Generating Alpha: Navigating Crypto Markets - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2023

all right so uh that was one introduction uh so excited to follow up on that um really excited uh first of all a big thank you to token 2049 for hosting both us and this panel today and for all of you for joining uh we have a lot to pack in here uh so we're going to kick it off um let's start with just a general question obviously last year was a pretty volatile year uh so um why don't we kick it off with just talking about how you view uh finding Alpha in the space and just overall Market changes pre- and post FTX uh shalang why don't we kick it off with you sure uh my name is shalang Tang I was the CIO of Ledger Prime which was a multi strategy hedge fund that um I guess was was part of FTX was a very pertinent question uh Ledger prime or relaunched by the end of the year as eminency group um and separately I've launched another trading firm called BOS markets which is focused on bilateral OTC derivatives um I'll would say like my conversations generally in the past few months with allocators you know counterparties um have focused a lot more on just operational um due diligence um less unlike the alpha generation uh I would say something that's changed massively is just how business is done in general right so like if you're an allocator um historically you allocate to a fund you follow up on a monthly basis um or you know multi-month basis I think nowadays what allocators one is a lot more control and visibility um there's a lot more allocators that are asking for like sub manage accounts uh a lot more allocators like if you're touching defi looking for more just like daily like transparency and visibility um and then on the counter party side right I think just the reyo rehypothecation of collateral margin is is kind of changing um it's more about like tripod or repo and um understanding like what uh like the margin everything is being used for so those are some of the changes that I've seen the past few months yeah uh it's one thing that I keep coming back to you know I've been trading this sasset class now for seven years uh both at Crypt native firms and now as a principal at golden tree which is a traditional asset manager the Trad Al is focused on credit debt distress debt uh and now has actually spun out a subsidiary called Golden Chain which I'm a partner of that focuses investing on the liquid markets and the Venture markets in the cryptocurrency world one thing I keep coming back to is that the markets changed dramatically year after year 2017 didn't look like 2018 didn't look like 2019 didn't look like 21 didn't look like 22 and doesn't look like 23 and the opportunities and the ways that you access the market market and the things that you look for you have to keep your nose to the ground and you have to really understand what's driving the interest in the market I remember back in 2019 the volumes out of Asia were much higher than the volumes out of the US and so if you wanted to understand what was happening in the markets you wanted to understand how to trade probably had to pay a lot more attention to the hangsang than you did to the S&P fast forward to 2021 that wasn't necessarily true a lot of the volume was coming from the US and so once you start to track the things and really understand what the driving forces are behind the markets who's interested in the markets at any given time you can really start to uncover Alpha in a way that you know you haven't you haven't before and you know Shang one thing that you you brought up that's just true is it's always been a struggle in the cryptocurrency industry to house your assets effectively to make sure that you don't take on losses because it's a new technology and things break everything here is really an an experiment basically everything outside of Bitcoin is constantly in flux and so approaching the market in a professional and rigorous fashion is extremely important to make sure that you mitigate the losses that can occur from things that are outside of your control what we saw with 2022 with Luna with FTX with three arrows you run into these situations consistently so you know one one thing that I always say is you just you always have to be paying attention you can never really take a break here good to be with you guys all right today the mic is working um I'm the CIO at selini selini is a very large Market making firm my background is both poker and trafi so crypto kind of brought those together for me and uh I I chose the title CIO instead of CEO because I still love chasing Alpha and actually being a Trader and investing so I spent that as a big part of my time but selini as a firm is a very large Market maker so we provide liquidity and I know uh these guys that execute keep complaining about how crappy the liquidity is right now so we can talk about why that is um most of our competitors have left the space but uh we continue to provide liquidity and uh yeah happy to get into that yeah um I'm Arthur I'm the founder of Def Finance Capital um we invest in crypto um I've been investing in crypto since 2017 we done uh both Venture and liquid investing but uh we launched our new fund this year that purely for on the C liquid crypto Market because we think the risk adjusted return in the liquid side is much more attractive right now and I think going back to the topic of the um what have changed post FTX I think one of the biggest thing is we it's a lot more focused on holistic risk management and I think that in a way um we we probably pay attention to risk even more than the traditional manager now u in a way that in a traditional manure you don't really think about your Prime broker Prime broker going down I think that that's something that you know we are just so conscious on counterparty risk custody risk um you know obviously Market risk and everything like you actually need to look at everything and you need to make sure your operational infrastructure is really up to task and actually that's something is quite challenging because you you're working with lesser resources compared to the traditional asset manager or hedge fund but yet you um actually have a higher um you need to invest more to make sure you are up to up to the standard like you need to make sure your custody is uh well Su up and if you want to do the onchain stuff that you can't use like a pure cold wallet custody you need use MPC then you need to re reconfigure your like your MPC infrastructure then you need to prevent like you know cyber security attack um Lazarus has been very active recently you know every month they have gotten away with like a very decent amount of money so there's a lot you know all this risk you need to manage and I've seen it firsthand and seen so many examples of some funds that were up like few thousand percents you know from the last cycle and just blew up in a very short amount of time so I think it doesn't really matter how much you are up I think it's really about like can you really survive and making something sustainable like are you like a one trick pony or actually you have a real sustainable Alpha I think that that has changed and um you know I think there was a lot more skepticism on you know is this guy just a buom market genius is just max leverage long long the entire Market or is actually know how to manage the risk and how to you know extract Alpha even in a difficult Market condition y yeah so my name is Daryl I'm one of the co-founders of tangent which is a multi strategy uh fund that was based in Singapore we started start at the start of this year and I've been investing in crypto markets for about 3 years so I think to a lot of the points that uh the fom panelist have said I think surviving in this industry is probably uh one of the hardest things to do and you know relative to any other space that you're in you have to think about so many risk factors attack vectors uh but I think if you can continue to stay in this space and take a longer term cycle view uh the alpha is just basically being I guess naturally long when markets are relatively doomy and gloomy um and you know taking profits off the table when everyone is euphoric so I was reading article recently and um it was a fantastic one because it is so pertinent in today's market climate where defensiveness is equally as important as offensiveness right how good you are at making money in the bullk Market is only as important as how good you are at you know defending that capital and preserving that capital and a bare market so I think right now with the markets the way they are you probably want to be focusing on defensiveness um and we can get to that I guess you know later on uh but yeah I think just surviving and you know being uh knowing how to be defensively positioned when you need to be is is Alpha in itself sure before we dive into specifically execution and then then also the effectiveness of uh getting some of the alpha uh structured into different strategies um why don't we dive into uh some of the hurdle rates between whether it's CI defi but also uh majors and altcoins Arthur can you dive into um you know what are some of the risks that you see with execution or even hurdle rates uh that maybe has changed between some of the majors and alts it could be let's say liquidity which Jordy you touched on um but anything else top of mind yeah I think uh first thing the hurdle rate is US Treasury rree rate I think that's the same for all asset class so I think in in is reflected in a manner where um you know the allocators are just going to you know think about like you know should I allocate so much to Alternative and crypto is part of the alternative basket so I think that's the things that have impacted and I think that's also one thing that lead to a like a liquidity withdrawal from the market because you know uh people don't uh don't have to take so much risk anymore to get the return they want it was very different where interest rate was zero and you are very happy with like a 6 to 8% but right now when you get like Risk rate of four to five or even slightly higher than five you probably want to be compensated more to take on such risk but at the same time uh the the return expectation in crypto has changed as well I don't think people kind of expecting that kind of uh crazy return that to come back so quickly so I think that's kind of the major reason they have uh pullback uh from the from from the crypto space and I think that in the out market like soal the non-bitcoin Eve there was even uh more more obvious like there was just like I would say 90 90 to 95% drop in liquidity compared to 2021 uh across most of the non-bitcoin eve crypto yep so liquidity people usually think it's because of the supply Supply liquidity oh you know big guys are out Citadel is out that's why you know alamaa is out the reality is actually more related to the demand for liquidity and we are able to always step in and provide more and more liquidity but there has to be a balance between informed flow kind of like insiders that are trading very profitably and uninformed flow and I would say you know since FTX went down a lot of the kind of more retail uninformed flow went out and you have a lot of people that have Insider knowledge of you know either uh legal things that are going on or specific coin things that makes it harder to Market make so very few Market makers are really able to survive against that type of flow and I think that's going to continue unfortunately we're not going to get better liquidity until there's a lot more kind of uh retail interest that just wants execution they just want to be able to buy I mean we saw with curve if you really want to execute 50 million of curve you got to do it OTC because if you do it on chain as a market maker we're not going to be willing to just sit there and get filled constantly for tens of millions of you know a coin that the founder can just decide uh to dump like you know 50% of the supply so uh it's a very tough Market to navigate I think if you're very short-term oriented you can definitely make money there's opportunities I was doing a uh podcast yesterday with my co-host thicki and this like alarm went off I thought like he he had like a fire alarm in the house but actually he whenever the FTX docket puts like a new announcement he just like has this like large sound go off so that he can like Rush this computer speed read like every line on like the new docked and make a trade so there's people out there doing that we got to watch out uh Shang how would you touch on CI D there's obviously always concerns about watch trading um yield compression and yield farming um and then just in general uh liquidity as uh Jordy mentioned yeah I think I think the just quickly I think what Jord like mentioned is extremely just relevant like in traditional like even trafi like crypto like it's if you're a market maker you don't want to be bumping against like other market makers that's not the point of like being a market maker and as a Trader like there's no Edge in that um but broadly taking a step back we're just in a very different macro environment now as well right like more dollars have been printed over coid than in the history of the United States right 55% like interest rates um like maybe we're at the end of like the US monetary tightening cycle but the rest of the world is not right they have to counterbalance the higher you know interest rates of the US um consumers are hurting generally unemployment lags um the peak of interest rates by8 quarters so we haven't seen that yet so like with less consumer like spending power and savings um just less like consumer like trading in the future and I do think that's a very like big point that crypto as a whole has missed or just kind of um won't necessarily completely understand given we've been the loosest like monetary cycle for the past like decade right right um and then in terms of just like uh General like C5 D5 right like the hurdle ratees a lot higher right like it's it's you know you can buy coinbase Bonds in the teens um it's difficult to justify to LPS why they should allocate you know to us for other people and earn like relative you know similar returns from much much higher risk so that that's a conversation that we're always just you know constantly having um and so uh I think as a way to kind of act that is how do you off for um similar risk adjusted returns uh whether that's through kind of like better operational um infrastructure um you know working with like Prime Brokers um integrating um you know technology platforms like fractal and others to to you know create more transparency and we have more transparency then um the kind of risk hurdle comes down and and becomes you know more like in line with like traditional assets yeah I I I want to touch on that point real quick because the the importance of Defi and the reason that people were interested in defi has shifted a lot over the last 3 years let's give go back to 2020 when you had defi summer and everything exploded and everything took off and people were chasing yields on things like kimchi farms for a th% and everybody was talking about oh defi is a great way to generate yield this is a phenomenal thing to go put your money in because there was the greatest amount of negative yielding debt that had ever existed at that time so people view defi as this amazing asset class where you could just you know go go put your money in and it was an infinite money machine and what ends up happening is obviously that has to come that has to come back down to Earth really what was invented at the time was a new way to distribute Equity to early adopters of a company or a protocol and so effectively for using a product you were getting paid equity in the form of the token most of that was worthless so most of these tokens didn't the products associated with those tokens were not going to last for a long time and so obviously that equalizes it comes it comes down and so you fast forward to today and you look at Defi and rates are much higher outside of crypto than they actually are inside of crypto a lot of that you know is just due is just due to the macro environment as as Shang as Shang mention and so what is the value of defi today relative to what people perceiv the value of defi might have been 3 years ago well the value is that it's actually easier and faster and better to build Financial products on a defi stack than it is to build it on the old traditional Financial stack that was built over the last over the last 50 years and that's why you're seeing major Banks major PBS start to build things like tokenized money market funds because they see this and they say oh the crypto rails are actually better for trading these traditional assets than the current rails that we have so we're going to move over slowly and so the benefit comes less from oh we're going to make a lot of money and we're going to generate this is It's All About yield and then it's now more about oh operational efficiencies and saving costs and actually just having a better and more composable system so I think that's been a major shift in the cd5 space yeah and just just adding on to that um I I think the D scene right now is pretty pessimistic right uh I think the relative yields that you can get in defi uh is not comparable to what we see in treasury rates and as a consequence of that you've seen us DC's circulating Supply Contin continuously dwindle um over months now right um I think and and it's pretty obvious because people who tend typically hold usdc would also have access to treasury rates and when you're not being compensated uh for that the opportunity cost gets higher and higher as interest rates go up uh but I would say that you know we we probably are at the peak of where interest rates will hopefully be um and that consequently also means that the opportunity cost or the the difference in you know preference for traditional markets versus defi is also at its highest um and as interest rates continue to come down and as more Alternatives in defi offer sustainable yield opportunities uh we I do expect you know defi to come back uh in some favor so uh yeah I think you know D5 right now as is is still very much in its original I guess version 0.2 or 0.3 of what it can be uh but you know we're going to need to offer a lot more compelling and secure OPP opportunities uh in the decentralized world as compared to what's available today curious what you guys think if we're going to have a repeat of what we've seen many times before where you know it's going to be dead at some point Bitcoin ETF news hopefully comes in and then we're now in this close system there's not any money entering once it does enter let's say through a Bitcoin ETF and potentially Bitcoin and ethereum do well is it going to be all over again you know speculation just goes all the way down a safe moon or do you think this time lessons have been learned how do you how do you play the the next cycle um I think that if you still believe that crypto has a future um and the asset cost is po to grow significantly going forward I think you just have to find some asset you really believe in and hold on to it if you're someone that's very bearish I mean set aside the active trading strategy I'm talking about more like a investing point of view um if you're actually feeling very bearish about industry I think it's better to just to leave and don't care about it it's just easier that way um there's no point trying to fight in a declining market so I think that for people who stay you actually have to you know in a certain way believe that over like a reasonable time frame going forward this asset class will grow in uh different forms um and then you just have to find something you really believe in and have to have some call position um because that's what we are in crypto for right and I think that's sometimes get overlooked you know in discount Market condition ah everything is a scam we're all going to zero you know all so I think that this it's good to sometime take a step back to take a more levelheaded perspective you know some things are overpriced over value and a lot of times it's really about the nuances like you know I think this is always one of the most underrated thing in crypto because we all on Twitter and nuances doesn't scale on Twitter you know that everything just you know a lot of things is more I'll care a lot more about details right now so I think that you know even like def5 right I mean I was very early def5 investor Ground Zero I think right now I try not to put def5 into one single basket is I think different parts of Diva had different kind of uh growth expectation like um I think borrowing and lending I think that's quite tough until interest rate normalized and also like um we we need more asset good asset as a collateral like even for Bitcoin um we have not even been able to bring a lot of good quality Bitcoin as a collateral to defi um we have rep BTC but I think the adoption have slowed significantly and even that alone have not really been um you know growing um so but you know on the derivative side I my firm belief is a decentralized derivative um we at least grow the market share by three to five times in the coming years it's not even talking about you know it's going to overtake the centralized venue but I think that the market share will increase because the core user base which is the crypto native crowd is we we we haven't even really penetrate the crypto native crowd yet so I I think that that's kind of the perspective if you really believe crypto is is is going to grow then you have to find something you really believe in and you know have a decent um stick in it in in various manner yep and AI I guess like you know you're always looking at supply and demand I I guess unlocks now are no longer bullish unlocks that we had during the bull market and even though Bitcoin and ethereum have this at this point very steady supply where we can actually invest knowing that there's not going to be a huge amount coming in for altcoins and other things that you're looking at are you just chasing Supply unlocks yeah that's that's definitely one way to trade it I think the bullish the the bullish unlock was let's think about what leads to that right when there's a telegraphed supply of anything coming online whether it's government Bitcoin that's going to be sold whether it's investors unlocking on a coin and it's going to be and it's going to be sold what you have to think about is how much of that is priced in and who's doing that pricing in and there are two ways of pricing that in the first is people are shorting that asset in anticipation of it coming online that Supply the second way of it being priced in is people not buying until that unlock happens because they're worried about that unlock so there's a pool of capital on the side that's waiting to see okay let's see how how much of this sells I'll be able to get a better price after it unlocks and what was happening in 21 was that there was just a tremendous amount of capital that was waiting on the sidelines to buy things like salana once we got past the fear of the unlock and I think there were also shorts in the Market at the time that that got blown out and you fast forward to today there's there's still people that are shorting this but there's nobody that is waiting on the sidelines to go buy these alts post unlock to be able to absorb the supply that comes in and so I think it's been you know it's been a really good trade I personally think it's it's not Juiced yet it's just that specific assets where it is Juiced right so if you look at something like a well I don't want to name exact names but you look at something that's been unlocking for a long time that's a lot more likely to be priced in than something that you know comes out at a 20 billion valuation and you know that that the supply is going to come online I want to um I want to Circle back for a second because I think the question of whether we will see another speculative cycle and whether we'll continue to have speculative Cycles is a very very pertinent one one and it's very important when understanding crypto so crypto is a very reflexive Market why well if you really think about Bitcoin the Bell weather asset what gives Bitcoin value it's the perception of value from other people it's the acceptance of it as a currency it's the ability that you can move it anywhere at any moment but really it comes from what you can do with it and what you can do with it comes from the perceived value that other people ascribe to it what that what does that mean when it goes up it actually gets more valuable when it goes down it gets less valuable and so that innate behavior of Bitcoin leads to speculative Cycles one thing and it's funny we're in the Marina Bay Sands one thing that's true is humans love to speculate I was walking through the casino there's a line for a Singaporean entry into the casino where you actually have to pay $100 to go in and gamble so you're paying $100 to go in and play a negative EV game where you're going to lose and the line is still extremely long people are paying right to speculate and people always will and so I think because of that nature of crypto there will always be a boom bus cycle associated with it because that's just human nature it's it's it's human behavior and at the same time there are real things that are being built in crypto they are real products they real applications There's real value to the tech but it's very difficult to pull out the speculative nature uh from this asset class because I just think that's just what it is yeah and of course I mean we talked about a number of different themes but also you have in the whole bucket of crypto speculation you have things like stable coins and uh if you look at even just market cap that's probably one of the the only things that stayed pretty flat and increasing despite everything that's happened in the market and the adoption of stable coins is really important how are you thinking about you know just timely news and even just more macro and Global um you know FTX was just approved in terms of the sale of the assets that they hold uh and that's going to happen over the course of the next couple of months and years how are you thinking about that you know obviously token unlocks is one thing but there is now guaranteed sell pressure across some of these tokens um how do you think about that when you consider you know maybe your momentum long some of those as asss or just in general uh Market making across those different platforms for those tokens I mean long term I think Bitcoin and ethereum despite some government sales here and there they're so underpriced you look at it as a global macro asset comparing to gold or you know any other thing of that scale these prices still seem so cheap and when you zoom out however you know if uh the FDX estate is going to sell $50 million of something that you know the liquidity is very thin and the market cap I mean I always look at FTB and market cap it's something that as a fundamentally minded investor I'm less of a meme investor I always just want to see what is the full fully diluted value that we're looking at um especially in situations that can get like very manipulated in in thin books I'm not saying I would short something because shorting is very dangerous but I wouldn't buy something if I feel like the the FTV is already very high so macro wise just keep stacking up and find these opportunities where governments will you know dump whatever uh it's not even governments I guess it's uh all these Estates there's assets that are very comfortable holding long term and I think this is going to be something that in two years time will look extremely cheap on the other end um I'm very careful with things that can get um a very large percentage of the supply sold and how do you guys think about you know you have Bitcoin having coming up in April 2024 um Arthur I see you laughing all right you can take that one you think I I feel like this Bitcoin having question is like a fouryear thing you know we were I remember that there so much discussion you know especially you know like Eric Moore and like Nick Carter was always debating is it pricing not pricing and rainbow chart and then you know what the stock to flow I'm not going to participate yeah I think other people you have more yeah insightful thing to say on this yeah yeah no I I I would say that I think it's it's a it's a Hallmark event that everybody pays attention to and you know even though you have a sample size of of two or three uh it's it's had a 100% hit rate in terms of forecasting you know what bull markets have uh uh happening happen after so you know I I think as as avv said crypto is an insanely reflexive uh you know asset class and and you kind of I I think the Haring alone is probably not sufficient to you know obviously guarantee that bull market comes but it it's the Nuance of how we get to prices where they are when the harving happens uh as well as the macroeconomic conditions that are present during that time and I think as crypto continues to mature the asset class will more and more trade in line with uh broader risk on assets so you know that Haring effect is probably going to dwindle um as you know you go on and on uh but I think you know 2024 is going to be certainly a it's setting up to be a very interesting year uh especially with you know the partisan issues uh that are dictating the institutional flows coming out of the states I'll just quickly add that like um completely age with the Jord I think like zooming out um the asset class Bitcoin ethereum extremely extremely underpriced the contrarian View with the having is like historically um a lot of the miners have been able to kind of hold back from selling Bitcoin and accumulate Bitcoin because they managed to continuously Source their expenses with just additional credit which um within the Bitcoin space uh was pretty loose um there was a ton of it uh what is a bit different this time around is that credit has largely disappeared and so as a result Bitcoin miners will need to tap into the inventory of Bitcoin to student to fund and Source their income uh um their expenses um and with the having coming up it just means less revenue for them post having and so that's something they're also very cognizant of uh going into the having um and it becomes a game of well who's going to sell first um you know into the having uh and then lastly just with the FTX thing I do think a lot of like the price action you've seen recently uh is kind of like front running the kind of the state Sal it's the very narrative thing um but like the state just literally got approved approval officially today it's going to take a couple of weeks for anything to start um a lot of the salana is locked up a lot there's a cap un like the weekly you know Etc amount of assets can be sold um and I do think it's more of a a slow sale process as opposed to like a bum rush for the exits they're not going to just be like hitting like liquidity uh on the CFI exchanges uh against like market makers a lot of it will be OTC uh which will minimize like price impact as well um so I think like you know again longer term um there you know it's it's probably like a bit exaggerated in terms of like just how much like pressure that is I want to talk oh sorry Jord go ahead I mean I don't think the Bitcoin housing is yet a meme I think it will be in eight years once we have a couple more because you go 4% to 2% 2% to 1% that still kind of matters it's still you know instead of 10 billion cell pressure it's 5 billion right now in this environment that's a lot 1% to half% maybe like you know in four years it'll still matter a little bit so I'm still bullish on on the happening I do think yeah in 32 it just becomes like a meme like a rainbow chart um but we have a little bit a little bit of juice left little bit of juice I also think that uh it depends a lot on what's happening around it right because the having is this moment where everybody just looks at Bitcoin but if there are other things that are happening that are good for Bitcoin at that time then it makes it a much more powerful event that's kind of what happened in 2020 you got the helicopter money you got the you know balance sheet expansion you got everything happening at the same time that was so good for Bitcoin and then the having happens and everybody's like oh my God this is really good but what we saw last year is like there's anything that can happen there's like truckers in Canada oh good for Bitcoin exactly there's a war in Ukraine you can s like there's so many things that will align and next year when it happens and I'm pretty bullish on the hening you're going to call me and say like hey Jord you got lucky it's because you know Donald Trump is like doing this or whatever I'm like there was always going to be something that was going to C I actually think that we there's a non-trivial percentage uh that we get rate cuts into the having and that itself will just be used as narrative F to actually send Bitcoin up so I'm going to call you and say hey we both got [Laughter] lucky all right um I want to wrap this up on one last question obviously you can't uh go around and talk about exactly how you get your Alpha uh across your different strategies but um what is something you're super excited about I know 2024 we're setting it up to be very volatile Year you guys have this bet going on we want to see who wins um but what else are you really excited about uh whether it's alpha or even just specific themes outside of what we talked about um we can go around uh actually darl why don't we start with you yeah no I think um sort of you if you look at how the nft market has progressed over the last 12 months uh you really see a lot of capitulation out of you know even the most Die Hard holders I think a perfect example is you know bases which was the go the golden project of the last cycle really coming back down to earth uh and I do think nfds as an asset class you know what you saw in 2021 was you know the first step uh of of of an iteration of how you trade I guess more a liquid assets and you know I think there have a lot of smart builders in this space working to develop the infrastructure needed to facilitate more of that kind of trading so you know nfts in general the concept is quite comfortable uh for most people I mean most people you know trade water you know some of them resell their cars uh this is this is something that is pretty ingrained in human culture um so and if you look at what nft prices are today uh or any of the nft protocols that are that do have a liquid token uh they're trading a pretty depressed prices right now and probably for good reason if you you know plot them out on a fundamental perspective uh but when the speculative further comes back and I I do agree with Jordi and and rvy there that you know we do expect some to come back next year uh I think I think this asset class is you know one to watch definitely I think I'm most looking forward to all the overhang and uncertainty from a few major issue and big elephant in the room getting removed I was like talking to a lot of the um crypto investor over the past few days and one thing that strikes me is most of us sign up to invest in crypto because we are excited by the technology um the vision and the the product but I think right now most of the liquid crypto investor end up we need to be a macro expert we need to be legal expert regulatory expert like we spend so much of our time looking at all this not really what we sign up for in crypto and I think that's kind of getting a bit old I mean I'm looking forward to be being able to focus more on the pure crypto fundamental St um instead of looking at spot Bitcoin e approval and like regulatory action enforcement all this thing um I I hope that the overhang can be resolved um you know even we going to get B get a big correction let's just get it away as soon as possible so we can spend less time on on this y yeah I think uh we talk about uh the big correction coming I've heard that a lot uh actually during this conference everyone's ready for the big correction as opposed to the slow drip that we're currently seeing right now so um with that Jordy uh what are you most excited about um on the alpha side and into 2024 so I'm excited about two things and they're a bit more fundamentally based one the actual product of crypto the user experience of using a blockchain product was pretty bad last cycle you know grandmas are not going to go on and get on metamask and AD account it's just awful and people are getting hacked I go to all these hackathons around the world and I see a lot of smart people working on account extraction security getting away with seed phrases you know maybe that's controversial maybe not but um I'm excited about the actual product and the usability so that next cycle people can actually have part of their financial lives on chain maybe with you know traditional yields being stacked on on top of defi yields so stable coins having um yields and being very safe and then we can actually use them and then the other thing I'm excited about is just one word uh Black Rock I uh I 100% agree I think that the most bullish thing that's happening right now in crypto are the development of applications that people actually enjoy using and so if you look back in 20121 the best trade that you could have possibly taken were all the L1 trades and the reason is because they were viewed as an index bet on the crypto ecosystem oh you buy Avalanche because if any apps do well on Avalanche then Avalanche the token itself does well same thing with salana same thing with madic right but the reality is that you need actual apps with actual usage to make that trade viable and I think people are are starting to realize that and so I've been spending a lot of time just looking at you know consumer apps institutional apps just things that people enjoy using on crypto and I'm starting to see that bubble up actually nft infrastructure the trading infrastructure around it is getting a lot better there's some good bets to make there uh yeah so just in just in general I think that it's the next two years they going to be a lot more focused on apps and layer ones or twos yeah I'll just quickly add that um completely agree like just moving past just like token prices but actually looking at the progress um of the whole industry which is not just like speculation right I think there's a ton of like real world use cases that are being built um you know it's not just like pure pure like D5 pumping and dumping tokens um infrastructure getting better connecting real world assets uh so I think that's that's really exciting um and now you know as investors that's a different kind of role that we have to take in terms of like understanding how we can actually monetize that for investors um but that that's something I'm pretty excited about and then you know last thing is on the speculative side uh I think friend Tech is pretty interesting I've already you know purchased all these guys Twitter account because I don't really uh go on Twitter much so if you can pump their uh you know bags that'd be great thank you well thank you guys so much uh and a big thank you uh to all of you for listening in and token 2049 for having us