Editor | Wu Says Blockchain

This episode of the "Good Game Podcast" focuses on the latest trends in the cryptocurrency market, discussing the integration of AI and cryptocurrency, the rise of tokenization as a market strategy, and Solana's leading position in the ecosystem. Guests analyze the reasons behind the recent market downturn, the long-term impact of favorable policies from the Trump administration (such as the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) plan) on the market, and the competitive relationship between Bitcoin and gold. Additionally, the differences between Base and Solana in terms of user profiles, culture, and product levels are discussed, along with the challenges Coinbase faces in its market strategy, and how memecoins and application tokens are becoming new tools for user growth. Finally, the competitive landscape of Layer 1 is anticipated, and the role of AI in future startups is explored, emphasizing that AI and cryptocurrency technology will gradually integrate into products rather than remain as independent tracks.

Recent Performance and Sentiment in the Cryptocurrency Market

Imran: Clearly, a lot has happened in the past few weeks. I remember the last time we were discussing Trump and our sentiment at that time. Before that, we felt like the tone we heard in the podcast reflected the atmosphere in the AI field, which was a bit uninspiring; you could feel that sentiment in the podcast. I wasn't sure if it was the market or the cryptocurrency space affecting us, or the atmosphere on Twitter; I thought it might just be our mood at the time. Then, over the past month, if you look at the market, it has basically been on a continuous decline. So I think, although we haven't explicitly stated it, our feelings are still in line with the market's performance.

Qiao: After I tweeted my market views, everyone should be clear about how I think.

Imran: Yes, I think if we are to discuss the AI field, there are indeed some projects that are quite good, which we have mentioned before. But I feel this is a general phenomenon, right? From my perspective, we have previously experienced TRUMP coin and MELANIA coin, and I feel the market is currently digesting that wave of liquidity. At the same time, there are all the bullish news brought by Trump. I don't know how the market will move in the short term, but from a mid to long-term perspective, it is still bullish.

Qiao: What do you think? I feel this is just a sideways market that will last for a while. We had a lot of good news in the past two weeks, supporting executive orders for cryptocurrency, repealing the SAB Act, the stablecoin bill, David Sacks mentioning cryptocurrency in his speech, and so on. There is a lot of good news, but the market hasn't reacted. It's bad; the market's response to this news has been poor. But at the same time, I think the economic situation is good.

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) May Advance, Bitcoin Severely Undervalued

Qiao: There is someone I pay a lot of attention to regarding Bitcoin. He tweeted yesterday, right after everything happened. He said, "The market is completely misled." Today's press conference is about the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) happening. This is DJT's top priority. They are gathering the nation's top officials to formulate a plan in the next 80 days. Half of the working group consists of Bitcoin holders. SBR is happening. If SBR really occurs in the next 80 days, then Bitcoin is currently severely undervalued; it cannot be priced.

Just like the case with the Bitcoin ETF. Yes, when the Bitcoin ETF happens, everyone says it's bearish, sell-off information, and so on. But what actually happens is that the Bitcoin ETF opens the door for financial buyers of Bitcoin. The situation with SBR is exactly the same. If we get SBR, we will have the government, not just the U.S. government, but state governments and governments around the world, all trying to act around the U.S. government, or at least trying to keep up. So we will see a new wave of net Bitcoin buyers that cannot be priced.

Imran: You also need to consider the sovereign fund created by the Trump administration. It is operated by Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald, who is also a heavy investor in cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin. If he is involved, he leads the sovereign fund. David Sacks has also mentioned that "we can't guarantee, but the sovereign fund may hold cryptocurrency." This is part of their strategy.

So from my perspective, the market is very confused right now. On one hand, we have experienced a huge memecoin bubble; on the other hand, Bitcoin has reached a certain historical high, like $108,000. At the same time, you have these extremely bullish news, and the market seems unsure how to digest all this information.

Qiao: I don't think the market is necessarily confused. I think the market has already priced in a lot of good news, except for SBR. So if SBR happens, we will rise a lot. But before that, I think it will be a sideways market that lasts for a while.

Imran: I mean, this will happen in 80 days, right? They will bring us news in 80 days. So from my perspective, this sideways market will need to be resolved quickly.

Qiao: For those who need more optimism, the $87 billion asset management company Standard Chartered Bank says Bitcoin could reach $500,000 before President Trump leaves office. What do you think? $500,000?

Imran: That's crazy.

Qiao: $500,000, almost more than half of gold. In fact, if Bitcoin reaches $500,000, I wouldn't be surprised if gold drops a bit. This means funds may flow from gold to Bitcoin.

Uncertainty in the Cryptocurrency Space Due to Trump Administration Policies

Imran: Did you see gold today or yesterday? It reached a historical high. It has performed very well; what do you think is driving it? Do you think it's just because of the huge uncertainty of global tariffs?

Qiao: It's a huge uncertainty regarding Trump because Trump 1.0 was basically complete chaos, with trade disputes with everyone, including allies. It's a hedge against chaos and also a hedge against the fact that the U.S. has so much debt.

Imran: And the huge volatility of all currencies. So you better take the risk and invest in gold now. I saw the Canadian dollar being crushed by tariffs.

Qiao: Yes. By the way, I am very surprised by the current speed of government action, especially those… it's crazy.

Imran: I did some rough calculations; they say they can save about $1 trillion a year in deficits. So now we have a $2 trillion deficit each year. If they can save $1 trillion, then over the long term, the national deficit may decrease over time, right? This has a huge impact on interest rates, inflation, and so on. This doesn't even consider the Fed's involvement.

Qiao: The Fed may be reconsidering their strategy because of all these government impacts. This will change the speed at which they lower interest rates.

Imran: I would assume they would do it as soon as possible, rather than dragging it out for a long time; that's my current view. Or will they take longer to balance the interest rate cuts? If there is a deflationary mechanism, will they just wait and see?

Qiao: I haven't thought deeply about this. I don't have a viewpoint.

Imran: I'm interested in how they will do this. Trump tweeted a message a few days ago. At first, he was talking about Powell. He said, "Powell needs to cut rates; I don't care; he needs to cut rates." Then a few days ago, he said, "I'm glad Powell didn't cut rates; I respect his decision very much." That's an interesting shift. I don't know how to interpret this, but it's also very interesting.

Qiao: Reducing government spending in the short term is deflationary because you are actually taking something out of the economy. Government spending is part of the economy, just like a one-to-one relationship in macroeconomics. But tariffs are inflationary. They paused the tariffs. But if they restore tariffs, that is inflationary.

Imran: I think this is Trump's game. He did this in 2017 as well. He forced all parties to sit down and renegotiate. For him, this is just news, right? Just like he got 20,000 law enforcement officers from Mexico to monitor the border, theoretically reducing the drugs and immigrants entering the market. And 10,000 from Canada. That was the Washington border. So in terms of illegal drugs, and so on. I saw news that many cartels have reorganized in Canada because Canada is not doing a good job of stopping drugs from entering its country. So I think these two news items are really favorable for America's drug war. So I think this is just a trade issue. I think this is just what he wants to achieve in a deal. China doesn't want to make a deal. So he stopped all the flow of U.S. mail.

So I think he will force them to do what he wants, and that's my view. So I think this is just a short-term news risk, but in the long term, he will get what he wants.

Qiao: After Eric Trump tweeted, ETH rose by 5%.

Imran: It did rise, but around $2,100 or a similar price. But anyway, in other news, did you hear someone tweeted that Justin Sun was affected?

Imran: Yes, there are rumors that Justin Sun's leveraged ETH position was liquidated. This could be one of the reasons for the price drop.

Qiao: That could be him. We are not sure yet. But now he is trying to launch some kind of decentralized stablecoin as a way to recover losses. This is just a rumor on Twitter and has not been confirmed, but it's interesting to look at these contents.

The Future of AI and Cryptocurrency: Integrating into Many Products as a Fundamental Feature Rather than an Independent Track

Qiao: Last time we talked about DeepSeek…

Imran: Interestingly, we talked about it when DeepSeek just launched, which was a few months ago. We discussed its impact but didn't delve into the recent news about their so-called $6 million "offer." Yes, but everyone is telling me different stories. For example, David Sacks said they couldn't possibly do it with just $6 million. They have a lot of H100s, etc. I don't know who to believe.

Qiao: But anyway, the point is that reasoning and training will continue to become cheaper and cheaper. This is good news for the application layer.

Imran: For consumers, yes, in the AI field.

Qiao: Obviously, there is a parallel story in the cryptocurrency field that we have been discussing. We have talked about it before.

Imran: You have tweeted about this.

Qiao: Well, we have been building this argument that cryptocurrency is also evolving from infrastructure to application layers as infrastructure becomes cheaper. This is happening in both the AI and cryptocurrency fields.

Imran: Yes, indeed. Even among founders in the cryptocurrency field, I feel to some extent, I participated in a discussion with several founders yesterday, but many of them are working in the AI field, and they asked, what aspect of AI should we build on? Most people said they are mainly focused on the consumer side. Of course, there are some exceptions in infrastructure, but I feel the competition in infrastructure is very fierce.

Qiao: I just looked at the applications for our next batch of startups, and about 30% of the companies are using AI in their products or in some way. But none of the companies identify themselves as AI startups or cryptocurrency startups. So, to me, it seems that many use cases for AI are now cheap enough for consumers and are being widely applied to products.

Imran: I believe that in the future, every startup will use cryptocurrency and AI in some form. Yes, so they may appear in any form. So they won't call themselves cryptocurrency startups or AI startups. I think they will just be "startups," which will open up the entire Total Addressable Market (TAM) for things you can build in cryptocurrency or AI, and the opportunities that exist there. In fact, as I mentioned, some of our audience may not know that we are supporting some startups that are purely AI and are not in the cryptocurrency space. They are purely AI.

Qiao: This morning, I looked at 10 applications, and about 7 to 8 of them are purely AI.

Imran: So, what do you think is driving this phenomenon? Obviously, this could be part of our project. A few days ago, I looked at one application where the person said, yes, this is an AI startup, but I can see some applications of cryptocurrency, and I want to explore that. But he knows nothing about cryptocurrency; he just wants to explore it, and I find that interesting. I think this adds to our argument that every startup will incorporate cryptocurrency and AI as features of their products.

Qiao: I feel that over the past two years, many arguments have been made about AI cryptocurrency, trying to imagine what AI cryptocurrency would look like. Many of these products feel forced. They try to train AI with cryptocurrency or attempt to solve some cryptocurrency problems, which feels contrived. I think what will happen is that people will build products that use some LLMs (large language models) as a feature, with cryptocurrency as another feature. It's like they are very natural; cryptocurrency and AI are hidden behind the scenes, and the end user doesn't even know what's happening. Users don't need to know this is an AI product, yes, or that this is a cryptocurrency product.

Imran: You raise a very interesting point. Peter Thiel, whom I recently listened to on a podcast, talked about people's previous views on AI, which had two perspectives. One perspective is that AI will become authoritative, and everyone thinks this is the future of AI. Then there is another perspective, which is unrelated to everyday use, that AI will completely replace all our jobs. But no one really thought about the middle ground, which is that AI can improve our lives in various aspects of daily life and enhance the way we operate our businesses. He didn't see that. So, as you said, with AI and cryptocurrency, people will always have this worldview, but ultimately, they will just be part of the core functionality of our products, enhancing the user experience tenfold. This is what I am starting to see; there are no so-called cryptocurrency startups or AI startups. They just become a way to better or somehow enhance your productivity. So, I think people always have this polarized way of thinking, but the truth may lie somewhere in between.

Vine and JellyJelly: A New Paradigm of Tokens as User Acquisition Tools

Qiao: What else has happened in the past two weeks?

Imran: The VINE token launched by the founder of Vine.

Qiao: Oh, yes, VINE, JellyJelly.

Imran: VINE and JellyJelly are the two most interesting things; they continue to showcase the powerful potential of tokenization, which will become a huge opportunity in cryptocurrency. Application tokens, which I would call memecoins and real-world asset (RWA) tokens, are all subfields of tokens. What do you think about these?

Let me tell this story. After the launch of the Trump token, people began to see tokenization as an interesting market strategy. The former founder of Vine sold it to Twitter for $30 million around 2018. At that time, it was probably one of the most popular video applications in the world. After Jack Dorsey took over, he shut it down. Obviously, he is a staunch Bitcoin maximalist who wanted to build something different. But it turns out that given the discussions around TikTok and the possibility of TikTok falling into the wrong hands, there is an opportunity for another competitor to enter and vie for this business. So Musk has been talking on Twitter for years about whether Vine should make a comeback, initiating a poll every few months. Then, Rus (the founder of Vine) continues to launch a token and says, let’s bring Vine back. If you look at the relevant documents, 5% of the VINE token supply will be allocated to Twitter. If Vine successfully returns, it will have over 140,000 to 150,000 token holders. From the day of launch, he is leveraging meme and meme energy to rekindle people's interest in Vine. I think this is a very interesting use case. If you look at the private group for Vine on Twitter, you start to see people graffitiing for Vine on streets around the world. People are taking or printing the Vine logo and sticking it on walls; it is turning into this raw energy that is rekindling people's interest in Vine. So I think this is a very interesting use case. I would love to hear your thoughts.

Qiao: How much supply does he have now?

Imran: 5%, he said 5% of the total supply will be donated to X. Technically, he actually has nothing.

Qiao: That means 95% is in circulation.

Imran: Yes. He launched it on Pump Fun.

Qiao: But how does he get 5%? Is it a sniper?

Imran: Self-purchase.

Qiao: There must be something in this; I don't know how to view it, but I think there is definitely something in it.

Imran: I agree. It's interesting because after this happened, two startups contacted me, saying, "Hey, look, we don't have an agreement, we are not a SaaS business, but we are in this space, and I am curious if we can simply use tokens as a market strategy?" I said, "Of course, why not?"

Another one is building a pure AI startup, an AI agent. He said, "Why not attach a token to it to compete against my competitors? I don't have a token, and this could help me gain more users." So, the insight I learned from this is that tokens, or what I call application tokens, are essentially advertising costs. As more and more people become interested in it, based on the founder's identity or any other factors, you can leverage it as a way to acquire users or gain some market share, right? Just like advertising costs equal viral spread, memecoins are tokens, and application tokens equal viral spread; this is how I see it. There may also be some acquisition channels. Jelly is doing something similar.

Qiao: Things like this wouldn't happen during the Biden era. By the way, I am certainly not a legal expert, but there are definitely securities law risks, right?

Imran: I don't know. I mean, as long as it is a token that is not tied to any future so-called equity or revenue, then…

Qiao: But I mean, at least compared to the Biden era, the perceived risks are much higher.

Imran: Definitely. So, I think all startups will use tokens in the future as a way of self-financing, or I see them using it as a way to acquire users. I think this is a very likely future. I have debated with many people on Twitter about why this is not the case. I won't name names, but you know.

Qiao: I know who you are talking about.

Imran: Yes. He would say, "You can't do that!" and then all the Ethereum maximalists love his tweets. I blocked him and blocked those Ethereum maximalists. Our worlds are very different; I understand it is hard to digest, and obviously, you are not happy about it. But this is innovation.

Qiao: The situation with Jelly is similar, right? What percentage of supply do they have?

Imran: I don't know how much they have. I didn't buy that, so I have no clue. It happened too quickly.

Qiao: Every time they launch a token, I am asleep. It's like they always launch tokens at 9 PM. I have a rule to turn off all screens two hours before bed. Yes, I know. It's always like this. It's like Trump at 9 PM, Vine at 9 PM, Jelly at 9 PM; it's always like this. I might have missed out on eight-figure wealth.

Imran: I kept texting you: "Bro, check this out! Hey!" But no reply until 5 AM. But anyway, now is a good time to buy Trump coins or Jelly or any of these tokens.

Imran: But I mean, these are just experiments that are happening, and I think it will get better over time. It will be improved.

Qiao: There is indeed a change in consumer behavior; people now see launching tokens as normal. Since the Trump coin, anyone launching a token is seen as normal.

Imran: Yes. Also, recently we launched Clout and Tribe, both social tokens. We just talked about startups and application tokens, and now we are talking about Clout and Tribe. I think creator tokens are similar; the argument is that attention is very cheap, and you can easily gain attention, but will people pay for social capital? Can people showcase whether they really have influence through social capital rather than cheap attention?

So we are running two very different experiments. One is more user-friendly and easier for anyone to buy and hold. The other is more cryptocurrency-native, where you can interact with creators, you can live stream and interact with your audience, like a subscription model. So we are currently running these two different experiential experiments.

Cryptocurrency is Essentially an Attention Asset

Qiao: Many tokens initially gained a lot of attention, like they were hyped, but then gradually lost steam. I don't know what we can learn from this.

Richard: This is strange. I think we are experiencing a paradigm shift in how we view assets. This is a topic we've discussed repeatedly, that we are moving from a world of countable assets to a world of uncountable assets. In the traditional world, there might be 30,000 U.S. stocks, along with some other bonds and financial instruments. In the realm of cryptocurrency and DeFi, we have essentially introduced uncountable tokens. This means that it was previously difficult to launch a token with meaningful liquidity, but the emergence of Pump Fun and bonding curves has essentially opened the floodgates for countless token launches. This means you will no longer focus on the long-term speculation of a single asset, but rather there will be countless moments where different assets will continuously emerge. Therefore, instead of thinking about how to trade a single asset long-term, it’s better to think about how to rotate between different assets. I believe applications like Vector are emerging in this context, as there is always new content and new tokens being shared, allowing you to keep up with trends.

Imran: I tweeted about this before, seeing people enter the cryptocurrency space through tokens is itself a very interesting phenomenon. This can almost be seen as a market strategy, attracting attention and acquiring users through tokens. For example, VINE, as we mentioned earlier, the founder of Vine reignited interest in Vine by launching a token. It has become quite viral. There are over 140,000 token holders globally. People are even graffitiing the Vine logo on streets around the world, and they are posting images of Vine on different streets in New York. So, this has actually created a phenomenon that rekindles interest in Vine. On the other hand, Jelly saw this and wanted to do something similar. But I think the way they launched may not be the best choice.

Qiao: Wait, what do you mean? What do you think is wrong with their launch? How do you think it should be improved?

Imran: I mean, you can't fix a "Christmas tree" by just patching it up, because when everyone rushes into the same project at the same time, it creates this hype cycle that usually peaks within minutes. You can hardly control this hype. Moreover, you have to stay away from the overly speculative crowd and try to build something truly organic. I don't know how to solve this problem, but that's part of the issue.

Another problem is the snipers, who typically eat up 5% to 10% of the tokens within the first few minutes after a project launches. This happens across all projects. I experienced this with Clout as well. So, when you have these issues simultaneously, combined with reputable people like the founder of Venmo launching the Jelly token, this situation naturally occurs. But you have to find a completely different way to address this issue. That’s one aspect. On the other hand, those who haven't sold yet, those who see the vision, will eventually stick around, and then they will hold long-term. But that’s another issue.

But ultimately, I think the phenomenon happening is that you can gain immediate attention and market share by launching an application with a token, rather than through other means like PR stunts, writing articles, or getting venture capital firms to back you for credibility. You just need to launch a token to gain immediate attention. Then, you have to leverage that to build a community and move forward.

In the beginning, I only saw VINE, and I initially thought it was a scam. I thought you were hacked. It looked like something with a market cap of $1 million. Then, but this is Rus, right? He recorded a video of himself, etc., verifying that it was indeed him. Since then, the community has taken over. There is a Vine enthusiast group with over 8,000 members, and they talk about Vine all day long. This is not the CTO; he is just building a good community.

Qiao: Are they talking about it on Twitter? Or elsewhere?

Imran: On Twitter, you can create Twitter groups, or something like Twitter groups. I am part of this Vine group, and my entire timeline is about Vine. So, this phenomenon, I think what Rus is doing, and perhaps what the founder of Venmo is doing, is that they are ultimately using tokens as a market strategy. I think this is an application marketing token, plain and simple. This is a very interesting future development direction for me. Well, I think the paradigm we are entering is that we will tokenize the world. If that’s fair, I just tweeted you…

Qiao: They are tokenizing stocks and bonds.

Imran: They are building a platform that allows anyone to tokenize stocks, bonds, and ETFs on-chain. So, with the Trump administration coming to power, hyper-tokenization is on the agenda.

Iljia: Yes, if you go back to the original blog posts and articles about cryptocurrency, they basically talked about two things. They talked about the idea that you can now have decentralized things, which was not possible before.

Then they talked about the idea that tokens can be used to guide networks. But remember, networks mean more than just liquidity; they also mean attention. When you start with nothing, you are trying to push a two-sided market, where on one side, for Vector, you have traders, and on the other side, you have investors.

Tokens are a great way to incentivize the cold start of a network because suddenly, you have momentum, people start paying attention, they start caring, and a lot of things start happening. If you build a product, people will stick around. I think a truly interesting arbitrage happening in the cryptocurrency space right now is that over the past four years, due to the previous administration, everyone was forced to believe that tokens are securities, and the only useful place for tokens is as assets. We have almost completely forgotten that the original conception of tokens was not like this. The whole point was not to make them securities. The whole point was to make them a mechanism for guiding the existence of networks. I think smart founders are seeing this now, and they will fully leverage this idea. And in 2 to 3 years, everyone will realize this, and tokens will be everywhere.

Richard: Yes, I think there are almost two types of tokenization happening right now. For a long time, people thought that the only things you could tokenize were financial instruments. This could be a representation of equity, right? It could be a form of ownership like future cash flow rights, which might be more like a security. It could be tokenized real-world assets (RWA). So it is still a representation of some kind of asset or commodity in the real world.

And now we are seeing things that are actually being tokenized are meme-ified, where the value is primarily driven by supply and demand, and people believe that this thing should have a certain price, and I want to buy it because I believe others will buy it too. One thing I wonder is how these meme-ified attention assets will perform across cycles? Because I think in a bull market, this makes complete sense. There are a lot of bubbles, a lot of capital flowing, and people want to spend this capital, speculate, and hope to profit. And I really want to know if attention assets can sustain multiple cycles in this scenario, whether they can survive in a bear market, and if this behavior ultimately becomes a dominant behavior where people engage in it for entertainment or to try to profit.

Qiao: I think attention assets have survived across multiple cycles. In the first cycle, it was colored coins on Bitcoin. Memecoins are not a new thing. They have been around for about 10 years. Then in the last cycle, we had NFTs. These are largely attention assets. Now we have memecoins, but we are just giving these things different names; fundamentally, they are the same thing, just in different forms.

In the last cycle, if we had large-scale blockchains that were cheap enough, then the dominant form of speculation and user onboarding would have been memecoins, not NFTs. So, I think unless we find a new form of token to represent attention, memecoins will continue to exist in the next cycle.

Richard: Clearly, we are very optimistic about attention assets. That’s how we built Vector. We saw the trend from NFTs to memecoins in this cycle. If the last cycle was new, then this cycle is the princess cycle. So, I think maybe the point here is that attention assets are quite reflexive; they may rely more on the market. They perform very well in bull markets. In bear markets, they may be cut back more compared to RWAs that represent financial assets.

Iljia: The point is that people still see cryptocurrency as a financial industry. To some extent, it is, but it is far more than that. Crypto is actually an attention industry. It is basically a new form of advertising.

And I think most people haven't really understood this yet. And then you can use it to create a lot of things, not just to create assets and prices. For me, I think two truly exciting products that can be built in the cryptocurrency space are: one is a stablecoin product built for developing countries, which is very exciting because it actually addresses real problems; the other is those crazy long-tail products, like those attention assets that only last 13 seconds. I think everything in between is quite boring. For example, tokenizing equity on-chain, I don’t think that will see much improvement. In my view, the most interesting and largest companies will build on these two ends of the barbell.

Startups Should Build Products on Solana Instead of Ethereum

Qiao: I do an experiment every year where I tweet, "Solana is the ultimate form of blockchain," just to see people's reactions. This year's reaction was much better than last year. Because last year, I was actually attacked by every Ethereum supporter. But this year, many of them collapsed two weeks ago. So, the reaction this year is much better.

Imran: Much better. Well, let’s talk about this because I think this is something we just discussed earlier today. Obviously, Alliance is a non-biased startup accelerator. We try to invest, and we have a portfolio of about 100 different Layer 1 blockchains. This also includes Layer 2 blockchains. Then you have some new blockchains being launched, like MegaETH, Monad, Abstract, Story Protocol, Hyperliquid. So, they may help Eclipse Atlas, Celestia, etc.

So, you have all these startups, Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains. If you look at the quality of the products these startups are building, we have read thousands of applications. The quality of these startups is very different from what we see on Ethereum and Solana. What’s happening? I mean, we have so many Layer 1 blockchains launching.

Imran: I’m even tired of tracking and following these things. Yes, Blast has a so-called successful launch, but the user sentiment is that they feel like they got rug-pulled or didn’t get enough support. Yes, in terms of user feedback.

Imran: On the other hand, I was surprised by the launch of Abstract; it performed quite well, but people still didn't like it. They are more focused on the consumer side, etc. So now many people are leaving Abstract. I think this continuous launch is becoming too complicated for users. So, I see less and less liquidity flowing to these new Layer 1 blockchains; that's my current view.

Qiao: Well, let's talk about this. It's important for investors and founders. Because we work in the early stages of startups, we see information that others in different fields do not see, as we are on the front lines. A year ago, I would have been neutral about leading Ethereum Layer 2 and Solana. But after seeing all these startups launching products on the two ecosystems, it is now very clear that you have to build on Solana. Because I have seen too many startups launching products on Solana that have traction, while launching on Ethereum Layer 2 has no appeal and no users. And the amazing thing is, it works on Solana. I have seen so many examples of this that at this point, it would be irresponsible not to recommend founders to build on Solana. The evidence is that strong.

Imran: Some support for your point: two supporters of Base have turned to support Solana, Alex Masmej and Salvino Armati, who are building Yapster. You are right because these supporters of Base are now building on Solana. So, why do you think that is?

Qiao: Because on Solana, you can acquire users more easily. In fact, for EVM developers, building on Solana is quite difficult. They need to learn all the tools. It may take at least one to two months to get familiar with Solana's tools, Rust, and everything around Solana. But even so, they believe it is worth it. By the way, I say this as a holder of the Ethereum genesis block.

Imran: Did you sell it?

Qiao: I sold it last year, but I held it for 10 years. Imagine holding an asset for 10 years, and then it ends.

Differences in Users, Culture, and Products Between Base and Solana

Imran: Yes, I think Base has the best strategy because it has distribution channels. Jesse's strategy is that he wants to help builders spread like a virus. I have watched many of his podcasts and recordings, and you have shared some with me. The concept makes sense. But the problem is that when people launch products on their chain, etc., they are not gaining many users or much liquidity.

What I mean by speculative liquidity is what many of these applications need. It seems that users on Solana are more willing to try new applications, while users on Base are not.

Qiao: When we say speculative, it doesn't just mean these are traders wanting to use trading applications. It means these users are very open to new things. They are willing to try new things.

Imran: Yes, you are right. So, it almost looks like the user profiles on Base and Solana are very different.

Qiao: Yes, they are very different. And we have been discussing this for two years. Initially, a year ago, it was just a guess, right? We had a guess that the user profiles were different. But now, there is real empirical evidence showing that these two user groups are completely different.

Imran: Is it a cultural factor? Because obviously, Base has Coinbase, which is more corporate.

Qiao: I think it is a cultural factor, but also a product factor. I feel that no EVM wallet can compare to Phantom.

Imran: Well, is Phantom now an EVM wallet?

Qiao: They have an EVM wallet, but they are still Solana-first. Can you think of an EVM wallet as good as Phantom?

Imran: Maybe Rabby.

Qiao: But on EVM, it is so fragmented, and as a new user, there are too many wallets to choose from. This creates a significant psychological burden for Solana. Currently, there is only one on Solana.

Solana Has Created a Winner-Takes-All Situation Through Technical Advantages, Network Effects, and Ecosystem

Imran: It seems like, I don't want to say this, but currently, Solana is a winner-takes-all. I'm not saying the battle is over. The battle may last for decades, but Hyperliquid is an emerging force that is rising. There are some interesting startups building on it. They now have a good narrative, along with Aptos and some other ultimate form blockchains.

Qiao: Do you see it? For me, the ultimate forms are about four to five chains. So Solana is clearly leading, far ahead of the others. Besides Solana, there are Sui, Aptos, and Monad. To me, these all fall within the category of ultimate forms because they fully utilize modern hardware, maximizing throughput while ensuring sufficient decentralization.

Qiao: Okay. Then at the other extreme, actually, this is somewhat in the middle, you have Ethereum, which tries to maximize decentralization, resist World War III, completely resist the government, 100%, 120% resist the government, but sacrifices a lot of scalability. So, that is one extreme. And at the other extreme, you have MegaETH and Fogo, which try to centralize nodes, right?

At the other extreme, you have projects like MegaETH and Fogo that try to sacrifice decentralization for speed, especially to support co-location for market makers. When market makers can co-locate with nodes in centralized data centers, it may be more beneficial for them. They are more willing to provide quotes in such a system rather than in a decentralized system like Solana. This viewpoint is reasonable but has yet to be validated because these chains have not yet gone into production. So, we still have to wait and see. I think these chains have a 10% to 20% chance of posing a threat to Solana, but my baseline is that Solana is currently the leading chain, with a very durable model in terms of users and throughput. By the way, Jump Trading has the best engineers in the world on Solana, and I find it hard to imagine any team competing with them when it comes to high-throughput distributed systems. Jump is also the team behind Firedancer. So, Solana has an advantage in users.

Imran: And DoubleZero, right?

Qiao: DoubleZero as well; it is very similar to the high-frequency trading (HFT) community and DNA, and it is all about the fastest possible communication between nodes. This is exactly what HFT excels at. By the way, Hyperliquid also comes from the HFT world. DeepSeek is the same. There is a pattern here. Even when Anatoly (the founder of Solana) initially thought of the idea of Solana, he envisioned putting NASDAQ on-chain. That was the use case he originally wanted to build.

Qiao: Interestingly, among all the centralized exchanges I have experienced, NASDAQ actually has the best technology. Compared to other exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), NASDAQ has the fastest, lowest latency, and most deterministic matching engine. Market makers like to trade on NASDAQ precisely because of this.

Imran: So, it’s almost like Anatoly is looking for the hardest problem to solve, right? Can you build a trading market maker or exchange on-chain? If you can solve this problem on-chain, then you can solve any problem. I think that’s his argument. That’s why he is so focused on this use case because ultimately, if you can solve this problem on-chain, then you can solve any problem.

Imran: Unchain, DoubleZero, Firedancer, network effects, applications entering our ecosystem, like the founder of Clout, who is also the founder of Monkey, one of the largest social applications in Web 2. He chose to build on Solana first. This is not something we told him. This has been the case all along.

Qiao: Someone asked me, what is the distribution of founders between Solana and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)? For example, what is the ratio of founders choosing Solana versus EVM? Another related question is, how is the distribution of top 1% talent? For the first question, I think it’s about 50-50, meaning 50% of founders choose Solana and 50% choose EVM. But when it comes to the top 1% of talent, I think the ratio is more like 75:25. Do you see a similar situation? Yes, I agree.

Imran: And I think this is a moat for Solana, right? Because those founders who find product-market fit will tell their friends and family to build products on Solana because they found product-market fit there. So, over time, this structured moat will grow larger.

I also want to talk about Coinbase's strategy. I don't want to judge from the outside; obviously, we respect Coinbase. They are pioneers in the cryptocurrency space, and I respect Brian Armstrong and the entire executive team, including Jesse. But in my view, perhaps Base is not the best strategic choice for Coinbase. I might be wrong, but I just want to put this point forward; you can counter me.

Qiao: I think Base should build its own Layer 1.

Imran: I mean, Layer 2, Layer 1, I think because Coinbase is politically inclined towards Base, they are a large company with many internal connections, and they are politically aligned with Base on anything related to Base assets. So, they are less supportive of other assets outside the ecosystem, right? It’s not that they don’t want to; it’s probably due to political and resource constraints. They are more inclined to support Base, but this has led them to become weak on Solana. Yes, to the extent that they have not supported many of the latest memecoins, etc.

Back to Coinbase and Base, I'm putting this point forward, but it's a bit rash. I don't completely agree with this viewpoint. But I just want to raise this point for you to think about. Coinbase's focus on Base has given them a tunnel vision structurally and politically, concentrating on Base to the extent that they have forgotten or are not paying attention to everything that is happening, most of which is occurring on Solana. Because of this, you have emerging platforms like Moonshot, which gives Moonshot a perfect opportunity to bring ordinary people into Solana and leverage the massive retail adoption of Solana memecoins. So, Trump ultimately reached an agreement with Moonshot to launch his token alongside Moonshot as a window for purchasing tokens. Thus, Moonshot attracted 400,000 to 500,000 new users on-chain, and ultimately these people got "rugged." Just kidding. But those 500,000 users could have come to Coinbase. So, I think Coinbase is losing the macro perspective they once had. This is the disruption I see happening.

Qiao: I actually talked about this on Ivan's podcast. I mentioned the hidden but very intense competition we are seeing between two camps. One camp is Coinbase, and the other camp is Jupiter, Meteora, Moonshot, Pump, Solana. What is happening is a bottom-up disruption, as so many tokens are being minted and traded on-chain that centralized exchanges cannot list all these tokens. So, they are losing a significant amount of business to decentralized finance. We are witnessing real disruption. Just like finance, finance will also be disrupted within the same category. Binance is the same. Look, I don't say this lightly. If you had asked me two years ago whether Coinbase would be disrupted, I would have said no, absolutely not. They are the largest and most powerful company in this space. But I think now they are being disrupted.

Imran: Well, Trump coin reached a market cap of $40 billion, with a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of $30 billion, right? Purely on-chain. I think exchanges started supporting them in the middle stage, but coordinating capital globally is easier than these micro exchanges. Yes, I think people will turn more to on-chain rather than exchanges. I agree with your point; in fact, in the memecoin community, Binance is now seen as a negative signal because once a token is listed on Binance, its price tends to drop.

Qiao: Especially pre-listing. Pre-listing is now a signal of a top.

Imran: Yes.

Qiao: Then you see the same data in the App Store, like in this cycle, Phantom and Moonshot often lead over Coinbase. Yes, this should tell you that ordinary people are going directly on-chain rather than to decentralized exchanges.

Imran: Yes, I 100% agree. Of course, Coinbase still has a huge business, so they will have a structural moat from that.

Qiao: Did you just see Ari's FUD?

Imran: Yes, Ari, the founder of Block Tower, talked about some things. He didn't directly say what he knows unless you read it. There are some things happening related to people losing funds. Or ZachXBT mentioned that over $150 million to $300 million is lost each year due to social engineering attacks.

Qiao: I don't have insider information; I don't know what the facts are. But he stated that what is happening inside Coinbase is worse than Choke Point 2.0. Yes, that's a crazy statement because not much is worse than that. FTX is one, and maybe Terra as well.

Imran: That's crazy. I don't know. I trust Brian Armstrong and his team. So I don't know. Another interesting aspect we haven't really discussed is that he has transformed from a hardcore researcher into… how should I put it, now becoming a "Milady of the Bronze Age." Now he is starting to embrace this community, which is a good sign, or rather embracing this user behavior, because it reminds me of what we discussed earlier, that users on Solana are very different from users on Base. I think satisfying these users or embracing these users has a key advantage because these users are speculators. So, he turns to Milady and replies to content from Malaysia in different tweets, indicating that he is now starting to embrace this community, embrace this user group. Is it too late? Or is it too early?

Qiao: Too late. That's unfortunate. A year ago, I wouldn't have said it was too late. But now, I think it is too late.

Imran: I also feel it is too late. Let's see the outcome of this competition. But for now, Solana is in the lead, and other competitors are not far behind, but I think they are losing market share. I think in terms of market share, I can talk about Hyperliquid; at least from the Twitter perspective, there are many credible founders building projects on Hyperliquid. So I feel they are attracting all the EVM developers.

This position should have been Blast. And because Blast's announcement was too slow. I tried the Blast Wallet app, and I don't even know what this app can actually do. For example, it can give you a 20% yield, which is great. But the problem is that this wallet must have some practical use. You can't just launch a yield wallet, right? You can't do anything on it. So that's my criticism of Blast Wallet. I feel they lost to Hyperliquid. I think they should capture the EVM developer community; even if it's just focusing on trading, I think that's fine. Then there are Sui and Aptos, whose total locked value reached an all-time high today, around $1.86 billion or $2 billion, or similar figures. I won't completely dismiss them; they do have something. So that's my current view of the competitive landscape. Do you agree or disagree?

Qiao: I am completely willing to change my mind. But for now, Solana is far ahead of the others. I'm not saying the race is over. But I feel that the probability of other Ethereum Layer 1s or any other emerging Layer 1s disrupting Solana is far less than 50%. It might only be 10% to 20%.

Imran: And the way Layer 1s are launched is really important. So far, only Berachain has done well, building a huge TBL base through Boyco, like $1.2 billion or similar amazing numbers, which is great for the narrative. But I know that many recent Layer 1 launches have not motivated me; they are not incentivizing enough. I hope this situation changes over time. And I think it completely depends on the types of products being built on these chains. But that's my view on Layer 1 and Layer 2 for now.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。