# Solana RWA Leadership, Market Fragmentation, and Agentic Trading Metas

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-06-05

## Transcript

I think the crypto market is fragmenting in a way I've never seen it before.
I think historically, it's always been the market trends with Bitcoin.
And you'll have outliers that do better or worse, but like generally the market trends with Bitcoin.
I think basically there is a new age of assets that have value that are generating revenue.
And then there's the rest of crypto.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Doucette here.
And welcome to The Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that really wants this bear market to mirror the last one, except for the parts where we get blown up like five times.
and we're already at four.
Today's June 5th, 2026, recording on June 4th.
Solana is below $70.
And if it closes here, that'll be the lowest daily close since December 2023.
The bear market has not been kind, especially to the darlings of the past.
Solana in particular is in a funny place.
It could potentially fall out of the top three this cycle, despite being a growing chain.
So where does it sit in the crypto ecosystem of the future and what apps on it, not called PumpFun, have a chance to actually bring retail or institutions back to the table?
We'll go over all that and more today with Carl Vogel, general partner at Six Man Ventures.
Also, the market is going...
pretty berserk this week, and our analysts have been busy.
They've made 12 trades so far since Monday as they adjust to a potential top in equities and an implosion in crypto.
You can see what they sold and what they bought for just a dollar in Milk Road Pro.
You get seven days in there and you can cancel anytime.
Today's episode is brought to you by Cape, the privacy-first mobile carrier, Nexo, Earn Interest, Borrow and Trade, Crypto, and Calci, where your takes finally pay out.
carl welcome back to the show man you haven't you haven't been here during the bear market you were here during the bull i know it's i i try to do a lot more podcasts during the bull market than the bear there's sometimes easier podcasts to do i was actually going to try to figure out what was the price of solana when we chatted last i and i don't want to look up the number but i i should have coming into this It was not below 100.
Let's put it that way.
It might have been above 200.
Who knows?
You came on with Jay, I think, maybe late 2024, and I think maybe once or twice in 2025 as well, the last time maybe being last summer.
So it's great to have you back.
If you want to know what's going on with us, we're surviving.
We're here.
We're here every day, keeping the lights on and knowing that there will be greener times in the future.
We never get the chance to talk about Solana, and I feel like you guys as six men, you have a lot of investment.
there.
You recently wrote a fantastic piece called Tokenizing Trillions, which largely is about RWAs, but obviously Solana is a place looking for that.
Carl, if I was a guy walking down the street and I hadn't looked at crypto in five years, but I knew what Solana was, how would you summarize where it's at right now?
It's a great question.
I would start by saying Solana is the most performant decentralized blockchain that exists.
I specifically say decentralized because a lot of what is being deemed a blockchain is no longer decentralized.
And there's pros and cons to a highly centralized approach to building a blockchain.
But nonetheless, Solana's technology is unmatched in the ability to enable any application and any developer from any over the world to build an application and immediately start generating revenue.
From an ecosystem perspective, Solana is the place where you can trade anything.
That's, in fact, the vision.
of Solana.
So you can trade any asset, everything from meme coins and other fun types of assets that you create all the way up to the most important assets in finance, which is equities and AAA class bonds and US treasuries and everything in between.
So whatever you want to trade, the vision is you can do that on Solana.
And I don't see another chain that is as far along in that vision than Solana is.
So I would say, again, not financial advice, all the normal disclaimers.
We may or may not hold positions in some of the assets that we discussed today.
But Solana is in a really great position looking forward.
And we're optimistic about the adoption that's going to occur on this line of blockchain.
When you say it's further along, how do you quantify that?
I quantify it based on the level of decentralization.
So how many different types of clients and operators and global distribution the network has.
Again, I think there's a classic running joke that if AWS Japan goes down, you know, half of the blockchains that exist today are going to cease to exist.
That's not the case with a network like Solana.
In fact, its uptime has been remarkable over the past couple of years.
Very early on, there were some outages, but the network has recovered incredibly well from all of those.
So I look at it from just the level of decentralization, the level of global access.
It has the most amount of wallets.
I don't know if I have any pure data, but I'd say the most certainly unique wallets trading on the application.
So if you want to reach users, it has that broad distribution that you might be looking for as a developer or a builder.
And it has billions of dollars of assets already on the chain that is liquidity that you can target.
So it's a really great network, great group of people.
And I think highly focused on reducing the cost of block space, such that you could build scalable applications there, unlike other networks where you might have to pay large amounts of fees in order to send transactions on the blockchain.
Got it.
So is that what you feel is also like the pitch to institutions, right?
When it's, I guess it's like, I guess it's Solana going into these meetings trying to, actually, maybe you can even just, you know, you wrote this kind of tokenized trillions.
Maybe you can kind of give us an overview of how you see those conversations going, right?
Because we track RWAs a lot on the show.
We know stable coins are growing, but I think both stable coins and other things, I think we want to know, like, how does, you know, when these institutions are evaluating this stuff.
Is what you said, is that what they see Solana as?
Is that what the moat is for Solana is kind of everything you just kind of outlined?
I think so.
And we're going to talk a lot on the show about Solana versus hype.
And I think institutional adoption is actually one of the places where Solana has a very big advantage.
It's, you know, a lot of the founders and, you know, team is based in the United States.
It already has a lot of the regulatory approvals.
It's already has DFS approval to be traded.
All of these things that.
What institution is looking for?
Credible decentralization, large US presence of both individuals and validators that are operating in the US, and it's low cost.
So if you're trying to get users and customers to participate in a network, you can't charge them like $3 to do a transaction.
It's just not scalable.
To send money on Solana, to do transactions on Solana is a fraction of a penny.
So when they look for, hey, I have hundreds of thousands or millions of people, I need to get my products to them.
There needs to be a scalable network to do that.
And so for all those reasons, and a lot of the policy work that Solana has done over the past years, they've laid a really solid foundation for future institutional adoption, especially for all the RWA type of assets.
Do you fancy yourself an analyst and or a content creator in this space?
Well, we want you.
Specifically, if you live and breathe tech equities, Milk Road could be the home for you.
We're hiring for two positions right now, analyst and content creator.
So check out the careers page below.
Do you feel, and I want to continue talking RWAs and institutions, I spend a lot of time on crypto Twitter.
I'm a former occasional DGEN still.
How has the meme coin meta of the past affected Solana's reputation and also potential adoption?
Because everything you just outlined, that has nothing to do with meme points.
But that is still a part of the story.
And I think it's very easy to kind of forget that you had like D-list celebrities.
launching and kind of rugging meme coins at times, right?
And that is recent.
That is like two years ago.
And a huge part of that was a story around salon, at least for retail.
Does that affect how institutions can see it or even how you see it?
You know, it doesn't.
And I think it maybe did when it first started happening, when we were in peak meme coin mania.
I think maybe institutions are like, I want to go towards something that is more, you know, has more outstanding products or is more like the type of people that I want that I want on my network to be buying my types of assets.
But I really think that's that's eroded.
I think there's been a couple of things.
One is it's very easy to talk about how the meme coins have had a cultural impact on Solana for the negative.
Some people say I actually think there's a lot of positives.
in terms of like cratership and the ability to generate assets.
But the positive is that meme coins broke Solana a number of times where the network needed to improve to handle the throughput and the volume that was taking place from all these different coins.
And so because of that, it actually radically hardened the infrastructure and was one of the best testbeds.
So now if you're looking to build somewhere, again, like it's going to work and you're able to do thousands of transactions per second.
And that's been tested in production versus a lot of these other newer networks I'm very excited by, but they haven't had that same level of testing in production.
So that's one of the positive sides of meme coins.
But I think today, institutions largely recognize there's many different people that are using blockchains.
And I don't think we see as many, you know, the scammy types of or extractive meme coins that we did before.
So no, when I talk to institutions, in fact, there's been times institutions want more out of this line of foundation.
There's times we're saying, hey, we want to launch on Solana and we actually need some more help from the Solana Foundation than we're able to get.
And so I'm actually seeing the opposite from my point of view.
So foundations want to work with Solana and they view it as an incredibly excited place to build.
What more help do they need?
Like what does an institution require from something like Solana Foundation?
Yeah, I don't want to get too specific.
I guess you can't give it away.
There's certain types of...
incentives and what I'd say top level support that institutions might want.
And I think one of the things historically Solana has done, and I'm not saying this is like good or bad, it's just, it is, is they've been very credibly neutral.
And they're not going to pay many millions of dollars to go bring people to their network in the same way we saw other institutions do that.
Again, that's like historically been very good.
And it means the institutions that do arrive on Solana are doing so for all the right reasons for the decentralization, for the throughput, for the users, all the right things.
But I think as you start to move up in the world towards more and more sophisticated institutions, there does become a pay to play.
That's just part of doing business.
It is not like a nefarious thing.
It's, hey, these are the types of incentives we need in order to launch in your network.
from talking institutions, there's been reticence from the Solana Foundation to take some of those steps.
And so because of that, there's been things that have not launched on Solana that I actually think would have been really good for Solana to launch.
So maybe I'll pause there.
But I guess the question is, the type of approach that got Solana to be the massive success where it is today, is that the right approach we need going forward?
We've seen a lot of turnover and change at the Solana Foundation.
In fact, over the past year, I'd say more than 50% of the people I know there have left and been replaced by new people.
And so you can look at that either in a positive sense or in a negative sense.
And I think Solana is recognizing the types of people we need going forward might look different than the ones we had previously.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
However, I think there's more that can be done and that I see.
to really bring the institutional narrative home onto Solana and make it a predominant place where institutions deploy.
Because you have really other great blockchains, like Avalanche is another institutional-focused blockchain that has made enormous leaps over the past couple of years.
And so it's Solana's to lose, I would say, at this point.
They're still in one of the driving positions.
But I've seen other chains take huge inroads and actually start to gain advantages in certain wedges of the institutional side.
So yeah, really important times for Solana over the next year relating to institutions.
Got it.
So to recap, Solana has one of Solana's competitive advantages to kind of answer the question I asked you is that they are battle tested because of meme coins.
Meme coins really stress the chain and they had to make a lot of improvements.
So if anything, that tells you that it has, it shows that it has grown a lot because of this extreme kind of stress.
And also that.
Solana is seeing some turnover as they evolve and stay relevant as well, right?
That they want to stay in the race and that this is a huge part of the pie that they are targeting and that they are players for as well.
And as other L1s as well also get a piece of that pie and do the same thing.
I do want to talk about Hyperliquid because obviously that's kind of the flavor of the month and for a lot of different reasons that we've broken down on this show.
quite a few times I I you know I want to know Carl from you how do you compare the two because to me they're they're they're drastically different products.
But obviously, you go on Twitter and people are just like, oh, there it goes.
It's going to flip Solana.
And it's like, that's not necessarily what's, that's not the best way to look at it because it's not, they're not necessarily trying to do the same thing.
But I want to get your take, man.
I want to know how you visualize these types of chains and products as we kind of go through a bear market too.
Yeah.
And to be clear, I actually think they're getting to be more similar than they are different.
I want to hear about it.
Tell me.
Their mission and their focus.
Yeah.
I think Hyperliquid's exact vision is to house all of finance or house the world's finance.
Solana's is NASDAQ on chain.
And so I think when you look at all the assets trade on NASDAQ, you look at housing all of finance, they're both aiming for the same things.
They're both in DC.
They're both trying to make the right connections.
They're both talking to institutions.
Again, I think Solana has a lot of advantages here.
But Hyperliquid, I think to be successful over the next leg.
there's a couple of things they need to evolve in order to continue to maintain the upward trajectory that's been really impressive that they have.
One of those big things, and we talked about a slide, so we talked about hyperliquid.
One of those big things is it's hard to house all of finance when any HIP3 or HIP4 institution that wants to deploy a market has to stake hundreds or thousands of hyperliquid.
You just think about scale and throughput.
The beauty of Solana is it's an open network and anybody can launch any market on the platform, right?
And you can customize it and do exactly what you want.
That's not the case in Hyperliquid.
And I think when we saw the prior USDH, I would say debacle, but set of competing proposals that were taking place and you had large institutions like Paxos and USDH and others all trying to buy for that space.
um it became very complex and it showed that like it's a very early ecosystem that has a high degree of like behavior and bias and i think institutions want certainty when they go to a network and if it's well now i need to buy a ticker i need to buy this volatile asset to do that and by the way if it's a spot market that ticker can be repurchased by someone else in the future.
So can you imagine going to like Jamie Dimon and saying, we want to deploy on Hyperliquid.
We have a market, but we might lose that market over time if somebody else bids more.
Like that's just not the way that finance works.
So I think just updates, I think again, what got them to be successful so far might not be the type of market structure to bring them into the future.
So I think that's one of the first things you need to change.
One of the other ones is I think they really need to focus more on the hyper EVM.
You know, a lot of our hyper liquid thesis was around the growth of the EVM.
And as you have this amazing liquidity in the core, but then you have this flourishing ecosystem all around it.
And, you know, for the past six months, there hasn't really been an emphasis on EVM.
And in fact, the core has expanded to now do the types of things that the EVM, the hyper EVM community was doing itself.
So I think like.
They have a really lean team, but figuring out how do we grow the EVM so that way we have the core liquidity that attracts users and institutions, but then enables a flourishing of different types of innovative products to exist.
And I think that's another thing they need to nail.
Otherwise, I think they're going to be a great product, a great trading terminal, but I think they're going to be very narrow in the types of users that they reach.
I mean, if you look at DAUs, it stayed relatively flat over the past 90 days.
If you look at revenue, it stayed relatively flat over the past 90 days.
So they've won crypto Twitter in terms of trading experience, but that's a very small market relative to all of finance.
The way we build wealth is changing.
Stocks, savings accounts, real estate, that playbook is getting rewritten in real time.
Nexo is the platform built for what's next.
It's an all-in-one digital wealth platform where you can earn interest on your crypto, borrow against it without selling, and trade a wide range of assets.
All in one place with 24-7 support and institutional great security.
Oh, and by the way, Nexo is back in the U.S.
with new U.S.
clients getting 30 days of Wealth Club Premier access.
That means elevated interest rates, lower borrowing costs, and crypto cash back on trades.
Benefits usually reserved for loyalty program members.
Get started at milkroad.com slash Nexo.
Your phone carrier knows more about you than your best friend does.
Where you go, who you call, when you sleep, and they're selling all of it.
AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, they've all been caught leaking data or caching in on it.
And your VPN, your encrypted messaging app, they can't fix what's broken at the network level.
That's where CAPE comes in.
CAPE is America's privacy-first mobile carrier.
Same premium coverage you'd expect, built with privacy from day one.
Your phone's network identifier rotates every 24 hours, so you look like a different subscriber every day.
Call logs are deleted after 24 hours.
You get two encrypted secondary numbers for signups and 2FA included in your plan.
Plus SIM swap protection that puts you in control of your number.
So no one, not even Kate, can hijack it.
Use code milkroad at milkroad.com slash Kate for 33% off your first six months.
So, okay.
So just to recap, so you're telling me, you know, despite all the good stuff about what Hyperliquid is, we're not, we haven't seen growth.
Hyper EVM feels pretty dead.
Honestly, I was, I was somebody who was using it, you know, trying to use some of those protocols, but it's something I haven't gone to in a long time.
and despite a lot of the headlines for hyperliquid in the last couple months like capturing a lot of you know volume for the silver trade and all that kind of stuff um it still hasn't grown and they don't have a lot of the same features that solana does um and i like what i it's interesting what you said about the tickers right for hyper liquid maybe you can explain that a little bit more how that works because they sell their tickers right exactly they sell their tickers on hyperliquid and then if you and is that like an annual fee or do you have to yeah so again i am not an expert here because i've never done it but my understanding so the maybe the comments and threads can can correct us where we're wrong but at a very high level yeah there's perpetual tickers and then there's spot tickers for the spot tickers uh there's a certain amount of uh hype you need just to buy the ticker but then there is an auction mechanism and a decay function essentially for that ticker for who owns it.
In other words, if you buy it, it's not yours in perpetuity.
And so with that, you actually might need to in the future bid in order to maintain your ticker.
And over time, somebody might come in if they really want it and potentially buy that from you.
Again, that's my understanding.
Apologies if it's incorrect.
But like, if that's the way, if I understand the market structure correctly, that just doesn't seem like a great system.
If you want to be able to come in and again, you're an executive and you're going to launch a crypto strategy, you need it to work and you need predictability.
And I don't think that's going to work going forward versus Solana.
Launch any token you want, come up with any ticker you want, people can trade it, use it, et cetera.
So, and then of course, on the perpetual side, there's a certain amount of hype you need to stake.
And then you'll...
be able to allocate a certain amount of tickers for markets specifically, I guess I should say, once you do that.
But again, that's a volatile asset.
Imagine when hype has recently hit at 73, 74, I think was the recent high.
Imagine if that goes down to...
I'm not saying it is, but what if it does?
And you're now trying to explain to your executive director, like, oh, by the way, the price went down.
We're still, we need to hold this thing.
Like it just, these are mechanisms that are more blockers and inhibitors to TradFi rather than they are types of features that welcome them to launch.
And I think Solana's construction so far is more open and accessible to being the bridge for those types of institutions.
Got it.
Okay.
Let's jump back to Solana.
So you said that they want to be the on-chain NASDAQ, right?
That that is kind of like the way to envision what this effort is for Solana.
How does that actually manifest in your view?
Is it that Jamie Dimon institutions are just porting their assets onto Solana?
Are they working with apps on Solana?
You know what I mean?
What does that actually look like in terms of the user experience once that vision fulfills?
So I think there's a couple of big things coming up.
on the RWA space more broadly that capture this.
The first is we're going to see a huge growth in tokenized equities.
I think you've already seen Kraken by X stocks.
You've seen a number of things around native issuance of stocks.
Bullish just bought a company in order to do this.
So I can tell you that every single exchange is figuring out, crypto exchange, figuring out how do we do tokenized equities?
Who are we going to partner and how are we going to get there?
So that is 100% happening right now.
And all of these, so basically you're going to have all of these equities that are now going to be traded on crypto rails.
And so for the Jamie Diamonds and others, they're going to look at, hey, we have a variety of different products.
If all of the attention and activity and product innovation is going to be taking place on chain, how do we launch products that therefore can plug into the ecosystem that's being built?
And so there's the distribution layer.
And then there's the app layer.
And so a lot of these big banks are going to be pushing their assets there.
They know they're going to get purchased.
We've even seen this in the form of stretch.
There's tokenized stretch, a number of teams that have launched this.
And it's done very well on chain.
And I think people on chain, they want good collateral.
They want collateral that yields.
They want to be able to use that to borrow to do other things on chain.
And so when you have this open infrastructure of on-chain finance, it allows for a lot more construction of new types of products.
And so that's a big area where the banks are going to want to deploy their products on chain and start to plug into the new types of product experiences that are being built.
The other part of this is I think they're also going to become vault curators.
So vaults are one of the most important trends in finance taking place today.
Crypto related finance is taking place.
And the curators we've had historically, the Centoras, the Gauntlets, and others, I think largely have done a good job.
I mean, obviously, there's been hacks that I would say are fairly inexcusable in how some of them have deployed individual vaults.
But nonetheless, across the board, there's been the first generation.
But if you think about a curator as basically a portfolio manager, well, these banks, really good portfolio managers and really good portfolio construction analysis.
And so you imagine them coming in and starting to deploy.
and be curators for their own vaults on chain, where they're going to be able to bring their products and then create curated experiences about them, maybe even more rapidly than they might be able to do on the traditional rails.
So those are a couple of big things I see in how these institutions, the big banks are going to participate.
And by the way, they're already doing this today.
We already have billions of dollars issued on chain from the likes of BlackRock and Apollo and others.
So I think it's just going to continue over time.
Got it.
Okay.
All right.
That makes a lot of sense.
I just want to zoom out.
Why would institutions want to do this?
Why do institutions want to put this stuff on chain?
There's obvious reasons.
I want to know from you.
Why?
Why do this?
I think it has to be to make money.
I think at the end of the day, they need to grow their AUM, the types of products and money that they touch.
And they know that they see all of finance is going to be moving on chain.
I mean, Larry Fink in his annual letter.
said you can tokenize any asset and it's going to revolutionize investing.
And so for them, part of this is they might not have the perfect business plan mapped out, but it's an existential crisis where think about if you're a bank, you have AI coming in on one angle and you have crypto and blockchain coming on the other.
It is one of the hardest times to be a fintech or bank that's ever existed.
But with all of these new technology disruptions, there's new opportunities.
And so you can expect that they're going to be looking to build experiences that both leverage agentic finance, agentic trading, with the trust and reputation and security that comes from being a larger institution or bank.
And they're going to build these types of products on blockchain rails because you can launch things faster than you can and try to do it in the traditional financial system and reach larger audiences.
Right.
Okay.
So it's really, it's just about growth, really.
It's about growth and revenue and being able to reach places that they never could before.
Yeah.
And I think there's a cost story to it, but like, I don't think cost is what's driving it.
Like at the end of the day, companies really need to show top line revenue growth.
That's one of the most important things.
And so I think it's about growth of AUM, growth of revenue.
There are cost benefits to using Vaults.
There's no question, but it's not the primary driver.
Got it.
Carl, I want to save the rest of the episode to honestly just get your thoughts on the market, man, because we conveniently, your episode, not only is it your first episode of The Bear, comes, you know, we're recording this on June 4th.
So I think people are going to listen to this on June 5th.
But, you know, we saw this week in the last couple of weeks, we slid.
83k just barely kissed like 61 last night um a major a major slide 25 down i think rarely we've seen this quick especially the last this week has been particularly uh extreme obviously everything we've just talked about is is irrelevant to price right and that's what's nice is that i think that that's the reason a lot of us are bullish long term is like all this stuff is happening regardless of what the price of bitcoin is or anything is um But if we can switch your brain for a second and ask you more on the, you know, what is the crypto market doing?
I want to know from you, where are we going?
I think the crypto market is fragmenting in a way I've never seen it before.
I think historically, it's always been the market trends with Bitcoin.
And you'll have outliers that do better or worse, but like generally the market trends of Bitcoin.
I think basically there's a new age of assets that have value that are generating revenue, and then there's the rest of crypto.
And I think that you're starting to really see these, I'll say quality assets, even though they're very expensive relative to the actual revenue they're creating, nonetheless, these quality assets breaking away.
And I've never seen such an extreme case where you have something like hype sets up relative to Bitcoin.
300 to 400% over periods of time.
I mean, and this is not like some small market cap token.
I mean, this is one of the largest tokens in crypto that is just running away while Bitcoin is sliding.
So I was writing our investor update actually recently.
And this is a pretty normal cycle.
If you look at the pullbacks and the percentages, and if you look at the four-year cycle, it's pretty standard.
Like there's nothing that is that unusual that has occurred today.
But the hard part about this is that other people seem to be winning and we're not.
And normally, equities are not ripping in the way they are.
I mean, some of these equities look like meme coins, the way they're taking off.
You look at these charts.
So I think that's just been the hard part.
And when there's great upside and opportunity in one of the most important technological changes we've seen in AI, you're just going to see liquidity leave the system.
And I don't see a near-term catalyst for a reversal.
I think generally Bitcoin has a number of structural issues that it's facing.
I think quantum is unfortunately one of those, even though I don't think Bitcoin is like subject to a quantum hack tomorrow.
I think the fact there's not a clear strategy in place is just an overhang.
That means institutions are going to go look at other things.
I think Ethereum is struggling on multiple fronts.
We've spent a lot of time on Solana.
So I think you're going to see more instead of the crypto market that goes up or down, it's you're really picking individual assets that are going to outperform in this type of conditions because there's the new age and then there's the old age of assets.
So that's at the highest, highest level how I characterize it.
But there's a lot of bright spots.
And I think if you're an investor, I'd be looking at what are the things that are generating revenue or are related to some of these most important technology cycles.
So I think one of the big opportunities for crypto coming up.
is true decentralized AI, or maybe I'll even say distributed AI, where it's not like decentralized, but okay, you're relying on distributed infrastructure to go ahead and do inference or create outcomes and do training in a way that you might have an advantage over centralized players.
And we're seeing this in terms of confidential AI computing that's taking place on some of these different emerging products and networks.
That is very interesting.
And I think you can catch a...
a narrative there, right?
If you look at how big this section of AI has grown and this crypto company is only worth a hundredth of it, well, maybe there's a lot of upside there.
So I'd be looking at what is doing well, where does that map to crypto and what types of crypto products can actually offer structural advantages and serve that same segment of customers that are spending lots of money.
And I would focus my energy there.
It's like one of the things when we're looking at a company, especially a B2B company, is who's the buyer of this product?
Like not just what customer, but like what person in that company is the buyer of the product that you're trying to sell?
And what is their budget?
You know, one of the big conversations on AI recently is, you know, AI has gone from an IT budget to an entire company budget because now it's the human workforce and all these other things.
And so...
So it's all about like, okay, who has the budget?
They're buying data, they're buying compute, they're buying energy.
Great.
Well, then if they have budget and they're buying these, how do I create a crypto version of it or decentralized distributed version that I can sell to those customers and give them unique advantage?
I think Grass is like one great example of a team that is doing it through leveraging the power of decentralization and their large network to go ahead and do something that is very hard, if not impossible for a centralized provider to do.
That's definitely been the theme.
You know, what's funny is that especially this week, I find, or the last two weeks with our guests as the, you know, crypto market cap has slid.
That has been a resounding theme, not just like, hey, why is hype doing well?
Why is Venice doing well?
The really big obvious ones are Zcash or any of that kind of stuff.
But we're starting to see even pointing out smaller caps that are doing really cool stuff that is relevant and useful, kind of like what Grass is doing, where people are starting to point that out.
And I feel like it's something we haven't really heard on the show in a long time is people start to point out kind of these smaller protocols that are doing.
interesting pieces.
One more question for you, Carl.
And this is kind of related to everything you're saying.
Revenue has been such an enormous, I wouldn't even call it meta.
That's the trend.
But it's something that to me in prior crypto cycles, we never talked about making money.
It was always just speculative.
In the future, people will use this.
We'll be the store of value.
It's going to be the whatever, ultrasound money.
There's all these narratives for what these things were going to be and what they could be in the future.
And that's starting to happen to some of them.
but in the last two three years it has been like also who actually makes money who's actually sustainably making money is that something you see continuing obviously that's also how normal finance is evaluating it are you making money but is that something that that continues and that we the lens we continue to use for basically most crypto projects no i think ultimately people are looking at upside again like i i think if you look at hyper liquid i again i i think it's like a hundred x annualized revenue, FTV, multiple.
If you look at PE as being a similar thing, it is wildly expensive.
And so you can't say it's the revenue that is giving it that valuation.
It's people thinking this is going to house all the finance.
And that is a very exciting vision that, and I believe in Jeff and the team, that I think they're going to do it.
So I think we always come up with a meta for why.
things are going to go up in price and what we're interested in.
And so I imagine if there's going to be some decentralized AI thing, it could be trading at billions of dollars and not make any money, but there's a promise future revenues or just general adoption that, hey, people are going to buy this because they're interested in it and it's going to go up and I can sell it in the future.
If there's that belief, it doesn't really matter if there's revenue or not.
Again, as a venture capitalist, I'm looking at things that are actually sustainable.
long-term businesses that are going to grow over time and revenue is pretty important part of growing a successful business.
But I think it's just a convenient narrative that people are honing into right now, but I met in a bear market, but I imagine that could change over time.
And once we go back to bullish and risk on people are going to bid, people are going to bid anything.
You're listening to the milk road show, which means you've got takes strong ones.
I bet where do those takes actually go?
Do you tweet them into the void, argue them in the group chat, or do you try to express them by buying a stock?
The thing is, stocks move on like 50 other things at once.
And that's where CalShe comes in.
It's a CFTC regulated prediction market where you bet directly on outcomes like Bitcoin hitting 100K, Fed rate cuts, GameStop buying eBay with a clean yes or no.
We did a full deep dive on why prediction markets might be crypto's third product market fit moment.
Check the show notes for the full report and claim $10 free when you trade $10 on CalShe.
Can I ask you a bit more of a like a retail DGEN question?
Yeah.
TCG.
is a huge part of on-chain these days, like Pokemon cards.
And to me, it's a huge part of retail RWAs, right?
Because we talk about stablecoins and all these other financial products coming on-chain, which is great.
But for everyday retail people, the people who in the past maybe were interested in NFTs and meme coins, Pokemon cards are at an all-time high.
potential bubble we don't know but is that is this a good thing that a lot of them are converting or you know collector crip uh trove like all these different types of companies that are actually bringing this stuff to market and tokenizing them is this is this good do you think that that's like a positive it's a it's a huge positive and it's something that is It's not, I think people look at it as, oh, wow, crypto is actually solving a problem for me instead of, oh, it's just a way I can make money.
It's like, if you want to trade Pokemon cards, you have to go to these...
bad sites that a lot of times aren't optimized for it or you have to go to conventions in order to like do certain things or if you want to do packs you got to buy the pack you got to open it and you got to like try to sell the cars buy another pack and i think the innovation of the gotcha machine where you basically instantly rip a pack that has certain odds then that company will sell it We'll buy it back at some discount and then put in new cards and repackage things.
That is something you can only do on crypto native rails or blockchain enabled rails and do so in a trustless, permissionless way.
Again, anyone can go to, PSA could launch this today.
They might even have it.
I don't know.
But are you really going to trust that they're actually giving you the cards and the odds that you expect?
Probably not.
But when it's on chain, you can verify that you're actually getting the risk and the odds that you expected.
And so it's an absolute massive boon.
And I think that's where crypto wins.
We've had tokenized equities on chain for a year and they haven't done well.
And by the way, I think even when all these exchanges like the Coinbase's and the OKX's and I think Binance already launched, there's so many of these exchanges launching tokenized equities, right?
Cool.
But that doesn't mean people are automatically going to trade that.
There needs to be good product experiences around it because right now Robinhood is really good.
Like it is a good product and you need new things.
And so I think when you look at tokenized collectibles, right, there's things you can do on chain you cannot do in the physical world.
That is the opportunity.
There's going to be indices and other types of new markets created around these collectibles and asset classes that is, again, impossible to do on chain.
And you can do it from anywhere in the world and launch the market in a permissionless way.
So that is how we bring real users on chain and not just the crypto native bubble.
And the big opportunity for equities coming up is like, how do I create new types of investing experiences, new types of baskets and products?
There's an interesting team we're chatting with.
I'm not going to say the name here.
But an interesting team we're chatting with where they enable anyone to launch a basket or an index.
And so you might have a Pelosi index.
You might launch a war index and whatever you want.
And basically, the curator.
chooses the assets that go into that basket.
And so now as an individual, you're not just bullish on individual companies, but you're bullish on themes.
Like what are the themes that I'm interested in and I want to participate in?
And then I can see how that basket tracks over time.
That is a net new product.
And you can't, if I'm an individual, I can't just go create a basket on Robinhood that you can trade, but I can do it in crypto.
And so there's going to be these social experiences that are going to happen on chain and it's going to completely change.
the trajectory of crypto.
And I think that's the type of thing that's going to give us a bullish reversal.
But without or absent any of those unique, fun experiences, I think we're just going to continue to, you know, kind of like do this until we get some strong momentum.
Dude, that's the future of influencers to me, right?
So influencers on social media is kind of saturated and everybody's becoming this, you know, the whole world is tokenizing, the whole world is betting, prediction markets.
And to me, I'm like, well, you know.
what's better than an influencer who hawks you like terrible healthcare products an influencer who helps you make money right so to me that's i'm like that is totally you know rather than you know you countless youtube videos where people talk about some of these pokemon cards it's like Those guys got to find a way to monetize and they're just getting YouTube ad dollars or whatever.
We're selling some other product, partnering with products or selling their own products.
It's like, forget that.
Like, let them create an index where they get a small fee.
And that's, that's, you can just follow their trades like that, right?
It's almost like 100%.
That makes so much more sense.
Yeah, we do a ton of different events.
We're successful investing across many verticals, but we're perhaps most known for consumer.
our investments in companies like Pump.Fun and Magic Eden and Seppin and a lot of the top consumer projects in crypto.
I have a thesis on consumer and it's related to this.
And so generally in Web2, there's apps that allow you to either maximize your social network or maximize fame.
And so look at Instagram, like you'll make some money on Instagram, but you actually make way more money off platform.
than you do on Instagram itself if you're a creator.
Likewise, you have Robinhoods and other platforms that are allowed to make money, but they haven't really figured out a social network yet.
And things like Pump.Fun are actually allow you to both get famous and get rich all in the same platform experience.
And so when we talk about influencers now, not just streaming, but being able to create products and baskets and ideas that people can buy, that is actually doing both of those axes, get rich, get famous.
in the same platform.
And so that's the opportunity for consumer.
I'm still very bullish on as part of my financialization of everything thesis that, you know, I can, we can chat about another episode at some time.
Absolutely.
Okay.
You've kind of hinted this is I promise this is my absolute last question.
Okay.
One of your partners, Mike Dudas recently went on the roll up and discussed the term alien ideas, which I think is, is a great way to think about what.
the next meta is in the next bull run.
And again, a degen by nature here of like, I was early to NFTs.
I was a little late to meme coins.
There's a lot of, there's a bunch of AI tokens.
There's always something ordinals is another bear market product from last time that nobody talks about anymore, but it was this alien idea.
You could call it of like, let's put graffiti on Bitcoin.
What a, besides everything you just said, do you have any other theories on what the next, the next meta that would be hard to believe is a meta could be?
And how do you evaluate those?
Yeah, I think the number one area I'd focus is like a trading experience.
I think that's where the meta is.
It's how do I trade better?
How do I have more fun?
How do I use agents?
In fact, our first investment out of this fund, I don't think we've announced it publicly yet, but it's an agentic trading experience.
Absolutely insane stacked team.
But what they're doing is they're introducing both a new foundational model that's actually optimized for financial applications from its structural design.
And then they're adding an agentic layer on top that can be accessed by consumers more broadly.
And I've played around with it.
And the level of insights you get from this model is light years above what you're going to get from any of the other leading model providers.
And they're introducing benchmarks that actually show this more numerically than just a user's individual experience.
But agentic trading is, I think, going to be a big one.
But I think people also at times will like pushing buttons.
And so I think it's something that marries AI and agentic trading with the monetization and creation.
I think that intersection of money, creation, and AI is where the next big thing is going to be.
So if you're building that, we would love to chat with you and help support you in your journey.
And how do I evaluate them?
I think it needs to be somebody that is...
incredibly determined that has unique insight on how people behave.
Like what about the human condition, both the good and the bad of humanity, am I going to lean into such that I'm going to get a rabid?
group of customers, you know, first a hundred, then a thousand, then 10,000 that are going to be on my product.
And they're going to tell me the first thing they open the morning, the last thing they open before they go to bed.
And they're going to tell all their friends about it because they're going to make money and then tell your other friends about it.
There's, it's going to rhyme with a lot of those overtones that, that I just discussed.
I don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but it's going to be in that area.
I would guess.
Wow.
You definitely need that rabidness.
What is going to make people stay up all night looking at it is definitely like a kind of good way to look at it and tell their friends about it.
That's the other thing.
Like what's going to make you like, tell your friends you're obsessed with this thing.
Yeah.
And like Twitter is a great example.
I get a lot of times it is one of the first things when I go on my phone in the morning, it's one of the first things I open.
A lot of times it's one of the last things I do when I go to bed.
And so you can only imagine if Twitter started to integrate more and more trading experiences, like how powerful an advantage they have.
But I think there's got to be something that's blockchain native and crypto native that has a very good opportunity to be one of those core apps I open in the morning and one of those core apps I open when I go to bed.
Well, we'll keep an eye on it.
And Carl, when you know what that is, when you find that app, come on, come on here and tell us, especially as the next bull market starts, we want, we want the alpha early from you.
Carl Vogel, thank you so much, man, for your thoughts.
Great to have you back.
And we will see you hopefully in greener candles.
Yes.
Hopefully the next time I'm back, we'll be for a bull market.
Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event?
Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%.
This show is for educational purposes only.
Nothing we say is financial advice.
Investing is risky.
Never invest more than you can afford to lose.