The Bull Case For Hyperliquid | Ryan Watkins

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:00)
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All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. I'm very excited about this one. We've got Ryan Watkins, co-founder of Syncracy on the pod. Long, short, I think mostly long, actually. Long, biased, I think is what the professionals would call it. Liquid fund and crypto. So, Ryan, welcome in.

**Ryan Watkins** (0:40)
Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:41)
Long, biased hedge fund?

**Ryan Watkins** (0:42)
Long, biased hedge fund.

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:44)
Yeah. Only crypto assets?

**Ryan Watkins** (0:45)
Only crypto.

**Jason Yanowitz** (0:46)
All right. All right. Well, I want to talk about a bunch of stuff. I mean, the biggest trade that I've seen you guys be public about is hyperliquid. And when I think about people who have put on the hyperliquid trade in size and done quite well, you guys are top of mind for that. But maybe before getting into the hyperliquid trade, we could talk about just this market environment in general. I think you're one of the first, one of the only people I've seen on Twitter who is positive and saying that we're entering a healthy market environment right now. Maybe you could just expand on what that means to you.
Yeah.

**Ryan Watkins** (1:20)
I think when I say healthy, I mean that there's opportunities that are available, but it's not necessarily rising tide lifts all boats. And I remember heading into this year, one of the biggest, almost like cognitive dissonance that I had was that I'm bullish, but at the same time, I'm so cynical about all these assets in the asset class, and all the behavior that we've seen over the past year, two years, even past four years since the 2021 peak. And I think when you zoom out, one helpful lens that I think we've kind of developed, and I think it's also helpful just to even just personally invest in many different asset classes to help you get to this conclusion, is if you actually have the kind of global capital allocator hat on, and you're thinking about, and you don't have a mandate to invest in crypto, what within crypto would you actually buy? And I think heading into this year, the answer was almost nothing.
Like almost nothing. You could buy AI equities, and go into private cramming. There's so many things you can do.

**Jason Yanowitz** (2:22)
If you were a global capital allocator who could buy anything in the world, would you actually buy anything in crypto? And you're saying maybe there's one or two things.

**Ryan Watkins** (2:30)
There was like a handful, there was like a handful. And it was, I think it was just being brutally honest with ourselves about, like, what is the actual state of the industry, or the state of like the token market? And I think when we put on that hat, we're like, all right, well, there's only so many things. Hyperliquid was one of them, as you mentioned before.
And what is that reason? Well, it's like, if the bar is, I can invest in, let's just say, AI equities, because that's like the hottest thing that everyone will talk about. Well, then you need to actually offer something in token markets that's interesting to the person that can just go invest in, like Micron, for example, or Sandisk or SK Hynex. And I think for that, you need a story of real fundamental acceleration and disruption. And there's just not many things that do that. There's so many things, I think, in crypto that are interesting to us, but they're like hairy. It's like they have token unlocks, or yeah, maybe it's like interesting if you're a venture capitalist and you're thinking 15 years out, but what is essentially the urgency to get along?
And I think that was like one of the biggest challenges that I saw on the market, while at the same time being so bullish on like a handful of products that we built, like perpetual swaps and prediction markets and stable coins and digital gold. And the fact that this year, where you're going to get like landmark legislation, hopefully at the Clarity Act, we're at that point heading into this year, six months after Genius, and starting to see like the stable coins stuff like different be implemented at a lot of these enterprise institutions. But again, there wasn't that many ways to play these themes, save for just a handful.