Haseeb Qureshi: The Meteoric Rise of Perps (And The Next Massive Move)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, guys, we're back with Haseeb in the Tokenization Tower. Haseeb, just a normal day, Nasdaq down 4%, SB down 2%, Bitcoin is under 60k, sitting at 59.2%.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:12)
So chill.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
Everyone's favorite tokens, Hyperliquid and Zcash are crushed, and the relative shrink trade got hit by a truck. And that always happens.

**Haseeb Qureshi** (0:24)
Yeah, I mean, look, markets are hurting, markets are hurting, but look, if you've been in crypto for a while, you've had your share of days like this. So I'm I'm I'm chilling. I think the Zcash one is the most idiosyncratic. Of course, it's about this bug, which I'm sure you guys have probably talked about given that you had Mr. Mert on.
But I was I was just chatting with some people online and realizing, like, man, people do not understand what happened. And so I wrote a post this morning trying to at least explain a little bit because people think there's some kind of like, oh, they were not. We're never going to know the supply of Zcash ever again. Maybe there'll be extra Zcash floating around.
And that's that's just not what happened. That's not what the bug means. So I did a little bit of educating this morning, which I think was was helpful to people. But the reality is that macro right now is primarily driving this downturn because, you know, with the jobs report being as strong as it is, it's just like, OK, hire for longer. Yeah. And it looks like now the markets are projecting that there may even be rate hikes coming this year. And if there are rate hikes this year, every risk asset is going to get crushed. That's just how it works. So crypto is no exception to that. And Bitcoin is still a risk asset at the end of the day. So that's why we're seeing what we're seeing. But, you know, I think it doesn't really change any fundamentals for anything.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:39)
Yeah. You know, that's an interesting point because it feels like the performance of equities and other kind of AI stocks have been dislocated from reality a little bit in terms of like the war or the rates or the liquidity environment. And, you know, Chris Berniski, he tweeted this, Bitcoin is the most honest macro asset. I think it's trying to tell us something. You know, I don't know, it was a couple of weeks ago. Like, what do you think about the honesty of Bitcoin as a macro asset?
How do you think about like stocks and equities just being kind of like pumped up by Trump or by whatever it is? Whereas Bitcoin being a more telltale signal of the reality of the situation. Do you agree?
Do you disagree?

**Haseeb Qureshi** (2:21)
I totally disagree with this. This is horseshit. I mean, it is not the case that the economy has deteriorated by 50% in the last six months. Like, that's just not a correct reading of reality. Very clearly, Bitcoin was drawing down well before the war in Iran began. So you can't really pin Bitcoin in the straight of Hormuz. Most of the downturn happened well before that. So, and when the Iran conflict started, Bitcoin was actually doing okay for a little bit. And actually it kind of started to recover during the Iran conflict. So that just cannot explain what's happening with Bitcoin. The extent to which Bitcoin is honest, it's like, I mean, okay, yes, obviously, Trump wants the stock market to go up, but we don't live in an essentially planned economy. Trump cannot make the market go up. If the market wants to go down, it's going to go down. Now, if you're talking about Treasury going out and buying bonds, or quantitative easing, or the Fed going in and doing something, that's a different story. None of those things have happened. There is no Trump price stabilizer, except for his change in underlying policy.
That's why I don't really think this is true. It's pretty obvious what's happening, which is that retail is not here. Retail left and it's just us in the room.
We're stabbing each other as we go and being like, oh, my coin better than your coin.
That's the relative strength trade.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:39)
That's what's been happening. It's been perps or the revenue trade, like, oh, my protocol makes money. We have buyback, so we're going to survive the bear. I'm a privacy protocol, so I'm important. I have something to do with AI, and there's important things happening there. I know you're a big lighter bull, and lighter was just doing quite well for the last couple of weeks. And it's buybacks significantly outpace hyperliquids. Your partner, Tom Schmidt, dunked on me today on Twitter, the screenshot of the hyperliquid, all time high revenue day, or sorry, all time in the last quarter, it was about four and a half million. And then he put a chart of buybacks and how lighter is just significantly higher in terms of its buybacks per, based on the total market cap.