TradFi adoption of crypto rails, altcoin DCA performance vs Bitcoin, and meme coin risks
Rob from Digital Asset News and Jerry from Costa Rica discuss macro conditions, crypto regulatory developments, and a four-year DCA comparison showing several altcoins outperforming Bitcoin.
Summary
Rob and Jerry cover a busy macro week featuring PPI and CPI data, with Jerry arguing the Fed will be forced to cut rates by year-end due to the $10 trillion debt refinancing challenge — regardless of inflation signals. They examine TradFi's deepening integration with crypto, including Kraken's smart order routing deal with SoFi and the SEC's moves to modernize transfer agent rules using blockchain and to formally classify Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP as commodities. The episode includes an extended discussion of Robinhood's layer-2 DEX (built on Arbitrum), which is generating roughly $3 billion in daily volume — nearly half of all DEX volume — driven largely by meme coin speculation, with Rob and Jerry warning viewers to treat meme coins as gambling rather than investing. A four-year daily DCA backtest shows Tron, Solana, and XRP all outperforming Bitcoin in total return, with Jerry arguing that staking blue-chip crypto assets represents a compounding investment strategy comparable to dividend reinvestment. The Q&A segment covers Jerry's biggest regret (watching a $23,000 investment reach $998,000 without taking profits), his approach this cycle (concentrating into a small number of high-conviction projects), concerns about a potential market shakeup from debt refinancing pressures, and a discussion of Tesla's robo taxi launch in Austin and its potential to disrupt ride-share economics.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and macro outlook for the week
Rob: It looks like TradFi needs a little bit of crypto, and we're going to take a look at some altcoin DCAing beating Bitcoin in the four-year time frame, which sounds ridiculous, but it is the truth. To help me out with that, we have, as ever, Jerry from Costa Rica. Jerry, how you doing?
Jerry: Hey Rob. Hello everyone.
Rob: Another great day and I've got another great tool. Back in the day we used to do this thing called Clown News, and it was fun. Every time we'd talk about something ridiculous — something stupid like from Dan Peña or something like that where he says Bitcoin is going to go to zero — I would put on the clown face. We lost that, and just recently this week I was able to gain it back with the help of Claude. As time goes on we'll do some fun stuff like this, maybe when I have to do math and things like that. But today I think is a pretty good day.
We can take a look real quick at what's going to happen in the upcoming week. This is a pretty pivotal week — but isn't it always, right? We've got some macroeconomic data coming out. We've got the Producer Price Index on Thursday. There's nothing going on on Monday — we're here in the States, it is Labor Day, so this is a three-day weekend holiday. Banks shut down, everything shuts down. We'll see what happens coming into Wednesday and Thursday, and then Friday comes the big one: the CPI print.
Jerry: Generally, the Fed will be operating under the guidance that the ongoing economy is its primary job. It wants to solidify the active economy that's happening right now. However, there's a backdrop — a bigger story that's kind of looming over everything, overarching every element — and that is the $10 trillion of government debt that needs to be refinanced.
When inflation numbers get high, the Fed generally can hike the interest rate to cool down borrowing. That's the whole function of a rate hike: to slow down the expansion of debt. Well, what we're seeing right now is the story of the refinancing of existing debt. Which one of those two macro events or elements of our economy is more dangerous?
Here's what I will tell you. If you hike the rate — if you're the Fed and you hike the rate and you make it harder for a new home buyer to buy a new home — you're going to drastically affect one of the more positive elements of our economy. Don't think for one second they're not under mandates to get homes sold. So I don't think we're living in the same world that we lived in four years ago as it pertains to what tools these institutions will use to try to affect the state of the economy.
I would not be surprised if by the end of this year the Fed is forced to lower rates. Now, they don't want to, because it encourages more debt. But here's the thing: debt is the only real driver of expansion. AI has not created that expansion yet. Robotics, although it promises to create that expansion of revenue and profitability and all of those wonderful things, it's not here today. The debt is. So I don't think you're going to see the same tools used for the same things now that we did four years ago, or during COVID, or the 2008 financial crisis.
Rob: Well said. Let's hope not. If we can actually cut rates — that unfortunately would increase inflation, and there's a dual mandate by the Fed: jobs and inflation. They did a great job with jobs. And people would say, "Well, that's just too much." It's a weird thing. Sometimes good news is bad news. But if we can keep inflation under control and they can hit this magical 2% number they've been talking about forever — and it seems like the last four years or so we can't hit those numbers — well, so much the better. We'll see if the Fed can turn things around. But this will be a very pivotal week.
Bitcoin resilience and ETF flows
Rob: Bitcoin has been quite resilient, especially with all the volatility going on, especially with this little skirmish going on in Iran. This morning I woke up kind of early and it was like $80,000. Now we're around $79,600. But this is a pretty good run for Bitcoin in quite a volatile market. I like to see this.
And on top of that, maybe — as friend of the show Wes over at Smart Money Tracking says — maybe it's just the smart money realizing what's actually happening and having some inside information. Who knows? But you can see the ETF flow and how great this was this week. We had an inflow from BlackRock — this was almost the highest in the last two weeks, almost half a billion dollars on September 3rd. We had $117 million on Friday, $454 million, $115 million, and we had a reduction on the 1st. But for the last two weeks or so, we're looking pretty good.
And if we zoom out and take a look at this, the spot ETF took a big tumble back after October 6th. But since May it went down, and here we are regaining things. As a reminder, I always like to look at this one because it makes me realize just how non-volatile it really has been compared to the last cycle. Jerry, remember the last cycle?
Jerry: 2022 — that was fun times.
Rob: Everything was collapsing. And of course then you had the pundits out there like the OG crypto critic Elizabeth Warren, who comes out and says this is just a scam and it's the worst thing of all time and illicit activity. And look — it was just greedy people doing greedy things. We saw Voyager, Celsius, FTX, BlockFi, Luna collapse, and we were at that point four years ago 70% down from the all-time high. Today we're at roughly 35 or 36%. I'll actually take that.
So Jerry, how are you dealing with this now? Because we talked about this on the 20-hour live stream — and thank you to everybody for donating, I really appreciate it, and to Krux and Stefan for having the guys on. How are you dealing with this week? Because it seems like this week has been very pivotal. Does it matter to you or are you just going to keep going forward?
Jerry: The one reassuring element for me around Bitcoin is that the world continues to view Bitcoin as sound money. This is really important in an era where a lot of free-flowing capital is chasing speculation — whether it was the promise of L1s back in the crypto boom or AI over the last three years. We're starting to see that maybe some of that AI capex expenditure may not get returned. In other words, the money that was invested in AI — there's probably a large portion of that that may not get returned to investors. It was overexuberance, no differently than the way the internet boom worked back in the mid-90s — what they call the dot-com era — where there was a tremendous amount of capex spent and not anywhere near the proportion that was spent was returned. We saw a lot of speculation, expansion, and then collapse.
I think we're in that same era for AI. Yes, there will be some winners. Yes, there will be some major productivity gains. But for the most part, out of the 5 million companies that are starting AI projects, probably only a hundred of them will be Amazon, Meta, Google ten years from now. And investors are thinking to themselves, "I need to capture gains. I can't lose X." So taking money out of the AI trade, backing out, withdrawing, cashing in — whatever you want to call it — and going back to sound money in an era where debt is getting funky and becoming headline news again. I think this is very logical, and I'm for one happy, because you and I have both been in that Bitcoin sound money camp for a long time. I think the world needs an anchor in soundness, in reason, in logic.
Rob: Yeah. And with AI, there's going to be some winners and a bunch of losers. I think Anthropic's IPO is the largest ever at two trillion plus. But I like your thesis, Jerry, about investing in Tesla as that becomes the umbrella for everything — for space, for AI, for underground tunneling, for X. We see all those things. And I just saw a little report — did you see this? The robo taxi just launched in Austin.
Jerry: Yeah.
Rob: Massively, wildly successful. And Elon actually talked about how — he goes, "You know, if you own one of these, this is like Airbnb and Uber put together."
Jerry: You can have this car come and pick you up, and then when you don't use it, you just send it off to go do some work and it brings in revenue. And you don't have to do anything. You just kind of sit back. This is why we talk about owning these assets. I think in the future I will probably pivot from real estate assets into vehicle assets — not junk, but maybe some robo taxis in the future.
TradFi integrating with crypto rails
Rob: Let's talk about TradFi. This is what it really comes down to. I'm always looking at the sectors to see what is the positivity of how we are shaping the traditional finance continuum. I know people will say, "Well, the banks are just going to take over and they're going to create their own chain. It's going to be permissioned, not permissionless. It's going to be centralized, not decentralized." And I have to remind everybody that banks are banks. Banks are a big huge conglomerate. If you've ever worked in a big company, you know how hard it is to be nimble and move things. You have to go through 20 layers of management just to get something done.
I still believe that the individual startups are going to do some great things, and stuff like this gives me hope. Kraken and SoFi are linking crypto trading to banking rails. Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken and fintech company SoFi, on Thursday announced a deal to route SoFi customers' crypto orders through Kraken's institutional trading platform and list SoFi's stablecoin on the exchange.
Rather than filling trades against a single order book, Kraken Prime uses smart order routing to compare prices and depth across multiple venues and execute where the fill is best. Let me just say it again: Kraken Prime uses smart order routing, compares prices and depth across venues, and executes where the fill is best. Execute is probably the lowest price for their customer, and they probably pocket the difference, which is pretty good. Before I go on — what does that sound like?
Jerry: Well, I don't know anything about this, so I'm learning about this from you right now in real time. But what it sounds like to me is Kraken plans to use a global market to fill orders. I'm a customer with Kraken. I come in with my user account. I put in an order and Kraken may go to a DEX. Kraken may go to another exchange like Binance. Kraken may go to Robinhood. This is dynamic, and it's actually at the core of what we built Compute Portal IO to do the same thing — not for trades but for compute resources like CPU, GPU, RAM, etc. It sounds perfect for the way I believe markets will shape as we move forward. They'll become more global. It sounds good and it's a cost-effective thing.
Rob: But there's a warning here. The warning is that I would hope Kraken would learn from past mistakes. I had one of the gentlemen on from Kraken — I'm going to be working with them a little more closely — and when they come on, I'm going to ask them this question. You guys are going to do smart routing, which is a pretty great thing. You know who else did that? ETrade did it. Very easy. And you know who was one of the CEOs of ETrade? Steve Ehrlich. He did a great job. And you know what he did? He then came forth with Voyager. And Voyager did the exact same thing. They said, "Hey, we're going to go across all these different exchanges, find you guys the best price, we'll pocket the difference, and we're going to save you some money." And if they would have just stuck with that, they would be here today.
Unfortunately, they did something very stupid and it screwed over a lot of people — that was Three Arrows Capital. Because of that, they collapsed. Three Arrows Capital collapsed. And it also wasn't that infrastructure. So we went through all that in 2022. I'm hoping that everybody has learned their lesson and doesn't get over their skis and does something stupid. So when I have Kraken on next time, I'm going to ask them this very specific question: are you going to do uncollateralized loans, and how are you protecting the customer? Because it's great to have this great technology, but you have to look at the past to know where you're going. Anyhow, not to get off subject — it's just me and my PTSD from 2022.
Lastly, Payward is also joining the SoFi Exchange Network, the bank's real-time settlement system, and will list SoFi USD, the stablecoin, on Kraken. I think this is a pretty big thing for Kraken. And as a reminder, Kraken is going to have their IPO in Q1 or Q2 of 2027 — not a bad time as we get out of this bear market.
SEC modernizing transfer agent rules and classifying crypto as commodities
Rob: We had talked about this a couple of days ago — the SEC. This is a statement from their actual newsroom. They proposed to modernize rules for registered transfer agents. Jerry can talk to this, but essentially transfer agents — when you buy a stock, they have to register everything. Who is this for? Where is this going? Where does the stock actually get held? Well, these transfer agents — the SEC under Paul Atkins is saying: we want to streamline this process and modernize it with blockchain rails or blockchain technology. As technology changes and the competitive marketplace evolves, good government requires revisiting legacy rules and regulations.
And they did this again two days ago. This is also from the SEC's official website and filings, from September 3rd, 2026. What they are talking about here is commodity-based trust shares. What this allows — and they've been able to do this for a while, but they're labeling specific digital assets or crypto as commodities. This was a big thing back in the day as far as the SEC versus CFTC debate: what's a commodity, what's a currency, what is a crypto, how do you distinguish that?
Well, they pretty much did this. What they did with this one is they said, "Look, up to 15% of the assets can be not just the ones that we deem as commodities, but they can be other cryptos that we do not deem as commodities." And the question you're probably having right now is: which ones are the commodities? Well, a commodity-based trust holds — and this is just an example — the values of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Those are the ones they have distinguished as commodities. Moving forward, I don't make the rules. I just show who's picking the winners.
And there was another segment on XRP — Alex Jones did a big long segment on the government taking your money and XRP. I was like, huh? Maybe winners are getting chosen. Good for XRP holders. Anyhow, go ahead, Jerry.
Jerry: It's great that you're bringing up what regulatory systems are labeling these assets that we've been dealing with for the last seven, eight years. Knowing that XRP, Solana, Ethereum, and Bitcoin are labeled commodities, we can then begin to know how to handle them, how to deal with them, how to address them. To build business, to bring forth true utility, there needs to be an atmosphere, an environment for that to happen. When there is clarity on an asset like XRP or Solana or Ethereum or Bitcoin, real businesses can build businesses that create true utility — therefore something that's in the market people can use with trust. That's worth investing in. Something that is opaque and unknown is a much higher risk. So I'm all in favor of identifying these assets that real businesses can build real products on that get real utility in marketplaces, because that is how the value is going to accrue. We need to move away from speculation and into utility, and that is the direction.
Robinhood DEX volume and meme coin risks
Rob: That is the direction. But just so everybody knows, speculation is a big huge driver and there are a lot of people that will look into that. The utility is there and it's growing, but the speculation I still believe will massively run up prices, and that's what we're seeing right now with Robinhood.
We talked about this yesterday. Robinhood's layer-2 solution is built on Arbitrum, which is a layer-2 solution of Ethereum. We see here that dollar daily DEX volume pushes Uniswap burn past a million. I didn't really think too much about this as I was looking through it. As I remember from yesterday, we talked about these meme coins on Robinhood, and these Robinhood people who are getting into that — they're going to learn something. They're going to learn something about loss. They're going to learn something about pain. Because meme coins can only end in one way, and that is a gamble, and that is people losing. Now, does that mean you shouldn't get into it? I'm not saying that — I bought Ponds yesterday. I'm just saying if you're going to gamble, know that you're gambling. You're not investing. You're gambling.
But it was interesting that they did $3 billion. What does that mean for the entire crypto space? Well, take a look at DeFi Llama. The DEX volume for all DEXes is $7.18 billion in the last 24 hours. That means Robinhood is essentially half — which is not too bad, considering they've only been doing this for a matter of months.
That would come down to meme coins. If you get into it, I'm always looking for patterns. I remember there was one called Pump.fun — it's still around, it's from Solana, and it actually launched in July of 2025. Didn't do much at all — this was after all the meme coins had essentially gone up and run up and then collapsed. Now Ponds is essentially the Pump.fun of meme coins for Robinhood, and it's gone straight vertical. I think it's up like 3,000% and now it's in the top 100 in about seven weeks.
But there are some differences between the two, because in 2025 there was a big run-up and then it kind of just fizzled out. I think with Ponds right now, what's going on is that we're coming out of the bear market, so people are just looking for gains anywhere they can. So I need to stress this: if you're going to do that, just realize that it's gambling. When things double, take out half and then play with the house money. Or when things triple, take out your initial investment plus the 2x and then let the rest go, or just ladder out. And if it stalls and it's taking too long, you're not a community member — you're just a sucker and you're exit liquidity. Get the hell out of there.
When I talk about Ponds and these types of things — over seven days it looks pretty good, but look at the last 24 hours. If you're going to get into it, or the other one we talked about, Hashfi — it's there, but it is risky. Before I get on to the DCA versus altcoins, Jerry, what are your thoughts?
Jerry: Gambling is as old as history. There is a part of human psychology that likes it, and some people have a larger appetite than others. But I think it's really important that we acknowledge and call it what it is. Call a spade a spade. Meme coins are a gamble. They're not an investment. I had a conversation with my son Dylan just a couple of days ago.
Rob: He's big on Robinhood. Robinhood is his favorite deal.
Jerry: And he's doing the same thing. I just had to say, "Dylan, you have to understand — even though Robinhood is an investment platform, when you are chasing memes, you're not investing." We had that father-son conversation about that. I'm not sure he completely got it. We'll find out. Maybe he needs to feel the pain of what it feels like when you wake up and it's gone. Maybe he needs to feel that. I know that most of your viewers don't need to go through that because you and I have gone through that for them.
Rob: Or they've done it themselves.
Jerry: Or they've done it themselves. Exactly.
Rob: The kids got to learn. The best way to learn —
Jerry: I learned. I did it with what they call liquidity pool yield farming.
Rob: Oh yeah, those were good days.
Jerry: Boy, did I lose my ass on that.
Rob: We've all been there, Jerry. We've all been there. And this is why I like the people that are here now — it's not like going into a blowoff top where I get a bunch of ridiculous questions. Everybody here in the chat group and watching the video, they've already been here. They already know what's going on. They know what time it is. So this is just keeping them updated as they dollar cost average and probably ladder out as time goes on.
Four-year altcoin DCA backtest vs Bitcoin
Rob: That would lead us to our last thing before we get to the Q&A. Talking about altcoins isn't a very popular thing, which is why you should talk about it when there are potentially some big opportunities. We just took a look at which ones are being chosen. We can take a look at Visa's onchain analytics site again — it's the best. It's the Binances, the Ethereums, the Solanas, Tron, BTC, and also XRP. So you could say XRP is best if you want to go down that route.
The question then was: okay, we're DCAing — how are we doing across the continuum going four years back? Not everything's perfect, obviously. Four-year cycles, but things are looking pretty good. I do believe, like Jerry talked about, especially as we move into these macroeconomic cycles, we're going to see some pretty big gains because assets will outdo the paper nonsense that is fiat cash.
So take a look at this. I just did a quick example. I went back four years to September 6th, 2022. I want to put $20 into Bitcoin daily. I'm not a baller like Jerry — I can't put in a thousand bucks a day or whatever he does. But if you're doing stuff like this, remember that back then you had to get out of the bear market and it's like you were throwing sand in the ocean for a while. You put $20 here, the value was $350, but you're down five, you're down one, you're up a little bit, and it just keeps going like that. You're down 17% — that sucks, stop crying. Then 10%. And then you're in 2023 and you're still down. Boohoo. So you just keep doing it because you're stubborn like me and you just keep putting it in.
And then of course over here, around October 6th, you were up 200%. Not too bad. All you had to do — you invested $22,000 and the value is $70,000. That's just on Bitcoin. And if you would have sold some — which I didn't, I didn't sell near the top — we come over here and then of course we're on $60K. And now look at this: as of today, if you would have held everything through, you'd still be up. You invested $20,000 and you've got $45,510. That's if you took no profits and you just kept putting $20 a day.
Now check this out. I'm going to put in BNB, Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and also XRP for the XRP army. Same thing — you're putting $20 a day into everything, which would be a little bit pricey. You're looking at $20, $40, $60, $80, $100, $120 — that's my math skills at work. Anyhow, the same thing: you're losing your tail in 2022. Look at this — you're down 50% on Solana.
Jerry: You could not share that with your wife.
Rob: No, no, no. Not marriage advice, but don't tell her — or don't tell him anything. They don't need to know. This is on a need-to-know basis. So we're doing this and we're not telling our spouses, and we're putting it in, and now we're like, "Hey, look at this. Fire up the truck, time to go to Costco. Things are looking pretty good. Maybe get a hot dog, maybe some frozen custard."
And then we keep doing this. Now I want you to notice where Bitcoin is in this section — you're still doing pretty good. But look at this in 2024: Solana and Bitcoin and BNB are almost the same, except Solana is outperforming. And then as we get further into this, look where Bitcoin is in 2024 — Solana crushed it, XRP killed it, Tron, and Bitcoin is number four. I know people will say, "Well, you're cherry-picking." No — I could put in a bunch of different ones over there and they outperform. Now, will they all outperform? I wish that was the case, but that's not how it works.
And again, you have to take a look at which ones are being chosen as the winners by TradFi, because those are the ones that will lead to speculation and will also have real utility — which is the cocktail for what you need for price appreciation. Bitcoin comes up a little bit. Not too bad. And then again in 2025, XRP is number one, Solana at number two, Tron, Bitcoin, and BNB the lag. But look at Ethereum — down again for the first time. And then off we go.
As of today, if you would have held everything through, Tron would have crushed it at 206%. Solana 137%, XRP 114%, and Bitcoin and BNB almost tied. That's the reality. I still say there is value — and Jerry said it perfectly — we need to get away from speculation where possible and go to utility. I'm looking at the utility and we took a look at those stories. I think there's utility there. It's going to change some things. But are you diversified enough to say, "I want to put a little bit into this, maybe not so much Bitcoin"? Whatever you want to do — we're not financial advisors, and my goals are not your goals. If you're Michael Saylor listening to this, it probably isn't for you.
Jerry, what are your thoughts on everything we just talked about there?
Jerry: I always compare and contrast where I can put my dollar and what kind of value it can create for me. If I put a dollar into Tesla, I think I'm putting a dollar into a company that's going to be here in 20 years, that's going to continue to create products and services that get used by the public. I think that company is going to continue to increase in value. So when I buy a share of Tesla, I'm buying it thinking that it's going to accrue.
When I compare and contrast that to what's going on in the crypto space, I can already see there are winners — very much like Tesla — in the crypto space. Tron, Ethereum, Solana — these are chains or projects that have real-world value, real-world utility today. I can put a dollar, buy a token, and here's the great thing — this is what Tesla does not give me: I can stake that token and earn more tokens over time without putting more dollars in as an investment. This is compounding, no differently than a dividend reinvestment program.
We've already established stablecoins are here. It's a market that is only going to grow as the digital expansion of value exchange grows and agentic commerce comes into play. In essence, we already have some blue-chip crypto projects that we can put our money into in the form of their coins, put those coins into a staking mechanism, and compound not only the value of the token itself but the quantity of the tokens that we will have in our portfolio over time. This is the holy grail of investing in my opinion.
And yes, I want to speculate on projects like Tao and things of that nature and hope that they do stuff. But if I can buy a winner in a vertical that is only going to expand over time — that many other segments of the industry are tying into — we already know Visa and Mastercard are tying into these projects. We're seeing Tether and Circle grow and grow and grow because they're useful and they've got great business models.
Rob: They did a good job. Tether did great.
Jerry: It's just a golden age. And there's going to be some winners and a lot of losers. How many altcoins are out there? They're all mostly worthless. There'll be tens of thousands of losers in the crypto space, but the industry has already showed us at least three winners. If you don't hold those three winners, then maybe you need to ask yourself: am I really investing or am I gambling?
Rob: We're all gambling. But just to kick back on that before we get to the questions for Jerry — when you said hold all three, I think you only have to hold like one good one. Imagine if you're like, "Okay, I'm going to hold Pets.com and I'm going to hold Purple Shoes dot net and I'm also going to have Amazon." All you got to do is just get with Amazon and congratulations. But who knew? Who knew in 1996 Amazon would be what it is? Pets.com was a very promising project sitting next to an online bookstore. Look at all the people that own pets — dogs, cats, rabbits, snakes, frogs, gerbils, hamsters. Pets.com was like, "Oh my god, this could really be something." Online bookstore? Why would I want an online bookstore? I can walk to Barnes & Noble.
Jerry: Right. So you don't know. But what we do know in the crypto space is that Tron, Solana, and Ethereum are producing stablecoins that the digital world of value exchange is adopting.
Rob: Which is the big thing — they are. So good one, Jerry. Excellent job. The best job of all time.
Q&A with Jerry
Rob: We've got a bunch of questions and we cannot let people down. This is a good one: what is Jerry's biggest regret in crypto?
Jerry: That's easy. The very biggest regret is when I was looking at my telephone and on my smart screen I saw my crypto portfolio on a $23,000 investment. The value of my portfolio was $998,000 — and I did not take profits. And then I watched for the next year as that value just absolutely plummeted. So that was the biggest regret. And then that biggest regret manifested itself in other regrets. It wasn't an isolated regret. It was a regret that put me in a position where I started chasing gains, which created other regrets. But the biggest regret was having this massive windfall of profit and not cashing in a large chunk of it.
Rob: They say investments can compound. Well, so can regrets. Compounding regrets. 2022 was a year of compounding regrets.
I can see it. I'm the same way. My biggest regret was not really digging into — and it's difficult — Celsius and Voyager, and calling them my one-two punch. It's okay if I lose, but as people listen to the show, it got me so angry with Mashinsky and just how badly they screwed that up, and what it could have been. I heard some rumblings at the Consensus conference in Austin. Came back, did a video, nine hours later they're done, they've collapsed. Voyager comes out, they have a public filing because I believe they were like a public company in Canada or something, and it came out they had uncollateralized loans. I talked about that for two weeks and I said, "Hey, if you've done loans before, you know you can't do uncollateralized loans. That's stupid. You can still use them, but you've got to take it off." And then they collapsed two weeks later. It's four years ago and it still makes me angry.
Jerry: I am staking it. I love it. I'm getting more every day.
Rob: So this is the follow-up: are you buying right now actively or just staking?
Jerry: Not buying — but here's the point. When I acquire a yield, when I buy 10 coins and put them into a staking mechanism, I look back over a year and I have three more. That was just like buying three more. I acquired three more. So when I say I'm acquiring more, that is exactly what I'm talking about. I made an investment, I'm staking it, and over time I will have more than I started with. To me, that's a huge win. If it becomes a successful endeavor, great. If it isn't, then I lost my initial investment. Oh well.
Rob: How about this one: will we see a crash in these stock markets soon? I know you're investing heavily into Tesla — what do you think?
Jerry: Am I concerned that there is $10 trillion of debt that needs to get refinanced — that was obtained at 0, 1, and 2% — and rates to refinance now are in the fives? Absolutely, I'm concerned. And could that create market instability? You bet. Do I think it will be long lasting? Do I see us going into a 1930s-type depression? No. But do I see a big shakeup? Absolutely. It's very possible. Don't get caught up in the idea that nothing bad can happen to us.
Rob: I was listening to the All In podcast — it was David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya — and they were talking back and forth about when they were in the dot-com era. They asked them, "Is this the '99 time frame?" — like a little bit earlier, '97, '98, as we're going into it. And they said, because they've been around and they've invested into it, they said no — they go, "It feels like this is just the big run-up. But at some point there's going to be a blowoff and there's going to be a lot of losses." They said people are always talking about how awful the stock market is or it's going to collapse any time. They said, once we get past these IPOs that are coming out — they mentioned Anthropic specifically — you're going to see that potentially. But they're saying this could be a ways out. And the people that are saying doom and gloom have been saying this for a year, two years. Michael Burry — I remember in 2024 he said, "Get out." And since then he's missed out massively. There's going to be some point where it actually comes to a realization. I just don't think it's going to come tomorrow.
How about this one, Jerry: what are you doing differently this cycle?
Jerry: This cycle I'm not blindly chasing the entire market. When that portfolio had a value of $998,000, there must have been 70 assets in there. I am not following the market, and I don't believe the market as a whole will continue to expand. I think all the value is going to accrue into a relative handful of projects — no differently than the way the S&P 500 is mainly made up of zombie companies, and it's only that top 10 companies in the S&P that are responsible for the growth of the entire index. So I'm selecting a small handful of companies that I put my money into, and I'm not getting concerned with the others because I think they're more like Pets.com than Amazon.
Rob: Good one. How about this one: do you actively stake Tao or do you just hold it?
Jerry: I actively stake it. I've got the app on my phone.
Rob: How do you do that? You buy Tao, you download the app, you stake it — like, I'm going to guess there's a Tao app?
Jerry: Yeah, it's from Tao. It's from Bittensor.
Rob: Okay. So everybody, what I want you to do — first of all, I'm going to put out my Bitcoin wallet address. If you send me one Bitcoin, I will send you the equivalent of two Bitcoin in Tao. Just kidding. Jerry, you've got to tell me what that app is so we can find it and not lead people astray.
Jerry: It's just called Bittensor, but hang on.
Rob: Everybody, if you're looking for the official place to go and find stuff — websites and apps — I always start with CoinGecko and I take a look at the actual product, the actual token itself. Here's Tao, right? And here's the contract address, which is very important if you're going to do decentralized stuff. If you put in "TAO," you might get like 30 different tokens — Bit Tao and Tao Awesome and Tao Alonga Dingdong or whatever — and you're like, "Which one is it?" If you get the contract address, you're good. Here's the official websites, the documents, the white paper, wallets, community. How about this — I bet if I go here to the website, is this what you're talking about, Jerry? The wallet?
Jerry: Yeah. It's tao.com — bittensor.tao.com.
Rob: So it's probably tao.com wallet?
Jerry: Yep, that's it right there.
Rob: The reason why I didn't want to just type that in — not to go against anything the great Jerry's saying — but I want you to go to the official websites and find it. So you're not going to some fake bittensor.com wallet. There you go. Hope that answers your question.
One guy told me in 2021: when you start to look at sports cars that you don't fit into, or jet skis when you don't live by the water, you should probably sell some — because you've got so much money you're like, "Hey, I really need to do this."
Here's a good one: biggest project or narrative in crypto that has not come to fruition that you expected it to?
Jerry: When I got into crypto specifically in 2018, I was very heavy into XRP and the narrative was that products like XRP would 100% take over the financial plumbing of the world. Therefore the value would accrue to the XRP token. Completely logical, completely made sense. A company like Ripple was making a lot of progress with real-world banks and financial institutions.
What we have seen — and this is the thing that did not come to fruition, and I don't know if it ever will — we have seen stablecoins take that route. Stablecoins have become the plumbing for financial institutions. Therefore, if a USDC or a Tether or a PayPal stablecoin or a Robinhood stablecoin — if they're the vehicle of value exchange, and their value is predicated on debt instruments like bonds and bills backing them, then how does value really accrue to a coin like XRP? I don't know. Hard to say. And so that's probably been the biggest narrative that I thought the technology would create, and we're watching it take a different turn. We're watching it go a real direction. I'd say that was the largest narrative that has not come to fruition.
Rob: Yeah. And I've got to tell you, I thought that Ethereum would be much higher as far as price action, because you need Ethereum for all the gas fees and such. But then when you take a look at it behind the scenes and say, "Well, how much gas fees are actually being generated by, say, Robinhood, which is on a layer-2 solution — Arbitrum or Base?" It's pennies. I mean, it's millions of dollars every year, but when you take a look at it, investors are like, "That's not enough. It really should be a little bit more." And now here we are. Yeah, it's a good point.
Steo says: "Solana had outages over two years ago and fixed their issue and added three validator clients. They've had 100% uptime for over two years now and are killing it." Not to be said, you know? That's what everybody would attack Solana on — "Ah, it always goes down." It's been two years. But even if it goes down tomorrow, I've got to tell you, it's had more uptime than my bank. My bank doesn't work. My bank's not working today, not working tomorrow. As far as 24/7, 365 — not too bad.
Tesla robo taxi economics and insurance
Rob: Ryan says: "How's the insurance going to work for a Tesla self-driving car that you're going to use as a taxi? Better have great credit and money. Start doing it. Seems like a great idea more than just getting one."
What we were talking about is these robo taxis that have been rolled out in Austin. They look pretty cool. There's no steering wheel, no gas pedal, no brake — none of that stuff. You come in, it takes you where you want to go, and then leaves to the next one. And what Elon was saying was you could have a fleet of these if you wanted to. The starting cost is $30,000. You buy however many you want, use it to go from point A to point B, and when you're not using it, you send it out to do ride shares — like Uber or Lyft. If I was the CEO of Uber or Lyft, I would be very worried about this.
But it's a good question about insurance. I'm not sure if they're going to do this, but I would assume they would do some type of insurance to use it, and they would take a cut. Here's how it works: Airbnb. Jerry's got a house right by the waterfall. He wants people to come and stay at it. He signs up for Airbnb, lists it on their platform, and now has millions of people to reach out to. Once they book with him, Jerry's going to get dinged 15%. And Airbnb is going to say, "Sorry, sucker. That's just how it works." And you're going to be happy with that for two reasons. First, you have the visibility that you didn't have before. Second, you have a million-dollar insurance product behind that. So if somebody screws up your house really bad, they have everything on file, they can try to get it from the person, and if they don't have it, the million dollars goes to Jerry. Everybody's good.
I think it's the same thing here with the cars. Let's say you pick up some drunks — they throw up in your car, they destroy your car. If it was smart, and I just took a look at the prices — they took a Cybercab robo taxi from an Uber-type drive and it was like 35 to 40% less than what it cost the other one. So they would probably take 10 to 15% out of everybody who is using it and give them insurance. And then the next thing is: what if you get into an accident and somebody's paralyzed? Is a million dollars even going to cover it? I don't have the answer for that. Jerry, that was a long statement — what do you think?
Jerry: I think actuaries are already building models around this. The insurance game, believe me, is on top of this. As far as Uber and Lyft go — the company Uber and the company Lyft don't care if the provider of a ride is named John or Robo Taxi. They are an aggregator. Here's where Uber and Lyft would get their feathers ruffled: if, for instance, Rob and I in San Juan, Puerto Rico had 10 of these robo taxis and we created our own app and called it Robo Taxi Puerto Rico and cut Uber and Lyft out of the equation. That's where. But how many taxi companies did Uber and Lyft just disrupt?
Rob: Many.
Jerry: Many. And so I think this is going to be really interesting. I'm really looking forward to it. I think you're going to see entirely new business models where people are owning small fleets of these things. They have a little maintenance crew — the crew that's responsible for actually plugging in the charger, cleaning the vehicle, washing the vehicle, doing maintenance on the vehicle. So instead of a driver driving, that human will be washing, vacuuming, cleaning, adding lubricant, changing a battery, changing tires — blah blah blah.
Rob: Blah blah blah. Yeah. Speaking of lubricants, I've got to go deal with the IRS.