Transcript 0:00 [funky music] Mayday, mayday. It is death and destruction. It's carnage out there. 0:17 Yes, I know the normal markets are tanking, Nasdaq's down, S&P's down. Maybe your favorite, like, TradFi company is down. Bitcoin's down. We just crossed under 100K. 0:27 But what I think most of you listening are, uh, you're most worried about your runes and your ordinals, because it has been an absolute bloodbath, and we're gonna blame it on DeepSeek, but maybe we have some soul-searching to do. 0:40 Right after this message from our new conference this April. 0:44 Hey, this is Will with Blockspace Media, and I don't know if you heard, but we just announced the second edition of our conference series, OpNext, now to be held at the MicroStrategy HQ in Tysons, Virginia. That's right. 0:56 After the success of our first scaling conference at Fidelity last fall, we're doing it again this spring, April 11th and 12th, at the MicroStrategy HQ. I'm really excited for the programming. 1:07 We have various stakeholders, industry, developers, and Bitcoin miners present. 1:11 So join us in April for open, neutral, and honest conversation about the leading proposals and technical solutions that will scale Bitcoin to the next billion users. 1:21 No booths, no tokens, no shills, just Bitcoin and honest conversation. You can find tickets and more information at opnext.dev, or click below in the show notes. Yeah, that's right. 1:37 We're doing a conference at MicroStrategy in April. More info, I will link it in the description, and hit my Twitter @CBspears and Blockspacepod. So it's been a rout in the markets. 1:50 This past weekend, uh, was like no-holds-barred precursor to what was gonna come this week. Um, this is the live stream. 1:58 Again, I typically do a little more metrics-heavy, some more news, and I try to keep it pretty short, so ten, 15 minutes this episode. 2:06 Um, I'm gonna share my screen, so if you're listening I'll try to narrate what's happening. But I'm gonna start with, um, whenever we get scared, we go to mempool.space. 2:15 And actually today mempool.space does not offer much consolation because fees are down as well, so it's easy-- it's easy and simple and cheap to transact on Bitcoin. 2:24 But if you are looking and you're wondering about Bitcoin's security budget, or you're- if you're wondering what- what's going on, we're in a bull market if Bitcoin's at 100K, or it was a couple hours ago, um, why is nobody transacting on Bitcoin? 2:38 Well, I don't know why. Ordinals and runes are down, so somebody else pick up the torch. We're looking at one to two sats for vBuy. 2:44 We only have 29 blocks worth of transactions, um, and, uh, we have significant, uh, you know, uh, concentration among block template producers, that is Foundry, Ampul, ViaBTC, and F2Pool making up, 3:02 uh, over, uh, just about 35%. I'm sorry, 75% of all network hash rate. Um, so let's get into the bloodbath. Here we have Magic Eden, and this is the 30-day view of the top 10 3:20 most traded ordinals on Bitcoin. We have Puppets in the past month down 55%, Quantum Cats down 21%, Node Monks down 47%, 3:33 OMB after a nice little pump and susp- and, uh, what looks like a new collection being inscribed, down 34%, Based Angels down 57%. The only thing that's up is [chuckles] OCM, OCM Genesis. Um, Pizza Pets are down 76%. 3:51 Um [clears throat] so... And if I were to expand this, it would just keep going down. I mean, what gives? Like, Bitcoin is only down from 106,000, I think, to 99,000. 4:03 Um, in fact, I think Bitcoin is actually up from where it was 30 days ago. These Bitcoin-denominated assets have not retained their price, neither in USD nor in Bitcoin. Um, I personally am bummed. I love these things. 4:17 Uh, I report on them, I talk about them, I own them, uh, but, uh, you know, you've got to wonder where is all the capital flowing? Is it just flowing to ETFs? Maybe. It's certainly not flowing to runes. 4:31 Here's runes.com, again, a 30-day view. These are the most traded, um, runes by ticker. Dog obviously number one, then PUPS, then Billion Dollar Cap, then RCIC. 4:43 Dog with $15, $16 million of total traded volume in the past 30 days. PUPS in a distant second with 2.7, and BDC with 2.1 a, a distant third. 4:57 Like, um, we are, uh, this, this is de minimis, uh, trading volume. 5:04 Uh, in fact, we see, uh, Solana shitcoins on pump.fun in an afternoon have an underwhelming performance and still trade more than all of these assets combined in a month. All of these are down. PUPS is down 5:21 66%, Dog down 44%, BDC down 53%. So it's been rough going. Um, it is an absolute bloodbath. Um, why is that? Well, there's a lot of things going on. 5:35 One, uh, we've been in a secular ordinals bear market for a little while, um, but then also we've had this, this news this past week. 5:43 How does a, a cracked, um, AI, you know, quant team in China, um, affect your, uh, Bitcoin-denominated ordinals assets? Well, [chuckles] this is how. 5:56 So if you weren't around this past weekend, um, to get a little hint of this over the past 24 or 48 hours-Here's what happened. So a Chinese, um, AI model called DeepSeek, D-E-E-P-S-E-E-K, 6:09 um, was released and, uh, was very... has been-- first impressions apparently are ve- it's very, very performant. It competes directly with your, your big name brand household names for AI such as OpenAI. 6:25 And so it's a Chinese AI startup, and, um, the... basically the TLDR is that they did it for way-- they were able to produce this AI model for way cheaper than you would, uh, uh, doing it as we've... 6:39 as many companies have, uh, predicted it would cost. Now, there are some caveats around this. 6:45 There are some asters- asterisks, but the short version is, is that they were able to produce this for much cheaper in an, an unconventional way, and it's much more efficient than many people have predicted. 6:56 And because it feels like the entire stock market is kind of held up on, like, the Nvidia trade, the AI trade. We even see this in Bitcoin mining. All the Bitcoin miners are flipping to AI. 7:06 This challenges a lot of the valuation models, and we see, like, we're coming into, like, stock earnings reports for a lot of the big companies this week and next. 7:14 And they've been, like, justifying, like, "We're pivoting to AI," or, "We're raising all this money, and here's the valuation, and here's why we need the money." 7:22 And this, um, kinda cuts the legs out from under them, or at least so it appears the market is, is interpreting it that way. Um, this morning, uh, Nasdaq down twelve percent, Nvidia down... 7:40 I'm sorry, Nvidia down twelve percent, Nasdaq down three or four percent. Um, you see... I'm just gonna pick, uh, we saw Core Scientific, uh, the largest Bitcoin miner, down thirty percent on the day, just today. 7:54 So, um, it's been pretty painful. And then in Bitcoin, you know, we've seen, uh, Bitcoin go down a bit, but nothing, like, remarkable interestingly. Like, Bitcoin hasn't really taken that much of a hit. 8:04 Some of your, like, shit coins, absolute shit coins, uh, are, are, are down massively. And in fact, let me just get into this. So this past week, or this past weekend, again, if you were offline, you didn't miss much. 8:17 But the good news is, is that, you know, if you were offline you missed, uh, some, some fun and fast, like, Solana shit coins being launched. And why am I talking about this on Bitcoin Season two? 8:28 Well, it's because apparently the boomers and some of the zoomers have decided that, "Oh, well, Bitcoin's not exciting enough. We're gonna launch, like, an, um, analogs to Bitcoin-type assets on Solana." 8:43 And the most famous one this past week was launched by user runetoshi, and it was kind of this i- uh, ironic, uh, b- uh, statement that, well, because runes are so bad on Bitcoin, we're just gonna do, air quotes, "runes on Solana." 9:00 And so what happened was, uh, 9:06 uh, this r- this, uh, pump dot fun token called runes, but it's on Solana, uh, was launched and made, uh, banner headlines on Saturday and Sunday as it soared from zero to I think, like, twenty some odd million total market cap, 9:23 and then subsequently over yesterday dumped to basically zero. The token currently sits at a fully diluted value, total market cap of three hundred and ninety thousand dollars, down, you know, ninety-five plus percent. 9:38 And the funny thing is, like, this was the chatter on Bitcoin Twitter, um, or rather Ordinals Twitter, Runes Twitter, if you wanna call it that. 9:47 And it also coincided with a lot of folks in the community, some of whom I'm, you know, close with, um, kinda publicly either capitulating on runes or, or s- or saying, "I'm a little disillusioned with the ecosystem." 10:01 So, you know, if you're listening to this, you're not on runes or Bitcoin Twitter. Thanks for bearing with me. Kinda feels like I'm, you know, giving you, like, the go- the hot gossip of, of all the, the kids in town. 10:12 But this particular, uh, token was a very interesting moment because we saw a lot of name, uh, well-known people talking about it, generated a ton of chatter, and now, now it's down. So, um, it's very painful. 10:24 So, so simultaneously, a different self-proclaimed Bitcoin maximalist, Fred Krueger, you can see him on the p- on the website here, um, on deck screener. 10:36 Uh, he's a, you know, classic boomer, and, um, he wanted to make a point about how dumb shit coins are, so he launched a shit coin called Stupid on Solana. And, um, in classic internet fashion, 10:53 uh, the, the kids took it and ran with it, and it's, uh, done pretty well. Why is this significant? Again, why am I talking about this on a Bitcoin podcast? 11:03 Well, um, it's because this was really a interesting weekend for a huge crossover for a lot of large public Bitcoin figures to start talking and, um, either explicitly or implicitly start shilling pump dot fun tokens on Solana. 11:19 Now, we know that these things have existed for a long time. There's been this kind of like side meme coin economy that goes along with this broader meme coin thesis. You know, if you had... 11:28 I had Murad on the show last November, and, you know, I've talked a bit about it. But what's interesting is, like, this is kind of like... I- I don't wanna say, like, to-- it's not capitulation. It's more like, um, 11:40 there's... it's huge crossover among a handful of public, like, larger public figures in the Bitcoin space, um, 11:46 when, you know, previously we would see a lot of the, the, the, the famous people in Bitcoin, um, outright reject or refuse to even talk about these things. And now you have, like, direct participation. 11:59 Either it's ironic or it's, uh, to make a point-Or, uh, or it's just, uh, uh, reversal and endorsing of these things. So, uh, I personally think, uh, meme coin trading is, it's a fun little hobby. 12:16 It's fun to watch. I like to kinda try to analyze it. But, um, more interestingly, I just-- I'm just curious what's happening in the market. 12:23 And so right now, the narrative this past weekend has been, like, the flip, the flip to these meme coin and shitcoins on Solana. Um, so I don't wanna... That's, that's as much as I'm gonna dwell on that. 12:34 I don't wanna burden this particular stream with too much more news. 12:39 Um, to maybe tie it back to something I think is a little more interesting, a dashboard I've never shared, in fact, I don't actually see many people share this dashboard, is the Pizza Pets dashboard. If you remember 12:50 three weeks ago, Pizza Pets were, like, the thing everybody's talking about. I still feed my Pizza Pets every day. And, um, we can see out of the, um, 13:03 like 60-some odd, uh, Pizza Pets which were airdropped to various owners of, um, Pizza Ninjas and otherwise, um, of them, 75, 75% have now died. Um, 13:18 40-- That is 43,499 have died and 14,697 have-- are alive. Um, we can see, like, other stats like, uh, 2% of the-- all the pets are listed. We can see the floor price in USD at $109. 13:35 That's pretty good, honestly, for a JPEG. And some of these pets have become immortal, meaning that they won't die except under specific conditions. So, um, yeah, this is an interesting dashboard. 13:45 I think it's kinda cool and fun to see. Like, I, I try... O-one thing I try to do on this stream is, like, pull up a dashboard, look over it, um, uh, hopefully a dashboard that you haven't looked at or haven't heard of. 13:57 So this is the one I've picked this, this particular week. Um, I will go back to-- I hope to go back to, like, normal type metrics, uh, next Monday. So make sure you stay tuned. 14:09 And, um, yeah, otherwise, stay safe out there, everybody. Um, you know, at some point you do have to wonder, like, 14:16 uh, you do have to self-reflect and say, um, "I know these JPEGs are really fun and the rooms are fun, but, uh, you know, you should be h- you should be DCA-ing Bitcoin this whole time." This is tried and true. 14:27 You cannot go wrong with this. So much love out there. 14:31 Stay safe, and I'll see you all- [upbeat music]
