Guest
Ryan Selkis
Episode 59: Scale Like Crazy
- Strategy completed a $1.5 billion repurchase of 2029 convertible notes at an 8% discount, reducing its debt cliff maturity and lowering the Bitcoin price floor (from $9,500 to $7,500) at which liabilities would exceed assets. - Strive acquired 1,109 Bitcoin in one week for $85.4 million, bringing total holdings to 16,500 Bitcoin (~$1.2 billion), making it the seventh-largest public Bitcoin holder. Company maintains 45% amplification with zero debt. - Strive will launch daily dividends on June 16th, replacing monthly payments. This marks the first implementation of business-day dividend payments in the sector and is expected to reduce volatility and unlock new DeFi use cases. - SEDA (Strive's preferred equity product) achieved a 3.74 Sharpe ratio over 30 days and traded 30% of STRC's volume despite holding 1/50th the Bitcoin, signaling strong demand for yield-focused instruments. - New Federal Reserve Chair Warsh took office and faces an impossible balancing act: raising rates risks debt refinancing crisis; cutting rates risks inflation; holding flat maintains status quo but doesn't address structural debt problems. - Ecosystem cooperation: hosts emphasize Strategy and Strive are complementary rather than competitive; multiple issuers of digital credit products strengthen the entire market and enable wider capital flows into Bitcoin.
#1035 - Ryan Selkis On The State Of Crypto After The Market Crash
- Grayscale's GBTC conversion attempt and SEC denial: The product trades at a 30% discount to spot Bitcoin with no redemption mechanism, creating $6 billion in investor losses and fueling contagion (Three Arrows Capital, BlockFi losses). - Centralized finance failures versus decentralized protocols: On-chain lending platforms functioned properly during liquidations; centralized lenders (Celsius, Voyager) froze withdrawals due to insolvency, revealing poor risk management and fraud. - Bitcoin maximalism as counterproductive: Selkis argues maximalism is "brain cancer"—a closed-minded stance that ignores legitimate innovations in zero-knowledge proofs, DeFi, and other layer-one blockchains. - Lightning Network and layer-two scaling: Development on Ethereum and emerging layer-ones outpaces Bitcoin layer-two adoption; the talent and capital deployment favors more complete ecosystems despite Bitcoin's security advantages. - Regulatory framework needed for crypto institutions: Industry consensus supports regulating centralized entities like exchanges and lenders as banks, while protecting decentralized peer-to-peer protocols and open-source code. - Crypto's political landscape and midterm elections: Initial optimism for divided government faded due to Luna collapse, Three Arrows contagion, and social issues dominating the agenda; Supreme Court may become battleground for First and Fourth Amendment crypto rights.
#738 The 2022 Crypto Thesis Report w/ Ryan Selkis
- Institutional trust has collapsed across government, media, and traditional finance, creating conditions where decentralized, math-based systems powered by crypto offer a compelling alternative for users dissatisfied with legacy institutions. - Crypto and Web3 are inevitable because they deliver structurally superior returns (5–20% in DeFi versus 0.5% in traditional banking) and user-owned economies that reward creators with 80–90% revenue splits instead of platform take-rates of 50–100%. - Regulatory arbitrage and outdated securities laws (based on 1933 and 1946 frameworks) create dysfunction where tokens designed to be utilities become trapped as unregistered securities, breaking protocol functionality and forcing teams to either dissolve entirely or operate overseas. - Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) lack clear legal definition in the U.S., but precedent exists: LLCs took a decade to gain national recognition after Wyoming adoption, and similar state-level DAO structures are emerging in Wyoming and Texas. - Venture capital's role is shifting from simply writing checks to providing community distribution, business development connectivity, and ecosystem integration—critical advantages in a marketplace where 500+ protocols exceed $100 million valuation. - Crypto cycles are compressing and decoupling thematically: Bitcoin, smart contract platforms (Ethereum, Solana), DeFi, and NFTs now rotate independently rather than moving in lockstep, reducing the severity of multi-year bear markets.
Ryan Selkis: Building Accountability in Crypto
- Messari's mission to establish **data transparency and disclosure standards** in crypto, addressing the lack of standardized information about token supply, vesting, and treasury movements. - The concept of **token curator registries** using economic incentives (staked deposits) to enforce event-driven disclosures, creating reputational and financial pressure on projects to maintain transparency. - Bitcoin's fungibility problem: absence of privacy features creates a two-tier system of "virgin" and "tainted" coins, potentially threatening equal treatment and censorship resistance over time. - The role of **influence in crypto markets**—Twitter verification, investor logos, and social reputation disproportionately move prices in an immature market lacking fundamental use cases and liquidity. - Crypto adoption remains speculative and narrative-driven; most payment tokens face collapse if they lack reservation demand, and institutional adoption may stall without clear regulatory pathways and market fundamentals. - Breaking into crypto professionally requires **consistent, high-quality public writing** (2+ years) rather than hype-chasing; reputation and network-building on Twitter are more valuable than credentials.
Tales from the Crypt #41: Ryan Selkis
- Ryan Selkis's entry into Bitcoin in 2013 and the role of Mt. Gox crisis reporting in establishing his credibility as an early industry analyst. - His career trajectory from writing pseudonymously as "two-bit-idiot" through DCG and CoinDesk (where he 10X'd revenue and scaled Consensus from 400 to 2,800+ attendees) to founding Messari as a data and research platform. - Messari's three-pillar approach: curated content/research, quantitative on-chain data, and token issuer disclosures to establish transparency standards without top-down regulatory mandates. - Token Curated Registries (TCRs) as a market-based solution to bootstrap credible credentials for token projects, addressing the coordination problem created by fragmented global regulation. - His bullish but measured long-term outlook on crypto; skepticism about most utility tokens due to poor UX; holdings concentrated in Bitcoin, Ether, and a small basket of protocol tokens (0x, Filecoin, Decentraland). - The importance of diverse information sources and resistance to personality-driven narratives in a still-immature industry.