The Edge Podcast

The ultimate crypto pod to uncover next gen protocols hosted and produced by @DeFi_Dad and @Nomaticcap, subscribe for FREE newsletter at

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

🎙️ Ep 260 is live

🗳️📈 Could A "Hated Rally" Fuel Crypto’s Next Leg? What The Midterms and The Binance Hack Mean for Crypto

✨ Featuring @therollupco CoFounders @robbieklages and @andyyy

https://t.co/KigEMGVRkb

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

Apple earnings, the midterms, Anthropic’s IPO, Nvidia. Each one is a negative catalyst crypto just has to absorb, like Q2.

“This is really, really similar to what we saw in Q2 over the summer, where Saylor was selling Bitcoin. We didn’t go up in the face of that, but we held the line.”

“Anthropic IPO is gonna come out sometime in the next two weeks. People are saying that’s gonna steal a ton of liquidity from the market. I kinda think it’s gonna be very similar to Q2.”

“I actually think crypto is gonna react before the equities markets.”

ft. @robbieklages, @andyyy, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[Nomatic @Nomaticcap]

I wasn’t excited about another L2.

Then I learned more about Elysium.

What happens when builders get fast, cheap blockspace next to Hyperliquid’s order books?

Why I’m bullish, what I tried and where $KNTQ fits in:

https://t.co/5b1rk75BBt

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

Zcash has had chain privacy since day one. Network privacy is the unfinished business.

“Zcash has full nodes, and then it has what we call light clients. There’s chain privacy, and then there’s network privacy.”

“We’ve had chain privacy since the beginning. The second piece is what do you actually use on mobile? You can’t run a full node on your phone.”

“That network privacy option that uses Tor… helps make it so that these network nodes can’t tell what IP address, what phone a given request is coming from.”

“Especially when you’re moving in and out of the shielded pool or you’re moving transparent ZEC, that is information that we would prefer to have more obfuscation about, and there continues to be ongoing work on making that better.”

ft. @zmanian, @sudo_ml, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

Everyone said a Binance hack would be game over. Then it happened.

“The whole time I’ve been in crypto, people have said, oh man, if Binance ever gets hacked, it’s game over. We get the biggest heist in financial history, and it’s Binance.”

“I actually felt oddly calm through the Binance hack, through the whole thing from start to finish.”

“That was the calmest hack, and then it was the absolute opposite result of what I thought would happen when Binance got hacked. And isn’t that just so crypto?”

ft. @robbieklages, @andyyy, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

What is Tacticals? Octav’s side project turns on-chain options into copy trading: follow a trader, get a Telegram ping, copy the same option at your size.

“Octav, we are a data provider, but we also trade. A lot of my guys at Octav were having trouble understanding options. Am I buying a put or selling a put? And it’s also why it’s the biggest market, because when you understand it, you can do a lot of stuff with options.”

“If I’m explaining that to two of my devs that are really deep in DeFi but not in options, clearly there’s a lot of people that don’t understand how to do that.”

“Instead of buying meme coins, you actually can copy trade anyone that is doing options. You can follow CoolCrypto, connect your Telegram account, and say, when CoolCrypto does something, tell me. You can copy the same thing at a different size.”

“The idea is kind of a social app for options, but the goal is mostly to explain to you how options work and which strategy you can do. Now it’s still really small.”

ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi & @tacticalsxyz, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

Zcash isn’t fully quantum-safe today. Here’s what’s already in place so your shielded ZEC survives the transition.

“As it stands today, Zcash is not fully quantum safe, but you’ve laid some of the ground rails to be more quantum safe.”

“You go into a coma for the next 10 years. You wake up… a quantum computer has come out, Zcash has migrated, Zcash is running a new protocol. Have you lost your coins? No. That’s kinda all you have to know.”

“Effectively, every person who has ZEC in the shielded pool today… they could just forget about Zcash and come back in 30 years, and their Zcash would be accessible.”

“Becoming post-quantum secure is not a thing you just do… It is a ridiculous amount of work with all these unknowns. So the best thing we can do now is to make a future transition, especially when quantum computers become more real, a lot faster, a lot easier.”

ft. @zmanian, @sudo_ml, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

“This next leg is gonna be the most aggressive leg of this bull market.”

“Once Bitcoin breaks out to all-time highs, you do get this crazy aggressive rally across the board, but the gains are made from positioning right now and over the last couple months before that breakout happens.”

“I’m talking trillions of dollars of stablecoins in the total supply by the end of the year or early 2028.”

“I firmly believe that 2024 was really not a real bull run. I believe 2021 was just a COVID-induced stimulus with no real fundamentals backing it. We have real fundamentals.”

ft. @robbieklages, @andyyy, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

How to hedge a Uniswap LP so impermanent loss can’t sink you: buy a put instead of shorting on perps.

“The easiest way to think about it is impermanent loss. I wanna have the yield from the market making, but I wanna make sure that I protect myself.”

“I prefer options. It’s a fixed fee. Your option costs you, I don’t know, $100. If your Uniswap v3 LP creates more than $100, everything above is pure profit, because you’ve removed that risk with your option.”

“You can short it on a perp, but the funding rates are changing over time. If you buy an option, there’s no liquidation. You just buy it.”

“It was really hard to hedge tokenized stock because there was no option on chain for stock. We have our own traditional stockbroker, so we were buying options on the traditional market to hedge our tokenized stock LP on Robinhood. You just need to make sure that the fee you’re gonna be doing with your LP is gonna cover the premium that you pay for your option.”

ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

Zcash shipped a wallet recovery tool because one person asked for it. It has since unlocked over $30M in ZEC.

“The way we like to think about the problems we wanna solve are potholes. Potholes are problems that affect everybody, but nobody really wants to stop and spend the resources to fix.”

“There’s a whole philosophy about why ECC didn’t build a wallet for a very long time. Part of it was regulatory fears… trying to have the community do it. All of that was a mistake.”

“If you tried to self-custody your Zcash between 2016 and 2023, there’s a pretty good chance that even if you are a deep technical expert in Zcash, you cannot figure out how to access your ZEC.”

“So we launched Argos. Argos has now rescued over $30,000,000 in ZEC for people. When we built it, we had one person who was asking for it.”

ft. @zmanian, @sudo_ml, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

The midterms didn’t end the crypto trade. They set up a hate rally.

“Florida elected a Republican governor who backs a US Bitcoin reserve, but at the same time, Texas elected a Democratic senator who voted to create a Bitcoin reserve in his state. And so crypto no longer is a partisan issue.”

“I think this is gonna lead to a hate rally. A hate rally in which Trump goes on an absolute brigade of pumping the market.”

“They’re gonna see all of the mainstream media going super negative against crypto and attacking Trump. And at the same time, they’re gonna see prices going higher.”

ft. @robbieklages, @andyyy, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

At ~$1B FDV he re-underwrites every position. And the biggest mistake he sees investors make is closing winners to double down on losers.

“When we’re close to $1,000,000,000 of FDV, I need to make sure I’m really convinced in that project. Look around your desk and find any company that’s on the stock market and look at the capitalization. They’re gonna be 50 million, 100 million. They’re not 50 billion. And they’re a real company with real revenue.”

“So to me, when we arrive close to a $1B FDV, I’m starting to look like, does it make sense? Should I keep doubling down or not?”

“The biggest mistake of a lot of investors is closing your winner and then doubling down on your loser. You should be doing the other way around. I lost 1k? Just kill it and move forward. And you should double down on your winner.”

“But it’s just really hard to do that because you’re like, well, I’m already winning. Why will I buy at a higher price?”

ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

A Zcash board member on the two years when the project was one bad quarter away from resizing the team.

“I joined the board end of 2023, so it’s almost three years now. We all agreed at the board level that this was the last shot. It was do or die.”

“Our treasury is comfortable now, but for most of the two years after that, depending on coin price, we’d have to resize the team and really think about what our future looks like.”

“So it’s been a long struggle to survive, but suddenly now you have new talent. You have a greater ability to fund different explorations, and you have a lot of interest from the market.”

“When the team left, we’re basically left with kind of a shell of an organization. And we did see it as our responsibility to properly steward… or point the organization towards its next phase.”

ft. @sudo_ml, @zmanian, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

His way to take profit on a token without ever selling the position: provide liquidity and sell the fees.

“I think the best way for me to sell a token is actually providing liquidity. Let’s say you’re bullish on Derive. If it doubles, the human mind will probably be like, well, it can double again.”

“What I prefer to do is provide liquidity, Uniswap v3 or v4, but really wide. Not full range. Normally people will do plus 100, minus 50. I’ll do plus 200, minus 66.”

“I will collect Derive and ETH over time, but then I can sell my Derive and I get a fee. I always keep my main position, but I sell the fee as kind of how I take profit.”

“If Derive goes 2x or 3x and now I’m fully out of Derive, at least it’s positively that I’m out. Now there’s a risk, again, if it’s going down the other way, you’re holding the bag. But that’s the best way for me to take profit.”

ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

🔗 Find all the links to this new episode of The @Edge_Pod and future pods by subscribing to The Edge Newsletter.
https://t.co/3Yh7nVLJDe

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

🎙️ Ep 260 is live

🗳️📈 Could A "Hated Rally" Fuel Crypto’s Next Leg? What The Midterms and The Binance Hack Mean for Crypto

✨ Featuring @therollupco CoFounders @robbieklages and @andyyy

https://t.co/KigEMGVRkb

[DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad]

🎙️ New @Edge_Pod

🗳️📈 Could A "Hated Rally" Fuel Crypto’s Next Leg? What The Midterms and The Binance Hack Mean for Crypto

0:00 - Intro
1:31 - Why Robbie expects crypto to lead stocks
4:14 - AI headwinds + why Andy’s fully allocated
6:35 - Is crypto now bipartisan?
9:33 - Could crypto rise if equities stall?
12:02 - Why markets shook off the Binance hack
16:55 - Tokenization super-cycle + concentrated bets
27:11 - What you'd buy if you rebuilt your portfolio
33:25 - Betting on category winners
39:53 - Crypto equities, DATs, and great founders
48:11 - Liquid tokens vs private markets
51:16 - The end of the disbelief phase
56:20 - Closing

🙏 Thanks to @therollupco CoFounders @robbieklages and @andyyy for joining us!

[DeFi Dad ⟠ defidad.eth @DeFi_Dad]

New @Edge_Pod!

Could a "hated rally" fuel crypto's next leg?

That’s Robbie’s thesis: prices can climb while sentiment for crypto stays hostile.

@robbieklages and @andyyy from @therollupco join us for reactions to the midterms and Binance hack, and how we’re all positioning.

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

The best privacy isn’t private payments. It’s money at rest that nobody can tell apart.

“We have these shielded pools. The coins in those shielded pools can’t be distinguished from each other.”

“You see a Bitcoin, it’s attached to an address, you see all the addresses that have ever touched that. You have ETH on Ethereum, you see all the different addresses that are connected… just ordinarily holding the coins, everybody can see.”

“Everything that’s in the shielded pool is indistinguishable. That’s not a property that things like Monero have… Just hold your money in an encrypted pool is kind of not a system that anyone else has ever been able to pull off.”

“If you’re trying to make a payment, trying to use a DeFi protocol, the transfers are always gonna leak information. But if you moved your money into a shielded pool just to hold it there for years, there’s no information to leak.”

ft. @zmanian, @sudo_ml, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Edge Podcast @edge_pod]

The “Bitcoin sweater guy” barely owns any Bitcoin. His store of value is ETH, and his reason is about community, not price.

“Even if I’m the Bitcoin sweater guy, I actually don’t own a lot of Bitcoin. The upside of Bitcoin is not as good as the upside of other liquid assets.”

“What makes the value of a company is its product and revenue. What makes the value of a token is its community. And I think the Bitcoin community became really toxic and did not really wanna evolve over time.”

“We’ve seen quantum stuff happening recently. Is the community that’s now leading Bitcoin ready to work on Bitcoin to make it quantum resistant? Do we need that? I don’t know.”

“I have an exposure to Ethereum because I see it as being the Internet, but I don’t see Ethereum at 30k. The Internet is not worth something. What’s built on it is worth a lot of money. So I see my store of value being Ethereum over time, more than Bitcoin.”

ft. @mbaril010 of @OctavFi, @DeFi_Dad & @Nomaticcap

[The Jedi M@n 🧑‍🦯 @gall_quay]

Privacy Researcher at Railgun, Alan Scott, explains why privacy should start at the wallet level, so people can make transactions without strangers digging through their wallets, checking their balances and judging how they spend their money:

"Privacy that really matters in crypto is wallet-side privacy... that is to say, actor blinding or peer-to-peer blinding."

"Whenever I transact with another DeFi user, he's going to immediately open Etherscan and proceed to judge me. He's going to look at my balance of tokens, click on the address that funded it, and kind of do that random walk we all do on Etherscan."

"I think that sort of thing is actually broadly bad for the ecosystem and it limits the actual usability of crypto. So that's the space that Railgun researchers want to solve."

"How do we make wallets have that privacy? How do we make it like bank transfers or using your Visa at a coffee shop? The only thing they see on the terminal is 'approved' and then they hand you your coffee and you go about your business."

"They don't know how much money you have in your bank account, they don't get to judge you, they don't get to say 'let's see, you're late on your mortgage.' None of their business, and that's the sort of thing we need in crypto payments."