The longer I spend in crypto, the more I realize that most people don't have an end goal. No matter how much money they earn, they won't improve themselves in any meaningful way. There are people sitting on 7-8 figure portfolios, embroiled in petty Twitter drama, with no intention of using their life-changing wealth to actually change their lives. It makes me think this might be one of the worst subsets of people—speed-running the hyper-greed arc, operating w/o empathy, and believing that hubris is just a fancy word in a thesaurus. Where else can millionaire babies throw tantrums because someone criticized a token they hold, while simultaneously claiming to be "industry thought leaders"? The obscenity of it all is, at best, a microcosm, or at worst, a reflection of the fallibility of raw, unimpeded capitalism. There is no value here, no lessons to be learned—only financial enrichment to be valued. You are only as valuable as the relative value you add to others. The new pharaohs are those with early CAs and you're stuck building their pyramids.

I bet the "longevity" hack here is just that men over a certain age were having more sex (from Cialis/Tadalafil) and that in and of itself was better for all cause mortality.

This should be interesting. Talking new model launches with new launch pad tomorrow. Can they save the trenches? x.com/i/spaces/1RJjppkkrXjKw…

I want to take this time to make you aware of how criminally undervalued base:0x3722264ab15a1dfce5a5af89e6547f7949a8aba3 is. The @lienfiapp is honestly a unicorn in crypto and I believe will end up being an industry disruption event. If you don’t know about @MLeeJr - do some homework. If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have time to try to convince you, sorry.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The big difference between now and previous bear markets (23 etc.) is that even though prices were down, there was still hope that crypto would become something bigger, and there were genuinely crypto-curious people still entering the market. Currently, we have neither. No one active/present in crypto genuinely thinks it will achieve the mission statements of old. Your hairdresser, Uber driver, or slop factory co-worker stopped asking you about digital assets. I think that's why we have entered into this absolute period of despair where people can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. And maybe that's true. Maybe crypto is dead and it's never coming back. Or, the game has simply changed, and your version of crypto is the one that's not coming back. Many people would point to the expanding stablecoin issuance/usage for seamless international transactions as an argument for this. Or the concept of normies holding X% of their portfolio in BTC as a hedge against the stock market, etc. It may simply be that the era of consumer crypto has died/is dying, and the institutional era is fully taking off. Personally, I am not sure. What I do know is that people will continue to chase asymmetric opportunities, and markets will continue to package and sell them. Regardless of the challenges facing the industry, be it quantum computing, regulation, or something else entirely, someone will find a way to financialise the next version of this market, even if it looks vastly different from what we recognise today. I remain sceptically hopeful.

It's not pessimism, old boy. It's fear.

This was not something we thought could happen 12-24 months ago... The concept of cults is totally dead on chain. The pattern/psychology of traders left is such that competition/extraction has been refined to extreme levels of survival as a first principle. Cults can only exist offchain - Like XRP - because normies still believe in stuff, and are not the top 1% of coin traders left in the onchain waste lands. This cannot change unless we onramp new liquidity. There is no greater fool left.

I sold all of my crypto near the top in 2025, and here's my plan for when I'm going to buy back in last cycle I successfully traded the memecoin bull run, AI coins, and crypto majors I have continued to trade onchain and have been stabling all of my profits over the past 18 months in this video I went over: ➡️ why I sold crypto back in 2025 ➡️ why I think we're getting close to the bottom ➡️ why I think crypto decoupled from the stock market ➡️ why you shouldn't write off crypto as "dead" ➡️ why the next 3-6 months is likely the buying window I've been waiting for

Challenge to this thesis is Pumpchain but I agree re Solana being undervalued.

I think I am done trading memes forever. On the 1 in 1000 coins you actually win on, the profit at best offsets the losses 1-1. So there's this perpetual spinning wheel of never making "real" gains. There is a statistical improbability of actually getting ahead here - regardless of sizing in. IMO, time to wait for better market conditions, and just load up on conviction infra/RWA/utility coins. We will be back at some point in the near future...

I would expect many other coins to go the way of ZEC in the months to come. But from the ashes of exploitable junk will come the next iteration of blockchain. Don't be fooled, this is the watershed moment.

No one outside of crypto will ever care about zcash. And a lot of ppl in crypto will never buy it because the thesis is terrible. The overall TAM for zec is tiny. Zcash has been out for 10 years. Experiencing these problems this late in the game is a permanent red flag.

I have been calling ZEC a KOL scam since day 1. These people led you to slaughter on a non private "privacy" token with an infinite supply. If you fell you it I empathise with you, but now you have a chance to mute these grifters for good. Consider it a hard lesson well learned.

I think the fundamental problem crypto has right now is that it failed to expand the consumer adoption narrative that most of CT was waiting for. Like, if you think about it critically, younger generations seem to be moving away from digital-first identities and towards real-world experiences, communities/"third spaces" etc. Digital currencies are like the least cool thing any young person wants to get involved with, while older generations already have crypto exposure via ETFs and other investment products. At this point, it feels like most people who were naturally predisposed to be interested in crypto are already market participants in one form or another, making it increasingly difficult to expand the TAM. Add to that the increasing frequency of DeFi hacks and subsequent outflows, and now the targeted attacks against projects like ZEC, and it starts to look like the industry's risk profile is > than its need. Moreover, the number of genuinely compelling use cases isn't expanding at the pace many expected, while the costs and risks of participation continue to rise causing market attrition by even cryptos staunchest power users. This isn't even taking into account the regulatory issues hanging over crypto's head, which, imo, pale in comparison to the above. Simply put, if the risk from AI is so great, there is little to no interest from Gen Z and below, and none of the old narratives manifested into anything meaningful, then what is the exponential "market goes up" narrative we have left as an industry? IMO, this isn't like other bear markets with baseless FUD. These concerns are tangible and real. The wheels look like they have come off.

Free money glitch.

This is going to start being the norm. Utility/RWA/infra tokens are the future in the absence of memes being something anyone wants to size into anymore. I'd expect to see coins on @base at 9 figs again once whale liquidity is more accustomed to this new paradigm sans memes.

Perhaps there's something in this challenging a mass adoption narrative.

My friend's dad died recently. In some turn of events, I found myself acting as messenger, passing the news through a loose network of old friends, acquaintances and people who knew the family in one way or another. The responses were almost universally the same. "That's sad." "That sucks!" "Give him my condolences." And then the conversation just completely fizzled out. At first I thought it was strange. Death is supposed to be one of the great events of human existence. Entire religions have been built around this philosophy. Massive wars have been fought over a single death. Philosophers have literally dedicated their lives to understanding it. Yet when confronted with the death of an actual human being, most people acknowledged it briefly before returning to whatever they had been doing five minutes earlier. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this isn't callousness or a lack of sensitivity. It's just that people are programmed to compartmentalize that information as "something sad but not directly related to my existence" and move on. The dead man's death was only a catastrophe to his wife, his children, and his close friends. To everyone else it was just a message they received, responded to, and moved on with their day. I realised, years earlier I had experienced something similar. There was a neighbour who had lived next door to my parents for most of my life. He was one of those permanent fixtures you unconsciously assume will always be there. Whenever I returned home, I'd inevitably end up talking to him over the fence. One evening after returning from a long overseas work trip I took my parents out to dinner and I asked my father how he was doing. "Oh, he's dead," he replied. Then he carried on with the conversation about a broken headlight he had gotten on his car that week. I remember feeling shocked. Like, "wait, what? This dude is dead?" This man had occupied a small corner of my world for decades. He had a family. A career. Hobbies. Opinions. Stories etc. He had accumulated an entire lifetime of experiences. Yet his passing entered the conversation with all the gravity of someone asking about the weather. What struck me later was that my father wasn't being dismissive about him. The world had just moved on, and eventually it always does. I think most people spend their lives assuming they occupy a much larger place in reality than they actually do just by default. We're the protagonist of our own story, so naturally we assume we're a significant character in everyone else's. We imagine our death as some great event because from our perspective it is the ultimate significance. But for almost everyone else, it's not. I mean, most people can't name their great-grandparents or couldn't tell you who lives in the apartment next to them. Most of us struggle to remember details about that holiday we took to South East Asia 10 years ago, let alone all the people we ever had some sort of close relationship with. Yet somehow we imagine that strangers will carry our memory indefinitely. A lifetime of worries, ambitions, achievements, failures, routines and relationships eventually gets compressed into an off hand line of "yeh he died". The truth is that history has no interest in the overwhelming majority of human beings. The universe is indifferent to our existence. Think about it. Are people going to gather their grandchildren around a fire to tell stories of Gavin, Senior Accounts Manager, who exceeded his quarterly targets year-on-year? An uncomfortable amount of modern life consists of expending enormous effort on things that will vanish almost immediately after we're gone. We assume we will be remembered and that our actions matter. But our actions are not a metric of what other people will care about us once we're gone, but more a measure by which we mark our own progress. In reality, the heroin addict living under the bridge has about as much cosmic impact on society as we do; we just assume we matter more because we're doing what society told us mattered. This isn't supposed to be depressing. If anything, you should probably view it as liberating. Because at the end of the day, if no one remembers who you were, then it doesn't matter whether you lived up to other people's expectations. The people judging your life will eventually be forgotten just as quickly as you were. The real mistake is spending your life trying to satisfy these people whose opinions were never going to survive any longer than their Chat-GPT written obituaries.

I have been counter trading the timeline (ZEC, HYPE) etc and have realized that we might have reached a point in this industry were the limited liquidity pool that's buying these assets is so diluted that it's either early consensus or nothing...

Back in the day, when I was a poor journalist covering zany vox-pop stories across South East Asia, I interviewed a criminal syndicate that had hotel staff tip them off about which guests were carrying Rimowa luggage. Those guests would then be marked for pickpocketing or muggings later on at a very high ROI for what was little to no effort. Simply put, if you're brain-dead enough to broadcast to the world that you're travelling with $2,000 suitcases, whether they're marginally better than the alternatives should be the least of your concerns when the likelihood of your dismemberment exponentially increases.

I think this is a pretty compelling argument. I'd add that, the moat for HL was largely that it offered non KYC perps for the onchain crowd, and the product experience/UX was super good by crypto standards. But, I totally agree that upside has a ceiling when the TAM here has already well an truly been captured. The competing product offerings re total perps market share will be via these legacy/normie friendly platforms. Simply put, all of the upside of onchain usage of perps is currently captured, so an up only thesis on the token (unless it pivots to an everything chain) is currently capped. This may or may not be "fair value" rn, but the thesis dictates that very soon it will be.