The Six Tokens To Own This Cycle | Yan Liberman

Jason Yanowitz (0:00)

Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products.

All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. We got Santi, we got myself, and we got a good friend, Yan Liberman, who's one of the co-founders of Delphi Digital, kind of grew up in the industry alongside Delphi. I remember the day you guys launched Yan. And Yan also is the managing partner of the venture book at Delphi. So Yan, welcome to Strapman.

Yan Liberman (0:25)

Thank you for having me, excited to be here.

Jason Yanowitz (0:28)

How's life?

Yan Liberman (0:29)

Good, good. Can't complain. Markets are better and Pump kind of solves everything, doesn't it?

Jason Yanowitz (0:34)

Yeah, Pump does solve everything. Okay, let's why don't we talk markets? I'd love to start broad high level, get your view of, I think you had some of the biggest wins that I have seen in last cycles.

And I would like to hear how you're thinking about this cycle and what your, yeah, actually, I'd love to spend time in this episode talking about your actual portfolio and the tokens that you hold. But before we do that, let's just talk like, yeah, how are you viewing this market? You've had a couple of weeks of, I don't know, number go up. So I'm curious how you're thinking about the market today and how you're allocated.

Yan Liberman (1:04)

Yeah, no, I'm pretty long. I haven't really been taking profit on any of the positions yet. Just holding steady. It feels like there's still legs. I think the market got a bit caught off sides on the best news that there are going to be basically some form of QE through long end of the bond curve control. And that was a catalyst in a time where everyone agreed that the markets were kind of bottomy, where nothing was really happening and Bitcoin was just chilling. And so if you had one light to kind of ignite the fuse and you had this big short squeeze. And so I think after that, everyone was kind of wondering, does this continue to have legs? What happens from here?

I think it's great that Saylor hasn't really been buying, right? That's usually been a bear signal. He's been kind of cash maxing and paying off some preferreds. And then you're kind of starting to see STRC go to 100 But I think that repag is going to be really tough with the derivatives market that exists on that. It's just like, you know, there's infinite selling that can basically happen.

And because your downside is you're capped at 100 So I don't know if he'll come back into the market anytime soon. But I think that's honestly been pretty favorable for it. Overall, you haven't really seen leverage build up too much. So it seems pretty measured, you know, these kind of slow grinds higher. And then we pause Ultron. I think if you really want to see this continue, it kind of has to be in this order where it doesn't all happen very quickly. I personally have a hard time seeing new all time highs anytime soon without some material new form of QE.

I think sailor was the one that took us to those highs. And that took quite a bit of capital. The counter is that you did have a lot of old holders sell out. And so it kind of went into much stronger hands in the form of sailor. So you can argue that that's constructive towards future all time highs. But I think it's going to take quite a bit of time because you need a lot of money to get there. And there's going to be skeptics along the way. And so you don't really have this obvious buyer, which we historically had in these markets.

So in the meantime, I do think the alt market isn't as deep as it used to be. And that's constructive in an environment where there's just not that much cash sloshing around in this market. So it's easier for people to coalesce around a handful of assets. And that makes it so you don't necessarily need a whole new collection of buyers to come in, and a lot of new capital. I think there's a decent amount of sideline capital that can move out of assets that are less attractive and it becomes a bit of a stock picker's market, so to say. And I think it's been pretty evident with just the amount of outperformance you've seen in a handful of names while a bunch of others haven't really done as well.

Jason Yanowitz (3:52)

Yeah. Is that a good or a bad thing though? Because I feel like, let's say there's 15 investible coins right now. Like any liquid fund that comes on Empire names the same five coins over and over and over again. Like it's, I mean, you know, I mean, you know, it's hyper liquid. It's like some of the things, it's a lot of the things that generate revenue. There's not many of them right now. So it's like, let's call it 10 to 15 total. The counter, so the good thing about that is like, yeah, maybe when fresh capital comes in, like there's only 15 things to buy. The other side of that, though, is all the crypto funds are already allocated to these 15 tokens.