Mike Ippolito (Blockworks co-founder)

“The way I describe it right now is we're about six months into a pretty deep bear market. Traditionally, bear markets have lasted around twelve months before activity started recovering. That kinda makes me think that by the end of this year, we'll be looking a little bit better. We won't be out of the woods yet, but I do think 2027 will be quite a good year.”

“Bitcoin has made it in the sense that it's still really the only institutional asset class, like, fully institutional asset class. So it's gonna start behaving like institutional assets behave. The original value prop of Bitcoin was you should buy this because this thing might 20 x in your face. And no one believes that anymore, and that's good if you are a kind of like a goal you you don't really wanna buy some there's a whole the big pockets of money in the world don't wanna buy things at 20 x because if it 20 x's, it can go down 90%.”

“Tokens are not an asset class. They are a way of they are they are a wrapper for different types of asset classes, period. Like, a token is not a new thing. It's not a new thing. It's just a different way of representing existing assets.”

“I think most people want a very sure 10 to 15% return. That's what I think that's what I think, like, most people are chasing. That's where I think the biggest amount of money in the world is. Have you guys spent a lot of time on, like, the Reddit forums of, like, financial freedom? I actually disagree with you. I don't think we are clouded by crypto that retail wants thousand x's.”

“One thing Mike said, which I agree with is, like, you know, meme coins and n f NFTs, etcetera, I'm not sure these things will come back. But there will be a new thing that people use, especially retail that we don't even know about right now, and that just absolutely blows up.”

“Honestly, the big winners, like, the fundamental compounders that I see this cycle are kind of like, you know, the Ave Morpho Sky Maples Caminos of the world. Right? I think I I think a lot of these Apollo type folks are gonna look at this world and be like, what? I get this. This makes a ton of sense to me. So, anyway, that's like my I think that that this next cycle is just all about that, to be honest.”

“I'm actually quite I'm surprisingly bullish on real world assets. I think that that would definitely be a thing this cycle. I spend less time there. I'm actually a bit concerned about the risks of real world assets. I wrote a master thesis on DeFi risks back in, like, 2019, and I think real world assets for me right now are, like, highly, highly risky and, like, massive chance of blowing up when the cycle comes back.”

“I think the the clarity and genius stuff is, like, you should fade it. I mean, the regulation is always a fade in terms of what's driving price movement 100% of the time. But I think that peep it I think it's the type of thing that people fail to price appropriately the long term effect of. Like, Genius got signed into effect, and then there are a bunch of things that are in motion right now which are going to drive, like, a whole bunch of changes that there will be big winners from.”

“I thought it was really funny in past cycles, especially, like, '21 where, when the institution institutional people, like, tried to basically, like, adopt crypto culture, you know, and you'd have, like like, you know, consulting firms being, like, g m g m. Like, we'd love to chat to you about x y z or just, like, random people at these big companies having, like, you know, board ape PFTs and things like that. And it was very much so, like, we're in our own little world over here.”