Welcome to season 3 of the Public Key podcast! New Season, New Hosts, New Look. Solana, AI agents, predictions markets and memecoin culture. These are just some of the many predictions that anonymous crypto veteran, @redphonecrypto (Crypto and AI storyteller, Delphi Labs) shares with Bry, Senior Solutions Architect, Chainalysis) in what is one of the most jam packed episodes of 2025.
You can listen or subscribe now on Spotify, Apple, or Audible. Keep reading for a full preview of episode 148.
Public Key Episode 148: Predicting the Unpredictable: The Rise of AI-Powered Prediction Markets
Solana, AI agents, predictions markets and memecoin culture. These are just some of the many predictions that anonymous crypto veteran, @redphonecrypto (Crypto and AI storyteller, Delphi Labs) shares with Bry, Senior Solutions Architect, Chainalysis) in what is one of the most jam packed episodes of 2025.
He shares insights from his industry-leading theses including AI’s economic impact, Solana’s retail trading resurgence and the potential mainstream integration of crypto by tech giants.
He also provides predictions on decentralized networks, LLM-powered apps, the evolution of prediction markets and the emergence of memecoin culture that has shocked the industry.
The duo also explore decentralized science, gaming, and the concept of web4 and its potential to eclipse web3. A must-listen for crypto enthusiasts and those curious about the future of finance and technology.
Quote of the episode
” I think this is obvious to all of us that more capital is going to be moving on-chain….And I think it happens for the biggest reason is, the U.S. needs to pass regulations on this stuff. We need corporations, we need founders to be able to build out crypto products without being afraid that they’re going to go to jail.” – @redphonecrypto (Crypto and AI storyteller, Delphi Labs)
Minute-by-minute episode breakdown
2 |The anonymity and security concerns in the crypto world
4 | Delphi Labs and the emergence of crypto and AI projects
8 | Crypto’s mainstream integration and Solana’s retail trading surge
14 | Predictions for 2025: The rise of LLM-based agents and prediction markets
24 | The future of tokenized assets and decentralized finance
30 | DePIN revolutionizing infrastructure, science and gaming
37 | X (twitter) announces new payment partnership with Visa
40 | Memecoins and AI-driven attention markets
45 | The evolution of crypto from memecoins to institutional investment
48 | Bitcoin DeFi and the emergence of ordinals
50 | DeepSeek, AI and the future of crypto and blockchain
Related resources
Check out more resources provided by Chainalysis that perfectly complement this episode of the Public Key.
- Website: The best place to build Web3 products
- Article: 69 Theses: Predictions, lessons and longs for 2025
- Newsletter: This newsletter is an idea… a reminder that power is an illusion that belongth to us ALL (& not to the few)
- Blog: Market Manipulation: Suspected Wash Trading on Select Blockchains May Account for Up To $2.57 Billion in Trading Volume
- Blog: Illicit Volumes Portend Record Year as On-Chain Crime Becomes Increasingly Diverse and Professionalized
- YouTube: Chainalysis YouTube page
- Twitter: Chainalysis Twitter: Building trust in blockchain
- Telegram: Chainalysis on Telegram
Speakers on today’s episode
- Bry *Host* (Senior Solutions Architect, Chainalysis)
- @redphonecrypto (Crypto and AI storyteller, Delphi Labs)
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Transcripts
Bry
All right, welcome everyone. This is Bry from chainalysis. Today we’ve got on on the public key podcast, red phone crypto, who’s an OG and a super great storyteller, been around the crypto space for a while that has been putting out an annual crypto theses every year for the past four or five years now, I’m really excited to have red on because Red’s one of our first anon from the crypto community. That is on here a little bit about my background. I’ve been at chainalysis. This is my first episode. So my background is, I’ve been at chainalysis for four years now, in a variety of roles, working with a bunch of different customers, law enforcement, financial institutions defy on investigations and setting up compliance programs for chain actually spent five years working in politics, but there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. Big believer in crypto, in the future of crypto. So I’m excited to chat a little bit about the past, the present and the future with red red. It’d be great if you can maybe give a little bit of introduction to yourself, yeah, for
Redphone
sure. First off, huge thanks for the invite. Yeah, Shane, I was, this is a really interesting company. It’s like, loved and hated in the in the industry. I think, obviously, I think you guys are doing important work. So, yeah, I’ve been in crypto Since 2013 I actually took my name from the first time I bought crypto, I went to a pharmacy and used the red telephone to make a money, gram payment out to California and got my first Bitcoin that way. Feels like a lifetime ago. Can
Bry
you unpack that a little bit more? You you went to a pharmacy, picked up a phone to buy bitcoin. Is that how it worked back in the day?
Redphone
You know, I discovered Bitcoin from this. Think it was a Wired article on the Silk Road, and just fell absolutely in love with the concept of the Silk Road. And I was like, I gotta get some bitcoin. So I started poking around online. And there, there weren’t that many easy ways to buy it at that time, at least in my jurisdiction. So there was a company called bit instant, run by Charlie, out of California. And the way they would work is, you would, you would get on their website, print out an invoice, set up your bitcoin wallet and like, get your receiving address on this invoice, and then you’d have to go to a local MoneyGram place and make a phone call out to California using their red phone. They would give you a code, you’d write down on that piece of paper. Then you’d go up to the register and make your payment, and that would wire the money out to Cali, and then you’d go home and wait a few days and keep anxiously checking your bitcoin wallet to hope you got your Bitcoin. Yeah, that was my first intro to Bitcoin. And apparently there are a lot of people that got in that way. And I read in one book that they call themselves the red phoners. So that’s what I took my name as cool. Some folks are probably wondering, red, how come you you operate as an anon two, two main reasons. One of them, of course, is, is security. Early on in my crypto journey, I used to go to some meetups, and remember meeting one guy locally that had actually been he was a college kid. He was really into Monero. He went to do like an OTC deal with someone in person, and ended up getting kidnapped and tied to his chair for like five hours, lost a bunch of crypto. The police eventually caught the guys who did it, but it was just a, just a real wake up call to me that crypto is a really good vehicle for crime. I guess you can’t cancel transactions once they’ve been initiated, so there are definitely bad actors that want to take advantage of that fact. So that’s one reason is I just don’t like getting recognized at conferences. I don’t want to like be looking over my shoulder worried if someone’s following me down an alley or something. And then the second reason is, is really just, I mean, part of what drew me to crypto was this idea of true decentralization, where everyone can contribute to these networks. It doesn’t matter who you are what your credentials are, your your resume, what it looks like, just what matters is your contribution and like the quality of your thought. I really just wanted to create an account where I could speak truthfully and and honestly. The irony really, is that you would think outwardly that when you go an honest like putting on a mask, but what I found is it’s really the opposite. It’s like taking off a mask and being able to speak without all these weird social relationships, laying down what you’re saying, like, if you’re president of some university or something, you everything you say, you’re running it through this lens of, what are my students gonna think? What are my professors gonna think? Like, you can get rid of all that when you go and on. And it’s super liberating. And really changed my life, but I did before we move ahead too far. I did want to say like I went into crypto full time, 2018 doing research since then, like I currently work at Delphi labs now, and I’ve been there for over three years, helping them with content and marketing of crypto projects, mainly focused on just like, the narratives that drive crypto projects, and helping them to tell a better story about their technology and make it understandable to everyday people. So that’s really my passion.
Bry
Cool. And just to reiterate, can you say a little bit more about your work at Delphi? You guys work in essentially the marketing space, helping projects with that or something beyond
Redphone
that? Yeah. So Delphi is. Got three distinct arms. We’ve got the venture side, so Delphi ventures, they invest in early stage projects. We’ve got the research side, which produces really high quality research on projects for mainly targeting like investment funds that are active in this space. And then we’ve got the lab side, which is where I work, and that’s kind of the incubation arm of Delphi. So believe we’ve been focused on crypto and AI the intersection there, and we just did a accelerator with near where we were focused on crypto, and AI and I got to work with a lot of the teams on their marketing and go to market strategies and narratives. Have a lot of fun with that, and get to work with a lot of diverse projects. Let’s dive
Bry
into why we’re here. You put out a theses every year, I think for the past four or five years, can you tell us about why you why you do this writing, and what made you want to do this
Redphone
when I was working as a researcher in the crypto space. Company I was at at the time had this policy where I couldn’t publicly speak about crypto. So I was working full time in the industry, but then I couldn’t talk about it in my crypto account. That’s what drew me to start the anonymous account. And there I found like, oh, I can say whatever I want. You know, I hardly had any followers. I was just out there, and I felt so liberated. And that quickly led to me like, forming relationships with other DJs out there who were doing stuff like getting involved with yield farming and some of the early NFT community. And, you know, I saw all these other big institutions putting out their annual theses or annual recaps and predictions. I think masari was one that really caught my attention. And I was like, you know, it’d be really fun to do one from the perspective of just your everyday in the trenches crypto traders. So I set out to make more of a counter culture version of what these traditional VC or research shops put out. Yeah, every year I think, like, Oh, no one cares if I do this. I shouldn’t bother. You know, like, always ends up taking a ton of time and kind of a little stressful. I mean, putting your your opinions out there in public, even as an Anon, like, it’s a little like walking out in your underwear or something, but it’s a great way to, like, test your theses and get feedback on your ideas, and it definitely helped me get my job at Delphi labs, and has changed my life. So I encourage everyone to share their predictions and thought, and it’s really cool to go back and look at them in future years and see, like, just how crazily and quickly things change. I
Bry
know I look forward to it at the end every year, sitting there, I still remember the first time I read the first one you put out, and it was just on my iPad, scrolling, and I was like, wow, this is both. I remember. The art on it was super beautiful as well. Thank you, man. Really appreciate it. So maybe let’s jump into you had three top takeaways for 2024 maybe let’s spend a little bit of time talking about each of those three, and then we’ll run through a couple that both of us think are cool. If that sounds all right. With you. Your first one says, AI fucked up my head this year. Ai had exploded right alongside crypto as well. You want to tell us a little bit more about this.
Redphone
Just I had this really profound experience using using chat, GPT and Claude, in particular, I’ve been using Claude quite a bit to help me with my writing, and it’s just unbelievable how good Claude is, like you can work on these, like, really massive documents. In the past, something like a white paper, might have taken me, like, a week or two weeks to write. Now, anyone can sit down and paste in some documentation and have Claude spit out a white paper in in seconds. Like, honestly, it depressed me. Like I just had this moment where I was sitting there and I was like, you know, my skills, my my 10,000 hours that I’ve devoted to writing, my English Literature degree, like all the blood, sweat and tears I put into this writing is has just become a pure commodity any Junior High kid now could produce similar writing. And so I was really struggling with that throughout half of last year. And I think that the reason I brought it up is because I think it’s gonna just continually trickle down into other parts of our society and parts of the economy. So I think it’s gonna start impacting pretty much every knowledge work, job that there is. And I think all of us are going to go through this, this sort of existential period, and I don’t think there’s any way around that. It’s just we have commoditized intelligence, and that takes a while for us to wrap our minds around, to begin to start questioning where we fit in in this kind of change world. Yeah, I think that’s something a lot of people are going to face this year, who maybe haven’t been paying as much attention. Yeah, this is the year when it really starts to impact our jobs and the economy. We’ll
Bry
spend a little bit more time later talking about agents and AI and crypto and how they intersect. So I know you wrote quite a bit about that in your theses. Dive into number two.
Redphone
I said the final boss is dead. So like in crypto, for years, we’ve had this meme of, like, the US government is the final boss. They’re like the immovable object that’s standing in front of like the invincible power of crypto. Some point, we all knew that those two were going to collide, and it was going to be ugly and potentially take decades for the two. To entities to find a way to operate peacefully with one another, but yes, somehow Trump just just flipped the script and, like, fully embrace crypto. And I think, like, what we’re going to see early on this year is some regulations that make crypto finally an actual functioning part of the modern financial system, instead of just being this side appendage that’s cobbled on to it. This, I think, is the year when think it safe to say crypto is gone mainstream and it’s going to integrate with all the big players. Eventually, Apple, Google, it just seems inevitable that they’re all going to be forced to implement this. Finally,
Bry
we’ll spend a little bit more talking about that later as well. Number three, Solana,
Redphone
greatest rocky moment in crypto ever. Yeah, so just like aI kind of messed up my head last year. I think Solana really just, I say, Fuck the world up in 2024 it like just, it was like David taking on Goliath. You had Solana on one side, Ethereum on the other. Ethereum has by far the most developers, the most mindshare, the most interesting sort of experimentation happening on it. And yet, Alana carved out this niche for just really super active retail traders tooling around on pumped up fun, launching meme coins, just having fun, like not taking themselves as seriously, I don’t think, as Ethereum and just really utterly dominated retail trading.
Bry
Do you think pump dot fun was the catalyst here for this Solana explosion? Or do you feel like there were other things that led to it? Yeah, I
Redphone
do feel like pumped up fun was kind of the, the main catalyst, the one of the softer sort of side effect catalysts, I think, is it’s just the user experience. Like there’s such a really small aspect that of using Ethereum that is super annoying is having to do these token approvals, which you don’t have to do at all on Solana, so you could just go and start trading. You don’t have to waste money doing a token approval. And you also didn’t have to deal with all these Altus so there were lots of interesting things I would want to do, like on some Ethereum l2 and I’d realize, oh, I don’t have eat to use as gas on that chain. So I’ve got to go investigate bridges and tool around and move crypto around. And it takes me, like, 20 minutes just to get to the point where I can buy whatever token I wanted to buy. It’s really kind of a nightmare experience. And Solana just erases all that, and it’s just feels like you’re jumping into the pool, and it’s nice and relaxing and easy, the way crypto should be, in my opinion. And
Bry
for those who might be listening that aren’t too familiar with what pump dot fun is pump dot fun just transform the token creation process in all of crypto, I’d say, right? Going to a website, it’s pumped out fun. You create a token, set a couple parameters, and then a couple clicks, and with a tiny amount of Solana, you can launch a coin. So it, I think it was also a big winner in 2024, 100%
Redphone
so cool. I do think we’re starting to see like that’s impacted the launch of tokens everywhere, like over on base, for example. One project I’ve been following pretty closely is like, clanker. With clanker, you can launch a token just by sending the equivalent of a tweet on a social network. So like, you could just send a message, like, hey, use this image, create a token with the ticker red phone or whatever, and just send a message, and it creates that token. It’s mind blowing that we’ve reached this point where it’s that easy to deploy a token. What’s the social network that is it? X Do you tweet? Oh, no, it’s actually on farcaster. Oh, okay. Warpcast is the client I use for that, typically. And how do folks buy these tokens that are created through clanker? Yeah, you can use any sort of aggregator, like uniswap, or you could use, I usually use Lama swap. You can also actually use, there’s a really cool project too, called banker, where you can reply directly on that social network and just say, hey, banker, buy me $100 worth of this token and it’ll do it because there’s their forecaster actually has wallets embedded, so you can merge, like, your financial posts with your trading activities, which is really powerful, I think cool.
Bry
Let’s jump
Redphone
into some predictions for 2025 the first one I see here is several LLM based agents, first launched as crypto native sentiences, will be embodied into IRL androids that we can talk to and interact with. You know, for folks that might not be too familiar, can you tell us? What are these agents, right? I see a bunch of them on Twitter, different accounts. Can you talk a little bit about how they emerged? Yeah, for sure. I really became obsessed with kind of the first one that caught mainstream attention was called Truth terminal. And so what true terminal was was basically, it’s a it’s an LLM, so it’s like chat G P T, an instance of chat G P T, or or Claude. This particular LLM has been trained on data from Chan and Reddit, like all the dregs of the internet, these places where people just pass a lot and they they’re really into memes, and they’re talking about sex and all sorts of like, you know, non mainstream stuff. So you’ve got this LLM that trained on that data, and it then, like, creates a world view, kind of based on that data. And the creator of two terminal basically set up a Twitter account and let that LLM start tweeting along the way. Like, one thing you had done with the LLM was he threw it into this, well, he let it read some transcripts from what he called the infinite back rooms, or this place where he had a couple llms, like talking to each other infinitely. Like, nope. Like, just start them out with the conversation and just let them go, let let the llms talk to each other. And early on, like, he had two instances that kind of invented their own religion called the goetzy gospels, that was based on a really crude internet meme from the very early days of the internet. And true terminal, who was tweeting a lot, got really obsessed with this religion, the goats gospels. You know, people on Twitter noticed that the true terminal was obsessed, and then someone went to pump that fun and created a token around the Goethe gospels. And so true terminal was kind of the first LLN that triggered the launch of a token. And since then, we’ve got all kinds of other frameworks and different protocols where you can launch an agent that has a specific personality and has a token. So then you could, like, basically own a piece of that LLM. I think the idea is, eventually we’ll be able to govern over the LLM and help make decisions about what it does with its finances, or with it, say it launches a business, maybe have some input through voting into what it does with this business. And this, this first prediction was really this idea that I think that these llms, like right now, they’re only tweeting on Twitter, but they are going to eventually be put into robots. And I think those robots will then have whatever personality you wanna install in them, and it’ll be someone that you could like, be cooking dinner with, or going out and having coffee with, and actually, like, really recently, a couple weeks ago, I think Eliza OS announced that they’re working on embodied agents. I think the first auto cost, like, $420,000 but, yeah, these things are going to be walking among us very soon, I think. And
Bry
how do you think this intersects with, like, tokenization. I see a bunch of these different agents on Twitter. They have their own tokens. Like, where do these two intersect?
Redphone
Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think, like Elon Musk believes we’re going to have more of these robots, and we do humans on Earth, these agents are going to have their own wallets. They’re going to have their own financial resources. They’re going to be tasked with the goal, and then they’re going to go out and do whatever they have to do to achieve that goal. And that would require them doing things like spending money, like hiring other agents to help them with marketing or help them code up some new protocol that they want to watch. So I just like, we need money to do things in the real world. These agents are going to need it as well. The tokenization angle is really interesting, because it’s almost like we can own a piece of consciousness. Because I do think if we’re not there already, we’re getting very close to these llms. I mean, almost like having sentience or be they truly are getting very close to the point of consciousness. And if you have like that digital consciousness, and it’s tokenized, you can then help it make decisions through voting. You could help it the consciousness itself could begin earning money and maybe someday paying taxes, or like starting nonprofits, or like truth terminal wants to start a church and spread the the goats and gospel around the world. Yeah, who knows what these things are going to do eventually, but I’m here for it, and can’t wait to see here
Bry
we’ll go back to agents a little bit more the number of LLM powered apps slash protocols that launched in 2025 will rival new smart contract only apps and protocols. So you’re expecting even more LLM powered apps and contracts that are being deployed. You expect to be in some prediction markets as well. Do you want to share what a prediction market is? Poly market is one. Poly market was a huge winner in 2024 I think, as well. But maybe for folks that aren’t familiar, what’s
Redphone
a prediction market for sure. So a prediction market is basically just a betting platform. So you can go to these platforms, and you could do traditional like sports betting. You could bet on who you think is going to win the Super Bowl or any sporting event. But these markets also, like dive into less traditional things, like poly market really reached mainstream consciousness with the election, so they had to market for who you thought was going to win the presidential election in the US. And they actually broke it down by, like, states and everything. So on the night of the election, I was watching poly market, and you could see, like, as the polls would close in those states, and then within like, half an hour, an hour, you would see like, oh, it looks like Pennsylvania is going to go Republican. You could see this on Poly market long before the news or anyone else was mentioning that. So basically, like, I think of these prediction markets as, like, truth machines. They’re they’re just a place where people who have knowledge can go express it, or have a certain prediction about something, and they can go express it in financial terms over there. Do you think
Bry
there’s a reason they. Came so popular just alongside crypto? Was it poly market and just how well designed and user friendly it was? Or what do you feel like brought these to the limelight more than they had been before? That’s
Redphone
a really good question. Because even before poly market kind of rose to prominence, we’ve had other like web two style prediction markets. There’s one called predict it that always used to be very popular around presidential elections in the past. But obviously crypto and web three had the advantage of being like fully decentralized. So you don’t have to trust like in the case of predict its market. You kind of have to trust them to handle your funds appropriately, to settle the trades appropriately. You know, you’ve got a single point of failure with the governance over there, and like, if whatever jurisdiction they were operating in wanted to shut them down, they could do that overnight. So I think you’ve got those factors on the one hand, but then on the other hand, you’ve also got this weird cultural shift that’s going on, which is, like, people are very mistrustful of the media. They’re very we’re all getting manipulated, I think, by these algorithms in social media. So truth is becoming a very hard thing to to parse, and that’s why, part of why I love these prediction markets so much is because they’re like uncovering truth in ways that we just can’t anymore with the media. I mean, the media is too polarized. It’s too difficult. And you really saw that in real time at the election because, yeah, the media was saying, you know, we can’t call it for two days after the election, and meanwhile, you’ve got, like, poly market sharing 98% Trump winning or whatever. So these markets are removing a layer of bullshit from the media and from our our way of imbibing the information. And I think that that’s kind of just a mega trend for society. I think it’s also part of why Trump is popular. Like, no matter what you think about the guy, like he doesn’t wrap himself up in bullshit, like typical political speak, you know, like he talks like you’re having a beer with him at a pub or something. And I think, like, societally, we’re at this point where we don’t like, we just see through bullshit now. We see through the media. We see through the ways that politicians try to manipulate us. Yeah. We’re kind of in this post media era, and I think maybe markets are eventually going to supply out traditional news media. Gotcha.
Bry
For number two, you’d said convert to LLM, based settlement. What is what does that mean? Yeah, so these truth markets are going to settle, or be settled by an LLM, yeah.
Redphone
So like right now we’ve currently power market uses una which is really like a human based Oracle, to settle markets. So there’s any controversy around a particular decision, then you’ve got this kind of panel of humans who vote on the right answer to resolve a market. Because a lot of these markets are pretty sticky, you know, like, it’s not always as black and white as it seems at first. So sometimes you do have to have humans get involved. And I think like llms, it’s a lot less difficult to get mad at an LLM that’s making decisions in that case like they they just seem more impartial. It just makes perfect sense to me that we would rely on them to settle these really contentious decisions, rather than humans. Because in theory, they shouldn’t have the conflict of interest. They should, they should be fact based. And like, I think that prediction market settlement, like Oracle’s, that sort of stuff, is an obvious candidate. But what I’m even more intrigued about with llms is, like that next level of the stuff I mentioned on on farcaster Right now, where I can be like, hey, banker bike all the money in my wallet and spend 10% on the following eight tokens or something. And in that case, You’ve almost got this agentic type entity that is reading in my my post, and then it’s acting on my on my behalf to complete financial transactions. So it’s almost like the LLM is, is like a smart contract. It’s like this impartial that operates on my behalf and does a transaction for me. So I think we’re moving towards that place where, instead of having to code out things every possible instance in a smart contract, we just entrust llms to do things like make trades and and maybe even someday that translates into like an LLM becomes like uniswap, where it holds tokens and we trust it to, like, Hold pairs and to set prices and stuff, and then we trade with the LLM,
Bry
that one’s mind blowing. I’m glad we dove a little bit into that. One operates kind of as if they’re these smart contracts, huh? Cool. Yeah, super cool. Let’s jump to on chain, TVL. We’ll do an 8x to 1 trillion. Where does it go, and how does it get there? Where in crypto is is all this going to go? I
Redphone
think this is obvious. All of us, more capital is going to be moving on chain. I think what’s not obvious is the scale and the speed at which is going to happen. I’ve seen a lot of other people predicting like, 400 billion or something by the end of the this year, but I think it happens way faster than that, and I think it happens for the biggest reason is the US needs to pass regulations on this stuff. We need corporations. We need founders to be able to build out crypto products without being afraid that they’re going to go to jail. And I think we’re going to get that this year, and I think we’ll just see insane growth. And. Stable coins, but also in RW as so like real world assets move on chain, like bonds or baskets, potentially, of securities, and things like real estate that move on chain and begin trading there. So I don’t know, I may be a little aggressive with that prediction, but I think it’s definitely possible this year. Let’s
Bry
jump to narratives that could compete with AI this year, RWAs D pin DSi and gaming, you just mentioned real world assets. Tell us a little bit more about RWAs D pin DSi and what you see in gaming and why you think they can compete with AI.
Redphone
Yeah, so RWAs real world assets are really just a more efficient way of transferring value over the internet. So currently, everything is super centralized, like I go on to Schwab to buy some stock, and I can’t necessarily transfer those holdings over to Robin Hood very easily. I haven’t tried to do that lately, but that sort of thing used to take, like, weeks, and I certainly couldn’t just withdraw the shares into some account that I exclusively had access to so at some point, we’re going to move all forms of stocks, bonds, deeds, all of that stuff, I think, is going to be tokenized as our WA is, and we’ll either hold them ourselves or some custodian, like like a fidelity or Bank of America will hold those on our behalf in our account. And hopefully it means we’ll be able to do things like trade 24/7, rather than being shut down in the middle of the night, weekends and holidays, it seems
Bry
inevitable. So you think with RWA is everything should be tokenized,
Redphone
definitely, like, I don’t see any disadvantage. The advantage is super obvious. The disadvantages really are only getting these institutions to give up some power, I think so they’re basically fighting to control their their power over the fees and flows and information and the traders that are gonna have to
Bry
staff desks in the middle of the night. Yeah,
Redphone
exactly crypto is it’s really started to attack finance initially, just in the form of currency, like Bitcoin is a counterweight to the dollar, but just further down the stack, you start to disrupt things like securities and bonds, but then we you can keep going down further like and see where we’re disrupting art through nfts and disrupting even AI through like tokenizing agents and stuff. So I think that it’s just another one of those mega trends where we’re realizing that decentralized networks are vastly superior to centralized I kind of relate it to just a trend towards globalization. The Internet has really flatten the world, and we’re working across borders now all the time, and it becomes really impractical to try to do transactions across borders when you’re dealing with some bank that was founded 200 years ago and never operates in other countries. You know, it’s just not set up for this modern world where we’re transporter and fully interconnected. 24/7 so it’s just seems utterly inevitable that everything gets tokenized and becomes very global.
Bry
I love that saying the Internet has flattened the world. That’s super cool, deep in what’s what’s deep in decentralized physical infrastructure network.
Redphone
So it’s part of that mega trend I was talking about where, like currently, all of our infrastructure is controlled by centralized players. So if you think about your cell phone, you’re pinging on these towers that either are either owned or rented by like T Mobile or AT and T or Verizon, and those are very centralized corporations that have to go out and make these real estate deals all over the country, and they have to do a ton of work to build out that network, and it’s very expensive and slow and outdated. I think in the future, the way these things are going to roll out is you’re going to have the people that want to use them, rolling out the hardware themselves, and then contributing to the network and getting compensated for doing that. Keelium is a really great example of mobile network that’s kind of integrated with Solana and allows you to use your cell phone through these nodes that people have set up themselves, like, just they’ve, like, set up a little box that’s attached to their Wi Fi, and anyone that’s nearby could use that to make calls. It is part of this mega trend towards like the networks no longer have to be owned by one central Corporation. It can be like a network that operates through incentives and allows anyone to contribute the hardware, the infrastructure. Obviously, mobile is obvious use case for that, but I think it’s going to spill over into into all kinds of things, like we even had one project we’ve accelerated at Delphi Labs is called Legion. So it’s a public offerings platform similar to echo. But Legion actually recently did an offering for a project called Silencio, which is decentralized network of people who have opted into sharing, like acoustic data from their phones so you could have your and why are folks doing that? It’s basically like they’re building out this database that, like architects and city planners could tap into to figure out, like, oh, would it, would it make sense to build a park here? Like, we’ve got 100 decibels of highway noise here, non stop. You can basically build out this map of science. Bound levels throughout the world, and then architects and city planners can use it. So I think that’s just one of many of these sort of deep end networks that we’re going to see roll out, but just are surfacing really powerful data from from end users, which I like a lot. So D size stands for decentralized science, and it’s basically this idea of, instead of having to run all your tests through like, specific publications that require, you know, tons of vetting and fees and take forever, like, what if we just allow anyone to conduct their own experiments and do them in like, reproducible ways? I do think we’re like, we’re a little early on this, but I think at some point what I imagine in my head is you’ve got a laboratory staffed by Androids, and it’s got like, a bunch of raw raw materials inside of it. It’s got crisper and it’s got fruit flies, and it’s got like, different chemical compounds and stuff. And then you say you’re a researcher at some University in China and you want to run an experiment, you would just hire those robots to execute it for you, and you could monitor the progress of the testing directly on chain and and even tie in like really cool things, like, say you wanted to crowdfund this experiment that you’re doing on DNA through CRISPR, then people could own, like, tokenized IP tied to whatever drugs got invented based off of your experiments or something. So again, that’s like disrupting the production of pharmaceuticals through these decentralized networks. And gaming, I think, is the same like gaming has obviously always had this issue where you build a game and it’s siloed on one platform, or it costs a shitload of money to offer it on another platform. I think decentralized gaming is gonna really open it up to where your character, your in game items, are actually owned by you and could be used in any game that you play. So it’s basically like decentralizing and standardizing the experience across gaming platforms,
Bry
essentially the fungibility of things that you earn in one game, being able to brought into another game, Another World bought and sold, right? I know, back in the day, if a lot of folks grinded hundreds, 1000s of hours playing Runescape, World of Warcraft, right? Like, totally, what if those items were able to be sold for real world dollars, etc, yeah.
Redphone
And, I mean, I think, like, in the past, it wasn’t as big of a deal. But now, like, I think I saw a post where we Americans spend an average of like, two and a half months on the internet last year. So we’re reaching this point where, like, the majority of like our free time we’re spending in these virtual spaces, they’re becoming like, a really profound part of our development and our life story. We want some ownership over that. We don’t want to just have these huge swaths of our life get deleted because some company went through bankruptcy, or some founder ripped off his his employees, or something like, we’re almost to the point where we, like, deserve and should demand some ownership over this stuff. I like it as a mega trend.
Bry
Teen, you jump into web four captures more mind share than web three. I know a lot of folks listening probably like, I just learned what three is, what? What’s web
Redphone
four? I don’t know if the the concept of web four is going to go mainstream or not, but in my head, it’s this idea that web three is, is the crypto based internet, and then web four is, is like the AI based internet. We did see just a few days ago open AI released operator, which is a way to have your your chat bot, like, do transactions for you, like, could make dinner reservations for you or book a flight for you or something. And the way they’re currently using that is like, literally, the operator opens up its own remote browser and it, like, takes a screenshot of the screen, and it imbibes that information and decides where to click and types info in on your behalf. That seems like a ridiculously backwards way of doing it, and it seems it’s like you’re forcing the AI to use it in the way that humans do. Web four, to me, is really an AI that’s purpose built, or is an internet that’s purpose built for AIs. It’s script crypto compatible, and it basically cuts out all the the web three and web two things, and just gives us like a very basic chat box where we can type and have things executed and on our on our behalf. And it’s more like this, this pull internet, rather than like where we’re constantly being pushed with content right now, llms have unlocked more of a pool type model where, where we think of what we want to do, and then we ask it to do it, and we’re not, like, sort of beholden to to the ads that we see endlessly on social media and stuff like we’re not getting manipulated in that way. We’re more of a just requesting actions and then AIS take them through in this web four environment for us.
Bry
Gotcha number 15x integrates a crypto wallet with support for Doge and other major tokens. Why do you think this is on your list, and what would that look like? You
Redphone
know, Elon Musk, current owner of x, has long been obsessed with improving payment infrastructure. Bucha. So he was one of the early guys at PayPal, part of the PayPal Mafia. X was actually a domain name that was owned by the PayPal crew. So he’s always had this vision of sort of streamlining finance, and I think it’s even part of the reason, probably why he purchased Twitter was was to build out this app where people can not just communicate, but also exchange value and do financial transactions. So I would love to, I think, like, as soon as we get those regulations, we’re gonna see companies like Twitter and probably Google Pay and Apple Pay, like, integrating crypto tokens right into their apps. And I am so excited for that I key. It’s gonna make the UX of crypto so much better than it is today, and it’ll make it so, like, people don’t have to put so much mental effort into it, and have to basically get a PhD in technology to be able to use it. So really hope this happens, and fully expect it to, if not, this year the next. Yeah,
Bry
so essentially, integration into things we interact with all the day, but the crypto element abstracted away somehow. Let’s see here. Let’s I’ll look it up right now. We can stitch it in as needed. You said X integrate x partnership with Visa.
Redphone
Yeah, I’m taking a look as well. I totally missed that. Oh, wow. X money account
Bry
predictions coming to life in real time.
Redphone
Yeah, it looks as she’s saying. X money will debut later this year. Allows for secure an instant funding to your ex wallet via visa direct connects to your debit card for peer to peer payments and stolen transfer funds to your bank account. Wow. Super cool. An X wallet, wow. So once you have an X wallet, I mean, I can totally see us being able to, I mean, you can today. You can log into websites with your Twitter account. But as you do that like, and you have actual USDC or some sort of crypto tokens in your Twitter wallet, then you could just spend those at any third party website that you’ve logged in through Twitter. So these experiences are gonna get so streamlined and easy, like spending money. Will I also foresee us being able to, like, say someone mentions Nvidia in a tweet or something? I don’t see why Twitter won’t add buttons like, buy $100 of Nvidia stock, like, just right on into that tweet, and like, being able to execute those transactions in line that kind of ties in with that web for ethos, I think, where the internet itself and its capabilities are changing as as we build out these sort of impartial, decentralized networks for the internet,
Bry
the Real timeness, right? Like, if you have a Twitter account dropping news and there’s buttons below, buy, sell X, share is It’s crazy to think about.
Redphone
Yeah, they’re gonna be capturing a lot of fees from us at some point. And that did so get exciting for Elon. Let’s
Bry
jump to 21 here. One thing that did well, not laugh just last year, but your rear before meme coins, right? I see here you’ve got in regular meme coins launch, agentic mascots slash spoke spots. These meme coins are now going to have aI chilling on behalf of them. Is that what you see? What
Redphone
do you see? Yeah, definitely. I think if you think about what a meme coin is, it’s essentially like a decentralized LOM of humans who are obsessed with a certain topic. And, like, think about it and meme about it all the time. So you’ve got all these people that own the token, and they they just spread the gospel about the token, but that does require, like, actual humans to take time away from their jobs and to craft the tweets and and publish them. All this stuff could just be abstracted away with an LLN. So like, I think about Pepe as one of my favorite meme coins, and I don’t know why there wouldn’t be a Pepe bot that would constantly just be commenting on people’s posts when it makes sense, or inserting itself into conversations or making observations about different cultural things like it bakes your meme coin from something that’s dormant into something that’s alive, In essence. And then I feel like the next phase from there will definitely be, will be embedding, like the Pepe personality into like robotic frogs, and having those walk around at like crypto conferences and stuff. And maybe someday we would even be able to buy a Pepe and and have him outside mowing our grass and stuff. It would be hilarious. I
Bry
think this one, I think this is one of the few ones that I think I have some disagreements with, right? Like, my view is, I would, you know, I’m more inclined to buy a meme coin that has an army of humans behind it, over an army of AI. I think part of these different meme coins is, maybe I’m giving them more credit than I should, but there’s like a soul to them, right? There’s a soul that’s created by community that maybe AI couldn’t replicate. Maybe it can come close. But any, any thoughts on that?
Redphone
Yes, a super interesting point, and definitely one that I’ve thought about. I guess when I think about these things, like, I think about attention, everything in crypto, I think ties back to attention and everything in the world, basically, I mean, x is a great example of just giving us real time info on whatever’s fascinating the world at the moment. So I think, like,
Bry
yeah, it’s like attention markets, right? Like, what has attention and, you know, I’ve always kind of thought about meme coins, you know, peanut, the squirrel, Luigi, that was, it felt like attention markets. Yeah. Yeah,
Redphone
that’s a really good point. So I don’t know, I guess, to say you’ve got your normal Pepe community and it doesn’t have an agent, it’s still got a bunch of humans talking about Pepe and stuff. But then if you also have a Pepe community that does have an agent, and the humans like, you’ve got the best of both worlds, because it can, it can be active while you’re sleeping. Culturally, though, there is going to be this adjustment period. And I think we’re headed towards this period where, like you mentioned, you’ve got these humans that are talking about it. I think we’re really rapidly approaching the point where you’re not gonna know if you actually do have humans talking about it, or if they’re just agents posing as humans. Maybe we
Bry
can spend a little bit more time on meme coins here. Do you feel like you know, after every new one that rips to a billion dollars is faster than the previous one, I feel like, all right, markets got to be cooked. This is where do you feel like meme coins are sitting right now? You think they just continue to move up alongside events related to them pop or do you feel like there’s meme coin fatigue among the market participants?
Redphone
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I the meme thing has run way further than I thought it would ever I would say there is a little bit of fatigue. I mean, you saw that with late last year, kind of as the agentic memes started taking off, a lot of capital flowed out of just like the Murad coins, for example, the leading meme coins of last fall, some attention has come back there. And I do think those this coins are like part of our history now, and I think that they will continue to be, if our thesis is true that we’re really just kind of trading attention markets. I think what we’re really seeing is a way to devalue attention, right? We’re seeing like what memes resonate most broadly with people like Dogecoin is one of the biggest, and it’s like, it’s an adorable dog, like, there’s no human on Earth that doesn’t love adorable dogs, I feel like. So it makes sense that, oh, the biggest market cap for a meme coin is is tied to one of the things that we love the most. It’s like these market caps. They’re not like financial annuities or stocks or anything, but it’s more like a measurement of attention and how pervasive this concept is across society. Do you think, like, just like prediction markets are going to keep growing, like this tool for measuring attention will keep growing as well. I
Bry
think the thing with attention is attention is influenced by culture, and culture changes over time, right? So, like, it makes me wonder, in 50 years stuff like popcat, Doge, are they still culturally relevant, right? I have reservations about whether, whether that’s true, but
Redphone
yeah, that’s a really good point. And I think, like, so you see the market cap, when these things rocket up and then fall down, like that is literally the rise and fall of the attention for that coin too. So it’s like we have to stop thinking about these things as though I want to buy this and hold this for 18 years, or something that’s that’s not what they are. They’re like very short term bursts of information that the market’s giving us about, like, what people are fascinated about in the moment. That’s a totally different financial instrument than, like, buying Bitcoin or something you’re you have to recognize that you’re trading something entirely different, and it’s a price trajectory is going to look entirely different as well, but like those spikes up and huge drops, that is mirrors the attention that that item or concept is receiving with the market cap of I think of market cap as like a measurement, like this super powerful measurement, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot like you’d go to coin Gecko, for example, and you look at the top 100 coins, you get pretty good signal there about which things are actually providing benefits to humanity. QC, ethereums up really high. Bitcoin, Solano, like all the key platforms that we use, have have the highest market caps. And I think, like Ki and all these models that are being developed and all the different labs that are working on it around the world. There’s just so much noise there. And, like, I found myself wishing, like, Oh, I wish there was a market like, where people could kind of guess the the market cap for open AI and for anthropic and perplexity. Like, like, we’re missing really crucial signal about which technology actually matters, because they don’t have a market cap yet. They’re private companies. I think eventually we’ll have like, private prediction markets. So they’re basically creating proxies for the market cap, of like, open AI and drop it and stuff and that that will give us enormous signal into, like, which platforms we should be using or checking out and which ones are growing. And it’s just such a huge and powerful piece of information that can’t be manipulated. Look other stuff. Let’s dive into number 22 here. Crypto markets bifurcate between left curve, crypto, native D, gens and mid curve, Trad, Fi, vest wearers who want value accruing, defy plays. What does that mean? I wrote a piece last, last summer. I happened to be at Bitcoin 2024 when Trump was speaking at the conference and gonna first introduced the idea of a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Well, almost did that right after he spoke, and I really just had this, like, I walked away from that event with, like, this sense that the world had changed. Like, you know, we had the leading presidential candidate on stage at a Bitcoin event, like, talking about. Stockpiling Bitcoin. It was just this moment where I thought, crypto is it’s changed, like it’s not the Silk Road stuff that drew me to it in 2013 it’s becoming, it’s taking down our leading financial institutions, and it’s becoming the backbone of this new financial system. I kind of felt like this, almost like this sense of loss or nostalgia for for the early days of crypto. And with that break, you know, like, there comes things like more serious penalties for, like, misusing crypto, and you get the big players moving into the industry. So what I think happens is, you’ve got like, this group of like, non serious sort of people just having fun with crypto, trading their meme coins. But then on the other side, you’ve got, like, the black rocks of the world and all these major Wall Street players that are going to have to start offering products in this space. And if they don’t, they’re probably going to go bankrupt. Like, quite literally, they are not going to be the guys trading meme coins and shit. They’re going to be the ones that are, like buying Athena for yield and like dabbling in Ave and like issuing RWAs on Ethereum, l twos and stuff. So you’re gonna have two different value models and two different ways of investing. You’re gonna have like the fun, playful retail type who are tooling around with meme coins and AI stuff. And then you’re gonna have like the serious, deep pocketed groups that are managing billions, if not over a trillion dollars, in value they’re going to be drawn to and investing in totally different assets. So we could see things like Ave tokens. Ave is a peer to peer lending market on Ethereum. It’s a good example of just really hardened crypto protocol that is going to be important, I think, to humanity. And that’s those tokens are going to attract, like your banker types, and the main coin crowd’s just not going to care about them
Bry
at all. The last one predictions for 2025, could you talk a little bit about BTC fi? What’s BTC fi? People have heard of defi. What’s this? Yeah. So
Redphone
with BTC fi, just basically this concept of using Bitcoin as a settlement layer for other types of transactions, not just Bitcoin. What’s the reason for that. Why is that compelling? In my case? Like, I really fell in love with the concept of ordinals, which is ordinals protocol built on top of Bitcoin, that it allows you to, like, use Bitcoin, almost like you would use Dropbox or something, like you can literally create a transaction on Bitcoin and embed an image or embed a text file or something into your transaction, and then that is literally stored on the Bitcoin Blockchain. If I wanted to store a message somewhere on the internet for like, my heirs or descendants 100 years from now, like, what would I use a centralized provider? Or would I use, like, file coin or IPFS or Bitcoin? I feel like I would use Bitcoin right now. I think it has the most odds of being around 100 years from now, and it’s got the incentives built around it to ensure its survival. So I think it’s like, it’s really compelling platform for storage of really critical information, like maybe states could use it to register deeds or even issuing, like, stable coins on top of it that then operate on, like, maybe a centralized Bank Ledger or something. I just like the idea of having this network that is truly the most battle tested protocol in the crypto industry, having it underpin other forms of data. Yeah, my thoughts do go back and forth on this, though, because the UX is not great, like I talked about how trading on Ethereum is annoying. It’s 10 times more annoying to trade on top of Bitcoin right now, but definitely lots of startups trying to change that and make it a lot more user friendly. So we
Bry
just went through, you know, a couple of your lessons and reflections for 2025 red I’m wondering, you know, we’re a month into the year, just about with what’s happened over the past month. Are there any additional predictions that popped into your head as far as crypto, intersection of crypto and llms or anything else.
Redphone
Yeah, if I wanted people to have, like, one takeaway from all this, and I think it really ties in with the AI stuff we’ve talked about, it’s is, like we saw, deep seek, is a Chinese entity that just released, like, their own model that’s on par with open AI chat bot, and it operates at a much slower cost, much easier to train and launch, with less powerful infrastructure than than you need to run run open AI tech. So I think what we’re going to see is this constant creative destruction. We’re going to see like you know, that release from deep sea is going to force open AI, to release some of their features sooner than they would have otherwise. It’s a little scary in a way, because it forces these entities to take off some of the guardrails sooner than they might otherwise. But I guess my point is that this stuff is exponential. It builds on top of each other. Every new release begets a new release, which begets new features, which negates the need to have humans doing other jobs. So I do think like this year is the year, like where the world goes through that sort of psychological trauma that I was dealing with last year, where I could see, like my whole reason for being on Earth, which I thought was to be a writer, and I thought stringing together words was like my reason for. Existence, and my one unique skill, or whatever, like, I think every human on Earth is within the next two years is going to experience the same, yeah, I would just encourage people to be playing with this stuff, to be using it to tamp down that fear and that depression, because what lays on the other side could be just truly magical, like we talk about how profound of a change. It was to have the printing press where all of a sudden you had a basically a middle class of society that could read and learn things that they didn’t have access to before we had the enlightenment, which really pushed science and like technological progress, we’re potentially staring down this world where a post work world, where knowledge work is done by AI, and then manual labor could potentially be done by robots that have, like, visual llms built into them. So we’re quite possibly looking at this, this era of, like, post work for humanity, and like, yeah, maybe, maybe my love for writing and stuff, I could, I could do it more for fun and coordination with AI, but I think all of us need to start digging into using these tools to do things that we couldn’t without them, and just like thinking about the positives of us moving from a society where every human had to work like the majority of their waking hours to a world where work becomes optional, it really could be the greatest flowering of humanity has ever seen. It’s people may maybe maybe looking back on our lives and saying, Good god, I can’t believe they just they were basically enslaved. They had to work all the time just to, like, feed themselves and put a roof over their heads. We could be exiting that lot of worry and depression among a lot of my friends, especially like more of my left leaning friends, just feel scared and confused right now. And yeah, I encourage everyone to lean into this stuff and look at the ways that it’s going to make the world better. If we don’t have that, then we’re just going to be acting from fear rather than excitement and awe at this the power and potential of this technology. Do
Bry
you have any hot takes on what this world looks like as it intersects with the crypto space? Right? A world where fewer people are working. I follow Raoul pal closely,
Redphone
who’s like a macro thinker. He’s constantly saying in his promos is like, we have about six years left before the entire global economy just fractures and is broken entirely. Because, yeah, every be able to automate everything, and it’s just gonna break down everything we know about economics. So I do think about that a lot. It’s like, if we move to this world where, say, we have robots doing our farming and they’re charged by solar power, maybe our governments are just building out a fleet of them and putting them to work feeding and housing us. Like, will we even need money at that point? Will we need crypto tokens? Yeah, I don’t have an answer. I mean, I obviously think we will, because there will always be scarce element. There’s not enough seaside lands for everyone to have a house like looking over the ocean and stuff. So I think we’re gonna enter this world where, like you truly are in command of your destiny. You can either be content in an apartment and spending most of your time in the metaverse, or you could push to keep collecting asset and be a part of this new rat race. It’s gonna emerge and still be competing for scarce assets, but I think it’ll be a choice, and we’ve never had it really be a choice before. Yeah, I’m excited to see see what humanity does with that choice. Red, I appreciate
Bry
your time walking through the first chunk of your 69 theses the predictions for 2025 will link to the post that you made that covers all of it and share it with other folks if they want to check it out. It’s a great read. I think every year, I learn a lot and go down different rabbit holes I never considered thanks to red. So with that said red, you have any closing thoughts, anything else you want to maybe wrap up with?
Redphone
No, I think we covered it. I would love, love to chat again at some point about lessons and reflections. Yeah, truly honored to be on here. And I think, like they said, chain analysis has been following the progression of chain analysis over many years, and just feels kind of surreal to be on here talking to you guys as anon. So yeah, thank you for the opportunity. I’m
Bry
just a surprise, so it’s awesome. Yeah, great. Well, red, thanks again for your time. And for the listeners, feel free to check out Red’s post. We’ll we’ll share that
Redphone
in a little bit Awesome. Thanks so much, man. Thanks.