Some Future Day

Marc: No business will be impacted in 2025 as much as cryptocurrency. President Trump's executive order concerning crypto encompasses several key points aimed at promoting growth. But what do individuals and businesses need to know about the world of crypto? Where are the financial risks and benefits? How can brands harness blockchain technology to enhance their relationship with consumers?
Donald Trump always talks about
Nicholas Lyons: AI and energy in the same breath, and energy of course is the critical input for AI, and it is also a critical input for the crypto economy.
Marc: Enter Nicholas Lyons. Nicholas is the founder of Verus, a cryptocurrency which emphasizes privacy, decentralization, and scalability.
Verus is also a public blockchain. This distinctive feature allows users to create their own Web3 ecosystem, including Verus tokens. But here's the rub. Public blockchains are where it's at now. They will be critical for brands and innovation in 2025.
Nicholas Lyons: People understand that it's about gamification and 4 billion of 8 billion people are playing games and America's the capital of the gaming world.
So, um, lots of reasons to be excited. I think
Marc: Nicholas, it's always a valuable use of my time when we engage in conversation. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of some future day.
All right, Nicholas Lyons. Welcome back to some future day. How are you?
Nicholas Lyons: All good, all good. Happy to see you again.
Marc: Are you still calling us from the cryptocurrency center of the universe in France? Well, I'm
Nicholas Lyons: on, uh, I'm on the border as always between, uh, multiple jurisdictions as the world changes. I, uh, I move with the world.
So, uh, maybe a return to America will be possible under the new administration.
Marc: Well, I would certainly love that. And it's interesting that you raise that topic because really that's what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to kind of get a sense in this episode of. Where cryptocurrency is today, generally speaking, and will we see a fundamental change with this new administration?
If so, how let's break down like what you expect happening with regards to crypto markets, with regards to the sec, really like let's predict, uh, what's going to happen over the next four years. So let's start with, where are we today?
Nicholas Lyons: Okay, so I think the simple answer is everything is going to change under the new administration.
Um, I think we should review the eras of cryptocurrency. So era one, Bitcoin come to maturity with the just before our last conversation, I said that I did think that there would be an ETF. The ETF was granted it, you know, pushed Bitcoin into the mainstream via BlackRock. Mainly, uh, it's the recognized face, of course, Coinbase and, uh, has moved in with its CBBTC wrapped token.
And so Bitcoin is the mainstream expression of, um, crypto world. The Ethereum ETF that came behind it, you know, has been less well received, uh, I think by markets, mainly because it's more complicated. But the real winning story, um, of course, is stable coins and stable coins is emblematic of the last era because there was, um, hope for stable coin legislation back in 2022 even, and it had a lot of, um, various different advocates in, in a split house.
And so with the unification of, um, Um, Of the new administration across the branches of government, um, there is going to be major change. So I think number one, yes, there is a bell where the sea where a sea change between. Era one of Bitcoin, era two of Ethereum, and Ethereum is split into sort of three eras, the ICO era, the DeFi summer era, and the NFT era, all of which were, you know, uh, eras of speculation.
The stablecoin era, um, is where we are now, and it is inherently linked to the economic policy of America, and the key through line on this is, Um, a gentleman by the name of Howard Lutnick, who I'm sure you know well, who was critical to, uh, the success, as I understand it, of, uh, of the Trump, uh, organization to win the election as his campaign manager, and because of his role at, um, Cantor Fitzgerald, and their role, I believe, as a custodian of some 2 billion worth of tether, and a giant amount of Bitcoin, Bitcoin.
There is a level of familiarity within the group that would seem to all go well for the big pieces of the equation. The big pieces being Bitcoin and the stable coins. Now there is a secondary reason which I think will be reflective of another appointee or nominee and that is Besant. Um, who, as a macro, uh, guy understands the import of liquidity and a macro hedge fund manager, as I understand his background, a very successful one at that, and the way that they have been talking around a strategic reserve of American cryptos, and Donald Trump himself seems to always, uh, conflate crypto with AI, which, he must have like a, a sort of, uh, A witchy instinct, um, but, um, he's often right without necessarily being technically au fait with the details, but machine to machine payments are going to be facilitated in the economy of, as we call it, the economy of me and we, by, um, by, uh, these, uh, stable coins, and so, um, and those stable coins that enable, Whether it's stablecoins or any other form of value that enable machine to machine payments.
I'm going to be critical in the next era of AI. And of course, when you talk about AI, you cannot help but talk about America. You cannot help but talk about America's AI policy. You cannot help but talk about the Chips Act. You cannot help but talk about the previous administration as well as the new administration.
And furthermore, you can't leave out the name of Elon Musk, the meme king, who has the power of hundreds of millions of followers, like Donald Trump, has the everything app, which is slated for payments, and he has one of the biggest AI, um, brains trust, both through Tesla and through X, uh, or Grock, uh, XAI.
And so, plus a massive installation, Which, again, Donald Trump always talks about AI and energy in the same breath, and energy, of course, is the critical input for AI, and it is also a critical input for the, um, crypto economy, if you're talking about mining, Bitcoin, and, uh, competing uses for energy. So, it is a macro, uh, jamboree of opportunity for America.
It is a man who clearly knows how to push the markets and the team is filled with, um, only friendly faces and the, uh, unfriendly face of Gary Gensler, who Donald Trump directly said would be fired the first thing, you know, first motion of the day. Um, was preempted. Gary Gensler fell on his sword by, uh, resigning from his position at the SEC to be replaced by again, um, a proponent who is friendly towards crypto and crypto mom has to pierce who has always been more friendly towards the community.
So there are a lot of reasons for those who believe in the Internet of value to be positive. And, of course, there are also massive amounts of speculators who sit on the sidelines, like the MicroStrategy crew, who are using sophisticated capital markets products, of which America excels, which America is now the dominant financial market.
There is no financial market in London or Hong Kong or Tokyo to speak of. The U. S. dominates. Financial markets and the Magnificent 7 is 39 percent of the S& P 500 at this point. So, you know, the stars are aligning and on the 25th of January, the planets will be aligning. So, um, there's a lot to be excited about.
And the metaverse is making sense now because people understand that it's about gamification and 4 billion of 8 billion people are playing games and, um, America is the capital of the gaming world. So, um, lots of reasons to be excited, I think.
Marc: So, that's great. A lot of optimism from you, and I love the fact that you're spreading it across all of these emerging technologies as it relates to crypto, artificial intelligence, fully immersive experiences.
But, you know, with optimism, there's the opposite side. What could go wrong here?
Nicholas Lyons: Well, you know, on the negative side, people like to talk about quantum computing, but that's principally because they know about as much about quantum computing as they know about cryptography. And, um, the truth is that, um, crypto will be quantum secure.
I think what you need to be more afraid of is that if you were involved in a state level attack The attack on the banks who have far less secure systems than some of the more sophisticated financial services businesses will, um, um, will suffer first. So I think if you're worried about, you know, when people go, Oh, quantum and, and, and, and willow and, uh, google, you know, yes.
Quantum computers are potentially going to change the game where they will change the game is in the ability to use less power to get more security and less power to get more compute for inference from the system so I think the things that people are afraid of are in the beyond the scope of this administration I don't think that we're going to see a generalized quantum computer that can you know, um, Take down Bitcoin per se or other, um, uh, other quote cryptography cryptographic systems.
But, um, what I do think one has to be, um, worried about is, um, as always, uh, the fact that, um, the technology is being the abstraction of technology. The simplification of technology is actually the centralizing force. So for those of us that are more interested in a third way, that don't necessarily want to reside in Musk's world, or in Zuck's world, or in Jeff's world, want to have a third way, as it used to be known, which is the self sovereign path.
And so I think the things that one should be nervous about is actually the closing information space and you know we talked about it before but there are three systems that we see as prevalent which we should be concerned about one is what we call the surveillance state that is the Chinese model the incoming what people call um, Central, uh, bank, uh, digital currency.
So CBDCs that, um, the Chinese have been piloting, which goes along with the social credit system. Then you've got this fear of the technocracy, which is a reasonable fear, which is massively centralized. You know, when the government has a problem, they don't try and solve it with their own software engineers.
They call Google and Microsoft and have them solve it like they did with Covid. That's very worrying when you consider the overlap on Section 230 between publishers and platforms, and who's supposed to take responsibility for that, and the legal precedent that comes from that, because why should publishers and platforms like, um, uh, Meta be, um, Exempt from responsibility when AI is supposedly going to be regulated.
Now, I don't know how you regulate AI in a world where unregulated counterparties like again, the Russians or the Koreans or the South Korea, the North Koreans or or the Iranians. So those are going to be national security issues. So crypto always comes wrapped up in this problems with regard to privacy and terrorism and counterterrorism and child abuse.
And, uh, and all of those abuses, um, that go with networks that are not under the control of centralized authority. So, there is a, the negative side is the adoption of crypto centralizes through BlackRock, through Coinbase, through centralizing forces. And those centralizing forces tend to go into the hands of the oligarchy and the, you know, autocracies.
And so. Potentially, the censorship resistance and the, um, trustless, um, nature of cryptocurrencies gets diluted. So, that would be the negative. I think, from a speculator's perspective, of course, the blow ups are what people are afraid of, right? And, you know, the FTX is of the world, etc. Now, I think one of those areas where people were afraid of USDT and they use this framing of FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt around USDT, I think has been ameliorated greatly by, uh, Howard Lutnick's involvement with Tether.
And I think he made a strategic investment in Tether for a single digit minority position. Which would lead one to believe that there is some more to that relationship that is the major feeder for Bitcoin as well. So, you know, I think some of the fears and uncertainties and the doubts are being removed.
That's mainly the regulatory, the normal fears and uncertainties and doubts of, you know, unscrupulous, um, and, um, and, and. over authoritarian control, other sort of negative downsides.
Marc: So it's kind of interesting because part of what you're talking about is consumer facing on the retail side, the familiarity, the old, um, uh, friendly types of inst governmental or private sector institutions.
Um, when you mentioned like BlackRock launching the Bitcoin ETF, that creates a certain level of trust that perhaps that That retail customer hasn't had before in the crypto space. That's kind of interesting on the flip side, just on the institutional side, on the B2B side, the deregulation, the deregulation part, as it relates to this new, um, let's say hands off Republican type of.
Government coming in should allow for more investment and more growth. A lot of what we've seen, uh, slow down during the Biden administration. I think the money will come flooding, uh, flooding back in. Do you agree? So I think there's a couple of things that worth,
Nicholas Lyons: you know, picking apart there. Number one.
Is that the major demand in aside from bitcoin has been for stable coins and there is one true golden thread that exists for stable coins is that as our as the world has is going away from globalization and back towards on on shoring and. And more, um, um, should we say balkanized approach? So friends of America, the BRICS nations are saying, Oh, we're getting going away from the, the, the, the dollar as a reserve currency, which I think is a nonsense.
I think the dollar is actually going to get stronger through this because the natural demand for stable coins. is from, uh, and the way that they're going to be regulated, the way they're regulated under MECA in Europe, is that you have to have 70 percent of the collateral. So 70 cents in every dollar has to be held in, um, AAA credit, like treasuries, right?
And, um, and 30 percent has to be held in cash, essentially, or cash equivalent, because every stablecoin has to be backed by a dollar. So what that means is that the, um, the Stable coin environment becomes the new buyer of treasuries where the Chinese and the Russians and the enemies of America have threatened to try to take on the dollar hegemony.
The dollar creates interoperability in global markets. The stable coins create a currency that can run over the internet. They can do the same. The difference is that you have to hold dollars one for one. When you put dollars in a banking system, dollars in a banking system are reserved at, you know, the Basel reserve at, say, 10 percent to 13%, which means that you are actually taking supplier dollars off the market in inverted commas by putting them into stable coins, which is effectively a replacement buyer for the reserve.
Um, state based, uh, competitors. So that's very, very good for America. Very, very good for the stable coin environment. Um, and what it also does is it creates yield. So the second point of so that's at the macro level at the micro level quite applicably because of micro strategy. Micro strategy has demonstrated what having a A crypto reserve does a fractional reserve that is backing a company and gives you new financing dynamics.
So MicroStrategy is the leader in that micro sale is the leader. I think there's some risk around that, but he's used his convertible bonds, his preference shares, and all of these other sophisticated tools to appeal to hedge funds that are convertible bond buyers that want exposure to the new economy of crypto.
So there are different. On ramp, so that's the, you know, the corporate level on ramp, and it leads to a lot of speculation and a lot of volatility, which is, you know, traders like. So there is a big, what I would say, high frequency, sophisticated market of traders who don't make money. Hedge funds have had a particularly bad run with an average performance of 10 percent compared to Cryptocurrencies, which obviously had a huge run.
So the the next big thing in the sophisticated, like the investment banking market, the merchant banking market, the New York market is going to be tokenization of real world assets. That is funds, mutual funds, all the stuff that you could buy. Via ETFs or via Schwab or via, you know, those online platforms, the digital platforms are going to move to the native platform of 24 7365 trading and what that then opens up as sophisticated X guys like me who use AI, but we used to call it machine learning.
To systematically trade those markets 24 7365 and exchange them at the speed of the Internet. And that is where regulation and deregulation to your point becomes very valuable. When you get to the final piece of the puzzle, which is the regular consumer, you know, the regular consumer doesn't have a lot of money to invest.
Let's be honest about it. Most of the money. that comes into markets, comes through pension funds, endowments, um, and, and a, a small amount of 401k style, um, uh, private investment. Um, it is the speculation and the excitement and the cultural mimetics of, of, of speculation, which we've seen through Solana, through the meme coin market that has attracted the.
What we would call in the defy summer the degens who just using it as an alternative to gambling and want a get rich quick scheme the regulators will have to regulate that there have been bad things that have happened around that suicides that have happened around that and in fact pump fun got called got banned in the UK by way of example so it's you know there's horses for courses the most important course is Macro.
Big. Traders. Dollar. Then corporations and sophisticated hedge fund traders who understand that this is the future of finance and then comes the retail market always with spiky volatility based speculation and some acknowledgement that the future of the Internet is a fully financialized market where your AI can, you know, trade markets for you and help you make the most of every day as we say.
Marc: It's interesting because you're painting this picture really where the worlds of like the legacy financial systems are intertwining at a heavier level with, uh, cryptocurrency and let's say digital, digital assets. Right? When you and I first met and started talking about cryptocurrency, now it's like over a decade ago.
Um, we really saw the two, Entities that the fiat currency world and the cryptocurrency world is kind of working on their own independently. But that's very different than what you're describing right now, right?
Nicholas Lyons: Well, you know, that's what happened. But, you know, no system can exist without energy coming into it.
And the energy that came into Bitcoin was via U. S. D. T. I was via dollars going into buy it something has to buy it to make it go up but there's more demand than supply so there was always about how does money funnel in and funnel out it's always been about on ramps and off ramps and this is where operation choke point is the subject that you know everyone talks about around the SEC well operation choke point 2.
0 was to try to protect those markets now. The previous administration was potentially, in my opinion, smart enough to realize that actually by embracing, I used to call it the bear hug, the bear hug strategy of bringing Bitcoin close and putting it in the hands of BlackRock is a far better strategy if you're looking to contain Bitcoin.
Thank you. The wilds of, um, of the market, and you need to have a way to exchange in and out. And so where you will choke the, uh, the part that they care about, which is taxation, right? As you know, no taxation without representation, right? Or no representation without taxation is the other way around on that, right?
Is that You know the crypto guys had came to pay their dues there's going to be a big crypto ball i believe in trump world where um you know all the faces are gonna be there paying you know good amount of money to sit at the table and to get that representation and they were a big part of the donor community as well and.
You know, crypto people generally care about laissez faire economics, to your point, and deregulation in markets. And, um, you know, I think that, um, this is something that we have, uh, to be excited, you know, about. Um, will there be messes? Will there be problems? Yes. Will there be bad people? Yes. But will America benefit?
You know, the beauty of embracing these technologies is that you can lead. And America has a big lead, as well, around AI because of the chip market, because of NVIDIA, because of Facebook, and Meta, and, uh, I should say Meta, not Facebook, and, and, and Musk, and Musk understands this, and he's sitting at every dinner.
And he is a very, very smart individual, and he has, he is the mean king, he, you know, Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, is a joke, an inside joke between, I think, uh, Plutnick and Musk, about his penchant for this meme coin with, uh, with the dog coin, and so he, um, definitely understands the new paradigm, but the new paradigm only exists If money can go in and come out.
And if that money going in and coming out goes through the government so that the government can make sure it gets its pound of flesh, then we're back in, you know, give on to Caesar that which is Caesar's and give on to the Lord that which is the Lord's, which is how Jesus, uh, you know, got with the Romans.
You know, we'll answer the questions, you know, pertaining to the Romans and that's what's going to happen. That is what's happening. That is the reason why I suspect tether and, uh, and that community has made the relationship with cancer. That's why the circle has a half a billion dollars. Um, with Blackrock, that's why Coinbase offers CBBTC and custody is it with Blackrock?
This is the intertwining of the old system migrating. To the new system it's going to happen
Marc: your optimism is exciting it's definitely energetic i love it i think it's really cool actually because i haven't seen you this optimistic and you know probably four years about all of this so it's definitely at another level right now
Nicholas Lyons: well you know.
It's always hard to be early on ideas because you expect people to acknowledge things that you understand and what one realizes is, you know, there was this great quote about crypto, everything you don't know about banking, politics, finance and law all rolled into one, right? It's your classic Twitter subject where people have opinions, but they're, you know, Uh, not necessarily well founded.
And so, you know, people, when they realize the efficiencies of AI are going to stop worrying about hyperinflation and this Weimar dollars going to, you know, like this nonsense about inflation, we're going to enter into a massively deflationary era where the time value of money is going to You know, explode, which is to say you can have a lot more free time.
And what are you going to do with this free time? You know, how are you going to spend that free time? And the real challenge is the challenge around how people are going to, um, be, uh, allocating time and money in, uh, in the new economy. You're going to have a lot more free time when look, it's happened to all of us.
You've used the A. I. To write yourself a first draft. You've used it. But. I'm sure we discussed it. You know, we've used it for a first draft of a press release for marketing. It's, you know, people have again that saying, you know, I is not going to take 50 percent of all the jobs. It's going to take 50 percent of your job, right?
Which is to say you're going to use it to become more time efficient and to get to an educated level. When that goes beyond into the generalized intelligence, you're going to need to own your AI. That's the next big leap. That's somewhere where you can be. Yeah. Worried if you don't have self sovereignty and sovereignty over a eyes that are going to use your data to help you that's the next big section that will I don't think that will happen during this administration but the old administration to the new mystery I want to be clear to say that.
I wasn't negative about the state of crypto in those markets because they were, they were suited to that era. There were a lot of bad people doing bad things and experimenting at the cost of innocent people that were just trying to play the game who, you know, they were being taken advantage of and the regulator needs to protect investors.
And MEV on the, uh, uh, EVM on the Ethereum virtual machine is front running, back running, and sandwich attacking regular people. And that will not be tolerable for anyone, even in today's regulators. So the headline news is good, the macro news is good, but at the detail level, you cannot front run your customers, you cannot back run them.
And that is a fundamental in built problem with MEV on, on Ethereum. That will still need to be addressed because that's market abuse.
Marc: So it's kind of interesting when you're throwing so many different ideas around right now, but I think if you isolate the next four years of growth and look at the role of that smaller retail investor, I think it's interesting because with the advent of new hardware, it will allow for, um, in For that smaller investor to start using cryptocurrency truly as a form of payment really integrating it into the way that communities work today right um i think that's gonna help quite a bit too.
Nicholas Lyons: Yeah i think that look it's not so much the hardware it's that you know the thing that people always used to be the contention in the last year when you would speak to people they go i can send apple pay i can send apple money i can use venmo i can use paypal. But what they don't realize is the reconciliation of those transactions in the old banking system were very expensive.
So the point now of having native currencies is that it automates things. It's just frictionless compared to all the friction that exists in the market otherwise. It's like, it's like, you know, it's the question that I think, um, Henry Ford. And I think that Steve Jobs talked about right, you know, in their own ways, everyone's got an analogy, you know, Henry Ford says, if I if people have asked me, you know, what did people want?
They would have said, you know, faster horses. And then, you know, Steve Jobs talks about, you know, the fastest animal on earth is the, you know, is the eagle, but a man on a bicycle can outperform even the most magnificent animal creature in the animal world. And so, you know, you've got to imagine that humanity is getting on a rocket ship, literally.
And, um, and, and, and that's going to mean that you can't have a payment system that's designed for bicycles and for horses. It needs to have, you know, very fast settlement because it's machine to machine. And that is something that most people don't yet really understand. But, you know, those who are in power and those who are close to power do understand that and it's going to be enormous.
And so it's not really about hardware per se or users, users never really want to know about the technology, no one wants to know about TCP IP or HTTPS or any of the protocols that run the existing internet, all they care about is I owe Joe 30 for dinner. And we got us bill split and i want to be able to pay them with whatever i got in my wallet and if i've got starbucks credits in my wallet that are worth thirty dollars i should be able to send my starbucks credits change them into usdc and deliver them to you know tom dick or harry and that's all they care about they care about the utility not how it happens it's magical you know that's what.
Steve Jobs did, but the iPhone presentation, it was like, I don't want to use that piece of glass. And it was like, Oh, you know, as soon as you saw it, you're like, yeah, I want to tap on a piece of glass for the next 10 years.
Marc: Yeah, Nicholas, you a lot of your optimism is coming through the, um. Uh, the fact that America is going to lean back in, right?
Like politics will influence and have a positive impact on, uh, corporate, um, uh, investment and, and, uh, managing trust as it relates to crypto. How does this play out on a geopolitical, um, access. Like now, well, will the United States use cryptocurrency to influence politics on an international scale? Will other like China has been very active over the past four years with crypto.
They've needed cryptocurrency. There are people needed it, not just the CBDC, but beyond that, like, you think that this is going to like what, what, what happens on the international landscape?
Nicholas Lyons: I think that, you know, This is going potential. The potential is for an exception, an era of American exceptionalism because you've got such a massive head start.
You don't, you couldn't name me a Russian technology company. You could name me a couple of Chinese companies, but mainly because they're being banned. So what we are seeing. Is globalization being dismantled in the technology arena and we have been in a cyber war for a very long time the band coming in against bite dance and tick tock in america and in other western countries is a direct result of allowing an unfettered access to your population to be swayed by um, Misinformation, disinformation, whatever you want to call it.
It doesn't matter. People politicize it. The fact of the matter is that those who have the best access to power, who have the best access to compute, who have a global hegemony in terms of trade and inter, you know, interoperable currency, which is America, will defeat everybody else if they get their act together.
The problem with America was it became obsessed with. The, uh, the, the, the need to please everybody, and they forgot that there is a market of ideas out there and in a world where, you know, ideas become easily clonable, and this is an economic concept of using Laffer curves, or as, uh, Bain called them learning curves, and George Gilder talks about it in his book about, um, The End of Capitalism.
You know it is about everything gets cheaper as knowledge proliferates right and so america has an advantage in that it needs the information economy and it has a global hegemony in terms of its ability to see those ideas into other markets now the chinese protect that market the russians protect that market the the the the opportunity for america is to take the openness that.
Everyone wants to come to America for and expand it to everybody else who wants to participate in this economy, and it will be done with Bitcoin. Yes, but it will be done with USDC, USDT, USDS, DAI, which are fully reserved currencies. That means that there is more demand because they're one for one than bank currency.
So that's. You know it has the opportunity to america's opportunity to bring the stable coin alongside the euro dollar and that is what created the credit opportunity for the dollar the dollar in the world is built on credit and the dollar stands. As the, the, the, the foundation for credit on the basis of getting a yield on your money and without getting that yield on your money and trusting the government, you don't have anything, which is the reason why you're not holding Chinese bonds, you're not holding ruble bonds, you hopefully you're not holding Turkish bonds and the reason why currencies.
What exchanges so that people can engage in carry trades like the japanese carry trade or the turkish carry trade etc where people play sophisticated games. From a geopolitical perspective if you are smart if you play this right you can have a fantastic uh era of growth and opportunity and we can get away from trying to you know hamstring our own entrepreneurs because.
you know, the opportunity is to deepen the relationship with allies and to understand that those that are not sharing our values will attempt their own currency like the BRICS currencies, and they do not share Western liberal values. So this is going to be an era where there is a battle of value. And values is the way we see it.
Marc: So how is AI, what's AI's role in it all? Um, is it more from the innovative side with regards to accelerating growth and innovation, um, helping entrepreneurs compete with. Bigger financed, um, entities that are developing new crypto products and crypto tools, or is it a utility that's baked into some sort of a expert user experience or beyond what, where do you think AI and cryptos strongest intersection is right now?
Nicholas Lyons: Yeah great question
Marc: great question
Nicholas Lyons: okay so i think that you have to answer it on a macro micro level so on a meta level the viewpoint is that ai is the next interface it is the way it's what replaces the iphone right so the iphone is the perfect device is the perfect size it's got great computer it does everything you need it to do and the app world is the application is the way that you access.
The, you know, the technology, so it became like more than the Internet, the, the, the, the, the phone became the platform. The medium is the message as as, um, what's his name said? Um, and so if you understand the medium is the message, then a eyes medium is is words. Essentially right it's a large language model and words have power and in the beginning was the word and so words and the way that one addresses one's a agents is the likely future it's so my viewpoint is it's gonna be an agentic future and you will ask the agent.
In the old days, you had a real estate agent, a travel agent, you know, hospitality concierge, who's an agent, right? They are agents of yours that go and do your bidding in in the market, right? And so the agentic future is the future that's coming, and it will be, um, Automated the issue is going to be how you own the data that informs the agent and how the agent then engages with other agents and make sure it's not being deceived by agents that are not really the agents of, you know, the other so sure that's really the so so the interface is voice.
The interface is always on 24 7365 doing your bidding for you and the, um, the opportunity for where crypto and, um, and the agentic future come together is in. The internet of value which is the exchange of value which is going to be irrelevant whether like we said before whether it's starbucks or whether it's you know anything that has value you know like mean coins have value you know everything has value time.
Is ultimately the most valuable thing so the thing that generally has driven markets historically is time and price so you know you want it now for more or you want it later for less or you want it in bulk for less so there's volume time and price so that's what Jeff Bezos said you know I don't care about so much about what's going to happen it's about what's not going to change it's not going to change that people move.
You know, care about the price and the speed by which he can deliver goods and services to them. Now, that's what is going to be the key. So in terms of AI and crypto, it's value exchanges. And the most important thing is that you can only be involved in value exchanges if you can prove that your data is accurate.
And that you can prove that you own certain information and that that information you are going to contribute to the economy in return for some value exchange and so it is the nexus between identity which is why you know we've been involved in identity technology for a long time and it's the nexus between identity and value because who owns it is the question so.
In the previous conversations that I've had with you and other, uh, other people, you know, they always, they always talk about this Peter Thiel's secret question, right? You know, what's the, what's the secret that you know that other people don't know? Or what's the, what question, you know, that drives you?
And so the question for me about the switch between Web 2 and 3 and, and the agentic future is, you know, what's better than free? That's the question. What, what's better than free? You get all these amazing services for free. Well, the only thing that's better than free is getting paid. And that requires crypto and AI to come together.
Marc: That's great. That's interesting. So, you know, you're kind of downplaying the role of, um, certain digital assets. Like, I think meme coins just had such a significant, um, moment. I know that it's speculating. I get that they're this small retail, like, maybe, like, Same thing that we saw with NFTs pre, pre COVID and all, um, but what, like, what's the story with meme coins?
Do you think they, they had their moment and they're gone? I'd be remiss to not ask. I know it's like, uh, we're going a little bit sideways here, but, um, did they have their moment? Will they stay around? Like what are they evolving? By the way, I've seen some AI meme coins recently. I think they're pretty cool.
Um, they're, they're, uh, leveraging the technology for marketing as well across social media to hype up those meme coins yet meme coins inherently aren't supposed to be a digital asset, but people are still speculating with it, as you mentioned. So what's the story with meme coins? So in
Nicholas Lyons: an internet of value.
And value exchanges people can exchange anything of value based on demand and supply the issue which is where regulators come in is when it relates to the money and demand and supply and promises of money and demand and supply and systems of. Demand and supply and money that are controlled by others right and so that's where still on has.
You know had its ICO moment right that's the use case that is driving Solana's adoption and sure and pump dot fun it you know the keys in the name you know it's about pumping and that you know reminds us all of the old days with your cohort of friends who were. At Stratton Oakmont and, uh, and the pink sheet merchants who are running up and down, uh, you know, Fifth Avenue and there's always a home for people that want to be speculators and want to enjoy themselves and they don't care about.
the, you know, the risk and everything else. They're just having fun. And NFTs were the same thing, but that becomes a mania when numbers get involved and big numbers get involved and fortunes are made and lost overnight. And, you know, it is the meme economy and You know, who better to, you know, than Elon Musk, who's the meme king, you know, understands this and we saw it with Wall Street bets.
We saw, saw it, you know, you can become famous and we have a, you know, a, a show on Netflix about you and, you know, roaring kissing or whoever it was. I think meme coins like NFTs are
Marc: a, by the way, I saw some meme coins, um, you know, recently also jumped into the craze with bitcoins. It's kind of interesting that Bitcoin launched, um, or mean
Nicholas Lyons: with the ordinals and things like that.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, that's what it is, right? It's not an so, so, so the way that I would look at it is that memes, you know, a meme by its definition is a unit of culture. So meme coins are a measure of a culture. A measure of a culture is the same as a Picasso or a Warhol and it depends on the amount of demand and supply and many people who've been, you know, involved in the, in Sotheby's and Christie's and the, and the, um, and the, uh, art world would say, well, those are, are those not meme currencies?
You know, you see someone with a, you know, a Warhol gun on their wall, you know, they're telling you something. Is it, uh, is an ape, uh, more beautiful than a Warhol gun or less war, beautiful than a Warhol gun? No, it's a form of currency when you have an excess of capital and you put it on your wall and it says, I own a Warhol, you know, revolver.
Um, you know. That is the way that the world works and that's why the mean king is also the space X maestro and the X everything maestro, you know, he understands that is that, you know, people want to be amused and as Maximus or what's his name said in that movie, you know, are you not amused and that's the era we are in, uh, we are in, isn't it?
That part of time when means, uh, are valuable because people have excess time and they feel it's being a member of a community. So a meme is a unit of culture and we live in a world of genes and memes. So, you know, things that make sense on a genetic basis and things that makes sense on a cultural basis.
So I think they will stay. Whether they're valued at whatever they're valued at is just a function of demand and supply.
Marc: Nicholas. I'm curious, like when you think about Elon like early on in his career, I'm sure you are aware of this. Like he had a bunch of failures. He hasn't always been this massive success.
And then at some point he like turned on the fame, right? He became world renowned, not just through leveraging, um, you know, memes that he built himself and, and, uh, third party memes, like, like the, the Doge, uh, the Dogecoin and the, and the dog and all, but once he turned on that fame, that fame knob, it seems like internationally money flowed towards him, and he was able to stand up these incredible businesses like Tesla, like SpaceX.
Um, and, and beyond frankly, we'll keep on going. Uh, is that the new way that entrepreneurs or that people in tech should be thinking? Should it be about creating individual fame to attract investment? Um, like what's really happening there? If you're going to break that down a little bit, how would you describe it?
Nicholas Lyons: Attention, right? We live in the attention economy and he is understanding that. The, uh, most amusing, uh, thing is what gets people's attention. He doesn't have to say a lot, and he makes the news flow. He has a giant following. He owns, uh, you know, the biggest media property in in the world in terms of. You know, amplifying message and he perfected the art of using it and he understood, you know, buyout secured at 420 was the perfect meme, right?
Because it allowed him the plausible deniability of joking that it was a, you know, a marijuana joke, but it also signaled that he wanted to signal to the market. That, you know, Tesla was, you know, he was going to buy it out, you know, and then the SEC got in his face and as they got into his face this week as well, right, about the Twitter acquisition because he hacked the, you know, the, the system he understood because he's a very smart guy that you need to get attention.
And when people don't understand how technologies work, they want to just back the guy, right? They back Steve Jobs. They back Elon Musk. They back Peter Thiel. They back, you know, Zuck. It's like, these people have charisma, and he doesn't need to write a white paper or a book about the network state. People will just say, he seems like a pretty smart guy, and guess what, he can prove it with a car, and they can see it, and seeing is believing, and Musk is the greatest showman on earth.
I mean, just, even things that don't go well for him, go well for him, like when he threw the rock at the Cybertruck window, and it shattered, and it was supposed to be bulletproof. Even That, you know, doesn't blow up on him because he's authentic, and he's hacked the dopamine, you know, uh, uh, metric, and he's one of the, one of the lads, and that's why, you know, the, the, the, the liberal progressive left hates him, and, you know, I haven't always been a fan of How he's communicated until I understood that he knows how to speak to people and long meandering explanations are for a different audience and when he does give his long meandering or, you know, explanations, you know, he comes off as a, you know, Asperger's a, uh, I don't know if it's the right word, you know, autist and he's a genius and people sort of see that and go, He does put these funny memes up and he does say these things and he does call people out, but he's not afraid of making mistakes and that's a very, uh, playful.
Way and he's very smart at how he does it because he always leaves himself room for just saying I was only doing it for shits and giggles and he's a genius. The man, you know, he's, he's PT Barnum on steroids. Do you
Marc: see any, um, legacy finance CEOs or anyone from the financial community that's been there for, you know, 30, 40 years looking at that type of approach, you know, Elon's approach and trying to, um, Put that into the legacy community.
No, I think the closest they're coming to life in like
Nicholas Lyons: a Bank of America or you can't because you need to be a founder you need to be the guy you can't be the employee of someone because Amy diamonds not gonna go bonkers you can't you can't do that you know the it's always founders that have the right to to to be different because there's no one to tell them to conform.
And when you try to tell them to conform, like, you know, I think it was, what's his name? Gray did, uh, with, with, um, jobs, you kill their creativity. And so, the fact that they are in charge gives them the ability to make those types of moves. I would say the person who's done it, who's tried to jump on that bandwagon, um, most has been Michael Saylor because of his, Embrace of the Bitcoin community during COVID and he's been sort of using that mimetic approach and laser eyes and trying to do that, but it doesn't feel as authentic.
You know, Musk is the meme king and his followers are the Pied Piper of, uh, of, um, Hamlin equivalent. I don't know. Musklin.
Marc: Interesting. So look, I know that this is, um, one of our shorter conversations. I got to wrap it up. I appreciate all your time, but hopefully you remember how I end every show. So let's do it.
Let's do it again. One more time. Stick with me in some future day. Cryptocurrency will become.
All right, man. I appreciate your time, Nicholas Lyons. Thank you so much. so much. It's great to see
Nicholas Lyons: you. Let's speak more, um, lots of subjects to talk about.
Marc: Let's bring you back on the show, um, you know, maybe a quarter or two after. Trump sets up everything that he's doing as it relates to crypto and, and give him like a report card.
Would you, would you be willing to join me for that?
Nicholas Lyons: Yeah, definitely. I think it's going to be interesting to see if he gets the strategic reserve set up. If he can do that, then goodness only knows what happens. Cool. All right. Thanks so
Marc: much, Nicholas. Thanks so much. I know your time is very important. So thank you so much for joining me today for ongoing insights surrounding these important topics you can join the conversation on my social media channels including Twitter Instagram and LinkedIn at Mark Beckman and to sign up for my newsletter on substack you can find me at mark Beckman substack.
com To make sure you don't miss a show be sure to subscribe To some future day across all major platforms worldwide, including YouTube, Spotify and Apple. Special thanks to New York University for producing Some Future Day and a big shout out to my producer extraordinaire, John Boomhoffer, for being patient and always encouraging me to push through.
Thanks a lot, John. Have a great day