time, listen to the same things, form teams, and grow the overall community

– There’s also pride, if you win you had to go through the gauntlet with everyone else

New Crypto Categories

– In 2017 everyone was publishing a white paper

– None of it worked lol

– Now people are actually able to ship this stuff and it works

– The idea of a fully decentralized Discord that feels like web 2 is where a lot of the devs are working now

Will an Algorithmic Stablecoin Ever Work?

– No…lol

– Cool think about Bitcoin was getting high grade cryptography into consumer hands

– If that’s the most powerful peace of this, people will find a censorship resistant way to coordinate these things

“What do you do?” Answer

– I just say a bunch of technical words and their eyes glaze over

– I tell people I work in blockchain and it will take over

– When first looking for seed money, banks wouldn’t give a bank account when using the word blockchain

– Cobie: “I just tell people I have a trust fund” lmao

– Ledge: “I tell people I work in web stuff”

– Ledge: “The only thing worse than saying you work in crypto is saying you’re a podcaster”

– Cobie: “Only thing worse than that is saying you’re a Twitch streamer” hahhaha

Thoughts on Bitcoin

– Bitcoin good

– Self-sovereign decentralized money that’s a store of value could be a huge force of good in the world

Other L1s

– Avalanche, Cardano, NEAR, etc

– It’s all good competition

– It’s like whatever the Lakers thing of the Warriors… in the heat they’re your enemy but hanging out later they’re nice guys lol

FUD a Project

– Safemoon

– Dfinity

– ETH

– Cardano

Dogcoins

– Dogcoins are winning because money is abundant, attention is scarce and memes have value for that reason

Free Alpha

– Raj: “new normal. You wake up, Bitcoin is legal tender, just head down and stay on course”

– Anatoly: “Don’t drink to much or eat too much, work out, don’t have too much caffeine. Just use some moderation”

Music by GiovanniPickle

Raoul Pal on the Inevitability of Crypto Jun 16, 2021

In this episode, Cobie & Ledger cover the gamut with global macro thinker and investor Raoul Pal: everything from bitcoin to the metaverse. It's a must watch.

Real Vision Crypto

Raoul on Twitter

This episode, like all episodes of UpOnly, is presented by Blockfolio. Make your first trade today: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Kyle Davies of Three Arrows Capital on Conviction & Concentrated Bets Jun 10, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Show Notes

China FUD

⁃ Matty: there will be some clamp down on leverage and futures trading but spot will be fair game. It’s about financial stability in China at the centre of it all, not crypto. Article: https://decrypt.co/72276/heres-how-chinas-crypto-fud-will-play-out

⁃ Sicarious: intro to crypto was during a wave of China FUD, right after his wedding, the same night there was a China ban and 50% drop. Has seen the ban so many times now it isn’t scary.

FloodCapital – State of the Market

⁃ Firmly in the “this is a correction” camp. We’re not going into a bear market.

⁃ US are printing money to pay their debt interest. 130% debt to GDP. Needs anomaly GDP growth in order to de-lever. Going to light a fire under the bond market. Money will flow into other markets

⁃ Matty: disagree (in the strongest possible terms). US has a huge underinvestment problem for e.g. infrastructure, R&D. Yield curve implies a different position on inflation. US debt is denominated in USD which makes a big difference – rock bottom interest rates, use it.

Sino Bull Thesis for $COPE

⁃ Shout out @cyrii_MM

⁃ COPE whitepaper: https://www.unlimitedcope.com/whitepaper/

⁃ Matty: Fully backing the team, if they don’t get the engine right first time they’ll pivot to something amazing.

⁃ Full Thesis: https://sinoglobalcap.medium.com/why-we-invested-in-cope-8dc920caeffe

VCs & Raising Money in Crypto

⁃ Cobie: If you have an awful project you can adjust the tokenomics to make it favourable to Vulture Capitalists and raise now, easy. Funds race to dump on other funds. Don’t buy pre-sales!

⁃ Hate the game rather than the players as if they players stop, they will be replaced with different players.

⁃ Will see a divergence in the types of projects raising. Good projects can raise what they want with long lockups – whole team get Castles if they want. You’ll be able to judge a projects quality by looking at their terms.

⁃ Matty: A lot of Crypto VCs are not actual VCs. They’re not acting in a VC capacity and servicing projects for the long haul. Sino are trying to do something different.

⁃ FloodCapital: There are rare opportunities that retail can get in at similar prices to VCs, those are always worth searching for.

Layer 1 Solutions

⁃ Matty: We’re still extremely early, comparing BTC penetration rate with Internet penetration rates.

⁃ Bullish on ETH and the moat they have created with their developer community.

⁃ ETH is the family car. SOL is the high performance car. They can coexist and both see enormous growth, as can other projects.

⁃ Cobie: What’s ADA? Matty: What’s the worst car you can think of?

⁃ Ledger: What’s Bitcoin? Chat says it’s a Tank.

What Sicarious looks for in a project?

⁃ Long term investor, if he likes a project he holds it long term e.g. One of the first investors in HXRO and still holding.

⁃ Doesn’t care what the team is building as long as he can trust them.

⁃ Got into DeFi “late” so it was important to look for long term fundamentals. Even if something is up 100x it can still be a good place to enter. Has to actually read white-papers now!

Bull Market? Over?

⁃ Flood: This is a mid cycle correction.

⁃ Sicarious: Hell no. Going to be taking profits this cycle compared to other cycles but items not over yet.

⁃ Cobie: Give the most likely scenarios weighting and trade on that. Just as likely that there is a 2013 style double bubble as it is that it’s over. Or maybe it really is a super-cycle, and it is UpOnly (lower probability but still possible). ETH might be able to prop up the market enough for ATHs. Looks for the narrative that would upset the most people Up(set)Only.

⁃ Ledger: Looking at charts on linear and it can get very scary. Thinks there will be a new high this year especially on ETH.

Final Alpha

⁃ Matty: Stop saying you don’t need sleep. You need sleep. 8-10 hours of sleep, don’t wreck your mental capacity. Get your sleep!

⁃ Sicarious: Don’t burn bridges needlessly. Even if someone screws you over, things might be different in future and the relationship will be beneficial.

⁃ FloodCapital: Be patient and a long term thinker. It’s so easy to be distracted. How much time do you spend a day thinking original thoughts? Longer term you can achieve what you want financially by growing year on year rather than needing to 100x.

Music by GiovanniPickle

Bitcoin Miami Wrap-up with Aubrey Strobel, SizeChad, and Lawmaster Jun 09, 2021

Show Partner

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Music by GiovanniPickle

The Vulture Capitalists, Inflation, and State of the Cycle Jun 04, 2021

In this episode, Cobie and Ledger are joined by Matthew Graham (Matty Sino), Flood Capital, and Sicarious to discuss a range of fun topics from VCs to market cycles.

Joined by:

@mattysino

@Sicarious_

@FloodCapital

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Try a trade there today: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Building blue chips, with Stani of Aave, Kain of Synthetix, and Santiago of Parafi May 28, 2021

In this episode, Cobie & Ledger are joined by the founders of two of the bluest of blue chip defi projects: Stani of Aave and Kain of Synthetix, along with epic investor Santiago of Parafi Capital. We go deep on all things defi.

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Make a trade there today: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Sam & CZ Discuss Building Crypto Empires May 26, 2021

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie and Ledger are joined by Sam of FTX and CZ of Binance to discuss building exchanges, supporting networks, and how their approaches differ on crypto.

This episode is presented by Blockfolio: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Is the bull market over? May 21, 2021

In this episode of UpOnly, a special panel joins Cobie and Ledger to discuss the state of the market post-dump.

Presented by Blockfolio: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Konstantin Lomashuk: Investing in people with a long term outlook May 19, 2021

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie and Ledger talk to diamond-handed investor Lomashuk, crowdsale investor in Eth and many other projects.

https://twitter.com/Lomashuk

https://lido.fi/

https://satoshi.fund/

https://p2p.org

Presented by Blockfolio. Trade and track your portfolio with zero fees: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

A Parallel Universe: We talk to two BSC project creators May 13, 2021

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Meltem Demirors: for Fun, for Profit, & for Learning May 11, 2021

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie and Ledger talk to Meltem Demirors, crypto investor and Chief Strategy Officer of CoinShares.

@melt_dem

Coinshares

UpOnly.tv

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Make trades with zero fees, plus track your portfolio like you've always loved: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Life changing trading in crypto May 07, 2021

Links

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Music by GiovanniPickle

Charlie Lee on Litecoin, decentralization, and the crypto ecosystem May 07, 2021

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Music by GiovanniPickle

Bitcoin Maxis versus Ledger & Cobie Apr 30, 2021

In this episode, Cobie and Ledger bring on three bitcoin maxis and have a wide ranging discussion about markets, bitcoin, eth, networks, and much more.

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Make your first trade (or even stack sats!) with Blockfolio today: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Jason from Telegram and Travis Kling talk trading and macro Apr 22, 2021

In this episode of UpOnly, the famous Jason from Telegram and Travis Kling join us to talk markets.

https://uponly.tv

https://twitter.com/Travis_Kling

https://www.ikigai.fund/

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Big Brain Crypto Club Apr 08, 2021

It's just an overload of alpha. This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Make your first trade today: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Crypto whale Tetranode on his story and his bullish outlook on Ethereum and defi Apr 07, 2021

Show links:

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Music by GiovanniPickle

Mark Cuban: Present & Future Opportunity of Crypto Apr 01, 2021

Notes & Links

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Music by GiovanniPickle

Tether & Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino talks stablecoins, exchange security, and more Mar 30, 2021

Notes & Links

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Music by GiovanniPickle

Carly Chaikin from Mr. Robot talks to IRL Hacker YTCracker Mar 25, 2021

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade seamlessly from one asset to another, and track your portfolio just like you've always loved: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Carly's NFT
Carly's website
Carly on Twitter

YT Cracker SoundCloud
Bitcoin Baron Video
YTCracker Twitter

CMS Holdings co-founder Daniel Matuszewski Mar 23, 2021

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Make a seamless trade on Blockfolio today at: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Santiago R Santos of ParaFI Capital on Defi Decoupling Mar 16, 2021

Follow Santiago

His blog

ParaFi

Books:

Finite and Infinite Games

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade on an awesome mobile interface fee-free, and still get all the great portfolio tracking features you know and love: https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Nifty Gateway CEO Griffin Cockfoster and Artist Ian Strange on the NFT Boom Mar 12, 2021

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Trade with Blockfolio today at https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Arthur0x on Defi Conviction Mar 11, 2021

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Make your first trade on Blockfolio today at https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Neeraj K. Agrawal on Crypto & Cooking Mar 05, 2021

Follow Neeraj.

Check out Coin Center

This episode is presented by Blockfolio. Make a trade today on Blockfolio.

Su Zhu from Three Arrows Capital on the Crypto Super Cycle Feb 24, 2021

Su Zuho on Twitter @zhusu
Three Arrows investments
Uncommon Core podcast

Our partner for this stream is Blockfolio. Try a trade on Blockfolio today, plus get all the great portfolio tracking features you already love at https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Beeple and PplPleasr on NFTs and the intersection of art and crypto Feb 19, 2021

Notes & Links

In this episode of UpOnly, Cobie and Ledger talk to Beeple and PplPleasr about their stories, art, NFTs, Defi, crypto, and everything inbetween.

Our partner for this stream is Blockfolio. Try a trade on Blockfolio today, plus get all the great portfolio tracking features you already love at https://uponly.tv/blockfolio

Live with Path on being a chart savant Feb 18, 2021

Presented by Blockfolio. Trade on Blockfolio today at: https://ledgerstatus.com/blockfolio

Follow Cobie: https://twitter.com/cryptocobain

Follow Ledger: https://twitter.com/ledgerstatus

Creating NFTs with Shams Meccea, Messi, & Rob Swire Feb 18, 2021

Presented by Blockfolio. Trade on Blockfolio today at: https://ledgerstatus.com/blockfolio

Shams' website: https://smeccea.com/INFO

APE ONLY NFT: https://superrare.co/artwork-v2/ape-o...

Rob Swire on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2SNg8...

Also joined by Udi and Box Lax.

Follow Cobie: https://twitter.com/cryptocobain

Follow Ledger: https://twitter.com/ledgerstatus

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