Alliance DAO: Trump's crypto policy, AI and cryptocurrency, Solana and Ethereum compete

Editor | Wu Shuo Blockchain

This issue of Good Game Podcast focuses on the latest trends in the crypto market, discussing the convergence of AI and cryptocurrencies, the rise of tokenization as a market strategy, and Solana's leading position in the ecosystem. The guests analyzed the reasons for the recent market downturn, the long-term impact of the Trump administration's policy benefits (such as the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve SBR Program) on the market, and the competitive relationship between Bitcoin and gold. In addition, the differences between Base and Solana at user profile, culture and product levels, Coinbase’s challenges in market strategy, and how memecoin and application tokens are new tools for user growth are discussed. Finally, we look forward to the competitive landscape of Layer 1 and explore the role of AI in future startups, emphasizing that AI and encryption will gradually be integrated into the product rather than the independent track.

Recent performance and sentiment of the cryptocurrency market

Imran: Obviously a lot has happened in the past few weeks. I remember the last podcast we were talking about Trump and how we were feeling at the time. Going forward, we felt like the tone we heard in the podcast, the atmosphere in the AI ​​field made us a little bit unimpressed, and that emotion could be felt in the podcast at that time. I didn't know at the time that this was the influence of the market or the cryptocurrency field, or the atmosphere on Twitter, I think this might just be our mood at that time. And then over the past month, if you look at the market, it's basically continuing to decline. So I think, although we didn't say it explicitly, our feelings are consistent with the performance of the market.

Qiao: After I tweeted to express my market views, everyone should know what I think.

Imran: Yes, I think if you want to discuss the AI ​​field, there may be some projects that are really good, and we have mentioned them before. But I feel this is a common phenomenon overall, right? In my opinion, we have experienced TRUMP coins and MELANIA coins before, and I feel that the market is digesting that wave of liquidity now. At the same time, there are all the bullish news brought by Trump. I don't know what the market will go in the short term, but from the medium to long term, this is still bullish.

Qiao: What do you think? I think this is just a sideways market that lasts for a while. We have had a lot of good news over the past two weeks, executive orders supporting cryptocurrencies, repealing the SAB bill, stablecoin bill, David Sacks mentioned cryptocurrencies in his speech, and so on. There is a lot of good news, but the market has not responded. This is bad, and the market has reacted poorly to the news. But at the same time, I think the economy is in good shape.

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) may advance, Bitcoin is seriously

undervalued

Qiao: Here is a person who I am very concerned about Bitcoin. He just tweeted yesterday, just after everything happened. He said "the market is completely misled." Today’s press conference, Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) is taking place. This is the first priority for DJT. They are calling up top officials in the country to make plans over the next 80 days. Half of the working group are Bitcoin holders. SBR is happening. If SBR does happen within the next 80 days, then Bitcoin is currently seriously undervalued and it cannot be priced.

Just like the case with Bitcoin ETFs. Yes, when the Bitcoin ETF occurs, everyone says it's bearish, selling information, etc. But what actually happened is that Bitcoin ETFs opened the door for Bitcoin’s financial buyers. The situation with SBR is exactly the same. If we get SBR, we will have governments, not just the U.S. government, but state governments and governments around the world, who are all going to try to act around the U.S. government, or at least try to keep pace. So we will welcome a new batch 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 Cantor Fitzgerald's Lutnick, who is also a heavy investor in cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin. If he is involved, he leads the sovereign fund. David Sacks also mentioned that he said: "We can't guarantee it, but sovereign funds may hold cryptocurrencies." This is part of their strategy.

So in my opinion, the market is very confused now. On the one hand, we have experienced a huge memecoin bubble; on the other hand, Bitcoin has reached a certain historical high, such as $108,000. At the same time, you have these extremely bullish news and the market doesn't seem to know how to digest all of this information.

Qiao: I don't think the market must be very confused. I think the market has just been priced a lot of good news, except for SBR. So if SBR happens, we will rise a lot. But until then, I think it will be a sideways market that will last for a while.

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

Qiao: For those who need more optimism, Standard Chartered Bank, an asset manager of $87 billion, said Bitcoin could hit $500,000 before President Trump leaves office. What would you think? $500,000?

Imran: This is crazy.

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

Uncertainty brought to the cryptocurrency circle by Trump administration

policies

Imran: Did you see gold today or yesterday? It reached an all-time high. It performed very well, what do you think drives it? Do you think this is just because of the huge uncertainty of global tariffs?

Qiao: This is a huge uncertainty about Trump, because Trump 1.0 is basically totally messy and has trade disputes with everyone, including its allies. It is a hedge against chaos and a hedge against the fact that the United States has so much debt.

Imran: There are also huge fluctuations in all currencies. So, you'd better take the risk of investing in gold now. I saw the Canadian dollar overwhelmed by tariffs.

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

Imran: I did some rough calculations and they said they were able to save about $1 trillion in deficits a year. So now we have a $2 trillion deficit every year. If you can save $1 trillion, then in the long run, the country's deficit may decrease over time, right? This has a huge impact on people in terms of interest rates, inflation, etc. This hasn't even taken into account the Fed's involvement.

Qiao: The Fed may be rethinking their strategy because of all these effects of the government. This will change the rate of their rate cuts.

Imran: I would assume they will do this as soon as possible, rather than dragging it out for a long time, which is what I think at the moment. Or will they take longer to balance the rate cut? If there is a deflation mechanism, will they just wait and observe?

Qiao: I haven't thought about this issue in depth. I have no opinion.

Imran: I'm interested in how they do this. Trump sent a message a few days ago. At first, he was talking about Powell. "Powell needs a rate cut, I don't care, he needs a rate cut." Then a few days ago, he said, "I'm glad Powell didn't cut rates, I respect his decision very much." It was an interesting turnaround. 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 from the economy. Government spending is part of the economy, like a one-to-one relationship in macroeconomics. But tariffs are inflationary. They suspended tariffs. But if they resume tariffs, it is inflation.

Imran: I think this is Trump's game. He did the same in 2017. He forced all parties to sit down and renegotiate. To him, it's just news, right? Just like he received 20,000 law enforcement officers from Mexico to monitor the border, this would theoretically reduce drugs and immigration entering the market. There are 10,000 more people from Canada. That was the Washington border. So as far as illegal drugs are concerned, wait. I've seen news that many cartels have been reorganized in Canada because Canada has not done a good job in stopping drug flows into its own country. So I think these two news projects are really good for the US anti-drug fight. So I think it's just a trade issue. I think it's just that he wants to make a deal. China does not want to make a deal. So he stopped all the flow of American mail.

So I think he'll force them to do what he wants to do, and that's what I think. So I think it's just short-term news risk, but in the long run, he'll get what he wants.

Qiao: ETH rose 5% after Eric Trump tweeted.

Imran: It does go up, but at around $2,100, or a similar price. But anyway, in other news, have you heard someone tweeted that Justin Sun was affected?

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

Qiao: That might 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 the content.

The Future of AI and Cryptocurrency: Incorporating the basic functions of

many products rather than independent tracks

Qiao: Last time we talked about DeepSeek...

Imran: Interestingly, we talked about it when DeepSeek was just launched, and that was a few months ago. We talked about its impact, but didn’t dig deep into the recent news, their so-called $6 million “quotation.” Yes, but everyone is telling me a different story. For example, David Sacks said they couldn't 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 get cheaper. This is good news for the application layer.

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

Qiao: Obviously, there is also a parallel story in the cryptocurrency field that we have been discussing. We've also discussed it before.

Imran: You have tweeted about this.

Qiao: Well, we've been building the argument that cryptocurrencies are also moving from infrastructure to application layer, as infrastructure is getting cheaper. This is happening in both AI and cryptocurrency.

Imran: Yes, indeed. Even among the founders of the cryptocurrency field, I feel that to some extent, I participated in a discussion yesterday with several founders, but a lot of them are working in the AI ​​field and they ask, where should we be in AI Construct? Most people say they focus mainly on the consumer side. Of course, there are some exceptions in infrastructure, but I think the competition in infrastructure is very fierce.

Qiao: I just looked at the application for our next batch of startups, and about 30% of the companies use AI in products or in some aspects. But no company calls itself an AI startup or cryptocurrency startup. So, to me, it looks like many of the use cases of AI are now cheap enough for consumers and are being widely used in products.

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

Qiao: I read 10 applications this morning, about 7 to 8 of which are pure AI.

Imran: So, what do you think drives this phenomenon? Yes, obviously, this could be part of our project. So, I looked at one of the applications the other day and this guy said, yes, this is an AI startup, but I can see some cryptocurrency applications that I want to explore. But he knows nothing about cryptocurrencies, he just wants to explore it, and I find it interesting. I think this adds to our argument that every startup will use cryptocurrency and AI as the capabilities of its products.

Qiao: I think over the past two years, people have made a lot of arguments about AI cryptocurrencies, trying to imagine what AI cryptocurrencies look like. Many of these products feel far-fetched. They try to train AI with cryptocurrencies, or try to solve some cryptocurrency problems, which feels far-fetched. What I think will happen is that people will build products that use some LLM (large language models) as functionality, and cryptocurrency as another feature. Just like they are very natural, both cryptocurrencies and AI are hidden behind the scenes, and the end users don’t even know what’s going on. Users don't need to know that this is an AI product, yes, or that this is a cryptocurrency product.

Imran: You put forward a very interesting point, that is Peter Thiel, I recently listened to one of his podcasts, and he talked about people’s previous views on AI, and there are two perspectives. One view is that AI will become authoritative and everyone thinks it is the future of AI. Then there is another point that it has nothing to do with everyday use, that is, AI will completely replace all our work. But no one really thinks about the middle way, that AI can improve our lives in every aspect of our daily life and improve the way our business works. He didn't see this. So, like you said, AI and cryptocurrencies, people always have this worldview, but ultimately, they are just part of our core product that improves the user experience by 10 times. That's what I've started to see, there are no so-called cryptocurrency startups, nor AI startups. They just become a way to improve your productivity better or in some way. So, I think people always have this polarized way of thinking, but the facts can be somewhere in between.

Vine and JellyJelly: New paradigm for tokens as user acquisition tools

Qiao: What other things have happened in the past two weeks?

Imran: VINE token released by the founder of Vine.

Qiao: Oh, yes, VINE, JellyJelly.

Imran: VINE and JellyJelly are two of the funniest things, and they continue to showcase the power of tokenization, which will be a huge opportunity for cryptocurrencies. Tokens, I would call memecoin and real-world assets (RWA) tokens, are all sub-fields of tokens. What do you think of these?

Let me tell this story. After the launch of Trump tokens, people began to view to tokenization as an interesting market strategy. Vine's former founder sold it to Twitter around 2018 for $30 million. At the time, it was probably one of the most popular video apps in the world. Jack Dorsey closed it after taking over. Obviously, he is a determined Bitcoin supremacist who wants to build something different. But it turns out that given the discussion with TikTok and the possibility that TikTok fell into the wrong hand, there is a chance to get another competitor in and compete for the business. So Musk has been tweeting for years about whether Vine should be returned, and he will start a vote every few months. Then, Rus (the founder of Vine) went on to launch a token and said let's get Vine back. If you view the relevant files, 5% of the Vine token supply will be allocated to Twitter. If Vine returns successfully, it will have more than 140,000 token holders. Since the launch day, he is using meme and meme energy to rekindle interest in Vine. I think this is a very interesting use case. If you look at Vine's private group on Twitter, you start to see people doodling Vine on streets around the world. People are photographing or printing Vine's logo and sticking it to the wall, and it is becoming this raw energy that re-interests people in Vine. So I think this is a very interesting use case. So I want to hear what you think.

Qiao: How much supply does he have now?

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

Qiao: This means 95% is in circulation.

Imran: Yes. He launched it on Pump Fun.

Qiao: But how do you get 5%? Sniper?

Imran: Buy it yourself.

Qiao: There must be something in it, I don’t know how to view it, but I think there must be something in it.

Imran: I agree. It's funny because after this happened, two startups contacted me and they said, "Hey look, we don't have a protocol, we're not a SaaS business, but we're in it, I'm curious if we can simply do it Using tokens as a market strategy? "I said, "Of course, why not?"

Another is building a pure AI startup, AI Agent. He said: "Why don't you attach a token to it to fight against my competitors? I don't have tokens, which can help me gain more users". So, what I learned from this is that tokens, or what I call application tokens, are essentially advertising fees. As more and more people become interested in it, based on the founder's identity or any other factor, you can use it as a way to gain users or gain some kind of market share, right? Just like advertising costs equal virality, memecoin is tokens, and application tokens equal virality, which is the way I see it. Maybe there is some kind of access. Jelly did something similar.

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

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

Qiao: But I mean, at least, the perceived risk is much higher than the Biden era.

Imran: Sure. So, I think all startups will use tokens in the future as a way to self-financing, or I see them using it as a way to get users. I think this is a very likely future. I've argued with a lot of people on Twitter about why this is not the case. I don't name it, but you know.

Qiao: I know who you are talking about.

Imran: Yes. He would say, "You can't do this!" And then all Ethereum supremacists like his tweets. I blocked him and those Ethereum-topists. Our world is very different and I understand it is difficult to digest, obviously you are not satisfied with it. But this is innovation.

Qiao: Jelly's situation 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 had no clue. It happens too quickly.

Qiao: Every time they launch a token, I sleep. Like they always launch tokens at 9 p.m. I have a rule that is to turn off all screens two hours before bedtime. Yes I know. This is always the case. Just like Trump at 9 o'clock, Vine at 9 o'clock, Jelly at 9 o'clock, it's like this every time. I may have missed an 8-digit fortune.

Imran: I've been texting you: Brother, take a look at this! Hey! But no response was made until 5 a.m. 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 are indeed changes in consumer behavior. People now think it is normal to launch tokens. Since Trump coins, it is normal for anyone to launch tokens.

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

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

Cryptocurrency is actually an attention asset

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

Richard: This is strange. I think we are going through a paradigm shift about how we view assets. This is a question we have repeatedly discussed, that is, we are moving from a countable world of assets to an uncountable world of assets. In the traditional world, there may be 30,000 U.S. stocks, and perhaps some other bonds and other financial instruments. In the cryptocurrency and DeFi field, we have basically introduced uncountable tokens. This means that it was previously difficult to launch a token with meaningful liquidity, and the emergence of Pump Fun and bonding curve basically opened the floodgates for the launch of countless tokens. This means that you will no longer focus on long-term speculation of a single asset, but there will be countless such moments, and different assets will continue to appear. Therefore, instead of thinking about how to trade a single asset for a long time, it is better to think about how to rotate between different assets. I think apps like Vector stand out in this context because there are always new content, new tokens being shared, and you can keep up with the trend.

Imran: I've also tweeted before and seeing people enter the cryptocurrency field through tokens, which is a very interesting phenomenon in itself. This can almost be seen as a market strategy to attract attention and gain users through tokens. For example, VINE, as we mentioned earlier, the founders of Vine rekindled interest in Vine by launching tokens. It has become quite viral. There are more than 140,000 token holders around the world. There are also people graffitiing Vine’s logo on streets around the world, and they even posted pictures of Vine on different streets in New York. So, this actually created a phenomenon that re-interests people in Vine. On the other hand, Jelly saw this and wanted to do something similar. But I think the way they launch may not be the best choice.

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

Imran: I mean, you can't fix the problem by fixing a "Christmas tree" because when everyone pours into the same project at the same time, this hype cycle is created and it usually reaches within minutes peak. You can hardly control this hype. And, you have to stay away from over-speculative crowds and try to build something really organic. I don't know how to solve this problem, but it's part of the problem.

Another problem is snipers, who usually eat 5% to 10% of tokens within the first few minutes of the project launch. This happens in all projects. I've also experienced this on Clout. So, this happens naturally when you have these problems at the same time, coupled with reputable people like Venmo founders launching Jelly tokens. But you have to find a completely different way to solve this problem. This is one aspect. On the other hand, those who haven’t sold out, those who see the vision will eventually stay, and then, they will hold it for a long time. But this is another problem.

But in the end, I think the phenomenon is happening is that you can get attention and market share immediately by launching an app with tokens, rather than through other ways, like doing PR stunts, writing articles, or getting risky Investment companies support you to gain credibility. You only need to launch a token to get attention immediately. Then you have to use this to build a community and move on.

Finally, I just saw VINE early on, and I initially thought it was a scam. I thought you were hacked. It's like a $1 million thing. Then, but it's Rus, right? He recorded a video of himself, and waited, verified that this was him. Since then, the community has taken over. There is a Vine enthusiast group of over 8,000 people who talk about Vine all day long. This is not a 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 just like Twitter groups. I'm part of this Vine group and my entire timeline is about Vine. So, this phenomenon, I think what Rus is doing, maybe what the founders of Venmo are doing, they end up using tokens as a market strategy. I think it's an app marketing token, that's it. This is a very interesting direction for me to develop in the future. Well, I think the paradigm we are entering is that we are going to tokenize the world. If that's fair, I just sent you a tweet...

Qiao: They are tokenizing stocks and bonds.

Imran: They are building a platform that allows anyone to tokenize stocks, bonds and ETFs to the chain. Therefore, with the Trump administration taking office, hypertokenization has been put on the agenda.

Iljia: Yes, if you go back to the original blog posts and posts about cryptocurrencies, they basically talk about two things. They talked about the idea that you can now have something decentralized, which was impossible before.

Then they talked about the idea that tokens can be used to guide the network. But remember that networks mean more than mobility, it also attention. When you start with nothing, you are trying to push a bilateral market, on the one hand, for example, for Vector, you have traders, on the other hand, you have investors.

Tokens are a great way to inspire the cold start of the network because suddenly, you have the motivation and people start paying attention, they start caring, and a lot of things start to happen. If you build a product, people stay. I think one of the really interesting arbitrage happening in the cryptocurrency space right now is that in the past four years, everyone has been forced to believe that tokens are securities due to the previous administration, and the only thing that tokens are useful is as assets. We almost completely forget that the original idea of ​​tokens was not actually like this. The whole point is not to make them securities. The whole point is to make them the mechanism that guides the existence of the network. I think smart founders are seeing this now and they will make the most of the idea. And 2 to 3 years later, everyone will realize this and tokens will be everywhere.

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

Then now we see that the tokenized thing is memetic, where the value is mainly driven by supply and demand. 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 want to know is how these memetic attention assets perform between cycles? Because I think it makes total sense in a bull market. There are many bubbles, there are a lot of capital flowing, and people want to spend this capital, speculate, and hope to make a profit. And I do wonder if attention assets can last for multiple cycles in this case, survive a bear market, and that this behavior eventually becomes a dominant behavior, people for the purpose of entertainment or trying to make a profit And perform this behavior.

Qiao: I think attention assets have survived in multiple cycles. In the first cycle, it is a colored coin on Bitcoin. memecoin is nothing new. They have been around for about 10 years. Then in the last cycle, we had NFTs. These are largely attention assets. Now we have memecoin, but we just give these things different names, but fundamentally they are the same thing, just in different forms.

In the last cycle, if we had large-scale blockchains and were cheap enough, then the dominant form of speculation and user-on-chain would be memecoin, not NFT. So, I think memecoin will continue to exist in the next cycle unless we find a new form of token to represent attention.

Richard: Obviously, we are very optimistic about attention assets. This is how we build Vector. We see a trend in this cycle from NFT to memecoin. If the previous cycle is new, then this cycle is the princess cycle. So, I think maybe the point here is that attention assets are quite reflective and they may be more market-dependent. In a bull market, they performed very well. In bear markets, they may be cut more, compared to RWAs representing financial assets.

Iljia: The point is that people still regard cryptocurrencies as a financial industry. To some extent, it is, but it's much more than that. Crypto is actually an attention industry. It's basically a new form of advertising.

And I don't think most people really understand this yet. Then you can use it to create a lot of things, not just creating assets and prices. For me, two really exciting products that I think can be built in the cryptocurrency space are: one is a stablecoin product built for developing countries, which is very exciting because it actually solves the reality The problem; the other is those crazy long-tail products, such as those attention assets that only have a lifespan of 13 seconds. I think everything in between is pretty boring. For example, on-chain tokenized equity, I don’t think this will improve much. In my opinion, the most interesting and largest company will be built on the barbells at both ends.

Startups should build products on Solana instead of Ethereum

Qiao: I do an experiment every year and send a tweet saying “Solana is the ultimate form of blockchain” just to see how everyone reacts. The response this year is much better than last year. Because last year I was actually attacked by every Ethereum advocate. But this year, many of them collapsed two weeks ago. So, the response this year was much better.

Imran: It's much better. OK, let's talk about this because I think this is something we just discussed earlier today. Obviously, Alliance is an unbiased startup accelerator. We try to invest, we have a portfolio with about 100 different Layer 1 blockchains. This also includes the Layer 2 blockchain. Then you also have some new blockchains that are being launched, such as MegaETH, Monad, Abstract, Story Protocol, Hyperliquid. So, they might help Eclipse Atlas, Celestia, etc.

So, you have all these startups, Layer 1 and Layer 2 blockchains. If you look at the quality of products these startups build, we read thousands of applications. The quality of these startups is very different from the quality of startups we see on Ethereum and Solana. what happened? I mean, we have so many Layer 1 blockchains being launched.

Imran: I'm even tired of following and following these things. Yes, Blast has a so-called successful launch, but the user feels that they feel they have been cut or not enough support. Yes, in terms of user feedback.

Imran: On the other hand, Abstract was surprised when it launched, and it performed quite well, but people still don’t like it. They are more concerned about consumer side and so on. So now there are a lot of people leaving Abstract. I think this kind of continuous rollout is becoming too complicated for users. So, I'm seeing less and less liquidity flowing to these new Layer 1 blockchains, which is what I think at the moment.

Qiao: OK, let's talk about this. This is important, for investors and founders. Because we work in the early stages of a startup, we see information that is not visible in other areas because we are at the forefront. A year ago, I would be neutral about the leading Ethereum Layer 2 and Solana. But after seeing all these startups launch products on both ecosystems, it’s very clear now that you have to build on Solana. Because, I've seen too many startups launch products on Solana and when launching products on Ethereum Layer 2, the latter has no appeal and no users. And the magic is that on Solana, it just works. I've seen so many examples like this that at this point it would be irresponsible if I don't recommend founders to build on Solana. The evidence is so powerful.

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

Qiao: Because on Solana, you can get users more easily. In fact, building on Solana is very difficult for EVM developers. 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 thought it was worth it. By the way, I'm saying so as a holder of the Ethereum Creation block.

Imran: Did you sell it?

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

Users, cultures and products differences between Base and Solana

Imran: Yes, I think Base has the best strategy because it has distribution channels, Jesse's strategy is, I want to help builders spread like a virus. I watched a lot of his podcasts and recordings, and you shared some with me. This concept makes sense. But the problem is, when people launch products on their chain, etc., they don't get a lot of users, nor a lot of 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 apps, while users on Base are not.

Qiao: When we say speculative, it doesn’t just mean that these are traders who want to use trading apps. This means that these users are very open to new things. They are willing to try new things.

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

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

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

Qiao: I think this is a cultural factor, but it is also a product factor. I don't think an EVM wallet is comparable to Phantom.

Imran: OK, is Phantom an EVM wallet now?

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

Imran: Maybe it's Rabby.

Qiao: But on EVM, it's so scattered that as a new user, there are so many wallets to choose from. This put a lot of psychological burden on Solana. On Solana, there is only one at the moment.

Solana has formed a winner-takes-all situation through technological

advantages, network effects and ecology

Imran: It seems like, I don't want to say that, but Solana is the winner-takes-all right now. I'm not saying that the battle is not over yet. The battle may last for decades, but Hyperliquid is a rising emerging force. There are some interesting startups that are being built on it. They now have a good narrative, as well as Aptos, and some other ultimate form of blockchain.

Qiao: Have you seen it? For me, the final form is about four or five chains. So Solana is obviously ahead, far ahead of the others. In addition to Solana, there are Sui, Aptos, and Monad. For me, these are all within the final form because they make full use of modern hardware, maximize throughput while ensuring adequate decentralization.

Qiao: OK. And then at the other extreme, in fact, it's kind of in the middle, you have Ethereum, it's trying to maximize decentralization, resist World War III, completely resist government, 100%, 120% resist government, but sacrifice a lot Scalability. So, this is at an 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 by centralizing nodes in exchange for speed, especially to support co-positioning of market makers. This may be more beneficial for market makers when they can co-locate with nodes located in centralized data centers. They prefer to offer quotes in such systems than in decentralized systems like Solana. This view is reasonable, but has not been proven, as these chains have not yet entered production. So, we still have to wait and see. I think there is a 10% to 20% chance of these chains posing a threat to Solana, but my basic situation is that Solana is currently the leading chain with a very persistent pattern in terms of user and throughput. By the way, Jump Trading has the best engineers in the world on Solana, and when it comes to high-throughput distributed systems, it's hard to imagine a team that can compete with it. Jump is also the team behind Firedancer. So, Solana has an advantage in terms of users.

Imran: And DoubleZero, right?

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

Qiao: Interestingly, of all the centralized exchanges I've experienced, Nasdaq actually has the best technology. Compared with other exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), Nasdaq has the fastest, lowest latency, and the most certain matching engine. Market makers love trading on the Nasdaq, and that's why.

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

Imran: Unchain, DoubleZero, Firedancer, network effects, applications enter our ecosystem, such as the founder of Clout, who is also the founder of Monkey, one of the largest social applications in Web 2. He first chose to build on Solana. This is not what we told him. This is what has always been happening.

Qiao: Someone asked me what is the founder distribution between Solana and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine)? For example, what is the ratio of founders of Solana and EVM? Another related question is, how is the talent distribution of the top 1%? For the first question, I think it is about 50-50, which means 50% of the founders choose Solana and 50% choose EVM. But when it comes to top 1% of talent, I think that ratio is more like 75:25. Are you seeing similar situations? Yes, I agree.

Imran: And, I think it's a moat in Solana, right? Because founders who find a product market fit will tell their friends and family to build products on Solana because they find a product market fit there. So, over time, this structured moat will become larger and larger.

I also want to talk about Coinbase's strategy. I'm not trying 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 opinion, maybe Base isn't the best strategic choice for Coinbase. I might be wrong, but I just want to make this point and you can refute me.

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

Imran: I mean, Layer 2, Layer 1, I think because Coinbase is more politically inclined to Base, they are a large company with a lot of internal links, they are politically consistent with Base, any assets with Base Something related. So, they don't support other assets outside the ecosystem very much, right? It's not because they don't want it, maybe because of political and resource constraints, they tend to support Base, but it makes them weak in Solana. Yes, so much so that they don't support the latest lot of memecoin, etc.

Going back to Coinbase and Base, I'm making this point, but it's frivolous. I don't quite agree with this point of view. But I just want to make this point and let you think about it. Coinbase focuses on Base, giving them a tunnel vision structurally and politically, focusing on Base so that they forget what is going on or they don’t focus on what is going on, and it’s mostly happening on Solana. So, because of this, you have an emerging platform like Moonshot, which gives Moonshot the perfect opportunity to bring the average person to Solana and then take advantage of the huge retail adoption of Solana memecoin. So, Trump finally reached an agreement with Moonshot to launch his tokens with Moonshot as a window to buy tokens. So, Moonshot attracted 400,000 to 500,000 new users to the link, and these people were eventually cut. Just a joke. But these 500,000 users could have come to Coinbase. So, I think Coinbase is losing the macro perspective they once had. This is the disruption that I see happening.

Qiao: I actually talked about this on Ivan’s podcast. I talked about the hidden but very intense competition between the two camps we actually saw. One camp is Coinbase, the other camp is Jupiter, Meteora, Moonshot, Pump, Solana. What is happening is bottom-up disruption, as there are so many tokens minted and traded on the chain that centralized exchanges cannot list all of them. So, they are losing a lot of business to decentralized finance. We are witnessing real disruption. Just like finance, finance will be subverted in the same category. The same goes for Binance. Look, I didn't say this easily. If I asked me two years ago whether Coinbase would be subverted, I would say no, absolutely impossible. They are the largest and most powerful company in this field. But I think they are being disrupted right now.

Imran: Well, the Trump currency has a market capitalization of 40 billion, a full diluted valuation (FDV) of $30 billion, right? Purely on the chain. I think exchanges start supporting them in the middle stage, but coordination like capital is easier than these micro-exchanges globally. Yes, I think people are going to be turning more on-chain than on-exchanges. I agree with you, in fact, in the memecoin community, Binance is now seen as a negative signal because once the tokens are listed on Binance, their prices will fall.

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

Imran: Yes.

Qiao: Then you see the same data on the App Store, just like in this cycle, Phantom and Moonshot often lead Coinbase. Yes, this should tell you that ordinary people are directly on the chain, not on decentralized exchanges.

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

Qiao: Did you just see Ari's FUD?

Imran: Yes, Block Tower founder Ari talked about something. He didn't say directly what he knew unless you read it. There are some things happening and it's about people losing money. Or ZachXBT talks about this, with more than $150 million to $300 million lost each year due to social engineering attacks.

Qiao: I don’t have internal information, I don’t know what the truth is. But he said that what happened inside Coinbase was worse than Choke Point 2.0. Yes, that's a crazy statement because there's not much worse than that. FTX is one, and maybe Terra.

Imran: This is crazy. I have no idea. I trust Brian Armstrong and his team. So I don't know. Another interesting aspect that we haven't really discussed is that he has gone from a hardcore researcher to... what should I say, now he has become a "Bronze Age Milady". Now that he is embracing the community, it is a good sign, or embracing this user behavior, because it reminds me of what we discussed earlier that users on Solana are very different from those on Base. I think there is a key advantage to satisfying these users or embracing them because these users are speculators. So, he turned to Milady and responded to Malaysian content in different tweets, which shows that he is now embracing this community, embracing this user community. Is it too late? Or is it too early?

Qiao: It's too late. This is a pity. A year ago, I wouldn't say it was too late. But now, I think it's too late.

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

This location should have been Blast. And, because Blast’s announcement was released too slowly. I tried the Blast Wallet app and I don't even know what the app can do. For example, it can give you 20% of the gain, which is great. But the problem is that this wallet must have some practical uses. You can't just launch a profitable wallet, right? You can do nothing on it. So that's my criticism of Blast Wallet. I think they lost to Hyperliquid. I think they should grab the EVM developer community, even if they are just focusing on transactions, I don't think that's a problem. Then there are Sui and Aptos, whose total locked positions reached a record high today, about 1.86 billion or 2 billion, or similar data. I won't deny them completely, they do have something. So, that's what I think about the competitive landscape at the moment. Do you agree, or disagree?

Qiao: I am completely willing to change my mind. But for now, Solana is far ahead of everyone else. I'm not saying the game is over. But I think the probability of other Ethereum Layer 1s, or any other emerging Layer 1s, is far below 50%. Probably only 10% to 20%.

Imran: And, the way Layer 1 is really important. So far, probably only Berachain has done a good job, and it has built a huge TBL foundation through Boyco, like 1.2 billion or similarly stunning numbers, which is great for the narrative. But I know that I have not been motivated by many Layer 1 launches recently, and they are not motivating enough. I hope this will change over time. And, I think it all depends on the type of product built on these chains. But that's what I think about Layer 1 and Layer 2 at the moment.