The Next Bull Market is Here, and Obvious | Spencer and Aleks, Blockchain Capital

David Hoffman (0:03)

Bankless Nation, we got Blockchain Capital on the podcast today. We got Spencer and Aleks, two GPs over at Blockchain Capital. Spencer, Aleks, welcome to the show.

Aleks Larsen (0:11)

Fired up. Thanks for having us, David.

David Hoffman (0:14)

Spencer, you and I have interacted in crypto as long as I can remember. Have we ever had you on the podcast before?

Spencer Bogart (0:20)

I think a couple of years ago. Yeah. I think it's been a while though. But yes, as long as I can remember too.

David Hoffman (0:24)

I think it's been more than a few years.

Spencer Bogart (0:25)

I was going to say in a way, I feel like we've grown up together in the industry. Especially for me following along with the show.

David Hoffman (0:32)

My first memory of interaction with you is talking about MKR value capture back in 2019, 2018 or something. Because BCAP was considering buying MKR. I think that was our first interaction before.

Spencer Bogart (0:46)

Wow. That's actually very funny. Alex was actually very involved behind the scenes on that discussion too. I remember that one well. I was going back and forth with Alex Evans, who was that placeholder at the time, now over at Bainport.

And I saw him about a year ago and he still loves that MKR. And I get it.

David Hoffman (1:04)

I still love MKR and I treated this out not terribly long ago, but even the most modern projects, so Hyperliquid, Lighter, Venice, are all doing the buy and burn model. And MKR was the first one to pioneer that. And there's been so much gnashing of teeth about the inefficiency of the buy and burn model.

But it's undefeated, dude. Here we are in 2026 and the best projects are still doing the buy and burn model. It's super.

Spencer Bogart (1:32)

100% works. And it's funny because back in the day, I was overly critical a bit of at the end of the tunnel, you can do a buy back, a buy and burn, right? At the end of the day, people need to think about cash flows.

And so the only thing I struggled with was at the end of the day, there needs to be when there's one share left, you need to have some cash flow to direct to it, right? Otherwise, you're buying back and you can never really build a model around what the realistic value is. All of that was overthinking it, buy and burn works well.

I understand the pushback from people of why it could be capital inefficient to do so.

But I think it's the most logical model today because token holders, unless we get Clarity Act passed, the rights of token holders are not very clear, right? So in theory, it would be better if I was a token holder, you're a startup, I want you to continue reinvesting those cash flows into identifying more growth opportunities. But today, two things have happened. One, not very many protocols have demonstrated an ability to find an adjacent opportunity to expand into and then actually been effective in doing it. So a lot of token holders are saying, wait a minute, when you take the cash flows and go and pursue that path, it doesn't lead to anything, at least not anything good for me. For me as a token holder, yeah. Yes, exactly. And so they'd say, listen, I'd prefer that you just, you stake a flag in the sand and you say that this is what we're going to do forever. We're going to buy back and burn. And that at least provides some level of certainty, right? If the markets hate uncertainty, that's a token network providing some degree of certainty for it. I don't mean to launch straight into some of the topics, but you happen to open it up with something that's super interesting to me.

David Hoffman (3:05)

I also think this is super interesting. I wonder to what degree does the need to buy back the token on day one, which again, inefficient, not what startups do, poor use of capital to do buybacks on day one. But part of that has to be downstream of the fact that tokens in crypto have been so dog shit, that quality tokens need to put their money where their mouth is and show the market that they're serious.

And the best way to do that is buy and burn. Maybe in a different equilibrium, when a higher percentage of our tokens are quality, can we start to trust as the investing community that just because they're not buying back their token today doesn't mean that the cash flows that they're making aren't actually going to the enterprise value. So maybe it's a little bit of just like we need to kind of grow up and we need clarity to allow us to do these sorts of things. And then maybe the investor base can have more confidence and trust in these crypto assets. But it's been a bit of a lemon market. And so the people that are serious about their token have to buy back and burn their token just to show that they're better than the rest.