Kyle Chassé - Trump, Crypto & Our Fight for Freedom: Will America Lead Or Be Left Behind Forever?

Full transcript: Kyle Chassé on London Real

3:31 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is… This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Kyle Chass, the crypto veteran, technology entrepreneur, and investor.

3:51 You are the founder and chairman of MV Global, a crypto-focused venture studio and fund that has deployed almost $100 million into over 300 early stage web three projects. You have been active in crypto since 2013 and we’re an early investor in platforms like Coinbase, Kraken, and Circle. You are a celebrity VC in the upcoming reality TV series, Crypto Nights, premiering on Amazon Prime, where entrepreneurs pitched their projects to a panel of seasoned investors.

4:20 You see crypto as the beginning of a new era of decentralization, making it your calling to equip the next generation of entrepreneurs with the knowledge, strategy, and support they need to succeed. Your mission is to help as many people as possible develop the mindset and practical tools to exit the failing legacy system and position themselves for a decade of wealth, creation, and freedom. Kyle, welcome to London Real. It’s quite an intro. Thank you, Brian.

4:50 Happy to be here. Look, it’s great having you here, Kyle. You and I met, I think 18 months ago in Singapore, and I could immediately tell you were a dude I needed to know and needed to talk to. You’ve been a big player in this space in so many different areas and verticals. But I also knew you as the guy that lived in Thailand.

5:07 Now you’re the guy that lives in Austin. And so I guess we’ll just kick it off and ask you the obvious, what are you doing back in the US? And what does it feel to like to be in the US right now with this completely new wave of pro-crypto sentiment from the government, from corporations, mergers, the whole thing, just what is going on there, Kyle? Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, it’s a bit of a reverse culture shock. I mean, it’s oddly familiar because I spent the first 28 years or whatever of my life living in, no, sorry, it’s long enough, 32 years of my life living in the States.

5:46 And then I left because of the regulatory environments because I was a builder in crypto. In fact, the first thing I ever built was a Bitcoin lottery in 2013. And that I even did, you know, protecting myself through when I would broadcast like, cause I broadcast live on YouTube, the, it wasn’t like a physical lottery. So we actually had the lottery machine with the ball that spin around like you’d see from a state lottery. And, uh, I did that out of an apartment in Chicago, uh, but using a VPN.

6:17 And I was always pseudo anonymous. You didn’t see my face and I did it through a VPN from Costa Rica because online gambling was legal in Costa Rica. So I’ve always been very aware of the regulatory landscape. I saw what they’ve done to other people. And really back then, you felt like a freedom fighter, a justice fighter, a disruptor.

6:39 I mean, it’s Bitcoin in the early days. The only people who were into it back then were people who really saw this as something to circumvent centralized control. And if you kind of knew what I knew back then, And you knew that the centralized control was not in our best interest. I’m not sure on the audience watching what side of the fence that you sit on, but for me personally, I think what WikiLeaks was doing was heroic. It was exposing and telling the public the things that are ours to know.

7:09 The United States belongs to the people. It doesn’t belong to the government. And when we commit crimes or we do things that are not in our best interest, we should know about it. And that was my feeling. So when WikiLeaks wasn’t able, when I saw them getting completely shut off from the centralized control payment rails, Venmo, PayPal, Western Union, MoneyGram, Banks, Swift, everyone said, Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, you guys cannot accept donations.

7:38 Of course, they wanted to stop them and arrest them and everything. But then they started accepting Bitcoin and those payment rails were always open. And that was a game changer for me. So the regulatory environment has always been super, I’ve been always super aware of. And as a builder in this space, you know, when I really want to start to build, I stayed here from 2012 when I first entered all the way until 2000, early 2018 is when I decided to actually leave because I really wanted to do more than invest and advise. By that time, I had invested already in Kraken, Ripple, Securitize, Circle, Abra, Coinbase, these things, but I wanted to build.

8:22 I felt like I wanted to build again. The lottery, I stopped building in 2000. I stopped running it in 2015 because it just wasn’t making enough money and I got another opportunity to be co-founder of a layer one that didn’t end up working out, but I wanted to continue to build. And so I left to Thailand. Why Thailand? Because it was a quality of life. At that point, I knew I would never need to work again because I sold a company in 2013, the company I’d started in the longevity space.

8:55 And we can get into longevity more if you’d like to, it’s really important to me. But I sold that company and I bought Bitcoin in 2013. And by 2015-16, when I hit $1,000, dollars, I realized as long as I don’t be dumb, I’ll never have to really worry about money again. And so it was a lifestyle choice. I had always imagined on my vision board that when I retire one day, I imagined it being much later in life that I would retire in Thailand because I backpacked and loved it. And what I did at that point is I took over a resort in Köppanyang, Thailand, and shut it down to the public, opened it up to crypto entrepreneurs.

9:33 I had a bunch of great guests like Didi from the Bitcoin family, Tone Vays, one of the smartest guys in the world. I know Emerson Spard, the founder of ZK Sync, Alex came by. So it was, for eight months, I had taken over this resort, invited crypto entrepreneurs, and Bitcoin was the only currency accepted there. And it was just an amazing experience. And then I was doing the crypto circuit tour heavily from 2017 until COVID.

10:07 And then every time I’ve been to a conference, people say, why do you live in Phuket? Why do you live in Thailand? Because I moved to Phuket. And it was really just a quality of life thing. But for networking and things like that, it wasn’t there.

10:18 But I had done the work networking already. I did it constantly from 2017. So let’s fast forward to Trump coming and running for office. And when he made his announcement that he wanted to make America the crypto capital of the world, I was glued. I was glued to the biggest reality show in the world, which is currently still running, which is called the Trump show.

10:42 And I was glued and when David Sachs came on and Bo Hines and we saw, okay, now we saw Gary Gensler was going to come out and I just thought, man, this is amazing. And I feel like I’m watching all this great things happening and all the stuff that, and not to mention all the stuff that I thought was wrong with the United States. I moved away also because I disagreed with a lot of stuff that was happening for years and years and years. You know, I felt like as long as lobbying was going to be allowed, that we’d always have corruption in Washington.

11:12 I felt like the deep state was too strong to overcome. I felt like, you know, we were allowing crime and violence and nowhere was safe again. And Thailand, very safe. They don’t even do petty crimes over there. The Buddhists have a very karmic reality where you really don’t, so I felt safe.

11:32 But now, with Trump coming into office, we’ve built two crowdfunding platforms. One called Commonwealth, which is for very early stage investing, giving you the same access to early stage crypto deals, just like any other VC. it’s for the 99%. And then we have paid network, which was launched in 2021, currently ranked the number two launchpad in the world globally by ROI and other metrics. And for paid especially, we’ve never been open to American business. And America, as you know, is the largest consumer market in the world. And there’s a strong demand, even though how shopping in Austin doesn’t feel like people here have any clue about crypto, and we’ll get into that in a bit, my struggles of adopting back into the American lifestyle. But there is a ton of consumer demand. In fact, I just did a show earlier today where we talked about there’s now 50 million United States citizens that hold Bitcoin, and there’s only 30 million that hold gold. I mean, that’s a clear signal that demand is here. Bitcoin is the new digital gold, and the landscape environment is changing to where now it’s just going to accelerate like crazy. So I want to tap into the American market. I want to give my fellow Americans an opportunity to invest in early stage startups. They’ve historically been late to the party. When you go buy a stock on a secondary market, it’s already in the billions of dollars of valuation, and all the early stage investors

13:07 Already made their money. And it leaves the retail as the buyers of those exits for the early stage investors. So I want to see the American landscape change to where we can make easier entries for startups to do capital formation, fundraising, and for American citizens who are capable of understanding risk and can get into it and we’ll see what that regulatory environment decides to do. But I think the barrier of entry for early stage investing should be dropped a lot. So, my team has met with Bo Hines already in the White House. We had a meeting with the SEC about three weeks ago, and I’m here to do that kind of work, to go continue my discussion with the SEC, continue my discussion with Bo Hines, and see where that goes, and to try to open up the businesses that we have legally, compliantly, in a way that can operate within America. And I think that’s a phenomenal thing. It’s a surreal thing being in the space for so long and sitting on a Zoom call with the SEC.

14:14 That was unfathomable a few months ago. And now to be sitting where they’re listening, they’re asking good questions, they care, and they’re trying to understand how do we protect the American consumer, but also not hinder innovation and how do we bring people like Kyle back from foreign countries to domicile the company, employ people here, and build businesses America and make America the crypto capital of the world. What will you talk to Beau about? I’m just kind of curious.

14:43 What might that be? Obviously, he’s very close to Trump, and he’s probably looking after maybe the crypto reserve and things like that. But what will be the topics of your conversation with him? So when you look at who was invited to the crypto roundtable at the White House, you You had a lot of legal, you had guys like Sergey Nazarov from Chainlink, you had Brian Armstrong from Coinbase. I believe, I don’t remember if Brad Garlinghouse was there, XRP, you had behind, you had David Sacks.

15:14 You have obviously David Sacks is close with the all-in guys who are all indirectly or directly investors in crypto companies. And what you see right now being discussed in Congress is a lot of, how do we bring trad fi on chain? And that’s cool. That’s fine. That innovates the existing system.

15:39 It benefits the 1%. It benefits Wall Street. It benefits institutions, hedge funds, pensions, family offices, all this kind of stuff. But what about people who want to build decentralized technology, right? And with all due respect to Beau and the White House and administration, it doesn’t seem like they have someone on the team that’s looking out for the people who want to disrupt incumbents, right?

16:08 And that should be allowed to be done and encouraged. I mean, bring your business to America, build a better version of Uber or Airbnb or whatever, Right? And let that operate within America and bring those jobs and bring that revenue into America. That’s going to happen. Decentralized applications are far more efficient if they can be built in a way that the user feels like it’s not a Web3 application.

16:35 And that’s happening. So we’re, you know, people say there was a talk, I forget her name. She’s a, it was at the Digital Asset Summit in New York. She was just saying that, you know, there’s been hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the crypto industry and we haven’t built anything and basically saying it’s a good casino and this and that. And, you know, I think that’s, that’s crazy to say because that’s like saying before AOL came along, the internet didn’t build anything.

17:01 It, you know, it needed time to develop infrastructure that made it usable for people like you and I. It’s also like saying AI didn’t do anything before Chad GPT. It’s also not true, right? It needed time to figure out how does this become useful for hundreds of millions of people around the world, where they’re not burdened by the kind of things that we’ve been burdened with, who are the crypto early adopters, who are okay with the private C, the private phrases, and the signing, and the slow transactions on Ethereum, these kind of things.

17:35 So yeah, so what I’ll talk to Beau about essentially would be, I think that, you know, I would like to contribute as much as possible, uh, to that discussion on, you know, and I’ve been there myself and I truly have a desire to make paid and Commonwealth, uh, decentralized and you know, and I want that to be done in a way that it’s, doesn’t hamper our ability to come back to the United States. And so I just want to help and give advice in a way that I can, uh, be supportive and then also just try to figure out is there a sort of sandbox that we can operate in so we can come and start offering sooner than we have clarity on what the regulatory landscape works looks like because they’re building it now. But I expect that we don’t get clarity on the different types of tokens and stuff like that until probably Q3, Q4, or something like that.

18:29 And we’re at all the time highs in Bitcoin, and I expect that we’re gonna have an alt season fairly soon. So if we really want companies to come back to America and operate here, it needs to be sooner than later. So that’s a discussion I’ll probably have with them and see where else they might need some support. Yeah, you say it right, because they seem very trad-fi focused, very institution focused. Obviously, there’s a lot of lobbying money coming at them and was down in Mar-a-Lago before that I got in there, not mention any names, you know, XRP, but you know, and so obviously World Liberty Financial, which is kind of Eric and Don Jr. are going after, you know, those bigger players and they’re doing their own stable coin.

19:10 But you’re right, I don’t see much for the little guy and that’s what’s really missing in crypto because this is, you know, the protocol where little guys can get in early as opposed to the American system where it’s, you know, accredited investors and like you said, the structure is where the little guy gets in only to exit the big VC money. This is, I mean, honestly, crypto is the most American thing because of its freedoms, and yet it’s not really encouraged in America. So props to you for making that trip and going back and for being able to meet with people like Bo and the SEC.

19:44 You know, you’ve got a great track record, Kyle, that shows that you’re probably in it for the right reasons and been in it as an OG. So yeah, I really, I hope all that goes really smooth. How do you think we’re doing in DC? Obviously that genius act seems like it’s moved on to the house, which I think is good news. Overall, how would you rate how the Trump administration is doing and how Congress is doing and how the SEC is doing in advancing the blockchain agenda?

20:12 How do you get out of a rat race? How do you create wealth, not only for yourself, but also for the generations to come after? I am absolutely amazed with the quality of companies that we’re getting exposure to. We go on to Zoom calls with the innovators and the folks who are building new applications in metaverse, blockchain, artificial intelligence, decentralized finance. What’s going on everybody?

20:34 Thumbs up if you can see me. We are focusing on early stage investment. And the quality of people that we’re getting exposure to, whether it be Dan Tapier with 1RT, Jason Ma from Open, Ayatsu from Anamoka. This been a phenomenal experience thus far. It has far exceeded my expectations.

20:52 We are focusing on cutting edge technologies. I view it now as the best investment I’ve ever made. The upside, I view, is unlimited. And as a retail investor, I would never get this exposure anywhere else outside of investment club. It’s the only investment club.

21:11 It’s a good question, and I’ll get back to it in just a second. I want to add one more thing to what I said before. My kind of sense of urgency to kind of move this discussion forward with Washington and the guys SCC and Bowe, et cetera. So what we do have clarity on from David Sacks is that meme coins are not securities. And when the American market only has a clear signal that you’re allowed to buy Bitcoin and meme coins, but not everything else, that creates a problem.

21:41 Then you have, so the American market can freely go and buy complete vapor trash coins on pump fund or this new narrative that kicked off internet capital markets, which is literally just a fancy way of packaging up an ICO with a meme coin and trying to pretend that maybe it has utility for a real company one day, which is literally just what my crowdfunding platforms do, but we actually vet screen due diligence, KYC, KYB, make sure that this is actually something that value accrual happens back to the investors, and it isn’t some completely uncorrelated token that has nothing to do with the business. a huge problem right now with the fact that David Sachs came out saying that meme coins are legal and platforms like Bonk Fund, Pump Fund, and Now Believe app can operate and service Americans when projects like mine can’t yet come in and clearly offer things that are less risky than these meme coin casinos. So back to the question of how is Washington doing?

22:41 I think that they’re do it so I wouldn’t disagree that the most important thing right now for the Trump administration to do is to try to find stability in the American fiscal and monetary policies and try to and you know just six months ago I was making lots of shows on how BRICS was accelerating at an alarming pace but there was over a hundred countries I think that signed up or applied or wanted to be part of what BRICS was doing and they wanted They wanted to make the unit to direct competitors to the US dollar. And so US dollar dominance as a reserve was facing real threats. And I think that the most clear thing why this Genius Act is getting bipartisan support and will likely pass through Congress is because there’s over $200 billion of stablecoins printed out there right now that are backing the US government, buying US short-term treasuries buying U.S. dollars and it’s making access to the U.S. dollar easier and cheaper than ever before.

23:44 So I understand why it’s a priority. I also understand that most of the United States, 99.9% lives on the TradFi world. And so let’s upgrade that TradFi infrastructure. I mean, you know, I bought a car recently here in Austin and, you know, I don’t even want to get it into the headache of trying to buy a car when I haven’t had, you know, a history of, of being plugged in the financial world and over a decade in America, they’re like, Oh, yeah, I’m like, yeah, but look at all this crypto I have. They’re like, what is that?

24:16 I don’t care if some of your bank statements, you know, like, what’s, what is a big state? Like, but, but they, you know, the point is I had to wire money. So I had to go figure out how to get my crypto off of what I’ve stored it in for years, over a decade, and then figure out, you know, how to get that into my bank, which I do have one US bank, and then I had to wire the money. And that took two and a half days to get it over. And I had to do two transactions.

24:40 I couldn’t even do, you know, I couldn’t even do, you know, the $80,000 is what I had to down payment for the car. So I couldn’t even do that in one transaction. And I, each time I had to pay $30 and wait two days for those to clear. It was just astonishing. So yes, let’s upgrade TradFi, fine.

24:55 That Sergey is doing a really good job at building infrastructure for interoperability, to bring real world assets on chain, to lower the time of settlement for things like Swift and DTCC. Yeah, fine, everything like that is great. But I’m missing the discussions about decentralization. I mean, we just don’t even hear that word anymore. Not on TV, not from the Trump administration, not from anybody, really.

25:21 So it comes back to that 2017, 2018 discussion that we used to hear all the time. Blockchain, not crypto, right? And it’s like, okay, so you wanna bring permissioned private chains into the market so that BlackRock and Citadel can build the Texas stock exchange where they got 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year trading of tokenized real world assets. Great, fine, do that. But I believe, and it’s probably a limited set of knowledge and manpower that at the same time, if the administration doesn’t also focus on how do you bring people building decentralized technology into America and give them a safe space to do so, we’re gonna miss out on that part of the industry, which is massive.

26:09 Yeah, really well said. It’s so important and I’m glad you’re pushing it and working on it. How is the administration doing? Are you happy that the Genius Act is moving forward? Are you happy with the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve?

26:24 Are you happy with what the SEC is doing so far or where would you rate some of these efforts? So I think obviously getting rid of Gary Gensler was a big, big win. And it’s funny because I’ve watched a couple interviews since then about how was Gary behind the scenes. And actually Gary, you know, we know that he was a college professor before, pro-crypto before the SEC. I think he got into the SEC and was on the wrong side of the aisle, right?

26:52 He was really trying to lean toward one party and the other party one. And so, in doing so, in playing a politician, he lost touch of what he probably truly believed in and became our industry villain. And so getting him out was fantastic. Getting Trump in office was fantastic for our industry. And now getting Paul Adkins, which we haven’t seen yet how he’s going to rule, but he definitely seems pro-crypto, pro-innovation, any falls under administration that has clearly deregulated lots of industries in America, deregulating energy, deregulating crypto space for now until we can actually regulate it, but stopping all the regulatory by enforcement actions that were happening before.

27:42 So I think that we’re on the right track. We have the crypto task force and the SEC as well. Well, so one of the things that we’re looking at exploring is the SEC is working with something called FinHub, which is kind of like a sandbox environment. And we’re trying to see, does it make sense for us to apply to work with FinHub as a company and go into that in a sandbox-like environment? From what I understand, traditionally, regulatory sandboxes limit how much business a company can do.

28:15 I understand that this fin hub doesn’t do that. So, but still, you know, it’s not clear yet to us and we have to have more discussion still to see is that a good smart business decision for us to do that or how do we better wait until we see what kind of regulation comes? Okay. Now today, literally as we speak, Kyle, we’re hitting an all time high in Bitcoin. By the way, I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

28:40 Obviously there’s two powerful people here talking about it. But at the same time, as posted as a graph in Twitter by my friend Benjamin Cowan who runs into the cryptoverse, the social interest in crypto is almost at an all-time low and he plotted it back to 2020. And you can literally see the YouTube searches and the videos and everything peak in 21 when we hit 69K in Bitcoin. Now we’re at 109 and it’s almost down at zero. So obviously, institutions are in.

29:13 The ETF people are buying, you know, the Saudi funds and the Abu Dhabi funds are buying. World Liberty’s in, Bank of America CEO says he’s ready to do the stablecoin as soon as genius passes. And yeah, retail is at an all time low. And you even said anecdotally, people in Austin don’t know what crypto is. What is going on here?

29:32 And is this potentially good news because it means when they do come on, we’re gonna have a crazy bull run. Yeah, it’s a really interesting point. And I think that what happened here is I think that we haven’t had an alt season yet. We had many bull runs within very specific niches over the past year and a half or so. And what happened was, is it was a massive value extracting experiments.

29:59 And we had meme coin runs, we had these AI agent runs and meme coins for sure, largely 99.99% are garbage. 99.99% are garbage. I will say that it’s a free market and I believe that true builders who want to build community, who want to build IP, who want to turn that into a brand, I think that they have every right to do so. And so I’m completely open and in fact, it’s support a couple that are doing that. But largely in part, it was value extracting.

30:32 Companies like PumpFun were making crazy money. We had billions and billions and billions of dollars, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars trading through the meme coin space and everyone was promising and looking to get rich quick. And so retail did come back for a second, you know, before we had that little blow off top in that market, we had the Coinbase app and the Phantom app on Solana for Solana, um, you know, climbing through the app store ranking and for a second there, they were at the top and for site that’s why we had this blow off top there.

31:00 What happened is all those people lost money and all the people like Hayden Davis who started the Argentina coin, Melania coin, maximum value extracting, stole over a hundred million dollars from people. I believe that even though we’ve stopped going up to crypto companies, we need to go after people like that who are just literally taking retail’s money, putting in their pocket shamelessly. Uh, you know, I was just, I just did an interview with the New York Post, it went out last Sunday, um, about influencers who shamelessly, this guy from Dubai, shameless just, yeah, I create pump and dumps and like, uh, you know, I’ve done over a hundred and I made millions of dollars from it, like, and just completely shameless about it.

31:38 So I think what happened is we did have retail come back for a minute there, right? I did get, you know, you probably feel it too. I did get a lot of views on my YouTube videos when I was doing that, right? And now I’m at about, you know, a quarter or a third of what I was doing back at that point. So retail did come back, but they got burnt and they’re pissed and they’re upset and they stopped watching our channels.

32:01 They stopped participating. They went back to their old life, right? And most of these guys weren’t investors before. They were teens on TikTok and they were whatever, people in the trenches hanging out, trying to get rich quick. People like that kid who did the rug pull, that token that was famous. So we got completely burnt. The retail got completely burnt.

32:23 And I think that they had PTSD still. But this new all the time high, I believe that over the next, you know, this is going to make news today, obviously, it’s going to get attention to people, obviously, and they’re going to come back cautiously. I think though, to your point, this is also why it’s so important for me to be in America right now, because I’m looking for a new audience that to participate in things like paid and Commonwealth, people who aren’t looking to get rich overnight, but want to allocate a small portion of what they make every month into making a better future for themselves by investing what they can afford to lose into solid potential companies that could be the next Coinbase and Kraken and Ripple and Secure ties and Circle, the things that I invested into seven, eight years ago, only one of them has gone public so far.

33:23 That was Coinbase, but I expect Ripple to go public. I expect Kraken to go public. I know Circle’s considering being acquired or going public. So finally, eight years later, these investments I made seven, eight years ago are finally coming into fruition. And probably if I had just maintained a nine to five job between then and now, that probably would have retired me.

33:44 And the seven to eight year time horizon is fantastic for people looking to make a financial massive shift their life, retire essentially, if you will, rather than working a nine to five and spending your money on Starbucks and other junk, invested it in quality things. So that’s why I think it’s important for America to open up because America has been in a way protected from a lot of this is happening. And I didn’t realize how walled off America was until I came back here and moved here. It is crazy. These people who own these houses, they know nothing about it. I can show them. I’m very crypto rich, very cash poor, and they’re just looking at me like, I don’t know if I’m going to let you in my house. I’m going to let you rent it. I don’t know if you can make the rent payments. It’s like, yeah, but I showed you all my ad gear, my wallets, but they’re like, well, isn’t crypto volatile? But yeah, but look, there’s still 10 years of rent and stablecoin, like, you know, like, it’s what is a stablecoin? It’s crazy. So this whole market, you know, I mean, I gave you this earlier, 50 million Americans own Bitcoin, but how many of them have looked into what’s beyond Bitcoin, right? And I know that you probably had the same experience.

35:01 I had the same experience. Everyone who comes in has the same experience. First, we’re introduced to Bitcoin, usually, although I’ll tell you in America, most people have XRP over Bitcoin, which is crazy. But there’s a lot so that they have to go through that learning curve. And then first, they have to get comfortable, familiar with what is Bitcoin, and then they have to understand what are smart contracts. And that’s a whole nother mind blowing experiment.

35:24 Yeah, it’s quite an education. We run a crypto DeFi Academy. So I’m constantly walking people through that. And yeah, we forget how how much of a mind blowing concept it is for someone that’s new. Also, you’re in Austin, which is quite the forward thinking capital, right? A lot of tech bros have moved there from Cali. Um, and so I’m surprised that you still find that the people you meet, uh, don’t know that much about crypto. Um, but then again, maybe that’s just the state of the U S right now, right? Well, they call Austin the Silicon Hills.

35:57 It’s, you know, it’s definitely like you’ve got Tesla, you got a bunch of companies have moved here. You’ve got a lot of content creators. You’ve got, I think, Mark Moss, Alex Jones. You’ve got J. Cal.

36:08 Rogan. Joe Rogan, Andre Marcus. These guys, they’re all here. They all obviously know about this stuff. I think what I’m encountering right now is I’m looking to lease a luxury home and this is usually old money. And so that’s been my experience for the past three weeks of being here is constantly every day trying to find a place to call home for the next 12 months, at least. And that’s who I’ve been dealing with. So I have a feeling though, that when I get plugged in, some friends introduced to me something called ATXDAO, which is just Austin, decentralized crypto community. So I think when I get plugged in more and start doing networking and can put aside the house hunting and actually settle down, I think that I’ll start to experience that side of Austin more. I haven’t really got to taste that yet.

36:55 Kyle, you mentioned that the alt season will be coming. About 10 days ago, I was at the Global Family Office Summit in Dubai and I sat at a table with someone and they leaned over to me and said, I don’t think there will be an alt season. And I looked at them. They’ve been in the market for quite a few years and I looked at them. First time I heard anybody say that. Of course, my stomach dropped because I think you and I both have a lot of, you know, pre-sale tokens in really good utility companies. I think we really look at the stuff that I believe is going to be the future Google or Amazon of the Web3 space. But when you hear something like that, you think, wow, is that true? What do you say to someone who says that?

37:37 Well, I definitely don’t think that’s true. I think that it’s going to be a potentially more difficult alt season than we’ve ever had before, because altcoins largely, almost entirely are narrative driven. Not always. For paid network, for example, if you have an alt season, and if these launches are doing well, then we have true demand for the token, which drives that up. But large in part, it’s driven by narrative. And now we have these platforms that allow anyone to create a token with just a tweet. Then you hear these stories of people who buy any of these things at stupid low valuations and they run up and then they post screenshots of their gains and then people think that that’s realistic. But the guys who build the picks and shovels are the ones actually making all the money. It’s the picks and shovels and the guys who maliciously create these tokens that are actually winning right now and extracting the money that should, in my opinion, be going to good utility projects.

38:46 And so it’ll be more difficult. But I think that what happens is people learn their lessons. And when you get burnt enough time, and if you play the meme coin casino inevitably, you will get burnt enough times, you will get tired of that. And you might leave for a while, which we’ve seen now. But then you might come back and you realize, OK, I need to be paying attention elsewhere.

39:13 I need to be investing in the future behemoths because I see what’s happening on the news. I see what’s happening on a geopolitical landscape. I see that these technologies are being used. I mean, BlackRock is building on Ethereum. They have the Biddle Fund and they’ve got a chain link integrating with real companies.

39:30 And so when you see, and you see the Trumps promoting Ethereum, for example, the ETF, if they start allowing the staking to happen ETFs, now you have potentially people like Vanguard who might come in because, you know, the Vanguard CEO says, we don’t invest and we don’t buy things that don’t earn us passive yield. But if you can stake your ETH and earn passive yield, maybe Vanguard comes into the ETFs. But inevitably, I believe it’s going to happen. And what might make the saying, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships is there’s probably more liquidity coming into the market than ever before. And so even though we have a an attention game fight like never before, we probably see more liquidity coming into things, but never before. And Peter Thiel took a half a million dollars and turned it into a billion dollars using the exact same techniques we’re using inside the investment. He met a CEO. His name was Zuckerberg. He pitched him the deal and he said, okay, I’ll give you a half a million dollars. Mark went public and sold the shares to people like you.

40:33 Well, what happened to Peter? Well, he exited and got a 2300x return. The wealthy invest in early stage companies, folks. The public markets are for suckers. It’s a rigged game. By the way, this happens in crypto as well. It’s called pre-sale tokens. This is Solana. Does anybody know this chain? They sold pre-sale tokens for four cents. And you can see the date on there, April 5th, 2018. Look at Solana today, folks. That thing’s up over 1000x. The media and Wall Street and all these hype people get you to buy the top. Meanwhile, they put their clients in at the bottom and they use you for liquidity to make their clients rich. You can play this same game.

41:13 You just have to have the financial education and the deal flow. That’s it. A lot of people, and this is why I think the American audience is so important for this, is because they’re going to come in and a lot of them are going to look for good quality companies to invest into. They’re going to understand this is the next internet revolution. This is the next AI revolution where money will be made and generational wealth will be created.

41:34 And for Bitcoin, that’s your store of value. That’s how you preserve your purchasing power. That’s how you protect it from the inflationary and the de-dollarization that’s happening. That’s how you protect it from the housing collapse that’s probably going to come or at least has currently stalled out over the last two years and likely will probably correct. So what else are you buying right now? Well, if you want to preserve your wealth, you put it in Bitcoin. If you want to try to change your generational wealth opportunity, you have to invest in something a little higher up the risk curve, and that’s going to be altcoins.

42:07 And so I think as we see more capital coming into Bitcoin, which is relentless right now, relentless bids on Bitcoin, as people start to take profits, they will rotate into Ethereum, because a lot of people believe in watching start charts and cycles. And people are going, if they’re going to bet on something that historically has happened every single bull run, or they’re going to possibly try to play their odds that a different outcome might happen this cycle, well, they’re betting against the odds that are not in their favor. And so my guess is that people who are placing bets are going to bet that the same thing happens this cycle historically has always happened in crypto, and that is the rotation of capital. And this is exactly what happens. It goes from Bitcoin, and then it rotates into Ethereum. And so the second that we start to see Ethereum rally, which everyone thinks it’s dead, but it’s not like if you want to build a company or an RWA play or anything with billions and billions and billions of dollars and your reputation from a Fortune 500 company is put on the line, you’re probably not going to build on Solana because it just hasn’t been battle tested like Ethereum has. And TradFi is totally OK waiting 12 seconds for a transaction to clear as long as they’re not going to get fired or they’re not going to get crucified by the media for building on something more experimental, like SWE or something, or Solana. And there’s places

43:27 For those too. I think that those blockchains are fantastic for lower value transactions, things like gaming, things like social media, things like streaming, whatever. Those blockchains will be cheap and fast. They’re less battle-tested. And those are the blockchains, I believe, that a lot of consumer apps will be built on. If we want to build a social media platform, and you want to build tipping built into it, you’re not going to do it on Ethereum.

43:53 You’re probably not going to do it on Ethereum layer 2 because it’s still slower and cheaper and not as nice if you’ve experienced. You’re going to do it on SUI, you’re going to do it on Solana, something like that. And that’s where we’re headed in the future where I believe big companies that want to put assets on chain will probably do it on Ethereum or Ethereum layer 2s. And consumer-facing apps that want to be cheap, fast, and lower-value transactions, That’s going to happen on Solana and Sui.

44:20 So to your points, I think that we’re going to have an altcoin season. I think it’s inevitable. And if you look at historically where we are in the markets, we’re in May right now. You know, last in 2021 cycle, we had a bit of an exciting Q1. And then we went real boring all the way all summer, which is the opposite of what’s happening right now.

44:41 We had a really bad Q1 this year. And now we’re at all-time highs today and we’re coming into the summer. So it’s a bit different. For me, I think that if anything, what happens is this just gets pushed out a little bit because of what’s happened on a regulatory framework and because of institutions coming in and governments, you know, it’s pretty massive. So I think that we’re going to have an altcoin season.

45:03 I think that it’s maybe delayed a little bit. It does seem to be replicating kind of what we saw in 2021 in a way where we had the first kind of blow off top, Bitcoin hit 108,000. And before, in the last cycle, it hit like 64,000 or something, and then we had this dip all the way until Q4, when you had this crazy mania that came in for a few months, blow off top at 69K in correction. I don’t know, but that seems to be kind of what’s happening here. We hit, this time it was shifted because of the ETFs, because of Trump.

45:32 So we saw all-time highs early, correction, now we see all-time highs again. I think that we’ll keep running, and we’re already starting to see altcoins, some of them starting to do really, really well right now. Some of the good ones are performing really well. Yeah, and Ethereum was up 50% in seven days. You know, we saw a bunch of things coming back, which was pretty impressive.

45:52 If you had to call a quarter for the Bitcoin high, I’m sorry to do this to you, but I have to do this, Kyle. And if you had to call a level plus or minus 20%, what would it be? This is so hard because I asked the same question to so many people that I find intelligent. I think that they have more experience in the traditional financial world and markets and things like that. I often get subconsciously influenced by the things that they’ve said before.

46:24 For me, I’ve always believed in fundamentally trying to assess a situation. Bitcoin’s fundamental situation right now is there’s very low emissions every single day. More and more, every single day, people come into Bitcoin with a mindset like Michael Saylor. They’re saying, okay, we are now going to allocate some percentage of our asset center management into this new digital gold that now has regulatory clarity and now has global recognition as a store of value.

47:02 It has outperformed gold on a long-term timeframe by far, outperformed everything, every other asset since its existence so far. And it will continue to do so, I think, for a very long time until it finds its stabilization points, which I don’t know what that will be. Probably in the tune of somewhere between $10 and $15 million in 10 years from now or something. I think we’re going to see… This is why we’re seeing a bit of a different cycle right now is because we might be seeing a super cycle. And what that essentially means is it’s a cycle that performs differently than expected given a traditional market cycle.

47:46 So what you would normally see is diminishing returns, right? Bitcoin’s first bull run, crazy. I don’t remember the percentage. The second bull run, it was almost just as crazy, but not quite. The third one, less crazy. And then the one after that, less crazy, right?

47:59 And now we’re coming into a new one where people would expect that a Bitcoin went before from all-time high of $20,000 to $69,000, okay, now you’re at like a 3.5X, right? And then the prior ones were 10, 20, 30, 100X. So someone would say, okay, well, I expect that now we’re going to do 1.5, 2X because law of diminishing returns and just it takes a lot more capital to move the price of Bitcoin than it used to. So people would say that, okay, well, this cycle, it makes sense that we top out 125 $175,000 or something. That’s people who are going to be looking at charts, which blows my mind, because a lot of people just don’t seem to look at fundamentals. And when you look at the amount of Bitcoin that’s being bought up every single day versus the available supply and the newly emitted Bitcoin that are being created every single day, I mean, we’re talking about 10, 20, 30, 40 times the amount of Bitcoin that are being mined every day being bought up just by those people who we know publicly are doing it, right? That doesn’t even include ultra high net worth individuals, family offices, governments that want to do it quietly behind the door before they announce it publicly. Who knows what’s going on, right? And back to Bitcoin Vegas, I kind of have, I’m kind of making a guess here, but I think that maybe there’s going to be some sort of announcement of the first move of doing something that falls within the executive order for the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, where they can make purchases

49:24 Of Bitcoin using budget neutral strategies that doesn’t cost the taxpayer any money. But we found budget neutral strategies to do that already. The question is, is that going to be announced at Bitcoin Vegas or not? And even if it doesn’t, which maybe it does, but the second that that actually happens, that the U.S. is buying Bitcoin and adding to the reserve, because it’s one thing to establish the Bitcoin reserve, but when all you do is don’t sell the tokens you already have, okay, like they obviously learned the lessons. Germany sold those Bitcoin last year, whatever, it cost them tens of billions, whatever, billions of dollars, the dumb move. Let’s not be dumb. Let’s keep the Bitcoin we have. Fine.

50:10 But we haven’t yet seen an action where we start acquiring, right? And maybe that’s because they’re carefully, strategically acquiring. And if you listen to Bo, he says, our objective is to acquire as much as possible, right? And people might write that off as, well, Bo’s not Trump. But he’s working directly with him. He is the crypto guy. I mean, he’s actually just as important as David Sachs when it comes into it. In fact, David Sachs is just an advisor.

50:35 Bo is actually on the crypto council at the White House. So when we start seeing this acquisition of Bitcoin first through the executive order, but then if we see something like Senator Lummis’ bill pass or we start to acquire $200,000 a year for the next five years, I can’t imagine a world. And I think that bill will get passed this year at some point. And I think that will make the first acquisition through the executive order this year as well. I can’t imagine in anyone’s same world where at that point everyone doesn’t start trying to front run the United States to come in. I mean, I’m talking other countries. I’m talking Middle East. Hide it within everybody.

51:18 If you know the United States is going to programmatically bid on Bitcoin for the foreseeable future, why are you not buying Bitcoin? That would be the most irresponsible fiscal thing that you can do as someone who manages money, as an individual, whatever. If you’re not buying Bitcoin when that starts to happen, you need to seriously reconsider what you’re doing with your financial life. Are you surprised the price of Bitcoin hasn’t spiked earlier? Because like everyone and their mother is buying like there’s like every week there’s a new major company that says it’s part of their treasury strategy.

51:54 You know Abu Dhabi investment fund just reported 400 million of the ETF they bought. I mean so many bullish things and yet the price has taken its sweet time to come up here. prize you? Because Bitcoin, Bitcoiners are typically holders as well. Yeah, I mean, it’s crazy. I just made a show earlier before this interview, and I forget who it was at the top of my head. I think it was, I don’t know if it was Marathon Digital or one of the other companies. They, I think it was in Japan. They were, they were, or maybe it was a new one. I don’t remember. But one of these companies started acquiring Bitcoin and the pump priced, the stock price pumped 90% overnight, they had actually halt trading because it was getting too hot. I mean, their demand is there. And it just goes to show you that people who aren’t buying Bitcoin directly want exposure to Bitcoin companies. Every time that a new company starts doing the micro strategy or a strategy and sailor strategy, every time a new company does that, it’s just one more powerful entity, constantly bidding on Bitcoin and adding it to their treasury reserves where they don’t plan on trading it and trying to sell the top.

53:05 They understand that’s going to be volatile and they have a 10, 20, 30 year horizon. In fact, if you’re buying gold before it becomes a global reserve currency, then you’re probably never selling the gold. You’re keeping it as a reserve on your balance sheet because you believe that’s going to the financial, that’s what’s going to cement in your financial status as a company. So am I surprised? Not really.

53:33 I’m not surprised because of the uncertainties that’s been happening in the market. So we had, you know, it didn’t help that you had the Trump coin and then the Melania coin, the Argentina coin, and the countries, you know, creating these meme coins. But then you had massive geopolitical instability for the since January 20. I mean, the tariffs and the wars and this and that and the Fed, you know, Jerome Powell and, you know, and JP Morgan saying the recession’s coming and all this, I mean, massive geopolitical uncertainty.

54:11 And we’re starting to see clarity coming and we’re starting to see that the tariffs are back, you at least in a pause, the wars have seemed to halt it or are coming to a pause or a ceasefire. And so right now, it makes sense. If you follow the geopolitical news and macro news, then it seems to make sense. Like that’s what I talk about daily on my channel. And so I’m not really surprised, but I’m glad that it’s happening, obviously.

54:39 You didn’t give me a quarter and you didn’t give me a price. Okay. So I’ll tell you what, I’ll throw you a little lifeline And then I’ll ask you again, you mentioned the supercycle. I was talking to Michael Turpin, who made his 11th consecutive appearance at Satoshi Roundtable in January. I think you were there in January, I think.

54:58 The year before. You were there the year before. That’s when I met you, I saw you there too. And I had a call with Turpin talking about something else and he walked me through his whole hypothesis and he said, 180K Bitcoin plus or minus 30K in Q4. He said, that’s if we stick on the cycle and don’t go into the super cycle, which is a possibility.

55:18 So maybe you can tell me what you think your call is or what you think some of the people you interviewed that you rate highly are saying. So I think that we go into 2026. I think that we go into 2026. And I think that we probably, I think that we probably go somewhere in the 250K region region in 2026. I agree, though, with Turpin, if we if we if we end up not going into a super cycle, then it’s it’s it follows every other four year cycle where the end Q4 happens and we were below 250 K at that point. But I but like I said before, I can’t imagine a world where these things that I mentioned don’t happen. And so I mean, I wouldn’t even be surprised because if you understand supply shock, it’s always talked about every four year cycle reminds us that Bitcoin is very scarce.

56:25 And when you understand just how much is being taken off the market every single day, then you really understand that eventually when these dominoes start to fall, a nation start buying it. It’s one thing that BlackRock has bought it. And yeah, nations like Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund have bought into the BlackRock ETF. And other ones we find out here in their R2. But eventually they’re going to hold it, they’re going to self custody it, right?

56:51 They’re not going to own it through the ETF. They want to hold it the same way they hold gold. And when that happens, I think that we go into a super cycle. And so if that happens, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a million dollar Bitcoin, you know, by the end of 2027. So it’s just a super cycle.

57:06 Just elongates that cycle and turns a four year cycle maybe into a six year cycle, which means higher highs for a longer period. Yeah, and I don’t, I don’t think that I believe the days of an 80% correction in Bitcoin are probably behind us. I don’t think it goes to a million dollars and comes back to, you know, then comes back to 200,000 in a bear market. I don’t think those days are gone anymore. And I think that right now what you’re seeing for the first time in history, and that’s why we can’t compare it to any prior cycles, is adoption.

57:43 It’s always been speculation before. It’s found its use case, product market fit on a global level. It’s never happened before. It just happened this year. And so when that happens, Bitcoin is inevitably going to do what it does and become less volatile like gold, where everybody who wants to acquire it has, and then eventually people will just start spending it and using it because it’s not so volatile anymore.

58:07 And that’s when it becomes pretty boring at that point. Yeah, we definitely live in some very exciting and interesting times. Kyle, I wanna ask you about Crypto Nights. Here you are as one of these kind of shark tank style celebrity VCs, you got these companies coming on and pitching you, it’s kind of high Hollywood factor. What makes a guy like you decide to do something?

58:33 I’m sure you got pitched these things over the years. The production value is super high. The quality of the firms are big. I know we both, I think, have invested in at least one of those companies and it’s now kind of being streamed live now on Amazon Prime. Tell me about crypto nights.

58:51 Yeah, so I have been pitched before to do it and I really, really considered, you know, if I would do it or not for a long time. I mean, the idea was originally pitched to me back during COVID, like 2021, to give some context of how long this has been in the works. And I kind of brushed it off at first. I didn’t really know who Riaz was, who created the whole show. And as we got closer to actual production, when I started seeing the track record of the guys who created it, you know, they shipped shows that have had, I think each of them had a, I don’t know, something crazy, over 50 or a hundred million views or something like that, a ton of views.

59:37 And I saw the production value of those previous shows that they’d done. I got quite interested. I’ve always wanted to do something like this because all day at home, oftentimes I’m sitting on calls with projects pitching me. And I’ve gotten to the point where initially I was nice and listened And now it’s just like, we really value our time. And so I’m straight to the point, often, if I think that it’s BS, I’ll call BS.

1:00:07 What the London Real Investment Club actually does for you, it gives you the keys to open that door to the inside deals. In the last three weeks, I’ve participated in three incredible deals, a layer two Bitcoin protocol, an incredible AI protocol. The deal flow is beyond what I expected. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a model like this that just gives average folks the opportunity to be behind the deals and that’s exactly what we’ve done. Not only that, you get to hang out with Brian Rose every week and for me, that was huge because I look at Brian as somebody who’s not only an expert in the space and I think is on the leading edge, but just the leading edge of thought with London Real and the work he’s doing there.

1:00:45 To anyone who’s taking a serious look at this, I know it’s a big decision. It was a big decision for me and my family And it is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. So I wish you all the best and hope you come join us. And I’ve tried to value my time, respect their time too, because if I’m not into it, let me just cut you off now and tell you that I’m not into it and let’s stop wasting both of our time. If I think that you’re a scam, I’ll tell you that you’re a scam.

1:01:14 If I think that there’s no use for this token that you’re trying to pitch me when you’re all value, cruel happens in the equity side of the business, but you’re trying to sell me this token, I’m gonna let you know that kind of stuff. And so, you know, my fiance who’ve met Jessica, she always said like, you should really try to put a lot of these calls on YouTube or something because they’re very entertaining. And I have a lot of calls recorded where I’m yelling at founders for things that they’re doing that are just dumb, naive, or pure criminal.

1:01:45 And, you know, I just, I can’t just release these things. I think that that’s not an ethical thing to do. But finally, the opportunity came where we could get some of these pitches permissioned on both sides and put on TV. And I thought that was just a perfect opportunity to showcase kind of what it’s like behind the scenes to actually be pitched by projects and then give honest feedback. And so, yeah, I was really impressed by the also who else was on stage with me and also Adrian Grenier from Entourage, which was one of my favorite shows going up. And then when I was really impressed when we stepped on set and saw the production value.

1:02:22 It was just incredible. So, uh, I’m, I’m quite optimistic that, uh, as, cause it is very similar to shark tank, there’s a few key differences though. One, uh, is shark tank has been around for 20 something years old. It’s on prime time TV and a lot of people still watch it, but I think less. So maybe it’s, it’s already peaked and the, a lot of these guys are probably close to retiring.

1:02:44 I think Cuban’s out if I believe, uh, Mr. Wonderful still doing it, but you know, it’s an older show where people investing in the next kitchen sponge or something, right? And on one hand, that’s appealing because it’s so easily relatable to the audience. Ours is different. It’s more difficult for a large audience to understand. I think that’s something that we need to work on in season two, which we’ll be filming this summer. But a lot of this technology discussion is over the head of a lot of audience. And I watched so far halfway through the season, watching it again, I watched it over. And I think that they’ve done a pretty good job with the way that it’s set up.

1:03:26 So you have us, the judges, the Knights, who are the VCs. And then back in another room called the Boiler Room, you have a couple of people back there, Gav from Wolf Financial. And then we had someone called Kim Lee, who Kim’s job was to be the voice of the person who doesn’t understand crypto. So she, every time she doesn’t understand something, she asks Gav back in the boiler room, what’s happening? And that was a really good job trying to explain some of the more difficult concepts to grasp that we were, we were doing on stage. Plus there’s little captions that come up that explain different things. And so while it might be difficult for someone who had never watched crypto to understand some of it, some of it’s not that difficult. I mean, you still get the drama, you still get the very funny moments. And for a lot of the projects, they’re not so technical, talk about gaming projects or whatever. Yeah, so I think it’s cool and I think that people watch it. It’s a good way for them to learn about crypto, to learn about investing, and it’s a good way to know what kind of questions to ask because as we evolve the financial infrastructure of the world, more and more access opens up to the 99%.

1:04:37 Percent, the audience who’s watching this show, and they don’t know what kind of questions VCs ask. They don’t know what questions to do their own due diligence, and they don’t really know how to identify scams or not. The more that you watch this show, the more that you get to hear the questions that the VCs ask and what they care about. And so if you care about your financial future, if you care about trying to learn how to be a better investigator due diligence, then the show is really good to watch because you’re You’re gonna learn as you go along and you’ll learn about blockchain.

1:05:08 You’ll learn about what we should be looking at when you’re identifying if something’s bestable or not. Do you invest your own money in the deals? Yes. Okay. So each VC or night decides they put in a certain amount.

1:05:23 Is there like a minimum or a maximum? No. So, and that’s another thing that’s quite different between Shark Tank and for each night that’s up there, it’s different, right? So like you’ve heard, Brock, Brock was one of the guys who helped co-found Tether and he was behind Block One, which did EOS, the largest fundraise for any blockchain project. So everyone invested off different balance sheets.

1:05:50 For me, it was all angel checks from me and myself. So we also have a fund and our fund didn’t deploy anything. It was, I didn’t have the authorization from my other investment committee to make those kind of decisions. on the other hand, from Blockchain Founders Fund, I believe all the deals that he did were through the fund directly. Brock, I think, were half and half.

1:06:11 And Nikita, when she did hers, it was, I think, her own capital. But here’s another big difference between Shark Tank and Crypto Nights is, in Shark Tank, you have much more attractive valuations. So these guys are coming in and they’ve got three restaurants set up already and they’ve proven product market fit in the few neighborhoods and now they think they want to take it globe nationally or something, right? Or you got someone who’s created a new little tinkering project and he wants Lori’s help to put it on QVC or whatever. And so these guys are coming in with $1 million valuations, $500,000 valuations, and they’re only able to accept check sizes of $100,000 or $200,000. Maybe once in a while you see where it’s $500,000, et cetera, something in our industry.

1:07:03 A lot of these projects are coming and they’re trying to not appeal on a regional level, a city level, maybe a state, but they’re actually open to a global market. So when you have a DeFi project or a game or something, they’re marketing to the entire globe. And so the potential market size is much bigger, which often allows for usually what the traditional world would see as an unreasonable and unrational valuation. And I think that us as an industry need to do a better job at checking these projects. And I think that the valuations were way too high for way too long. And this was started a lot oftentimes by SPF, FTX, right? So Alameda Research, Sam McMinn Fried, notoriously, along with other big tier one VCs from America, would notoriously come into projects and they would scoop up these really talented founders from Stanford and Oxford and Harvard and all these other ones. And they would make the first investment in the company, right? And then they would own the rights to previous investment rounds. They would structure the whole fundraising round. And so they would come in very cheap. And then they do the next round at 2x, 3x what they invested into. And that would be all their friends who were other tier one VCs or notable investors, build the cap table, make it look really strong.

1:08:30 By the time it got to the last private round, it would be six, 10 times what the first round got in at, a lot of times, these guys would actually sell those on the market, their investments to get out of the deal before it even went public. And then they would sell it to the public at 20, 30, 40 times what these early investors got into. So that started this huge overvaluation of projects. And I think that one of the things that I’m working on, I know Ali’s working on, is we’re trying to work with founders to get those valuations much more reasonable because you’re actually doing yourself a disservice by raising the bar super high before you prove product market fit and revenue and you try to get to a fair valuation. What ends up happening is all those early investors take profit and all the influencers and stuff encourage people, the retail, to go try to buy the investors’ bags and they get crushed because the investors started selling on the retail, which kills the community sentiment, which in crypto is pretty fatal to a project. And so they’re doing themselves a disservice. And so, but the point all about your question was on crypto nights, they’re often, they were often raising more like HON, which we both invested into from Blue Whale. I believe there was a million dollars or $700,000 possible.

1:09:59 So all the nights were able to come into that round. And we had a few deals where all nights invested into it. And even on the ones where, for example, Brock said, I’ll take the whole round, he still then backed up tiptoed backward and said, well, maybe it’s valuable that Kyle comes in because he can help with the tokenomics. And maybe Ali can come in because he can help, maybe Nikita can help in the marketing, for example. So it was a bit more, you had less of the drama of the sharks and shark tank fighting over the deal. And this one, there was other drama in other places, but I do think that maybe we should structure that a little bit differently in season two because we all we also want to make good tv and i think part of shark tank is watching the night the sharks argue with each other over these deals did can you lope all the valves like they do on shark tank where sehan was raising at 60 million you could say no but at 30 million i’ll give you this or was there none of that going on no we did i i uh yeah i mean um when you watch the show you’ll see i there’s one project that was raising uh i forget what it was, but I basically offered him a hundred grand for 10% of the company. And they laughed, but I also wasn’t interested in coming into the deal largely. I thought that them as developers had good potential, but I thought that they would massively, we’re missing the business acumen to

1:11:21 Grow the company. And so what I wanted to do was try to come into that company. And because they also had sufficient runway, they had raised like $3 million already. So I thought that they They could afford the capital to go and hire an amazing CEO or someone that could operate the business side of the company while they focus on the development. But what I saw on stage was not investable in the current state.

1:11:44 So I lowballed up a lot. They declined the offer. That’s fine. There was a couple more that I lowballed like 50% below what they were asking. I believe they accepted after doing due diligence though.

1:11:54 One thing that people should know is that if we committed on the show, it doesn’t mean that we ultimately ended up investing. Why? Because they only get 45 minutes or an hour to pitch us. In real life, due diligence often takes weeks or months if you really want to do good due diligence. You need to check financial statements, fake statements, code, Things like that.

1:12:18 And so the yes on the show was the indicator that we needed to go and start doing due diligence and see if the deal was made. And so there was a few deals where I said yes on the show and end up not investing. I don’t want to mention those now. I don’t know what the rules are of what I’m allowed to disclose on that either, but I’ll just say that. Yeah.

1:12:37 Well, congrats on that. People can go watch it now on Amazon Prime. Is that the best place? Yeah. Yeah.

1:12:44 They told us that not the same as on Prime. Prime Video is how they’re branding it. Like Amazon Prime’s video service is called Prime Video. Yeah, and they have a separate app for that too, which is kind of cool. So no, Prime Video is decent actually.

1:12:54 And now you’re taping the second series this summer as well. Yes. Amazing, congrats on that. Yeah, Production Valley is amazing. We know Brock Pierce, he’s been a guest on the show.

1:13:04 We know your guy from Blockchain Founders Fund. We’ve co-invested in like eight deals with those guys. They’re super legit. So it was really nice to see some real talent there as opposed to a bunch of people I’d never heard of before. And like you said, production value was next level.

1:13:19 I used to watch the show with Adrian Greer as well, so that was cool to see. I didn’t recognize him at first, and I was like, oh yeah. So that was kind of cool, little bit of a Hollywood factor. So yeah, they clearly were doing something intentional, which is nice to see. Kyle, a couple final questions.

1:13:36 If I gave you a million bucks right now and asked you to invest it, sector-wise, What would you put it in, assuming we’re gonna have a mid to late 26th top? And then maybe that could be Bitcoin, Ethereum, and then things like RWA or AI or this kind of thing. But roughly, what would you put that in? Especially, I guess I’m asking more on the altcoins, or the altcoin sectors. What do you like?

1:14:02 Yeah, so I think that, I believe in, and usually imagine my portfolio through the barbell strategy, which is, you know, 85% or so is going to be on the more blue chip safer investments. That would be Ethereum, Solana, SWE, Chainlink, probably even, then you go down the risk curve a little bit more, but still, I think a lot of potential avalanche, things like that. Top 25 market cap kind of things. Yeah. Top 50.

1:14:39 Yeah. I still think that’s all fair game in that blue chip category, especially when you start limiting how many of those top 50 include stable coins and other things like the Biddle Fund and stuff like that. So true altcoins. Um, and then I would go down and look at, you know, things that, uh, and of course, like this is me being biased, but you know, I mean, from, like, like, obviously I’m very bullish on what I’m building, right? Our, when you look at, and I’ll just use me as an example, because it’s the easiest, I understand it the most, right?

1:15:09 So people watching this, oh, he’s shilling his own bags. And I’m not, I’m not saying to go buy my coin, but I’m saying that looking at projects and founders like me who are clearly trying to do things right and trying to build something that is going to be around for generations and trying to build something that’s going to open up to America. Not saying that we’re going to be successful, I’m trying to be successful, but if you can find these kind of opportunities where you see the token is still down 99% from all time highs because there hasn’t been all season yet, there hasn’t been a thing where So far, since 2021, launchpad performance has not performed.

1:15:46 New, the mean coin thing has taken the spotlight. Like I said, I think people have gotten burnt on that. So that’s going to take some work. That’s going to take going and looking at projects that maybe once were in the spotlight and what are they doing now? So you’ve got to go do some research and find out.

1:16:03 Another thing that it’s not altcoins necessarily, but one of the things that I’ve been extremely impressed with with is a trading algorithm that I’ve partnered with that’s trading Bitcoin for me. I am not a trader, but I’ve always thought that if I can generate yield off my Bitcoin, that would be so great because I’ve given Bitcoin twice in my life to other people to manage and trade for me, and both times I’ve lost it entirely. And so this time, this is a strategy I’m using that it’s called the Bitcoin Accumulation Strategy.

1:16:34 And when you understand the law of compounding returns, they’re incredibly powerful. And so this trading algorithm that I’m running, people can find it on my YouTube channel. But it’s just able to do high-frequency trading with really low leverage. And so far it’s done since March 10th, it’s traded for me, it’s done 69 trades, every single one of them. Bitcoin would need to go to like $1,000 for me to get liquidated.

1:16:57 And I remain the owner of that exchange account, and I know that they can’t do anything stupid with it. And they only get paid if they make money for me. So I like that because on average, they’ve returned 36% a year on your Bitcoin. And I’m a big believer in Bitcoin. I just think it’s like the most obvious risk to a reward play right now.

1:17:17 And if you compound 36% over 10 years, you start with one Bitcoin, you end with 10 Bitcoin. And if Bitcoin goes to a million dollars or 10 million, now you’ve got 10 Bitcoin. And that’s enough for anyone to retire off of pretty much at that point. So that’s Bitcoin and I’m big of it. And then also things like, I think right now, so I’m talking to you about things I’ve high conviction in, right?

1:17:40 And I’ve mentioned the layer ones, I’ve mentioned interoperability plays like Chainlink. Another one that’s really interesting and really interesting why I felt was so fascinated by them is a project called Mind Network. So Chainlink has, if you believe that Chainlink is going to be hugely valuable to the traditional financial rails, like I do, then that ecosystem becomes very interesting. And Chainlink has something called a build program. And they designate…

1:18:08 It’s like an incubator. And they designate the participants in that program by tiers, and a tier one project means that that project is critical to the Chainlink technology stack that essentially can’t function without that integration from that partner. And one of my portfolio companies called Mind Network is the privacy layer for Chainlink. So if you look at a lot of the bank reports who did trials with Chainlink, they say, this is fantastic. We could use this, but the problem is Chainlink has no privacy built in.

1:18:38 And so is when you start doing things like using AI agents at a trading firm, because if AI can do everything better than humans, which it can at most things already, of course, firms like JP Morgan and others are going to start using AI agents for trading, and want to do that on chain eventually, because that’s the most efficient markets, it will be the most efficient markets. Those transactions and those strategies need to remain private, right? When bank A sends money to bank B using Chainlink CCIP program, it needs privacy.

1:19:10 And so the holy grail of encryption technology is called FAHE. And so my network is that tier one designated partner with Chainlink, and they just launched like a month or so ago. there’s not a whole lot of awareness around there. I still think it’s a really good entry. And when it comes to gaming, my highest conviction play, I’m a really big early stage investor in Gunzilla. But even though I invested in between my fund and myself personally as an angel, we have a large percent of the token supply. I still am buying Gunzilla open market today.

1:19:43 Why? Because I don’t know what it is right now at the currently time of filming, but when I check like three days ago, it was a $36 million market cap. And all tokens from all other categories are locked for 12 months from the TGE. So that means that for the next 10 months or so, there’s no more inflation, which means that the market cap that you need to pay attention to is not FDV, it’s circulating market cap. Investment Club. Today, I considered the best investment that I’ve ever made. We get four projects presented a week by their associated CEOs. Personally, I’m completely blown away by the quality of these projects. And I know of nowhere else where I would be given this same opportunity.

1:20:19 Each week that passes, I feel more appreciative of the fact that I’m a member of this group. The vibe was just tremendous. Everybody’s on the same wavelength. We just clicked. Everybody listened to each other, enjoyed their company.

1:20:31 It was just magical, magical. Take action, don’t take my word for it, through diligence you need to do. And I really hope that someday down the road I see you in the club. A far exceeded expectations without question. at a 35 or even $50 million valuation for Gunzilla that’s co-founded by Neil Blomkamp, who made District 9 and Elysium, Hollywood star director with a huge stuff of news in the pipeline that they haven’t disclosed yet, and a tier one game that’s on PlayStation, on Xbox.

1:21:11 It’s getting millions of on-chain transactions every day and hundreds of thousands of users in the beta tests with all tier one, they’ve raised tons of money. I can’t think of any other project in the entire crypto market that in the next 10 months makes sense as a trade, right? So why am I buying Gunzilla on the open market when I already have a big supply? Well, because that big supply is like, I believe that’s going to be, I’m not going to, I’m probably not going to sell those tokens this bull market.

1:21:43 If it’s a four year cycle, we will have been in the bear market by the time it was unlocked. And if we get a blow off top in December, like a lot of four year analysts predict, then no VCs are taking anything out that invested in Godzilla, which means that the current circulating supply is the current circulating supply, which means if we go into an altcoin season, that thing’s going parabolic, in my opinion. And so from a risk reward perspective, so I’m still buying the guidance token on the open market right now.

1:22:08 Off the top of my head, that’s what I would think of. All right. That’s a pretty good summary. Last question, Kyle. Now, if you do everything right, or at least close to right, what does your life look like?

1:22:19 Where are you located? What have you built? And what does the market look like as well? Okay, so great question, thank you. So I think that if you’re building, if you understand decentralization, right?

1:22:32 And if you think that peer-to-peer transactions and smart contracts are the future of applications, I do. Why? Because if you understand decentralization, point is to remove middlemen. What does that do? It removes friction, it removes fees.

1:22:47 And so when you think about a use case like a ride sharing application like Uber, if you were to, if you were to build, if someone were to build a very similar user experience where any driver in the world can sign in and any passenger in the world to take their service, but you remove that middleman fee that Uber takes like 30% or whatever. Now what happens is my ride to the airport costs me 30% less. And that means I pay less and the driver makes more money, and then you can still have one or two percent from that that goes back to people who are securing the network, the token holders, the governance, whatever.

1:23:21 And so that becomes, as long as the user experience is super easy, you know, like I mentioned before, the consumer apps that aren’t having billions of dollars in DeFi locked in it can be slightly less secure if my transaction size is something like 100 bucks or 50 bucks or 20 bucks or without whatever, then you can have an application that doesn’t feel like Web 3. It feels like Web 2, but you get all the benefits of Web 3. You get the decentralization. So I believe that is the future of applications purely because they’re going to make more sense for the consumers and the other side. So I want to decentralize the products that we’re building, paid in commonwealth. I eventually want to get them in a position to where that cannot happen overnight. It cannot happen in early stage. It is just too difficult to build a constitution in place that the down members will understand how it operates and what the rules are of that ecosystem and how it functions. That’s going to take time. And that’s one of the discussions I’d also like to help with with the American regulators. So I see myself mostly out of crypto. I still want to be a voice in the streets, still operating my YouTube channel.

1:24:34 Hopefully, the show Cryptonites is still going by then, still investing into plain capital. But where I was before crypto was longevity and anti-aging. And I’ve started taking that very seriously the past six or eight months or something like that. And so now I’m a certified biohacker. I’m going back to my roots of where I was before crypto. And I want to invest and be part of that industry. And so there’s a couple companies right now that I have a close relationship with that are doing incredible things. One of them is doing gene therapy to make life better, to solve really critical problems that we have that are inherent in our DNA.

1:25:15 And another one is a stem cell company that’s doing something that no one else is doing in the stem cell world. Those are two that in the next six to 12 months, I’d like to get a little bit closer to. And I plan on investing some of my gains from this bull run into those companies and hopefully taking an advisor position or something over there. As I get a bit older, I’m now 40 and I’d like to control the faith in my health. And I think guys like Brian Johnson are surely out there showing us that you can be 50 years old and healthier than most 18-year-olds.

1:25:54 And, uh, and so whether he’s able to indefinitely extend lifespan or just significantly increase his lifespan, but also at the same time, simultaneously increasing his health span, like I want to be, if, you know, if I died naturally or, or of an accident at a hundred years old, 110 years, 120 years, whatever it is, then I want to be healthy until the end of my life too. I don’t want to spend the last 10 years of my life dependent on someone else taking care of me. And I certainly think that that world is as fascinating as AI and crypto 100%. Because most people, well, everyone, when they start, if they’re not taking care of themselves, and they start to get to my age, like, you start to feel the effects of aging, and it’s not nice.

1:26:40 It’s not nice at all, right? And then when you get older and older, it becomes more crippling, uh, more debilitating and we’re at a point where we no longer need to accept that aging is inevitable. In fact, people are currently proving that it’s not inevitable. In fact, me myself in the past year and a half have reversed my biological age. And this is how crazy it was. When I was 39, I had my telomeres tested, which for those watching, it’s just a way scientists can measure your biological age. When I was 39 years old, I came back as a 51 year old, right? The doctors used to say I was living life in the fast lane.

1:27:13 You know, I was, I was an entrepreneur that was hustling, that was proud of going on a call. I only got three hours of sleep last night. I was working too hard, right? Like, and, and eating like crap and severely overweight and all these kinds of things. And so I’ve taken my biological age from 51 to now last time I checked, which was like four months ago, telomere length was 46.

1:27:33 And then my whoop whoop just got an upgrade. They say my biological age is 41.8. I don’t, that’s not nearly as accurate as a telomere test. I need to do a telomere test again. But anyway, I’m going in the right direction, and I see myself as a voice in the crypto industry, as someone who helped shape it, who has left infrastructure that becomes very valuable.

1:27:54 In fact, my goal in this industry is to change the financial, allow the financial future of the 99% to flourish. How do you do that? You need to look at your risk-minimized investment opportunities that give you really big upside potential with, You know, it’s to put you in the same ability as a sophisticated VC. And those are the kind of platforms, technological platforms I built. And my goal over the next year or two is to really help with adoption of those technologies and then eventually hand them over to the community.

1:28:27 Love it. And I love the longevity stuff. We’ve been actually talking about this on London Real for quite some time. We had Aubrey de Grey on the show about 10 years ago, one of the first people talking that maybe age was a disease. We’ve had David Sinclair on the show.

1:28:40 I actually just had my first boxing match, just turned 54 years old. I fought this- I heard. Yeah, I fought this 28-year-old kid at Crypto Fight Night and it was a judge’s decision. Looks like we’ll do a rematch, but I’ve been working with the guys at the Lifespan Clinic in Dubai with exosomes and they got me dialed in, so- Oh, Dr. Sami?

1:29:00 Yeah, Dr. Sami, yeah, exactly. He’s amazing, right? Yeah, he’s amazing. Shout out, Dr. Sami.

1:29:05 He actually, they sponsored me for the Crypto Fight Night Lifespan Clinic. So when you see round one and three, their logo is right behind me, and that was Sammy coming in. So yeah, I love this space. I’m so glad you’re involved in it. And this concept of health span is so important.

1:29:20 So important. And a lot of the crypto community is really interested. There’s quite a synergy and overlap in this community. And I know Chris M. M. Crypto, he’s really big into his biohacking, does regular five-day fasts, saunas, and a lot of guys in the community or waking up to it.

1:29:39 So I’m so glad you’re doing that. He’s one of my best friends. It’s very interesting. He’s gone into, he had some health issues and then he went into the carnivore diets, which is a big fat right now. And that’s an interesting discussion.

1:29:55 We can talk about it another time, but yeah, I think for me, I’m really fascinated. And I’ve always been data-driven. I’ve always said, okay, like, sure, you stop eating processed foods. you stop eating seed oils, yes, a lot of your health problems went away and you think it’s because you went on a carnivore diet, but maybe it’s just because you stopped eating a bunch of junk food and processed foods. I don’t know, but I would just say that for me, even though I don’t agree with everything Brian Johnson does, I think he’s the only person that’s in like promoting this biohacking kind of stuff in a way that says, I’m transparent with all of my data. Here’s everything. You be the judge, right? And I’m not a vegan, vegan, but I think that a lot of the, you know, anyway, so, uh, but yeah, one of the things too is, uh, when I was in Dubai at the same time, I saw Dr. Sami from my span. I also went and I can say now that I’m, I’m no longer organic. I’m, I’m GMO, uh, that gene therapy company I was telling you about. I got a gene therapy, which, uh, actually does a little bit of cell gene mutation in the area where I was injected and that it creates a full statin, more full statin, which inhibits something called myostatin, which is a muscle regulator. So if you inhibit myostatin, it actually encourages your body to produce more muscle mass and burn more fat and actually has an epigenetic or lifespan net benefit as well. So yeah, I’m really into this stuff. I think

1:31:20 It’s fascinating. Did Johnson have that same treatment when he went down to Panama or was that a slightly different gene therapy? Honduras, it was the same one. Honduras, Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I’ve been into each company. Yeah, I’ve been a mini circle. That’s doing it. Okay. Yeah I’ve been a social Brian back and forth and I love what he’s doing. I wouldn’t necessarily follow those protocols I went vegan for a year back in the day as well And I don’t think it’s the right diet especially for me But um, I love what he’s doing because he pushes the limit and you can learn from him And so I’ve tried to adopt a lot of his sleep protocols and I just take a lot of his stuff is is really good data And so I appreciate everybody out there really pushing the limit and just adding to the conversation as well.

1:31:59 So yeah, great stuff. Kyle, what’s the best way for people to follow you on X, on YouTube, and to learn more about your platforms like paid in Commonwealth? Yeah, so I have a website, KyleShase.com, C-H-A-S-S-E.com, which has all my links on it. But also just on YouTube, Kyle Shase Crypto on X, Kyle underscore Shase. And I’m even thinking about, and we’ll update people later, but I’m even thinking about firing up.

1:32:25 I haven’t been on Instagram and those platforms for a long time. But now that Cryptonites is going to be a more mainstream TV show, I might start doing some more lifestyle stuff. I really want to do more in the health and longevity stuff, so I’ll keep people posted on those. I did start a longevity channel on YouTube, but I haven’t had the mental power or the time to keep it up. But those are the places people can find me.

1:32:45 I look forward to, you know, to anyone reaching out. People can find me on my, they can find me on my X account. There’s a, one of those hyperlinks that give you all my stuff and they can reach out directly to Telegram if they need to, you know, want to raise money on paid or they want to be on season two of crypto nights. I can put them in touch with the producers over there, whatever. Excellent stuff.

1:33:08 Well, look, all the best with your meetings with Bo and the SEC and everything you’re trying to do. Really hope that you have success because it’s extremely well needed. I’m so glad you’re back in the States to push that forward. And you’re right, I turn on the reality show every day and it’s fun to watch and it’s great to be a part. And I hope we get a really good cycle here.

1:33:25 I really do. So there you go, Kyle, thanks so much. Let’s do this again next time in person and wishing you all the best. Thanks, Brian. All right, and thanks everybody.

1:33:34 We’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care, bye.