STANDARDIZE DISCLOSURES

“One is your actual business and the product or service that you're selling, and the other is your instrument. So the CEO or the CFO of a publicly traded company spends a lot of time on their business, on their internals, all that kind of stuff. But they also spend a lot of time selling their other product, their stock, to their investors. And the honest truth is that you just have to do both of those things.”

“If you're not following along on your screen here, we've gone from about 2 million some tokens to just over 35 That is an explosion of the supply, right? So if you were to look at the normalized market cap and look at it on a per-token basis adjusted for the supply, it's this blue line here, which is way worse, which is basically, as crazy as this sounds, the average token is essentially where it was in July of 2020, pre-two bull markets ago.”

“But really, what is happening here is that capital markets are getting rebuilt and they're getting rebuilt on chain. That is the big opportunity mega trend of the next five to 10 years. And so when you think about capital markets, what powers capital markets is trust and infrastructure that connects investors and people with capital, the people that want to use that capital businesses, on-chain businesses. So that is the opportunity that we're orienting Blockworks around.”

“The days of tokens, just being able to launch this liquid instrument, not really define what it is, provide no disclosures about ownership, sales, those days are ending. And by the way, they should end. This does not work. Refer back to the data that we just showed. It's broken. It doesn't work. So there's actually a layer of disclosures that is the bedrock, which is just super table stakes, basic stuff.”

“By the way, all of that whole data layer is powered by AI, right? So the days of, I used to be a consultant, any analyst knows the pain of like sorting through two and a half year old 10Ks, and you're looking for one line item, all of that is going to be answered by AI. Like, we can do this stuff way, the exciting thing about this is that we can actually do this much better than TradFi does.”

“This transparency, having the real-time data, if the right amount is displayed, actually smooths volatility. It smooths the volatility over. So that's the opportunity for on-chain businesses. And then because all of that data is just live and it's up to date and real-time, I feel like Coinbase and any public company that does that should get some props, right? They should have to do less of the other bullshit that comes along with being a public company.”

“But really, what is happening here is that capital markets are getting rebuilt and they're getting rebuilt on chain. That is the big opportunity mega trend of the next five to 10 years. And so when you think about capital markets, what powers capital markets is trust and infrastructure that connects investors and people with capital, the people that want to use that capital businesses, on-chain businesses.”

“So we actually went the opposite way, and we went down into the bedrock and the foundation. And if you look at a lot of our branding, we're keeping that signature Blockworks purple, but we have a lot of imagery of stone and solidity and caves and identifying things via echolocation. And that's the reason why I think this is so cool. And it informs what we view as the opportunity for this space, which is, for lack of a better word, it's the seam.”

“So what this actually is, is a kind of ideological, political movement, new technology that moved from the fringe into winning. This is literally what winning feels like. But now some of the parts of our ideology that hasn't survived contact with the real world are going to have to get changed. And that is the moment that we're currently in.”

“Net net, what can you take away from all of this? It's not just a revenue story. It's not just build great products, generate tons of revenue. We're actually doing that and the prices still aren't going up. So what it tells you is there's a trust problem. Investors have stopped. They never really understood what the difference was between a token and equity in the project.”

“And if you look at how this has played out in the past, there's the initial dump, then there's actually an initial recovery faster than you think, that no one really believes, because it doesn't translate business sentiment and activity lags price by about six months.”

“And I think actually, funnily enough, what's causing the sentiment drift here is that that ideological movement industry blob that is crypto won. And so now that it won, it moved from being a movement which is on the fringe, on the outside and countercultural, to one which is in the mainstream and it's struggling with an identity crisis.”

“I don't think it's going to be this huge surge in everything winning again. I do think there'll be some knee-jerk surge where capital moves back into the space, and maybe the dino coins pump a little bit. But that dispersion trend and the winners winning and compounding, I think will happen, and it'll give faith to everyone again.”

“We used to, hey, crypto, we're in a bear market because FTX blew up. We're in a bear market because Gary Gensler. We're in a market because Jane Street is selling. I mean, it's just hilarious to me that now we're blaming Jane Street. I mean, if you think of the villains list, like how low the bar has gotten. But now I think we're realizing there's no one to blame but us.”

“I mean, I think everyone overcomplicated, and something like the four-year cycle is clearly in effect here. And if you look at how this has played out in the past, there's the initial dump, then there's actually an initial recovery faster than you think, that no one really believes, because it doesn't translate business sentiment and activity lags price by about six months.”

“We have an asset problem, and we have a trust problem. That's the core of what's happening right now, which is, you know, we'll get into some of the data that backs this up later. But I mean, the average token or the median net return of a token over the last five years is down 80%.”

“The days of tokens, just being able to launch this liquid instrument, not really define what it is, provide no disclosures about ownership, sales, those days are ending. And by the way, they should end. This does not work. Refer back to the data that we just showed. It's broken. It doesn't work. So there's actually a layer of disclosures that is the bedrock, which is just super table stakes, basic stuff.”