Alexander Good - Apes Together Strong - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Today I am going to talk to you about AI apes together strong. Uh taking the theory of reflexivity to its logical conclusion with AI powered hive minds. George Soros posited the idea of the super bubble that the system is falling apart. There are three basic ideas in his theory. First that endless credit expansion and moral hazard is not economic growth.

Second, that globalization of financial markets is not inevitable because there is not endless demand for US dollars. And third, that the entire system that we are in right now is not actually inevitable because there is reflexivity where we are all looking at each other being more chimplike than anything else. He said, "In my 50 years as a speculator, I've often heard of the efficient market hypothesis, but I've never encountered in real life. So, what happens when the super bubble crashes? The death of market fundamentalism, the belief in the system, and the efficient market hypothesis bring rise to my AI hive mind thesis.

First, Morad was right. Second, he didn't get exactly the coins right, but we need to engage in the stable coin system. But third, the speculative excess that is required for stable coins to grow is not warranted. And that actually AI hive minds is how we get out of this system. And AI hive minds are what comes after the super bubble crashes.

So Morad told you stop trading and believe in something whereas I am saying in AI hive minds you will have AI trading collectives making trillions. So Morad got the logic right but the hive minds wrong. Uh the hive minds won. On September 27th 2024 Mad made his speech about memecoins. After Morad's presentation he made $50 million in a straight line.

He was doubted publicly doubled down and all told he's made about $30 to $40 million. by far the most watched presentation in token 2024. But despite a big showing, the mega cap cult coin XRP, as he identified it or called it, dwarfed memecoin gains over the past year. XRP has gained $158 billion of market cap in one year, almost five times as much as memes in the past 12 months. XRP got one big thing right, that blockchains will be part of a system, not outside of it.

You can see it here with Trump and Brad Garlinghouse. And obviously, President Trump is paying attention to the thesis because he's 78% of his family's net worth long crypto. XRP shows us what the market actually cares about. It's not about active addresses which are going down. It's not about be banks on the unique node list.

It's about global believers, basic functioning, fixed supply, fast transactions, and existing in the real world. So, Morad was right. He made money, but his thesis better apply to XRP than memes. So what are hive mindines and what are memecoins? Hive mindines are more serious.

They're more age inclusive. They're more nationality inclusive. They tend to skew female versus other coins. So for example in Asia, they tend to engage in the system. They do B2B work and they tend to be toxic maximalist and L1s whereas you know others are multi-chain.

So they do have in common what Maria identified token price community missiondriven and VCs not driving the price. So, some examples of the current hive mindcoins and a stock, Bitcoin, XRP, chain link, hyperlquid, the Trump coins, and Palunteer. All of these are movements that have rabid holders that will do things in the real world to advance their community's interests. Hivemind assets typically appeal to older people who are extremely rich and capable of buying new coins. If you look at the chart behind me, you can see that the silent generation, people literally on the verge of death, have more money than millennials.

So of course the Kos for these coins tend to drive price and Ajuma in Korea drive a lot of the price such as new coins as they did in XRP with IP which is a current cycle coin. So rabbit evangelists who combined with the world as it is will make the holders rich. The world as it is has two big trends. The debt supernova and the rise of AI. A stable coin collateralized casino is the plan to finance the deficit.

This is the single biggest trend in the world. If you bought $1 of gold in 2020, you'd have $3.39 today. If you went to the government for 20 years, you'd have 60. The casino we are building is a solution for the reckless spending that is destroying bond holders.

The scale of the debt crisis is global and accelerating. UK bond yields are near where they were during the trustdriven budget collapse. Japan, which has an enormous debt to GDP, is sealing a spiraling bond market. Germany has gone from zero rates to 3.3% interest rates.

and US rates are making mortgages unaffordable. When you do the math, the the per spending household of the United States cannot support the $47,000 a year roughly that you would need to fund the unfunded fiscal liabilities and the debt. And this is just the beginning. The question is, was AI going to bail us out or not? Unfortunately, right now, that doesn't look like the case.

AI is boosting the distraction economy as we've seen from these short form video releases and not actually necessarily making us more productive. Post World War II, we saw 4% productivity growth. In the internet boom, we saw 3% productivity growth. And right now, we're hovering at 1.5% while electricity is surging 38% since 2020.

The US is the hub of most AI investment and is actually seeing decelerating GDP growth forecasts. So real GDP in 2024 was comping at 2.5% a year and by 2026 according to most analysts it's actually scheduled to decelerate not accelerate. Corporate cash flow growth of all publicly US traded companies exponentials and utilities you can see that preAI cash flow growth was actually higher than postAI and that margin expansion despite the claims is going to make us all more efficient is somewhat minimal. This is a more important chart.

Since 2008 debt growth has been exponential. You can see on the blue line that's basically all of the net income of all publicly traded companies in the United States. Whereas the red line is incremental public debt expansion that every time the blue line goes down, the red line goes up more. And in CO, you can see it's absolutely parabolic. And then in 2024, we had just massive infrastructure spend without any expansion in net income.

As Elon Musk put it, it's easier to go to space than it is to cut the US budget deficit. And he was in charge of cutting the US budget deficit. We have a long history in the United States of pushing the USD as a reserve asset in order to deal with this problem. Here's a picture of Henry Kissinger who architected the pro dollar which was the original solution to US deficit financing after the 70s. Stable coins and CBDC's are best understood in this context.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bassent made this clear. He put out a tweet saying we need $3.7 trillion of stable coin assets by 2030. Uh but that would imply totally unprecedented moves. You can see on this chart where tether supply would need to go in order for us to get there.

The turquoise line is where we are. The red line is where we need to be. That's a big jump. So, right now we're doing $ 38.1 billion a quarter in terms of stable coin supply growth.

But in order to get to that target, we need to be doing $83 billion, which is totally nonlinear and requires different changes. How do we get to that 83 billion? How do we get to these numbers overall? It basically comes down to this. Foreigners have about 30% of the debt.

There's about $1.8 trillion of issuance per year. There's about$ 1.3 to$ 1.4 trillion of interest payments by 2030.

And so you get to basically a 600 to 800 billion per year offset required by the stable coin market which is basically how the scent probably got to those numbers. Now the problem is that stable coins are mostly used for speculation. Nansen has identified that 80% of onchain stable volumes is trading and arbitrage not genuine payment. So even if that number goes to 50% which would be an unprecedented change, you still need to 5 to 10x existing exchange margin balances by the time you get to 2030. Brokerage performance is already reflecting this.

You'd done a liquid 17x investing in brokerages since 2020. And brokerages have 8x the performance of the S&P. And it's not just TRFI brokerage. BNB has 40xed in BTC terms since 2017. Regulators are encouraging it.

Here you can see we have a 600% increase in call option volume from Robin Hood. ZeroDTE options volume is driving the market. Sports betting is going parabolic and prediction markets are the major meta. But speculation cannot scale to trillions because it has a churn problem. It impoverishes its users.

According to most studies ranging from the longest study from the Taiwan stock exchange, 97% of day traders lose money on any given day and only less than 1% are long-term profitable. Most of them are out of the game. And these studies have been replicated in Brazil, Colombia, Finland, and when Australia actually intervened and raised margin requirements for traders, it basically found an immediate increase in trader profitability. Unofficially from crypto exchanges, when people get an airdrop and put that airdrop into perpetual swap trading, they lose all of their money on average in two weeks. And then according to, you know, unofficial options commentary, there's a 90 by90 rule.

So you lose 90% of your money in 90 days with options accounts. This is kind of uh re like uh referenced by Indian Indian regulators who've pointed to 12 billion of annual losses from derivatives trading in India. So if retail is losing a ton of money then stable coin growth won't go up. When you have stables you basically have a virtuous loop between funding rate VC funding people keeping on money on exchanges for new launches and defy primitives and lending. Whereas when retail is losing money, you have stuff like the Terara world or the FTX world, which I know we don't want to go back to, where basically, you know, there's solveny risks, the funding rates go down, there's less inflows, there's less V BTC funding, and the sex spreads blow out.

And furthermore, there's a more profound point that, you know, network security is actually influenced by the amount of speculation. So you can see here on this chart that in order to break even or kind of like you know outperform network infl inflation you need to go to the green line on Salana which is about $16 million a day of fees and that only happened during the Trump memecoin mania right so in order for these networks to become safe for scaled securitization of assets you really need to have a high a much higher level of sustained speculation historically like when stable coin supply is going down it typically means bad times in markets, which kind of echoes this analysis. And really what it boils down to is churn. When retail loses 70% of their money every year versus when they break even, there's about a 3.5x difference in the rate of stable coin supply growth.

That means fewer losses, higher funding rates, retail continuing to post more collateral, higher network fees, which means more security for institutional investors, and more appetite for new launches, exchange fees, and keeping money on exchanges, which you want to do when there's low credit risk. And the math currently isn't working. Even now with with crazy $ 38 billion stable growth, Athena, which is one measure of uh stablecoin expected value, has paid out less than the decline in the US dollar index year to date. So if you want lasting stable coin demand, it needs to like the government basically needs to step in and boost retail profitability, which is actually what is going on right now. So, we're seeing loosening social media standards, allowing ETFs for assets and making it clear that they are not securities, marketing crypto projects at the top level of the government, encouraging onchain stocks and bonds along with privacy, and bringing exchanges into the US and allowing a massive expansion in decentralized exchanges.

All five of these are going on right now. Passive investors though are the only market which is large enough to possibly account for some of the numbers that Bent is talking about. It's a $36 trillion market with $40 trillion of potential inflows if the world gets to passive funding levels of the United States. Now, going back to our first slide, Soros said that if the super bubble's ending, prices are not going to be set effectively. And I do in fact believe that prices are going to be set on the behalf of retail traders.

The playbook is already being deployed at massive scale in traditional markets. Oracle gained 42% in one day after announcing a $300 billion LOI with OpenAI. Oracle used the proceeds to buy Nvidia GPUs, which then plowed hundred billion dollars back into Oracle, which makes Nvidia the most valuable stock in the S&P 500. And the entire infinite money glitch is funded by passive investors. Now, Nvidia is creating a persuasion and gamification machine.

Generative worlds are coming in 2026, and Nvidia was originally a gaming company. Most AI products come from social media and video companies, and these systems that they're developing can coordinate actions across large groups, generate persuasive media, and categorize and understand market narratives. Now, Palunteer shows you the power of group coordination when you apply it to battlefields and businesses, and it was originally a hedge fund business. Now, much as Palanteer supercharges business coordination, I believe that AI tools are going to supercharge distributed hivemines, and we're very, very early on this. Michael Sailor on average posts 20 AI enhanced bull posts a month and there's a lot of specific levers that are going to drive basically crypto number one direct specific community membered uh goals generated by I AI uh creating media assets collecting informations for members performing real optimization of brand campaigns doing customer support and onboarding and coordinating what was essentially market maker actions of optimal liquidity pushes and facilitating group interactions me mentorships and benefits for token holders Hivemines 1.

0 have already worked. Isshar's Bitcoin ETF is the most successful ETF project ever and has currently more aumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumumum than the entire you know iShares treasury ETF. Um Micro Strategy and IBIT are doing more annual volume than the Russell 2000. And so basically what I'm saying is in the status quo passive investors are gaining but in the future retail investors and traders are the only hope to increase stable coin supply. So, the government is going to do things to encourage these trends that I'm talking about.

Retail investors are already fully ramped on AI tools and willing to speculate on it and with it. Chat GPT has four times as much search volume as Bitcoin and twothirds of Americans have used generative AI for financial advice and 80% who have used it have acted on it. So, contrarian ways to express my view. First, hive minds will win. You can see that Bitcoin and XRP are on the lows ball weighted versus gold.

We're all aware of it that gold is skyrocketing and I believe that if this thesis is true, this trend is actually going to completely reverse. Second, all assets need to come on chain. So, Soul, AVAC, and ETH are bringing assets on chain. And according to this logic, we need more assets to speculate on besides tokens, so they'll outperform. And finally, if I'm right, retail coordination platforms in crypto will massively crush passive investing, which means Telegram via TO and pump will outperform passive indicy companies like BlackRock, MSCI, and S&P Global.

So, Alex Cart made a really profound statement, which is that LLMs don't work out of the box. And the power of palunteer is basically saying that LMS are raw materials that need to be processed via the creation of what's known as an ontology or a way of understanding the world that allows groups of people to make money. And so uh essentially I believe that there is an opportunity to give retail investors or people in crypto who currently don't have access to scaled AI tools the ability to coordinate and effectively act just like the corporate and military actors have today. So, I'm building Post Fiat, which is a new layer 1 forked from XRP. And if you're interested in being a validator, please reach out.

We're also hiring at alexpostfiat.org. So, you know, some of you might be saying this doesn't sound that compelling. You know, like redistribution to AI enabled apes is actually, you know, bad. This might hurt people.

But the reality is that passive investors have won for too long. They've seen a record run in wealth, free writing off price setting. The top 1.1% of society owns 10 times as much as the bottom 50%. 80 year olds have more than current adults.

Younger people are the ones trading. And as AI displaces jobs, the number of speculators in society is going to increase massively the same way that it did during co. So the only question is, do we want to punish these people or do we want to benefit them? And I believe that in order to hit our stable coin growth targets, it's very obvious that we need to enable these AI based hivemines to succeed. So Henry Kissinger, you know, the actual architect of the US dollar, petro dollar, became very good friends with Eric Schmidt and he wrote a book about it before he died and he had a really powerful quote.

He said, "Enthralled by machines that appear to be our friends, fearful of blocking their superhuman speed and incapable of explaining their new conclusions, we may develop a reverence for computers that borders on mysticism. The roles of history, morality, justice, and human judgment in such a world are unclear." So going back to our first slide, if our whole premise is that the super bubble, the belief in society, the belief in this credit machine is collapsing, the question is what replaces it. I think there's three levers that are going to happen that are going to play out over the next 24 months. First, individuals will trust AI for their personal decisions.

Next, they'll trust it for their financial decisions via the birth of AI hive minds. And finally, once they're bought into it, they'll start to actually trust uh, you know, basically artificial intelligence as deterministic judgment at scale for entirely new societies and currencies. And we're already starting to see this trend to merge with countries like Albania having AI based ministers. So, I'm going to leave it there, but you know, I think the the big takeaway for me of all of this is that we are very very early on an unstoppable macro trend which is being driven by the top levels of the government. So, the thing that Morad got right is that these communities are going to drive the market going forward.

But the thing that he got wrong is it is going to be fundamentally part of the system. It's going to be enabled by stable coins and fueled by AI. Thank you.