Talk to Pima: From Meme Coins to Launch Platforms, the Investment Logic Behind Stud Culture
Arranged & Compiled by: Deep Wave TechFlow
Air Date: May 24, 2025
Podcast Source: Web3 101
[anchor]
Liu Feng, BODL Ventures Partner, Former Editor-in-Chief of Chainwen
Xiong Haojun Jack, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Groove BlockBeats, anchor of “Web3 Unknown Tales”
[Guest]
Pima，Continue Capitalco-founder
The legendary investor in the cryptocurrency world visited Web3 101 to discuss why he believes Meme is immortal and the investment logic of the Meme launch platform, and that the investment theme of the cryptocurrency world changed in the eyes of Pima after the era we live in completely changed.
Cosmos Meme Reflections: The Siphon Effect and Matthew Effect of Mobility
Liu Feng: As an OG, you used to be on the public chain,DeFiThere are impressive achievements in the field, but in today's crypto investment world, OG feels like a curse word. The best thing right now is the story of Junior General P becoming Field Marshal P. What do you think of this trend?
Pirates:
I'm a very experienced Memecoin participant. On the one hand, I worked a lot on Solana during this cycle. I participated in all of Solana's Memecoins, including the earliest BONK, WIF, BOME, POP CAT, and later GOAT, as well as a number of projects that were defeated by the fittest.
At the time, we took it for grantedSolanaMeme is recovering, and other public chains will definitely recover to some extent, so after Solana lays out BONK, goCosmos 和 AvalancheWaiting for the ecosystem to find a layout similar to Memecoin seemed to me at the time to be quite seamless.
But I overlooked the liquidity siphon effect and the Matthew effect. It actually ended after you participated in the first wave. You think it still has a second and third wave, but in fact, it completed its historical mission in the early rebound phase, and the remaining mainstream capital attention will return to some on-chain ecosystems centered around Solana at the time.
I've shared before that Memecoin accounts for about 1% to 3% of the public chain market value, and in extreme conditions, it may reach 5%. I did a lot of observations and statistics at the time and came to the conclusion that the top Memecoin accounted for 1% to 5% of the current public chain market value over a certain period of time. There were several outstanding cases in this range, such as DOGE and SHIB, but I excluded them.
Later, with the development of the coin industry, you will find that Solana is completely unsuited to this system. A large number of Memecoins have sprung up, showing a completely different atmosphere from other ecosystems.
This is entirely determined by Solana's retail investors. Solana is a market with retail investors at the core. This determines that the birth of the Solana ecosystem has many tracks and fields that can easily bring emotions, volatility, and a high degree of marketability to retail investors. On the one hand, I want to observe the entire Solana ecosystem, and on the other hand, I am willing to actively participate in Memecoin, a circuit that has established liquidity, participation, and a broad user base, and is relatively not that mainstream.
How can you make money in Memecoin's behavioral finance feast?
Liu Feng: If I want to invest in Memecoin, how can I make money? This is a particularly rough question.
Pirates:
Basically 90% of my Memecoin is on Solana, or even higher, and I don't pay attention to other coins on any other chain. This market has evolved an optimal solution for you; you're just looking for a second alternative on this optimal solution.
The core reason for looking for the second alternative is that you didn't get any kind of results in the optimal solution, or were not involved; you were just looking for that kind of increase to make up, and this is very easy for people to fall into an investment trap. You'll find that once you get in, it either doesn't rise, or it tortures your body completely between ups and downs. Another core point is that it's hard to fall back. You'll find that when Solana's head meme retracts 30%, your 200% profit is gone, and the retracement is very fast. Therefore, in any investment system, I basically don't pursue the ultimate settling of pockets for security. I personally think it's a very difficult thing if you want to try to dodge the first bullet of the entire market, from cow to bear. Crypto is 7 x 24 hours, and you can't keep an eye on all market fluctuations in real time, which inevitably means it's easy to float and difficult to fall into the bag.
The role of the leader is that it gives you a second chance to reach a high point and give you an attempt to make a profit, so basically just focus on the leader.
Second, I think that when investing in Memecoin, people often focus on a short and flat speed. In fact, from my personal experience of getting big results, short and flat speed may not be suitable for medium and above investors, unless you are particularly small.
Quick players are often only attracted to short-term attention and don't consider Memecoin's core operating logic. Memecoin is split into a horizontal axis and a vertical axis, and the x axis is time. The y-axis is the market value. You will find that the market value of the vast majority of Memecoins is proportional to time. Time is a very important concept. With the exception of rare cases such as BOME and TRUMP, all current Memecoins worth more than 1 billion US dollars have basically been in operation for more than half a year. Less time is a factor, and many assumptions are untrue.
I think Memecoin is a feast for behavioral finance a lot of the time.
One of the founders of behavioral finance is Richard Saylor, who is also a Nobel Prize winner. He divided the original investment system into two types, one is a savings account and the other is an entertainment account. Memecoin as a whole has strong entertainment account attributes and functions. Daniel Kahneman also wrote a very famous thought before. He basically divided people into two types of systems: System 1 requires thinking, logical, and rational, and consumes a lot of energy; System 2 is simple, direct, and fast, and doesn't require much effort. Reflected into the crypto field, Memecoin is perfectly compatible with system two, is fast, effective, and highly volatile, and satisfies some of our FOMO emotional and funded operations.
I read a paper in the first two weeks, saying that one person's investment decision process probably won't take more than 6 minutes. Now it's even 6 seconds. This is very similar to many of our investment decisions. I'm actually very impulsive. Of course, I'm impulsive because I've clearly thought out the basic beta or savings account, and I only have a lot of time and energy to find more possibilities in the Alpha market. A very important challenge of behavioral finance to traditional finance is that everyone is irrational. What you think is rational is only living in your own information cocoon, people live in huge noise, and most people don't have the ability to discern noise.
Taken together, I think Memecoin is a huge development in behavioral finance. If we develop theoretical systems related to behavioral finance later, we can actually use some Memecoin data as research samples.
Three questions for souls: Dare you buy it? Do you dare to buy it again? Can you hold it when it falls?
Liu Feng: From the past few cycles, we learned the seamless investment logic you wrote, until today we probably only look at volatility and whether Meme's social consensus can quickly attract liquidity. Do you think this situation can continue?
Pirates:
In fact, the reason why many investments are difficult is because the times are changing, and the structure of investors, the age group of investors, and the income level of investors are all changing.
Let me start by saying that Memecoin will continue to evolve; this isn't just about Crypto. In my system, the crypto sector is not a separate market; it is completely related and synchronized with the development of the world. People who haven't caught up with the dividends of the times, people who have been eliminated by globalization, and people who have been solidified by class and have no direction or investment opportunities. They use a rebellious mentality and refuse to vote a large number of votes for those elites, whether it's US tariffs. The rise of new nationalism in Europe, including the rise of conservatism on the right side of Australia, is undergoing a new wave of nationalism around the world. The mapping of this trend in real life is condensed into slogans such as All in and One Shuttle. This trend is not only in the crypto field, but globally.
I think the rise of nationalism has injected great strength into the Memecoin market and other niche markets and speculative markets. With the development of AI and peer-to-peer Internet information technology, this power will have a big impact on traditional financial markets.
You are following Mr. P because he brought a lot of chips and results. This one is the most impactful, communicative, and attention-grabbing. I myself would avoid sharing practical plans, but many other Twitter users will use it to gain huge exposure. On the other hand, we are now focusing on information equality. People have very limited attention. When you pay a lot of attention to General P, you definitely won't do in-depth research on the theoretical system; the core goes back to the old three: would you dare to buy it? If you bought it, would you dare to buy it again? Can you hold on to your heavy position when it falls?
Many times, you only get results, but you don't have the decision-making thinking process behind getting the results, so even if you know the results, you still won't buy them, don't dare to buy them, don't buy them in a heavy position, and you won't keep holding them all the time.
With the advent of a lonely society, selling demand is more attractive than selling products for niche racetracks. What is the demand in the crypto sector? In other words, a sense of psychological identity. Memecoin users form a small group and community, bringing strong psychological identity, and this community of extreme identity only strengthens itself. Unfortunately, Pump has launched more than 1 million Memecoins, but only a few have survived. This state of excessive participation and excessive lack of results can create a very rebellious situation: seeing that others have achieved good results can be very stimulating for oneself, making more diligent, making further mistakes in making wrong choices, and then affecting the mentality even more. Unable to focus on analysis and summary, it is even harder to get results. It's a very vicious cycle.
Memecoin is a very interesting social phenomenon, but fewer and fewer people are watching it.
More Focus on Meme Infrastructure: Which LaunchPads Are Worth Studying?
Jack:
Many memes may not have particularly big results even if they are reversed 100 times. So what is the purpose of your frequent participation in small to medium memes?
Pirates:
This is the temperature of market participation. I need to participate in the market with the most liquidity and the largest number of retail investors. I'm discussing Memecoin, not about what kind of results Memecoin can bring me. For our investments, I'm probably more concerned about Memecoin infrastructure, such as DEX, LaunchPad, etc. These are two completely different systems, which you can understand as left-handed beta and right-handed alpha. For me, under the premise that my beta work was already very solid, I set aside some time and effort to invest in the Memecoin market to feel market trends.
The best thing about the crypto field is that you can feel the flow of global capital markets with very small observations. All Memecoins have gone to zero, and there are no major losses for us. However, every time the Memecoin market is mirrored and related to other investment markets, it's just that most people don't feel much about it. We need to consider the allocation of global capital. These targets only serve my core beta choices, so participating in Memecoin is just to confirm some logic. Let's make a more reasonable assessment of some of Beta's core targets.
Liu Feng: I actually understand your logic. The meme investment logic you shared earlier, why do you only want to get real profit from memes with large market capitalization? This is related to your size, and it's completely different from what many people call the logic of changing your life by investing in memes. Maybe retail investors just want to talk about Alpha, but Beta is more important to you.
This era is actually the Memecoin era. Meme is already the voice of the times; we should not deny it; we should accept it.
Well, in this case, we can take a look at the beta and see the meme launch platforms that have gone through several generations of evolution. Can you introduce which operational launch platforms you can look at and which you think are still worth studying?
Pirates:
The one that caught my eye the most was Pump.fun (hereinafter referred to as Pump). Actually, they don't have much innovation, but the core business model of Crypto is transaction fees. As much market share can you occupy from this business model, how much cash flow you have, I can give you an estimate. Pump has met the need for asset issuance. With this product integrated into Memecoin's huge demand, the two parties will hit it off, have endless supply, and infinite intangible pursuit of ultra-high retail investors, so you'll see asset distribution platforms springing up.
Consumer retail investors are a group of highly financialized people in the crypto field. They have a high sense of risk. They have a high impulse to play games, and you need to design products based on their impulse. Where do retail investors spend their money? When it comes to transaction fees only, they would rather pay you more fees and try to beat Memecoin. He's not an idiot, why is he paying such a high MEV priority fee? Because he felt that the benefits would cover the costs.
We position Crypto retail investors as an extremely financialized group. We launch all of our products around their needs. This is one of the key factors in Pump.fun's success, including Virtuals, which later made AI, and a LaunchPad. Both meet the strong demand for asset issuance, so we have observed that this launch platform is a very good investment target. Memecoins can die a thousand, ten thousand, and there will be successive Memecoins, but a good launch platform can solidify your capital, profit, and truly win, and capture the greatest value in capturing the entire Memecoin operating trend or trend.
Launch platforms and public chains: attracting developers is the core
Jack: Now that Virtuals is on Solana, for example, do you think it's too late? You only get one chance?
Pirates:
For any launch platform, you need to understand its supply and demand. Who will supply the launch platform? This is a very important factor. Many suppliers of Pump are anonymous. Virtuals has certain options, but of course they are also anonymous, so if you go to see how good or bad any launch platform is, you should pay close attention to revenue.
As for launch platforms, my evaluation system is exactly the same as DEX. In fact, to another extent, launch platforms are a bit similar to public chains, but no one has raised the two to the same level.
As a launch platform, the core capability is how to attract developers. This is exactly the same as public chain logic. Why should developers go to A instead of B? This is something worth thinking deeply about. It is the most important issue in determining the future direction of launch platforms and public chains.
Because the experiential side of the service is occupied by a large number of retail users, we usually think that launch platforms, including the public chain, are a TOC market, but in fact, in my opinion, they are a TOB market. Without good assets and good developers to enter, your public chain/launch platform will never be able to do it.
The most important thing about public chains and launch platforms is future cash flow revenue. This depends on continuous transaction volume, and transaction volume depends on continuous diversification, so how to attract excellent developers to your launch platform is the core. It's actually very easy to conquer retail investors. As long as you have good assets, retail investors can smell it.
Of course, whether it's a public chain or launch platform, many times test some marketing methods and methods, but without the injection of high-quality assets, it is difficult to do a launch platform or public chain for a long time.
Believe's unique market positioning
Pirates:
I think Believe's go-to-market strategy is right. App developers need a lot of financing, but they almost never get it. Believe's supply side is an independent developer. They develop a large number of apps every year, hoping to achieve positive cash flow for apps, but they don't have the right channels to monetize and finance apps. If the market is niche, it will not be possible to achieve a market capitalization of 1 billion or 10 billion dollars.
Believe focuses on this group of independent developers, or those who want to try out new fields and new directions. Crypto retail investors have a very high level of risk awareness and tolerance. The core thing is that its market value is very low. This has long been possible a hundred times or a thousand times. Believe directly draws on some of the experiences of other launch platforms, namely cost sharing with these developers, which is very good, and achieved positive cash flow for independent developers during the cold launch phase.
In the traditional field, making an app requires many people to do a lot of work, including development and marketing, but in Crypto, it's not important whether the product succeeds or not, but once it is successfully launched, it can distribute hundreds of thousands of US dollars in cash flow within a short week. This is a very impressive amount of revenue for independent developers. Once they have this kind of positive cash flow, they can continue to polish products, expand markets, and serve users.
This actually explains why this model is called the Internet capital market. It satisfies the strong demand of a large number of small developers and small and micro enterprises with financing difficulties, frees up the supply side, and is very in line with the trend. With the advent of AI, independent developers alone can generate very good annualized revenue, and your promotion and operation can completely use TikTok and Twitter to spread the virus.
But do you think it's possible for a very big, very good company to emerge on the Believe platform? I'm actually not convinced. I'm observant about this, but what I really believe is that Believe is a very good solution to the niche market. This niche market serves a small group of people, and serves very targeted customers. They make this portion of the money, which means they don't need to grow big, but they have their market.
Also, what impressed me about Believe is their careful planning and packaging, and their page design is quite careful. In addition, they focus on launching some projects and activities. They try to tell a story. In addition to the crypto field, they can also connect with other market niches. These traditional internet developers are unfamiliar with encryption. This process must be the same as the first wave of AI. I personally think it will die out thousands of such projects. This is a familiar and adaptable process. We are slowly watching.
Liu Feng: You agree very much with Believe's logic and his own positioning. It's more like a launch platform for practical applications. Now that all launch assets are memeized, believe there may be a number of usable applications.
Pirates:
Hope haha.
Update: Prior to the release of this podcast, the Believe team announced that they will be suspending Launchcoin's automated tokenization feature, which will be manually reviewed and verified tags added. Once again, we'd like to ask you to comment on this change. Pima's opinion is: “Audit systems are generally stupid; permissionless is king.” Obviously he doesn't like this change.
Liu Feng: Recently, we also pulled out some of the apps that are appearing on Believe, or some assets that are currently being launched. I should have a watch in my hand; there should be about 560 of them. I'm also thinking that if it were just a meme, this event would actually be too abstract, but if it were actually applied, it might be something different, including the launch platform being promoted by Dingaling. Its advantage is that the token design is quite unique, but only the token design. I think it's difficult to occupy my place in the market because Virtuals' token design is already quite extreme.
Pirates:
The focus is on how someone can fool developers into your launch platform. This is a very critical matter.
Trading volume: the only evaluation criteria for launch platforms
Pirates:
The only criterion for evaluating LaunchPad is trading volume, which represents core profit. If you can't figure out the underlying logic, you won't invest when Pump comes out.
You've seen the results now. Pump has already earned $700 million, so how reasonable is Pump's valuation? Under normal logic, the $14 billion valuation of 20 times PE is also reasonable. If you consider that the volatility is too high, Memecoin won't last, the $7 billion valuation under 10 times PE is OK, or even the $3.5 billion valuation under 5 times PE. The core of this problem is:
What exactly are investments being invested in? It is an investment with a discount on future cash flow.
So when you think about LaunchPad, it's not about whether the platform is currently 100 million, 200 million or 1 billion, but whether the platform's revenue can continue to expand in the future; in fact, this is completely applied to the stock market investment logic.
Crypto AI: Driven by return on investment results
Liu Feng: I must let you make a disclosure here. Believe me, you voted, right?
Horse: Right.
Liu Feng: Disclosure of this information is quite important. The audience can also feel that they have invested in this project, so they have a very high opinion of this project, so if they look at it as an investment, I think everyone should do their own research and be responsible for themselves.
Other than memes, do you watch AI Agent?
Pirates:
Today, the entire AI circuit is essentially outcome-oriented, that is, investment-oriented.
In the field of Crypto AI, we feel that all of these infrastructure investments seem to repeatedly draw on some AI technology in the Internet field, so we think it's not a particularly deep moat, and it doesn't have any unique characteristics of its own, so basically we are all results-oriented, that is, you can help me make transactions or increase my revenue. The combination of AI and social media may be a more profitable flashpoint.
Liu Feng: Sounds like you don't have much confidence in Crypto AI or Crypto's AI agents?
Pirates:
On the one hand, I think many of their core technologies basically come from the field of the traditional Internet. On the other hand, if you want to find your own business model, Pump is a very important representative of the rise of the application side, and we will tend to look at some ecosystem on the application side.
In the app-side ecosystem, I first need to know where the paid user base is? Other than asset issuance and trading, many application-side projects didn't come out in the end because they were unable to achieve positive cash flow, such as games. Can you tell me that a game console has achieved a stable annual revenue of 300 million or 500 million US dollars? No.
Liu Feng: In real-world games, this is definitely OK, but apparently in Crypto, you can only get this kind of profit by selling coins.
Pirates:
Right, because of the unique nature of Crypto users, players will think you let me pay for Crypto games. Am I right? No one gambles, but the main commercial logic of the game is gambling.
Therefore, in the application field, revenue is still the main focus. Where is the revenue generated? How high is the quality of revenue generation? The sustainability of revenue generation? These are all points we are very concerned about and are results oriented.
Liu Feng: So it can be said that your current investment logic is very clear. That is, don't talk to me about trends and draw big cakes; what I want is for you to actually be able to produce results, be able to make your own blood, and have real users.
Pirates:
Yes, because the times are developing, innovation is also evolving, the macro interest rate environment is also changing, and the development logic of globalization is also changing. I think there are a lot of things you can't set in stone.
Optimistic about the next development of Crypto
Liu Feng: I don't think the coin industry you are talking about is really a coin circle we are familiar with.
Pirates:
Actually, I think I'm very optimistic about the future development of the coin industry.
Much of the logic revolves around transactions. If it can better meet the trading experience of global users, whether it is a launch platform, DEX, traditional exchange, or dog fighting software, these products have both marketability, demand, and users, and customers are willing to pay for your product.
US legislation is slowly becoming legal and compliant, and a large amount of money will come to the chain. Stablecoins are now only 200 billion US dollars. Over the next two, three, three, or five years, stablecoins may continue to reach 1 trillion US dollars. At this size, they will show a kind of 24-hour transaction and operation. The trading circuit can extend a very large and very large market space, so I'm looking forward to products in the form of on-chain DeFi or on-chain internet finance.
Also, the core business model in the entire crypto field is transaction fees. After the transaction fee is reimbursed, the enterprise side will reimburse the company side, and the company will continue to positively expand the user base after receiving the money. Combined with the religious nature of the Crypto community, it is very likely that it will gain some market growth and space in some segments we have not been able to touch.
This is actually a logic I've seen that works very well. That is, you don't need to sell tokens to maintain cash flow; you only need to let everyone trade more, you can achieve a daily transaction volume of 100 million US dollars. You can get a profit of probably 1 million US dollars, and you can completely expand your coverage and achieve higher profits.
Of course, it has some problems. For example, once it comes to arbitrage, or the product may collapse after not receiving a positive flow of information other than transactions, but this is not important. What is important is that we have seen a very good way to start, that is, using transaction fees to support the growth of the enterprise in the early stages, which is also very much in line with the characteristics of Crypto investment.
Liu Feng: You're still so energetic. Thank you for your recharging beliefs.
Pirates:
I just saw a possibility.
The core of the public chain is gas fees and MEV fees
Jack: Actually, I'm also confused. I just mentioned that in the future, with the development of stablecoins, more capital may flow to the chain, but is it possible that all of these funds flowing to the chain will stay in the stablecoin state, and transactions are also measured and anchored through stablecoins. It will no longer use native assets in this layer of the chain, such as ETH or Solana. The platform that earns profits is stuck in the Pump app. It seems that the underlying chain is still stuck in a model of selling coins. It sells or sends coins to nodes, then The node is then sold to the market, and then the underlying coin doesn't seem to have any processing fees anymore. As a result, although the industry may indeed have a lot of money, it doesn't seem to be of much help to the underlying tokens.
Pirates:
The core of the public chain is gas fees and MEV, which is slowly developing.
The gas fee is the cost you need to pay for every action. You can understand it as a cost expense for bandwidth storage or computing resources for a public chain over a period of time. This is where you have to pay; you have to pay means this is a very good business model and investment system logic.
A large number of stablecoins are on the chain. No matter which chain they connect to, they will definitely need to move and there will definitely be a need for transactions. An asset chain is an asset chain for everything, and tokenization is a very big trend. Because it has a very high level of transparency and flexibility, it also has the characteristic of being uninterrupted 24 hours a day. Do you need to have a deeper understanding of what exactly is an on-chain NASDAQ? That is, issuing assets and trading assets. This is your source.
Once you have that much capital in, you can take a look at Wave Market's revenue. Their revenue is very stable. Wave Market maintains a revenue of 10 billion dollars because it requires stablecoin gas fees.
Jack: I understand this, but it is a trend that can be seen now. For example, looking at Ethereum, its last cycle had a big impact on its value capture because of this gas fee and various on-chain innovations, whether it was an NFT or DeFi, but in the process of using a large number of applications on the chain, its gas fee also became an obstacle to its own expansion, and then it began to enter a process of reducing gas fees. Gas fees were continuously reduced, and it was discovered that although on-chain adoption has increased, gas fees have been continuously reduced. The income is getting lower and lower, and at the end of the day, it can hardly be relied upon to maintain its own value. It seems that this phenomenon can also be seen on Solana.
Pirates:
You're absolutely right. All blockchain systems are a type of software, and software will be constantly iterated. If you think about the world from a long-term, ultimate perspective, the marginal cost of gas fees for all public chains is zero, then what do you rely on to profit?
You can take a look at the priority fee on Solana. Solana's basic fee only accounts for 1/3. Most of the others are tips and priority fees. Why increase tips and priority fees? This is actually the most competitive one. The future revenue of the public chain will be determined by tips and MEV. Solana actually uses this to differentiate the ecosystem. The basic fee is just an ordinary transfer, which means that transfers are one type of fee, and other transactions are another type of fee.
You'll find that when you optimize the system around trading, you can take up a large amount of profit on the trading side. The profits of MEV and REV are huge, and will definitely far exceed gas fees in the future development process. Why are users paying for acceleration? Because they are willing to seize this block, the trading market is on a first-come, first-served basis. This is also the reason why on-chain Nasdaq pursues block generation speeds in the millisecond level. Currently, Solana is 400 ms, which is actually far from enough. I think it might be able to compete with traditional internet by 20 ms.
In this kind of REV or MEV competition, customers are willing to pay; this is the core competitiveness. Why are customers willing to pay? Because customers find it profitable. Who accounts for the majority of MEV and who makes customers more willing to pay determines a way to discount the company's future core cash flow.
A large percentage of Solana's current daily revenue is tips, priority fees, and MEV fees, which explains the problem very much. We're looking for more lasting, more efficient, and higher quality revenue.
The moat for a chain of development is the developer. The public chain is a B-side market, and the C-side does not determine its success or failure. How to attract developers on a public chain depends on their own skills. What matters to me is the transaction volume, REV, and developers of this chain. This is an important indicator of the growth and future plasticity of the public chain.
We will try not to invest in any public chain projects right now. The overall situation has already been decided; what is uncertain is your position. There is also the network effect, like why not challenge the Ningde era in the field of new energy sources, because building an ecosystem is a very difficult thing.
Liu Feng: Can't we think that, in your opinion, the public chain world has a fixed layout now, don't expect any new public chains to successfully counterattack?
Pirates:
The Chinese Internet has sprung up ByteDance, a 100 billion dollar company in the past ten years. If you haven't invested in ByteDance in the past 10 years or more, there's basically no need to do it, because 55% of the profits will be taken away by ByteDance. The 28 laws exist in every field, and the reason we have expectations for many things is because we are loyal to some of the logic of the past.
Crypto is still promising, just likeHYPERLIQUIDOn the rise, I think Hyperliquid, like Solana, aims to become a decentralized NASDAQ.MonadSeems like it can also be calculated.
The core thing is that we have learned to settle accounts. We have a large number of ETFs. We are facing more mature investors. In the future, there will be less and less friction in transactions in a unified account. If you buy Nvidia, Alibaba, and Tencent today, you can buy Bitcoin ETFs in the same account tomorrow. Whoever you buy determines who is more expensive and who is cheaper.
The core question is, why give Solana and Ethereum 100, 200 times PE? If your revenue performance falls short of expectations after multiple cycles, then PE will decline. The investment system is becoming more mature, but many people are not thinking about this issue. The focus is on core revenue and core fundamentals.
There are many people in this world who are willing to think, but now everyone's attention is extremely scattered and one-sided, so they use simple and abstract language to express emotions, such as a shuttle, etc., which is also a microcosm of social evolution. What is scarce in this world is the ability to think independently and discern noise.
Layer 2 has greatly weakened the economic value of Ethereum
Liu Feng: Actually, my last question was to ask you, if you had to choose between Ethereum and Solana, how would you choose? But apparently this question is no longer necessary.
So, can you talk about how Ethereum actually made you abandon it? why? Can't the developers of Ethereum do it?
Pirates:
I think the transformation of the core of Ethereum was in 2018 and 2019. You asked me about an area that was bearish at the time. I said Layer 2, Layer 2 would greatly reduce the economic value of Ethereum.
I've actually studied so-called technical terms such as currency settlement layer and execution layer, but I'm not fond of them, because these things are best quantified. How much money has the settlement layer settled? How much does Layer 1 make in a day? As soon as Layer 2 is split, OK, after Base and Arbitrum have earned all the money, how much money will they hand over to the central government Ethereum? Does this division make sense? After the Layer 2 local lords have taken a large amount of economic ownership, will they have any other idea to seek armed independence? Will it seek a more profitable market-based operation? I think these are all questions that Ethereum didn't think clearly about in the past.
I think everything can be quantified, and it can be clearly explained using certain financial indicators. The gross margin of the public chain is actually very high. If you want to know who earns this money, you don't know who will pay for it. This is a very important issue.
So I personally think that it is a relatively wrong way for Ethereum to go through Layer 2. There is no good return to Ethereum, and the money is taken away by the local lords of Layer 2.
epilogue
Liu Feng: Finally, I would also like to give this podcast to a very good friend I know from Mr. Pima. He is a little fan of Pima. He left us in the second half of last year, and we are all very sorry.
I think if he were there, he'd be very careful to listen to this podcast, so I'd like to give it to him, and thank you for sharing it.
