# Bitcoin Decoupling, Solana Speed, and AI Revenue

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-10-23

## Transcript

It doesn't need the price of Bitcoin and ETH to go up.
It doesn't really care what goes on in the crypto world.
It's more, do people want to use more AI or not?
And that is a clear trend that we know is happening for sure.
Solana just flipped on its biggest upgrade ever, built to make transactions final about 85 times faster.
Meanwhile, a private AI app run by Crypto OG now says it is making over $150 million a year, but Bitcoin is stalled out here in the 80s.
What happens next?
Where do we go from here?
And what do investors need to know about all of this?
Hello and welcome.
to Milk Road Crypto, the show that now reaches its takes on altcoins in less than 150 milliseconds.
I'm your host, John Gill, and today is Thursday, October 22nd, and it's time for another round of the Milk Road Crypto Roll-Up.
I'm joined by two of my Milk Road colleagues, Kyle Reedhead, our head of research, and Martin, our lead analyst.
We've got a lot to cover today.
They have prepared a lot of good stuff to cover, and we're just going to get each other's takes on the market.
So there's going to be a lot of alpha in this episode, if that sounds good to you.
Make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who needs to hear it.
As a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our partners at Alumni Ventures, giving accredited investors access to private market investment opportunities alongside leading VC firms.
Keep an ear out for more information on them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome back, my good buddies, Kyle, Martin.
Gentlemen, welcome to Crypto.
John, how you doing, man?
Can we just start?
Martin, turn your head sideways.
Look at this guy's cut he's got today.
That looks phenomenal.
Holy, whoever your barber is, did a great job this week.
Thank you.
He's embarrassed.
He's embarrassed.
It's a bullish haircut.
Good.
It's a good place to start.
Okay, well, let's kick off with this.
I want to get you guys' updated thoughts on the markets here.
As I said, there's been a lot of bullish things happening in crypto, but Bitcoin is still stalled out here in the low 80s, around 81K at the time of recording.
Martin, what's your updated thoughts on the crypto markets here?
Yeah, I saw some stats from JP Morgan, who is now pretty bullish on Bitcoin because they project that the next returns for 10 for the next 10 years returns for Bitcoin are going to be about 10%.
And then real estate 8%, stocks 7%, gold 5%.
So they are very bullish on Bitcoin for the next 10 years.
And so also If you look at how Bitcoin performed, let me actually share a chart here.
If you look at the last two kind of AI corrections, one was in June and July during the summer, and we are going through now in October.
So look how Bitcoin performed and look at, you know, Korean exchange or Micron or Nasdaq or Escarian X, like, like you would not expect Bitcoin like holding so well.
during these times.
So now the question I have, like there's no obvious answer, but if we are going to keep seeing that Bitcoin is going to kind of breaking away from the correlation with the whole AI trade, that is going to be a huge value proposition.
And like even for people who are not interested in Bitcoin, if you see something like this, you now get an asset that is not correlated to the rest of the market, to capex, to anything, and you want to own that asset.
So now because again Bitcoin is still around 83k right now or something around that levels, so it kind of gives me optimism about Bitcoin looks pretty good here and yeah I remain really bullish on Bitcoin and in fact I'm considering adding more to my portfolio.
Okay.
There it is.
There it is.
That makes me bullish.
Kyle, what are you seeing in crypto right now?
What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, it's been interesting to see Bitcoin hold as strong as it has.
We're sitting at 81.5, by the way, Martin, right now, which is kind of an important area.
And it maintains above it, even though the stock market is quite shaky.
We had a huge scare yesterday around.
I don't know, a million different vulnerabilities on the Internet.
And, you know, generally that would be pretty bearish for crypto and it held out quite strong throughout it.
And then on top of that, I just feel like the macro world is still not in our favor.
uh oil is you know getting close to 100 bucks uh it just is staying stubborn um i don't think we're gonna raise rates um but you know obviously things still don't look great over on the on the rate side of things and and we've had a couple kind of hot inflation prints over the last few weeks so uh The macro backdrop has not been great.
And then I guess the other thing, and John, I kind of want to get your opinion on this because I've been thinking about the last couple of days is the midterms coming up.
How much is this going to affect crypto if it ends up being the Democrats?
So there's just a lot of, I feel like, headwinds.
And yet Bitcoin has remained very strong.
And so that is a very bullish signal.
And I mean, it's been kind of decorrelated from the stock market for a while.
I feel like, Martin, it was decorrelated in the wrong direction at the first half of this year and late last year.
That was always a common thing, right?
But now it's kind of decorrelated the opposite way and maybe in the better way, which is great news.
So I do agree, though.
The thing I love the most about Bitcoin and even some of the alts is that it's just a, everything in the stock market is kind of correlated.
It's all the same bet.
It's all about CapEx.
In crypto, you have something very different.
And so it is a nice kind of, I don't want to call it a hedge necessarily, but a nice diversification.
So I do think there is going to be a lot of interest from the market on that regard.
This pullback on Bitcoin is scaring a lot of people and I am not one of them.
So if you want to see what I'm not selling and why, what's on my watch list and when I'm going to be deploying more capital into these markets, you can join Milk Row Pro today.
It's just a dollar.
The link is in the description.
I answer questions day and night in Discord.
I'll see you there.
Yeah, so I think the ranging price action we've seen from Bitcoin is really bullish.
I think it is showing that the crypto markets are behaving differently than the rest of the markets.
And I think it's a good sign that the bears can't break 81K.
A lot of people were looking for, myself included, were looking for Bitcoin to find support much lower than these levels.
And it seems like the bulls keep stepping in in the low 80s to support there.
Yeah, I think once some of these macro headwinds clear up.
That outlook for Bitcoin and crypto changes and the bull market continues and we go higher.
But yeah, I agree with everything you guys shared on this.
I think the thing that is unclear still in the market is how does Bitcoin behave around the FOMC meeting next week?
How does it react to midterms?
But I think a lot of these things are sort of like known.
And the only thing that can really happen is we get more certainty, more clarity, and a better changing macro backdrop because it's kind of tougher to get.
much worse than this at the moment.
So yeah, I'm kind of like a bullish from that standpoint, right?
Like we've had a lot of bearish, you know, headwinds this month from the macro.
Bitcoin has held up surprisingly well.
And so I think once it starts to clear and the picture brightens in Q4, you're going to see some continued strength from Bitcoin.
That's going to let all rip again.
And so I think that the outlook for the rest of Q4 is going to be really bullish.
Even all it's have held fairly strong.
Like sure.
They're down in, in, you know, 10, 20, sometimes 30% in some cases, but like, That's pretty typical for altcoins.
Generally, they would be down a lot more in a world like this.
So I would say they're fairly strong.
The interesting trend that I've noticed over the last little while is we're starting to see a lot of the big banks.
put coverage on crypto assets.
We're seeing like Citi, Standard Charter, I think Franklin Templeton maybe did one as well.
You know, we've seen them on Aave, I think was the most recent one from Citi.
We've seen them on Uniswap.
There's been a few others that on the list right now, but it feels like we're getting more and more of those, which is kind of interesting because usually the banks don't do coverage on an asset unless they are the ones that are like basically running the IPO or part of their, you know, raising capital stuff of the way to monetize it.
And they don't have a way to monetize Aave or Uniswap or any of these.
And yet we're starting to see them put coverage on.
So that's a very bullish signal.
Now it's still small.
It's a small number of assets, but it feels like we're getting more and more.
over time and i think that's a really good development and something to keep your eye on i think you want to look at the assets that they're getting coverage on because if they're getting coverage those are going out to all the analysts right to to the big bags and so they're finally starting to learn about things like uniswap like amms and stuff which they have not previously had any coverage on in an institutional kind of uh level so i think that's a very interesting development i've noticed for the last little bit Yeah, absolutely.
I think that cities, they wrote like a 24-page report on Aave.
And I wrote like some coverage on this for our Milk Road Pro community because that's a huge change, just like you said.
And it's extremely bullish, the outlook on Aave and a lot of other things.
And I think people aren't still fully appreciating how powerful some of these protocols are.
Martin, what are your thoughts on this?
Because I think that you have been looking at DeFi again recently and at Aave specifically.
What stood out to you about that?
I think the biggest problem of all DeFi was mass adoption or the distribution because I feel like we still have the very same users we have had for years, but it's really hard to get new users because like, honestly, if you need to download MetaMask and, you know, write 24 words on paper, store it somewhere, that sucks.
Like we really need like Revolut, Robinhood, Coinbase, Nubank, those kind of guys to bring people on chain because otherwise they're not coming because, you know, blockchains are better infrastructure.
Nobody cares.
So what AVA has built with their version 4 is that anyone can kind of come in and build on top of AVA, which kind of uses the existing liquidity and like smart contracts and it's composable.
So Imagine I am actually Conbase just launched on Aave with tokenized stocks.
So if I own tokenized stocks on base, I can bring my own tokenized stocks to Aave, I can lend them and then some people can use those and you know, short them or whatever they want, but I'll get returned, I'll get yield for just lending my stocks.
It already happens right now.
like no matter what broker you have, like usually like 10 to 12 to 20% of the stocks are landed to short, short to people who are shorting positions, but you barely get some yield.
But here, you can keep that yield.
Because right now, like if you have if you use your broker, he's the one who is capturing that yield.
And so here I'm showing how Aavev4 is actually growing because There are not that many things in crypto that are growing as fast as like Aave before.
And so when I see that something is getting an option and people are starting using it more and more and we see the results like up only, that's what kind of got my interest.
And so I'm very bullish on Aave and I really like Aave.
I think last week we talked somewhere on other podcasts, maybe it was MA or something, I don't remember.
But anyway, I was saying that they stopped buybacks, the revenues are down.
So, you know, the kind of bull case for AVA is not as strong.
But at the same time, I am very constructive on these new products that AVA is building because they finally realized that we might not need to bring like next 1 million users plus ourselves we just provide the infrastructure and you know the existing players with huge user bases can just come in and join and use our liquidity in our platform and so this is a very good sign and like i am actually gonna add other on my watch list and i'll keep close eye on this because eventually i want to own some defy tokens and I don't necessarily need buybacks.
I just want to own tokens that do not have a lot of incentives or emissions going forward.
And AVA is one of those where I can also see a kind of potential.
of a huge upside.
Okay, yeah, I want to get Kyle's thoughts on this because there have been a lot of changes to Aave as a protocol since before launch.
They got rid of staking, but they have brought back a form of automated token buybacks.
And they're, I think, continuing this, right?
That's the guidance from the team is like, we're going to continue to update the token alignment and how we do that.
But Kyle, what do you think needs to happen for Aave's token price to sort of follow this huge adoption and the expanding number of businesses that they've set up here?
I think revenue needs to pick back up, obviously.
Right.
And as Martin said, even though, you know, we were seeing some growth in before in the entirety of the business, it's still not growing.
And I think ultimately that's what we need to see.
And I don't know what's going to what's going to make that happen.
My guess is probably it's tokenized stocks.
Aave is kind of a, you know, one of the first to start to integrate that into their protocol with Coinbase tokenized stocks.
So I think as that starts to pick up and gain adoption, I think that's going to be a big driver because otherwise most of the revenues just revolve around the price of of ETH and Bitcoin other assets going up, which which maybe that does it too.
We'll have to see.
Right.
Obviously, Bitcoin goes.
goes to 100K, you're going to see Aave's revenues jump.
But what I'd like to see is those revenues become not just reliant on the price of Bitcoin and ETH.
And I think likely that's going to come from tokenized stocks, which should gain adoption over the next year or so.
It's growing quite fast already.
So I think that is a big thing.
And then I think the buybacks will actually matter.
Right now, the buybacks, I don't even know if they are actually on, but they're very minimal, right?
They stopped them fully, yeah.
Which makes sense.
Their revenues aren't that big.
And so to do buybacks at this level probably doesn't make sense.
Maybe they need to just build up their treasury and their balance sheet more first.
And then they can start buybacks once they feel like they're in a better position.
That's what Sky did.
throughout the bear market.
Sky had buybacks.
Everyone was pumped about it.
Everyone started following suit, turning on buybacks because Sky was actually performing well.
And then Sky was like, you know what?
Now we're going to turn it off.
The market's getting a little more risky.
Oil's at, you know, a hundred bucks.
We should build a better base in reserve within our protocol just because, well, interestingly, Sky did it because they are getting reviewed from Moody's and from S&P.
to get a rating on their yield and on their protocol, which they've had from both of them.
And a big part of that was the rating agencies wanted them to build up a stronger reserve base.
And so they wanted to see that these protocols are kind of financially sound.
And so I imagine Aave is probably trying to do something similar here, and it's a good idea to do that.
I know the market loves buybacks, but you don't always need buybacks.
There are times and moments when you should buy back, like when the asset is undervalued and you have a strong base of capital.
But sometimes you just need to build a protocol, get growth and build your base first.
And I think Avi's doing that.
So hopefully they can get some growth and bring their revenues back up.
I think the biggest thing that people are missing about Aave is the migration of assets on chain is going to benefit a lot of protocols, not just Aave's, but Aave's is going to be one of the ones that benefits the most.
And I think that GPU hours as compute coming on chain is going to be a trillion dollar on chain asset class by 2030.
And I think that equities and other assets moving on chain as well are going to be big sources of value drivers for things like Uniswap, Arrow, Aave.
specifically.
And I think that the banks, once they do start coming on chain, are more likely, I think, to plug into some of these protocols like Sky, like Aave and others.
And so that's the thing I think they're building for and setting up this infrastructure for.
Like Aave Horizon is oriented towards that.
Also, Aave, I think, has close to a dozen, like 15 different revenue generating business lines.
And all these things start to scale once you start putting more and more high quality assets on chain and through these protocols.
That's sort of the future they're going for, and they're really well positioned for it.
So I think that's where that big call option is for Aave right now.
Okay, I want to bring up, this is kind of a hard pivot, but I want to make sure we talk about this.
Martin, if you have something else you wanted to say, go ahead.
I see you're biting your tongue.
Yeah, I just want to summarize the discussion about Aave because the bull case for Aave is that all of us are super bullish that we are going to tokenize a lot of stuff.
And okay, it's great, maybe like, because right now, a lot of people do not have access to US stocks or US treasuries, whatever.
But the second thing why this is so bullish is because you can now lend those assets and they can kind of generate yield for you.
And so you are likely going to lend on a protocol that's the biggest one out there.
And Aave's market share is about 30% right now.
And I...
I assume that it will only grow over time because like, you know, the liquidity begets liquidity.
And so I really think that Aave is in a very good position here.
And if people believe that we are going to tokenize a lot of things, a lot of real world assets, including, you know, stocks, treasuries, houses, like whatever, like there's very high chance that a lot of those tokenized assets are going to end up landed on Aave.
And so I think that the bull case for Aave is just easy to make.
And right now, it seems like the revenues are not picking up yet.
But, you know, if you buy Aave right now, your bet is not that, you know, they'll just keep making 100 million in revenue per year.
That's not interesting.
I think right now, they are like barely profitable.
I think they are at break even.
But that future that I just shared is huge.
And if...
If that's what it's about to become, Aave will be tens of billions company in no time.
Do you guys remember the KelpDAO hack?
Whatever that was earlier this year.
Do you think that that's still weighing on Aave at all?
Do you think that's going to matter to, let's say, the institutions that are coming and looking at Aave as Citi writes that report?
Do you think it's just a nothing burger and it was just like a crypto thing that doesn't make it out of our world?
I don't think it was a nothing burger, but I think it's ancient history now.
And I think the recovery, the way they handled it, I thought was really the most impressive part of it.
And there's always attack vectors, but they learned, they hardened the protocol, and they showed that they can survive something like that.
All right, I am going to pivot us now because we have to talk about this.
I get accused of being bearish on Solana or being an ETH maxi all the time.
Solana just pushed through Alpenglow and it's like the biggest upgrade since Ethereum moved to proof of stake.
Some people are calling it that.
Anyway, this changed the consensus algorithm on Solana.
It makes it 85 times faster.
Solana also, to add some more context.
passed some improvement proposals that changed the issuance of Sol, the asset, and reduced, 50% reduced the issuance of Solana.
I want to get updated thoughts from both of you on Sol, on Solana, because we don't talk about layer ones all that often on the platform, on the podcast anymore with you guys.
So what is your thoughts on Alpenglow for Solana?
How big of a change does this make?
And does this make you more bullish on Sol, on Solana overall?
Kyle, let's start with you on this one.
Look, I think Solana continues to kind of push the limits in terms of their tech, which I think is fantastic.
Do I think that this is going to make a difference on the price?
No, because I think what matters is demand for the block space, demand for the token.
This doesn't change anything.
uh in terms of that you know they already had enough block space and it wasn't you know we're still not using enough of that block space so adding more uh or adding kind of fast transactions like yes it is great in the world where we get so much demand that we need it We just still aren't really there.
So I don't think it makes a difference today, but in the longterm, of course it does because it's a better technology.
Hopefully this means that you'll get more use cases, more companies that will want to build on Solana as a result.
So we'll see if it does make a difference.
But at the moment, I don't know that this is as big as when Ethereum went to proof of stake.
That seems like a, I mean, Solana is really good at marketing.
So it seems like a good narrative spin, but I don't think I would compare it to that.
But it is a big development.
Get me wrong.
I'm not downplaying it.
So yeah, long-term, bullish.
I don't think it really matters today.
Well, just for some context, they did change their consensus algorithm.
So it may not be as big as the proof of stake switch, but it's in the ballpark.
Martin, what's your thoughts on this?
Yeah, I think it's actually pretty bullish Solana.
And there are two reasons.
One, because right now, if you run validator on Solana, you need to vote and kind of say that each block is correct.
and you need to pay fees for that.
So they get rid of it.
And so now if I run validator, it's about 70% cheaper.
I actually have a chart here.
So as you can see before, like you had to pay about two sol per day as validator.
And with this new update, you are going to pay flat fee, which is going to be 0.8 Solana per day, which, you know, Solana was constantly attacked by like ethereomaxies and pretty much by everyone that they do not have enough validators and that they are not kind of you know decentralized enough but like once so what you can make to improve that it's that you reduce the cost to run a validator and so it just happened right so like i think this is important step in that regard and second of all they reduce finality of their blocks from uh i think 12 seconds or something like that to 200 milliseconds.
I think this is not gonna like affect Solana immediately but in the long term this is a huge huge improvement because imagine that you are a business owner and you are thinking about using blockchains and you only get kind of final confirmation that you know you will get the money not in one second but in like 12 seconds like you ideally want your users to click confirm, that's it.
Like, right, that's what we are used to right now.
So now when they finally bring that finality to 200 milliseconds, I think that's a huge step because it's really gonna say like, hey, like, you can, you know, run your own validator, it's much cheaper today, and you will get final settlement in like 200 milliseconds, which is like, you click button and that's it pretty much.
So I think this is a very good improvement and I think like obviously Solana is not gonna like pump tomorrow because of this but right now it's gonna attract like more developers and more businesses as a result.
Gotcha, okay.
I think my take on this is that Solana has been sort of going through a period of trying to figure out its new form of product-oriented fit.
It used to be the home of retail trading.
Pump Fund kind of took some of that in a different direction.
It's still like aligned with Solana but it still is kind of...
Yeah, exactly.
But it's still like it kind of, you know.
took some of Sol's thunder off of the Solana blockchain L1.
And then Hyperliquid came out and took a lot of trading volume and people went to perps.
And what I see right now happening is Solana has tried to change their tokenomics and fix some of the inflation around the asset.
And they're reorienting towards trying to be the home of on-chain trading for tokenized equities.
Right now, they have the lion's share of volume of tokenized equities.
They don't have the lion's share.
of capital in terms of tokenized real world assets.
So they're trying to make a play for that.
And we'll kind of see.
But I think that this is part of that strategy to try to set themselves up to capture that future.
Kyle, let's maybe take this in that direction.
You said you want to see demand for block space on sole pickup.
Do you think that this strategy of trying to go for tokenized equities trading on chain will work out for Solana?
Do you think that they're going to get because right now, Ethereum and BNB are giving them a run for their money?
It's hard to say who's going to win.
I do think whoever goes after tokenized stocks and becomes the place for those to settle is going to be a big winner because I do think this is going to be probably the biggest thing to hit.
blockchains that we have in the next few years.
But it's quite competitive right now, right?
You've got Solana.
Sure, you've got Ethereum, but then you've got Base.
You've got Robinhood Chain.
So the list goes on.
Each of them kind of have their own big exchange.
Like if you think of Solana, you've got kind of Kraken with X stocks that are on there, which is interesting because Kraken also has its own chain.
elected to go with solana but then you've got robin hood tokenizing stocks and robin chain coinbase doing it on pace and so we have this you know incredible competition between the really these three and then of course you kind of have versions over on hyperliquid as well so um I don't know who's going to win it right now.
I think it's still so, so, so early.
Like the numbers in terms of volumes are just so small.
The market caps of these stocks in terms of the supply that's actually on chain is so small.
And so it's still too early to tell.
But I think.
The fact that Solana is going after this, and I think what they're doing is building for not just, hey, come and tokenize on here, but it's, hey, you can build different primitives around these tokenized stocks.
That's the key output here is just tokenizing a stock and putting on chain doesn't really matter.
It's can I now do things with it, which is what Martin was just talking about with Aave.
And I think that's what Solana is building for, which I think is super key.
So I don't know who's going to win it.
We'll see.
But I do think it is the key to anyone's success here.
I think my view is that.
Solana is trying to win kind of new applications or new founders or the businesses that do not necessarily have huge user bases because that's kind of the only landfill where they can really operate because then you have companies like Coinbase or Kraken, well Kraken actually launched on Solana, Robinhood and like All these companies who have huge user bases, they don't want to just bring their own users to some neutral blockchain and kind of bringing value to someone else and leak that value to some third party blockchain.
So that's why Coinbase wants their own blockchain.
blockchain.
That's why Robinhood launched their own layer 2 on Ethereum.
Because they want that control and whatever happens there, they are not leaking value to someone else.
And so I think all these big players with a lot of people today, all the fintechs, are eventually gonna probably have a version of their own infrastructure that is ideally gonna be composable with the rest of the blockchain sector or market.
But Solana is trying to kind of tap into the rest who might not have that much power to build their own blockchains and stuff.
And so it's going to be interesting.
But there's probably not going to be a big winner next year or something.
It's probably going to take a lot of years.
Just looking at the numbers, Solana has 635 million in circulating supply of tokenized equities.
So we're not even at a billion yet.
That's how small this is.
So it's pretty wild, right?
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Right.
But I think the thing that stands out to me in their data is just like you said, like they have a smaller amount of capital on chain, but the volume that they're seeing, and a lot of it I think is bots still, but the volume that they're seeing seems to be leading right now.
So anyway, we'll see how this plays out.
But I agree, this is something to monitor because they are playing for the future here.
Gentlemen, I do want to pivot us once again.
Kyle, you wanted to talk about Venice because they are blowing up right now.
So just some context on this for the audience.
Venice is a crypto and AI project that allows people to get.
private inference and among other things, they have several other products too, but is now handling over 500 billion AI tokens a day.
They are breaking their records for new subscribers on the daily at this point.
And Eric Voorhees, who is the co-founder or the founder of the project, says that they are now doing over $150 million a year in revenue.
Kyle, why did you want to discuss Venice?
What's gotten your attention about this?
And what do you think people should know about what's happening here?
Yeah, so what's interesting about Venice, so this is their new daily signups and credit revenue.
And so they're kind of, we talked about, you know, we want to see some crypto protocols that are generating revenue and increasing revenue.
And we're seeing that in Venice.
Now, to be fair, Venice isn't really a...
crypto protocol.
It's a it's just an AI harnessed that happens to use crypto in the back end as its its equity structure.
And which is which is quite interesting.
But this is gaining a ton of adoption right now, not just revenue, but in users.
for I don't know exactly why, but it's interesting because what it is is a harness.
So basically, you can use Venice, it'll kind of route to the different various models, mostly the open source model.
So it's quite cheap, if you want to use AI, and it's private.
So your data in terms of your prompts and your history, it's, I think, just saved locally and doesn't go to OpenAI or Google or Anthropic.
So there is quite a large group of people who want this, that are using AI more and more, but want to keep it private.
I would say a lot of that is probably the crypto industry, but I think they're likely starting to extend out beyond the crypto industry.
And so...
Yeah, it's interesting to see the adoption that's happening right now with Venice.
It doesn't need the price of Bitcoin and ETH to go up.
It doesn't really care what goes on in the crypto world.
It's more, do people want to use more AI or not?
And that is a clear trend that we know is happening for sure.
And Venice is starting to become a legit player there.
I think they have, in terms of users, we don't know the exact numbers, but let's say in terms of paid subscribers, somewhere around like two to three hundred thousand.
So it's pretty decent, right?
Like that's actual people who have put in their credit cards and are paying.
These are not like crypto wallets that may or may not be a person that may or may not be boss.
These are real people pulling out their credit cards, paying every single month, similar to like what you're seeing with, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI.
And it's going up and up every single basically day.
And so that is a very bullish signal for adoption from this.
And then what's cool is they take that revenue and they use it to do buybacks and burns of their VVV tokens.
What I like about it is, again, it's a business that doesn't rely on the price of Bitcoin and ETH.
And then it's a business that uses its revenues to buy back its tokens.
So it's kind of like the perfect fit of everything.
And it's in a clear adoption curve of people wanting to use AI.
And there's not a lot of, I mean, there is competition in terms of private AI harnesses, but this is one of the better ones.
And it's got the support of, if I was to launch a private AI one and I'm not in crypto.
I just got to hope I find some new customers, right?
And people that actually love it and get behind it.
What's interesting is, you know, Eric Voorhees already has a huge following.
He's a big name in the crypto space.
And so you have a lot of users in terms of the crypto users who will immediately use this and then they'll want to go and promote it on X.
They'll want to market it because it has a token that they can use and hold, right?
A lot of the other private AI harnesses.
You have to be a private investor and an accredited investor because it's private equity right now, right?
And so you're getting kind of this like amplified marketing from Venice because it's a token that anyone can hold already.
So I think it's one of the benefits of it.
Now, the only thing I will say is they do have the typical equity structure and a token.
So I don't love that.
But as long as you trust Eric Voorhees, you know, they've said most of the, you know.
revenues and profit are going to go to the actual token.
So, you know, I don't really know what to think about the whole equity token structure, but either way, it's a great product that's growing and they have buybacks.
The buyback is still kind of small, but it is growing quite fast.
So it's interesting to see.
And I would say if you actually look at the numbers, it's fairly...
It's fairly priced.
It's not like this thing is so overvalued like a lot of other crypto assets would be.
It's actually fairly decently priced.
So I think it's an interesting look for a lot of people if you haven't yet.
Gotcha.
Martin, I would love to hear your thoughts on all this because you've been covering AI and the AI trade a lot this past year.
Where does Venice fit into that for you?
What's your reaction to all this?
I love the chart when it goes up.
I think when I quote that.
This is token token.
It's a really good chart as well.
Yeah, when I was looking at Venice earlier this year, I, I thought that the privacy is not going to be such a big thing.
Because if there is a huge demand for like, private usage of AI, like, what's what's stopping cloud or, you know, open AI just to add new feature that is going to provide privacy.
And, and so like, That's one thing.
And the other thing is like for myself, I know that there are a lot of people probably who are like maxis of privacy, but like, I don't care if I use Cloud or Grogbot and they see my data.
I don't really care.
And like, I don't know how the big market really is for like someone who is like going to use Venice like forever.
And so I wasn't that bullish, but I see the adoption is happening.
And yet, I might not understand who their total market is and who their ideal customer is, but they keep growing and so it looks pretty good.
What I realized is because I had the same...
thought, I think we talked about Venice months ago and I had the same idea, Martin, but then I realized is like their customer is your typical like Bitcoiner slash like diehard crypto person.
This is what they care about, right?
Like, I like crypto not necessarily because of some of the values that other people are obsessed with.
I like it as an investment, right?
And of course, some of the values that it brings, but not around this like kind of privacy stuff, but there are certain people that this is really what they care about.
And they're going to be, and these are also people that use AI a lot, right?
They're internet.
native people.
And so this is, they've kind of found their home.
And, you know, I don't know what's caused this, this jump over the last few days.
I was looking on Twitter and we're trying to figure out what it is.
Speculation was that it's just like one big company that's come in and they're using this.
Cause this is also potentially a benefit for certain companies that need privacy.
And, and maybe this is just like one company that's plugged in and is now using this.
So like, imagine this happens for more and more companies over time.
But you're definitely seeing incredible.
incredible adoption growth here.
I'd like to continue this.
The pitch for Nier has been blockchain for AI, but it's also got that privacy angle to it.
Zcash has been on a huge run around this privacy narrative as well.
Martin, I would love to hear if you have any updated thoughts on Nier protocol or anything at this intersection of crypto and AI and privacy, because this does seem to be a really huge narrative in the markets right now.
What are you seeing around that and any updated thoughts on there?
Yeah, a lot of people keep talking about Near and I wonder why.
So I went to learn more about Near and they basically have two products right now.
They've made so many pivots in the past and probably they are still looking for product market fit, which is fine.
That's what you should do.
And right now they have Near Intense, which is like Intense is something that CowSwap started like a couple years ago and it's basically just you'll say what you want, like what's the goal and they will find like your path, your blockchain, your exchange to do it for you.
So you don't need to kind of go to Uniswap or you need to go to AeroDrum.
You don't care about that.
You just say, hey, my intent is to swap 100 USDC into Bitcoin.
Just do it for me.
And so what happens on the back end is that they will just send the intent.
And then there are many like trading prop and trading companies who are trying to fill in and kind of win your intent.
And if they do, they will get a reward.
And so they kind of solve the bridging for everyone because now you don't need to bridge like assets from everywhere.
Like those trading firms have liquidity on these chains.
So they will just.
like fill in your intent and like you know everyone's happy and that part of the business is doing pretty well they actually hit all-time high in September which was pretty huge and and it was also mainly because Zcash was kind of booming in that time and so you know and you should not like base your forecast based on one spiky month and but It's certainly something that a lot of people are going to try to figure out in the future.
And also, the thing that I got always wrong was that I was always trying to look for the best product in crypto.
But not all the crypto users are so rational and so they might prefer just to use their own favorite protocol because they like it or they like the community.
But now, we need to think more about agents and what agents are going to use.
They are going to be brand agnostic.
They don't care about any of that stuff.
So they just want to get the task done.
And so I think Near Intense is a pretty good kind of solution because a lot of people are going to swap different things across different chains.
And Near Intense is going to do the job for you.
So I think this is a pretty good product.
But this is just the one product.
This is the near intent.
So you can swap tokens whenever you want on all chains pretty much.
And then there is near AI, which is something that Venice uses on the back end, by the way.
And it's about that if you select a specific tire on Venice, then it's using near AI on the back end, which is kind of chips that are...
kind of encoded so nobody can really see what you are sending to the AI.
And so it's pretty interesting, but, you know, we don't know any revenue numbers.
We don't know how many GPS they have.
Like, we do not have any insights on that part.
Plus, there are rumors that the revenue is going to the lab or to the, you know, equity holders, not to the token.
So again, the same issue.
I thought that we have already, you know, figure that out.
Unfortunately not, but I think NIR is quite interesting here, but is it just all the hype or is it really something building here?
I don't know.
Yet to be seen.
Yeah, token obvious matter for all of these things.
All right, gentlemen, we have gone longer than I intended to here.
So we're going to wrap this up.
I just want to end with one final question for the week ahead.
Are you expecting Bitcoin to hold on to 81K and eventually move higher?
Or do you think we are finally going to break down?
Kyle, what do you think happens?
It's a good question.
It has been surprisingly strong.
So it's so hard to say because everything is getting thrown at it right now.
Every single possible headwind.
And I'm like, wow, it's still above 80K.
You know what?
I'm going to say I actually expect it to go lower.
I expect it to go into the 70s, not below the 70s.
I don't think we're going and putting in new lows or anything.
I have been waiting for it to go into the 70s.
So I'm hoping it does anyway, because I think what happens is if it does, it goes to maybe like, I don't know, 74 max.
I don't know if we'll get that low.
74 is kind of the number that I'm waiting for.
If it does, I'm thinking all it's puke one last time.
Cause even all it's have been fairly strong, as I said, at the beginning of the show.
And I think it's going to give some good buys for things like Guinness swap, Aave and a bunch of the assets that we just talked about.
I think a lot of them are kind of sitting up quite high right now.
And so I wouldn't want to be deploying into them at the moment.
But if we get that puke down, I think, I think it's gonna be a great buying opportunity.
So I'm kind of sitting back and waiting for that.
All right.
Sitting and waiting, Martin, what about you?
Your question reminded me that Leiter just launched binary options, which is like, is Bitcoin going to be above 80k by the end of this week or something?
I hate these questions.
I guess Kyle does too.
I think we are going to be lower too.
I think it's all about macro.
And I think there are still too many things like European oil just hit all time highs.
you know, dollar is still quite expensive.
Like there are going to probably be rate hikes.
So there are a lot of things that are not really supportive of like making new highs anytime soon.
So I'll say you're going to be below, but it's not like you just asked by the end of this week.
I don't really know, but I'll say you're going to be down.
How many times like I've been in crypto for a very long time and how many times and you guys have as well.
How many times do you remember everyone on Twitter?
bragging about how strong Bitcoin has been when there's a bunch of headwinds and then it just gets absolutely wrecked.
Again, I don't know if that's going to happen, but it's happened so many times in my history that I'm just like, why wouldn't it just happen again?
I think John, what do you think?
I think you might see 79, 78K at best, but the bears have nothing.
The bears are all done.
We had one of the most violent and depressing bear markets we've had in crypto.
There's nobody left to sell.
It's just me.
Everybody who's left is zealots and fanatics.
So it's a lockout rally.
I think if you get dips, take them, but you're not going to get big ones.
I don't think we're going to get a big pullback on this just because there's no one left to sell.
And there's a lot of fundamental drivers of value for crypto that's bringing in capital.
And so I think that we're going to move higher.
Do you really call that one of the most violent bear markets we've had?
We had one of the most depressing for sure.
Yeah, because we never really got a euphoric rally or blow off top.
And like for like nine months, sentiment was just like in the toilet, man.
It was bad.
But this was nowhere near as violent as 2022.
Like the whole industry went under.
I mean, go back even farther when in 2018, it was like, is crypto even going to exist?
You know what I mean?
Like, I think this bear market, we knew crypto wasn't going away, right?
There was fundamentals.
It's like, we're here, right?
And so it was frustrating, don't get me wrong, because we didn't have that, you know, the move everyone wanted.
And then all of a sudden we went down a bunch.
But like, I don't think this was anything like the previous bear markets.
I think the 2022 was more existential, but October 10th was...
just as violent as anything that's seen thankfully i was on a plane so i missed that whole thing i i got off and we had already rebounded and i was like what is that dip in the chart and then all of a sudden i looked What the heck happened?
I was live streaming and I was like, don't worry, guys, we can fall another 20K from here and it'll be fine.
And then that's exactly what happened.
Like that day was, it was, oh man, that was rough.
All right, we're going to end it there.
Martin, Kyle, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom.
This has been a great episode.
I really enjoyed this.
I hope our audience does too.
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It's just a dollar if you want to see what we're doing in our portfolios and how we're trading all these markets right now, how we're setting up for the next bull run and the next lockout.
But until next time, thank you all so much for joining us.
Stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
We will see you all in the next episode of Milk Road Crypto.
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