Compiled edited by TechFlow
Air date: May 24, 2025
Podcast source: Web3 101
【Anchor】
Liu Feng, Partner at BODL Ventures, Former Editor-in-Chief of Lianwen
Xiong Haojun Jack, deputy editor-in-chief of BlockBeats, host of Web3 Wumingshuo
【Guests】
Pima, Co-founder of Continue Capital
Pi Ma, a legendary investor in the cryptocurrency world, was a guest on Web3 101 to discuss why he believes Meme is immortal and the investment logic of Meme Launch Platform, as well as the changes in investment themes in the cryptocurrency world in Pi Mas eyes after the era we live in has completely changed.
Cosmos Meme Reflection: Liquidity Siphon Effect and Matthew Effect
Liu Feng: As an OG, you have made outstanding achievements in the public chain and DeFi fields, but in todays Crypto investment world, OG feels like a swear word. Now the most amazing thing is the story of P Junior becoming P Marshal. What do you think of this trend?
Horse:
I am a relatively senior participant in Memecoin. On the one hand, I have worked harder on Solana in this cycle. I have participated in all of Solana’s Memecoins, including the earliest BONK, WIF, BOME, POP CAT, and the later GOAT, as well as a large number of projects that have been eliminated by the survival of the fittest.
At that time, we took it for granted that if the Solana Meme recovered, other public chains would definitely recover to a certain extent. So after deploying BONK on Solana, we went to Cosmos, Avalanche and other ecosystems to look for similar Memecoins to deploy. At that time, I thought it was a relatively seamless logic.
But I ignored the siphon effect and Matthew effect of liquidity. After you participated in the first wave, it was actually over. You thought there would be a second and third wave, but in fact it completed its historical mission in an initial rebound stage. The remaining mainstream funds will focus on some on-chain ecosystems, mainly Solana at the time.
I have shared before that Memecoin accounts for about 1% to 3% of the public chain market value, and may reach 5% in extreme cases. At that time, I did a lot of observations and statistics and concluded that the top Memecoin accounted for 1% to 5% of the public chain market value at that time in a certain period of time. There are several outliers in this range, such as DOGE and SHIB, but I excluded them.
Later, as the cryptocurrency circle develops, you will find that Solana is completely incompatible with this system. It has a large number of Memecoins emerging one after another, presenting an atmosphere that is completely different from other ecosystems.
This is entirely determined by Solanas retail investors. Solana is a market centered on retail investors, which determines that the Solana ecosystem has given birth to many tracks and fields that are prone to emotional, volatile, and highly market-oriented for 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 tracks like Memecoin, which has both liquidity, participation, and a wide user base, and is relatively less mainstream.
How to make money in Memecoin, a feast of behavioral finance?
Liu Feng: If you want to invest in Memecoin, how can you make money? This is a particularly crude question.
Horse:
Basically, 90% of my Memecoin is on Solana, or even higher. I don’t pay attention to other currencies on any other chain. This market has evolved an optimal solution for you, and you are just looking for a second alternative based on this optimal solution.
The core reason for looking for a second option is that you did not get a result on the optimal solution, or you did not participate in it. You just look for that kind of compensatory rise, which is very easy to make people fall into investment traps. You will find that once you enter, it will either not rise, or it will torture you to death between the rise and fall. Another core is that it is difficult to pocket. You will find that when the Solana head meme retreats 30%, your 200% profit is gone, and the retreat is very fast. So I basically do not pursue the final pocketing in any investment system. I personally think it is very difficult for you to try to avoid the first knife of the entire market from bull to bear. Crypto is 7 X 24 hours, you cant keep an eye on all market fluctuations in real time, which is destined to mean that floating profits are easy to pocket but difficult to pocket.
The function of the leader is that it can give you a second chance to touch a higher point, giving you an attempt to realize your profits, so basically you just need to focus on the leader.
Secondly, I think when people invest in Memecoin, they often focus on quick, flat and profitable results. In fact, from my personal experience of getting big results, quick, flat and profitable results may not be suitable for medium and large investors, unless your scale is very small.
Participants who seek quick returns are often attracted by short-term attention and do not consider the core operating logic of Memecoin. Split Memecoin into horizontal and vertical axes, with the x-axis representing time and the y-axis representing market value. You will find that the market value of most Memecoins is proportional to time. Time is a very important concept. Except for very few cases such as BOME and TRUMP, all current Memecoins with a value of more than $1 billion have basically been running for more than half a year. Without the factor of time, many assumptions are invalid.
I think Memecoin is a feast of behavioral finance in many cases.
One of the founders of behavioral finance is Richard Thaler, 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. The entire Memecoin has strong entertainment account attributes and functions. Daniel Kahneman also wrote a very famous thinking before. He basically divided people into two systems: System 1 is thinking, logical, rational, and requires a lot of energy; System 2 is simple, direct, and fast, and does not require too much energy. Reflecting in the field of Crypto, Memecoin is perfectly compatible with System 2, fast, effective, and highly volatile, satisfying some of our FOMO emotional and capitalized operations.
I read a paper two weeks ago, saying that a persons investment decision-making process may not exceed 6 minutes, and now in Memecoin it is even 6 seconds. This is very similar to many of our investment decisions. In fact, many of my investment decisions are very impulsive. Of course, I am impulsive because I have thought about and arranged the foundation Beta or savings account, so I 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 just living in your own information cocoon. People live in huge noise, and most people do not have the ability to distinguish noise.
All in all, I think Memecoin is a great development in behavioral finance. If we develop a theoretical system related to behavioral finance in the future, we can actually use some of Memecoins data as research samples.
Three soul-searching questions: Do you dare to buy? Do you dare to hold a large position after buying? Can you hold on when the price drops?
Liu Feng: In the past few cycles, we have learned the investment logic you wrote, but today we may only look at volatility and whether the social consensus of Meme can quickly attract liquidity. Do you think this situation can continue?
Horse:
In fact, the reason why many investments are difficult is that times are changing. The structure of investors, the age group of investors, and the income level of investors are all changing.
Let me first state the conclusion. Memecoin will continue to develop, and this is not just in Crypto. In my system, the Crypto field is not a separate market, it is completely related to and synchronized with the development of the world. People who have not caught up with the dividends of the times, a large number of unemployed people, people who have been eliminated by globalization, and people who have no direction and investment opportunities due to class solidification, they use a rebellious psychology to refuse to vote for those elite personalities. Whether it is the tariffs in the United States, the rise of new nationalism in Europe, including the rise of right-wing conservatism in Australia, the world is undergoing a new wave of nationalism. The reflection of this trend in real life is condensed into slogans such as All in and A Shuttle. This trend is not only in the Crypto field, but also global.
I believe that the rise of nationalism has injected a lot of power 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 great impact on the traditional financial market.
You follow P Xiaojiang because he brings a lot of chips and results, which are the most impactful, spreadable and eye-catching. I will avoid sharing practical pictures, but many other Twitter users will use them to gain huge exposure. On the other hand, we now emphasize information equality. Peoples attention is very limited. When you pay a lot of attention to P Xiaojiang, you will definitely not do in-depth research on the theoretical system. The core is back to the old three things: Do you dare to buy? Do you dare to hold a large position after buying? Can you hold a large position when it falls?
Many times, you only get the results, but not the decision-making thinking process behind the results, so even if you know the results, you still will not buy, dare not buy, do not buy in large quantities, and will not hold it all the time.
With the advent of a lonely society, selling demand is more attractive than selling products for niche tracks. What is demand in the Crypto field? That is, psychological identity. Users holding Memecoin form a small group and community, which brings strong psychological identity, and this extremely identified community will only strengthen itself. But unfortunately, Pump has launched more than 1 million Memecoins, but only a handful of them survived. This state of excessive participation and excessive lack of results will form a very rebellious situation: seeing others get good results will cause great stimulation to oneself, thus becoming more diligent, making further mistakes in wrong choices, and then further affecting the mentality, unable to focus on analysis and summary, and even more difficult to get results, a very vicious cycle.
Memecoin is a very interesting social phenomenon, but fewer and fewer people are observing it.
More focus on Meme infrastructure: Which LaunchPads are worth studying?
Jack:
Many memes may not bring particularly big results even if they are multiplied 100 times. So what is the purpose of your frequent participation in small and medium-sized memes?
Horse:
This is a kind of market participation temperature. I need to participate in the market with the most liquidity and the most retail investors. When I discuss Memecoin, I am not talking about what kind of results Memecoin can bring to me. For our investment, I may pay more attention to Memecoin infrastructure, such as DEX, LaunchPad, etc. These are two completely different systems. You can understand it as Beta on the left hand and Alpha on the right hand. For me, I only devote some time and energy to investing in the Memecoin market to feel the market trend, on the premise that my Beta work is already very solid.
The best thing about the crypto space is that you can use very subtle observations to feel the flow of the global capital market. All Memecoins have gone to zero, so there is no significant loss for us. However, each Memecoin market is mapped and related to other investment markets, but most people don’t feel much about it. We have to consider the allocation of global capital, and these targets only serve my core Beta selection, so participating in Memecoin is just to verify some logic, so that we can make a more reasonable evaluation of some of Beta’s core targets.
Liu Feng: I actually understand your logic. You shared your Meme investment logic before. Why do you only want to get real returns on Memes with large market capitalization? This is related to your size. It is completely different from the logic of many people who say that investing in Memes can change their lives. Maybe retail investors only want to talk about Alpha, but Beta is more important to you.
This era is actually the era of Memecoin. Meme is already the voice of the times. We should not deny it but accept it.
In this case, we can take a look at Beta and the Meme launch platforms that have gone through several generations of evolution. Can you introduce which ones are attractive and worth studying?
Horse:
The most eye-catching one is Pump.fun (hereinafter referred to as Pump). In fact, they don’t have much innovation, but the core business model of Crypto is transaction fees. How much market share you can occupy from this business model, how much cash flow you have, and how much valuation I can give you. Pump meets the needs of asset issuance. This product integrates the huge demand of Memecoin, and the two parties will hit it off. There is an infinite supply, and there are infinite invisible pursuits of retail investors with super high multiples, so you will see asset issuance platforms springing up like mushrooms after rain.
Consumer retail investors are a group of highly financialized people in the Crypto field. They are very risk-aware and have a strong gambling impulse. You need to design products for their impulse. Where do retail investors spend money? Only on transaction fees. They would rather give you more handling fees than try to hit Memecoin. He is not a fool. Why does he pay such a high MEV priority fee? Because he thinks the income can cover the cost.
Our positioning for Crypto retail investors is a group of extremely financialized people. All our products are centered around their needs. This is one of the important factors for the success of Pump.fun, including Virtuals, which later developed AI, which is also a LaunchPad. Both of them meet the strong demand for asset issuance, so we observe that this launch platform is a very good investment target. Memecoins can die a thousand or ten thousand times, and there will be more Memecoins that will rise one after another, but a good launch platform can solidify your funds, make profits, and truly win without doing anything, and capture the greatest value in capturing the entire Memecoin operating trend or trend.
Launch platform and public chain: attracting developers is the core
Jack: So for example, Virtuals is now on Solana. Do you think it’s too late? There’s only one chance?
Horse:
For all launch platforms, you need to understand their supply and demand. Who will be the supplier of the launch platform? This is a very important factor. Pumps suppliers are mostly anonymous. Virtuals has some choices, but of course they are also anonymous. So when you look at the quality of any launch platform, you should pay close attention to revenue.
For the launch platform, my evaluation system is exactly the same as that of DEX. In fact, to another extent, the launch platform is also a bit similar to the public chain, but people have not raised the two to the same level.
As a launch platform, the core capability lies in how to attract developers, which is exactly the same as the logic of the public chain. Why do developers go to A instead of B? This is something that is worth thinking about in depth. This is the most important issue that determines the future direction of the launch platform and the public chain.
Because the service experience end is occupied by a large number of retail investors, we usually think that the launch platform including the public chain is a to C market, but in fact, in my opinion, they are a to B market. If there are no good assets and no good developers entering, your public chain/launch platform will never be successful.
The most important thing for a public chain and a launch platform is future cash flow income, which depends on continuous trading volume, and trading volume depends on the continuous enrichment of varieties, so how to attract excellent developers to your launch platform is the core. It is actually very easy to conquer retail investors. As long as there are good assets, retail investors will come when they smell the scent.
Of course, whether it is a public chain or a launch platform, it often tests some marketing means and methods, but without the injection of high-quality assets, it is difficult for a launch platform or a public chain to last.
Believe’s unique market positioning
Horse:
I think Believes strategy to enter the market is right. App developers have a huge demand for financing, but they rarely get it. Believes supply side is independent developers, who develop a large number of apps every year and hope to achieve positive cash flow from the apps, but there is no suitable channel to monetize the apps. If the market is niche, it is impossible to achieve a market value of billions or tens of billions.
Believe focuses on this group of independent developers, or those who want to try new fields and new directions. Crypto retail investors have a very high risk awareness and tolerance, and the core is that its market value is very low, which has long made it possible to achieve a hundredfold or a thousandfold increase. Believe directly borrowed some experience from other launch platforms, that is, sharing expenses with these developers, which is very good, and achieved positive cash flow for independent developers in the cold start phase.
In the traditional field, making an APP requires a lot of people to do a lot of work including development and marketing, but in Crypto, you only make a product. It doesn’t matter whether the product is successful or not, but once it is successfully launched, you can get hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash flow within just one week. This is a very considerable income for independent developers. Once they have this positive cash flow, they can continue to polish the product, expand the market and serve users.
This actually explains why this model is called the Internet capital market. It meets the strong demand of a large number of small developers and micro-enterprises that have difficulty in financing, releases the supply side, and is very in line with the trend. With the advent of AI, independent developers can generate very good annualized revenue alone, and your promotion and operation can be completely spread virally with the help of TikTok and Twitter.
But you asked if it is possible for very large and very good companies to emerge on the Believe platform? I am not confident. I am observing this, but I believe that Believe has solved the niche market very well. This niche market serves a small range, a specific group of people, and very targeted customers. They make money from this part, which means that they don’t need to be big, but they have their market.
Another thing that impressed me about Believe is their careful planning and packaging. Their page design is quite elaborate. In addition, they have focused 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 niche groups. These traditional Internet developers are not familiar with encryption. This process must be the same as the first wave of AI market. I personally think that thousands of such projects will die. This is a process of familiarity and adaptation. We will observe slowly.
Liu Feng: You are very supportive of Believes logic and its own positioning. It is more like a launch platform for practical applications. Now all the launch assets are meme-like, and Believe may have a number of usable applications.
Horse:
I hope so haha.
Update: Before this podcast was published, the Believe team announced that they would suspend the automatic issuance of Launchcoins and would manually review and add the verified label. We asked Pima to comment on this change again. Pimas opinion was: Audit systems are generally stupid; permissionless is the way to go. Obviously he didnt like this change.
Liu Feng: We have recently pulled out some of the emerging applications or assets being launched on Believe. I have a table in my hand, and there should be about 50 or 60 of them. I am also thinking that if it is just a meme, it is actually too abstract. But if there is a real application, maybe it will be something different, including the launch platform promoted by Dingaling. Its advantage lies in the unique token design. But with only the token design, I think it is difficult to occupy its own position in the market, because the token design of Virtuals is already quite extreme.
Horse:
The key point is to have people. How to trick developers into coming to your launch platform is a very critical thing.
Trading volume: the only evaluation criterion for launch platforms
Horse:
The only criterion for evaluating LaunchPad is trading volume, which represents core earnings. If you don’t understand the underlying logic, you won’t invest when Pump comes out.
Now you have seen the results. Pump has earned $700 million. So what is a reasonable valuation for Pump? Under normal logic, a valuation of $14 billion with a PE of 20 times is also reasonable. If we consider that volatility is too high and Memecoin is not sustainable, a valuation of $7 billion with a PE of 10 times is also acceptable, or even a valuation of $3.5 billion with a PE of 5 times is also acceptable. The core of this question is:
What exactly is investment? It is a discount of future cash flows.
So when you consider LaunchPad, it doesn’t matter whether the platform is currently worth 100 million, 200 million, or 1 billion, but whether the platform’s revenue can continue to expand in the future. This is actually completely consistent with the logic of stock market investment.
Crypto AI: Investment return results oriented
Liu Feng: I have to ask you to make a disclosure here. Believe, you invested, right?
Horse: Yes.
Liu Feng: Information disclosure is quite important. The audience may also think that Pima invested in this project, so it thinks highly of it. So if you look at it as an investment, I think everyone should do their own research and be responsible for themselves.
In addition to Meme, do you also watch AI Agent?
Horse:
Now the entire AI track is basically result-oriented, that is, investment return-oriented.
In the field of Crypto AI, we feel that all these investments in the infrastructure field seem to be repeatedly borrowing some AI technologies from the Internet field, so we feel that it does not have a particularly deep moat and does not have any unique characteristics. Therefore, we are basically result-oriented, that is, you can help me make transactions or increase my revenue. The combination of AI and social media may have a greater profit explosion point.
Liu Feng: It sounds like you are not very confident about Crypto AI or Cryptos AI agent?
Horse:
On the one hand, I think many of their core technologies basically come from the field of traditional Internet. On the other hand, in order to find their own business model, Pump is a very important representative of the rise of the application side. We tend to look at more application-side ecosystems.
For the application ecosystem, I first need to know where the paying user base is. In addition to asset issuance and trading, many application projects never came out because they could not achieve positive cash flow. For example, for games, can you tell me a game that has achieved a stable annual revenue of 300 million or 500 million US dollars? No.
Liu Feng: In real-world games, this is definitely possible, but in Crypto, you can obviously only get such returns by selling coins.
Horse:
Yes, because of the uniqueness of Crypto users, for Crypto games, players will feel that you are asking me to pay, am I right? No one pays for the game, but the main business logic of the game is to pay for the game.
Therefore, in the application field, revenue is still the main focus. Where is the revenue generated? How high is the quality of the revenue? Is the revenue sustainable? These are all points we pay close attention to and are result-oriented.
Liu Feng: So I can say that your current investment logic is very clear. Don’t tell me about trends or make empty promises. What I want is that you can actually produce results, generate your own revenue, and have real users.
Horse:
Yes, because the times are changing, innovation is evolving, the macro interest rate environment is changing, and the logic of global development is also changing. I think many things cannot remain unchanged.
Optimistic about the future development of Crypto
Liu Feng: The cryptocurrency circle you are talking about doesn’t seem to be the one we are familiar with.
Horse:
In fact, I am very optimistic about the future development of the cryptocurrency industry.
A lot of logic revolves around transactions. If you can better meet the trading experience of global users, whether it is a launch platform, DEX, traditional exchange, or dog-beating software, these products are both market-oriented, have demand, and have users, customers are willing to pay for your product.
The US legislation has gradually become legal and compliant, and a lot of money will come to the chain. Stablecoins are only 200 billion US dollars now. In the next two or three years, or three to five years, stablecoins may continue to reach 1 trillion US dollars. At this scale, it will present a 24-hour transaction and operation. The trading track can extend a lot of huge market space, so I am very much looking forward to the products in the form of DeFi or Internet finance on the chain.
In addition, the core business model of the entire Crypto field is transaction fees. After the transaction fees are reimbursed, the enterprise side will reimburse the company side, and the company will continue to expand its user base after receiving the money. Combined with the religious nature of the Crypto community, it is very likely to gain certain market growth and space in some niche areas that we cannot access.
This is actually a very good and effective operating logic that I have seen, that is, you do not need to maintain cash flow by selling tokens, you just need to encourage more transactions, and you can achieve an average daily transaction volume of $100 million, and you may get $1 million in profit. You can completely expand your coverage to achieve higher profits.
Of course, it has some problems. For example, once it reaches arbitrage, or the product does not obtain positive information flow other than transactions, it may collapse. But this is not important. What is important is that we have seen a very good way to start, which is to use transaction fees to support the growth of the company in the early stages, which is also very consistent with the characteristics of Crypto investment.
Liu Feng: You are still so high-spirited. Thank you for recharging your faith during this period.
Horse:
I just see a possibility.
The core of the public chain is the Gas fee and MEV fee
Jack: Actually, I have another confusion. I just mentioned that in the future, with the development of stablecoins, more funds may flow to the chain. But is it possible that all the funds flowing to the chain will remain in the state of stablecoins, and transactions will also be priced and anchored by stablecoins. It will no longer use the native assets of the chain, such as ETH or Solana. The profit-making platform will remain at the application end of Pump. The underlying chain seems to still be in a mode of selling coins. It sells or sends coins to nodes, and then nodes sell them to the market. Then the underlying coin seems to no longer have the ability to generate self-blood from handling fees. In this way, although there may be a lot of money in this industry, it does not seem to be of much help to the underlying tokens.
Horse:
The core of the public chain lies in the gas fee and the slowly developing MEV.
Gas fee is the fee you have to pay for every action you make. You can understand it as a cost expenditure for the bandwidth storage or computing resources of a public chain in a period of time. This is where you have to pay, and the fact that you have to pay means that this is a very good business model and investment system logic.
A large number of stablecoins have come to the chain. No matter which chain it is connected to, it will definitely have liquidity needs and transaction needs. Assets on the chain are all assets on the chain, and tokenization is a very big trend. Because it has very high transparency and flexibility, and it has 24-hour uninterrupted features. Do you want to understand more deeply what is the on-chain Nasdaq? It is the issuance of assets and trading assets, which is your source.
After you have so much capital coming in, you can look at Tron’s revenue. Their revenue is very stable. Tron maintains a revenue of tens of billions because it has a demand for stablecoin gas fees.
Jack: I understand this, but the trend we can see now, for example, from Ethereum, in the last cycle, because of the Gas fee and various on-chain innovations, whether it is NFT or DeFi, it did promote its value capture a lot, but in the process of a large number of applications on the chain, its Gas fee has become an obstacle to its own expansion, and then it began to enter a process of reducing Gas fees. Gas fees continued to decrease, and it was found that although the on-chain adoption increased, the Gas income was getting less and less, and in the end it basically could not rely on this to maintain its own value. It seems that this phenomenon can also be seen on Solana.
Horse:
You are absolutely right. All blockchain systems are a kind of software, and the software will be continuously iterated. If we think from a long-term and ultimate perspective, the marginal cost of gas fees for all public chains is zero, so how can we make a profit?
You can look at the priority fee on Solana. Solanas basic fee accounts for only about 1/3, and most of the rest are tips and priority fees. Why raise the tip and priority fees? This is actually the most core competitiveness. In the future, the revenue of the public chain will be determined by tips and MEV. Solana actually distinguishes the ecosystem through this. The basic fee is just an ordinary transfer, that is, transfer is one fee, and other transactions are another fee.
You will find that when you optimize the system around transactions, you can occupy a lot of profits on the transaction side. The profits of MEV and REV are very large, and will definitely far exceed the gas fee in the future development process. Why do users pay for acceleration? Because they are willing to grab this block. The trading market is first come first served. This is also the reason why Nasdaq on the chain pursues millisecond block speed. Solana is now 400 milliseconds, which is actually far from enough. I think it may be possible to compete with the traditional Internet at 20 milliseconds.
In the competition process of REV or MEV, customers are willing to pay, which is the core competitiveness. Why are customers willing to pay? Because they think it is profitable. Whoever occupies the majority of MEV and makes customers more willing to pay determines the discount method of the companys future core cash flow.
Solana now has 80% of its daily revenue coming from tips, priority fees, and MEV fees, which is very telling. We are looking for more sustainable, efficient, and higher-quality revenue.
The moat of a chain is developers. The public chain is a market for the B-end, and the C-end does not determine its success or failure. How a public chain attracts developers depends on its own ability. What is important to me is the transaction volume, REV and developers of this chain. These are important indicators for me to view the growth and future plasticity of the public chain.
We try not to invest in any public chain projects now. The overall situation has been determined, but your position is not determined. There is also the network effect, just like why we don’t challenge CATL in the new energy field, because building an ecosystem is very difficult.
Liu Feng: Can we assume that, in your opinion, the public chain world has already had a fixed structure, and we should not expect any new public chain to successfully counterattack?
Horse:
In the past decade, Chinas Internet industry has produced a $100 billion company called ByteDance. If venture capital or secondary capital had not invested in ByteDance in the past decade, it would basically be useless because ByteDance took away 55% of the profits. The 80/20 rule exists in every field. The reason why we have expectations for many things is because we are loyal to some of the logic of the past.
Crypto still has hope, just like Hyperliquid is on the rise. I think Hyperliquid and Solana have the same goal, which is to become a decentralized Nasdaq. Monad seems to be able to be counted as well.
The most important thing is that we have learned to do the math. We have a large number of ETFs coming, and we are facing more mature investors. In the future, in a unified account, the friction of transactions will become smaller and smaller. You can buy Nvidia, Alibaba, and Tencent today, and buy Bitcoin ETF, etc. in the same account tomorrow. Who you buy determines who is more expensive and who is cheaper.
The core question is, why should Solana and Ethereum be given 100 or 200 times PE? If your revenue performance is not as expected after multiple cycles, then the PE should be reduced. The investment system is becoming more and more mature, but many people do not think about this issue. The focus should be on the core revenue and the core fundamentals.
There are many people in this world who are willing to think, but now everyones attention is extremely scattered and one-sided, so they use some concise and abstract language to express emotions, such as a shuttle, etc. This is also a microcosm of social evolution. What is scarce in this world is the ability to think independently and distinguish noise.
Layer 2 has greatly weakened the economic value of Ethereum
Liu Feng: Actually, my last question was originally going to be, if you had to choose between Ethereum and Solana, which one would you choose? But obviously this question doesn’t need to be asked anymore.
So, can you tell me how Ethereum made you abandon it? Why? Is it because of the Ethereum developers?
Horse:
I think the core transformation of Ethereum occurred in 2018 and 2019. You asked me at that time about an area that I was bearish on, and I said Layer 2. Layer 2 would greatly weaken the economic value of Ethereum.
I have actually studied the so-called professional terms such as currency settlement layer and execution layer, but I am not interested in them because it is best to quantify these things. How much money is settled in the settlement layer? How much money can Layer 1 make in a day? Once Layer 2 is split, OK, all the money is made by Base and Arbitrum. How much money do they hand over to the central government Ethereum? Is this way of sharing reasonable? After the local princes of Layer 2 get a lot of economic ownership, will they have other ideas to seek armed independence? Will they seek market-oriented operation with greater profits? I think these are all issues that Ethereum has not thought clearly about in the past.
I think everything can be quantified and explained with certain financial indicators. The gross profit margin of the public chain is actually very high. If you want to know who is making the money, you will not know who will pay the bill. This is a very important issue.
Therefore, I personally think that Ethereum’s approach to Layer 2 is a wrong one. It does not provide good returns to Ethereum, and all the money is taken away by local lords in Layer 2.
Conclusion
Liu Feng: Finally, I would like to dedicate this episode of the podcast to a very good friend that both Mr. Pima and I know. He was a little fan of Pima and left us in the second half of last year. We were all very sad about it.
I think if he were here, he would definitely listen to this podcast very carefully, so I want to give it to him, and thank Pima for sharing it.
