Full Transcript
Slava Rubin (00:00)
In this episode of Smart Humans, we talk with Kyle Samani, who's managing partner of MultiCoin Capital, as well as executive chairman of Forward Industries. He is well known as being one of the first investors into Solana, and the world of crypto has been his oyster for a very long time. He discusses why the Genius Act is such a big deal and how stable coins are gonna change our world. We cover everything from DATs to why you should be investing into crypto.
and how the world is changing into the internet capital of markets. He gives us all of this information as well as his picks for three years out.
Slava Rubin (01:01)
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Smart Humans. I am super excited for today's guest. We have one of the top tier managers in all of crypto with us. He's actually managing partner of MultiCoin Capital as well as chairman of Forward Industries, a new role that he'll be telling us about shortly. Kyle Samani, welcome to the show.
Kyle Samani (01:22)
Slava appreciate the opportunity to be here excited to jump in.
Slava Rubin (01:26)
Absolutely. We always start in the beginning. Take us back as far as you'd like. But how did you get into this world of alternative investments? Did it start in childhood with something, some of your first job? Was it after college? How did it all start as you were thinking, you know what, I really love this stuff.
Kyle Samani (01:41)
You know, I don't think about what I do as alternative investments. I think about what I do as mainstream investments, but I suppose I'm the weird one. Look, I grew up around computers, been programming since I was a little kid. Studied finance at NYU. Realized while I was at NYU that I did not want to work in finance. I always kind of identified more as a tech guy than as a finance guy. Did a tech startup after college, didn't work. Learned a lot about...
health, was in the healthcare space, learned a lot about healthcare, learned how terrible healthcare is, that I never want to touch it ever again. And then kind of discovered crypto in 2016. I obviously had heard of Bitcoin, know, you prior to that, but never cared for Bitcoin, still don't care for Bitcoin, actually. But I discovered Ethereum in March or so of 2016, and kind of fell down the rabbit hole from there. Made the decision to launch Multicoin in 2017.
But over that kind of one year period or so, kind of realized crypto was all I was thinking about. My basically whole net worth was Ethereum for some time there and started to realize I developed a full-time internet hobby. And at some point around May or so of 2017 decided, hey, maybe I can turn my internet hobby into a job.
Slava Rubin (02:50)
So were you actually working a quote unquote day job while you were doing your internet hobby of investing or that was your day job?
Kyle Samani (02:58)
No, I was was unemployed for 18 months after ⁓ stepping down from pristine, which was my last company, and kind of discovered crypto and fell down the rabbit hole during that period. Fortunately, I had the time to explore
Slava Rubin (03:09)
So before you went down the rabbit hole with crypto, were you doing similar with day trading or any other types of investing?
Kyle Samani (03:18)
No, I've never considered myself a trader. I'm a terrible trader. I like to think I'm good at identifying trends early, or I should say like waves early, and then buying, holding, and most importantly, not selling. I would posit that the third step is the hardest step. The not selling part is the hardest part.
Slava Rubin (03:35)
than not selling.
I will completely agree with you. One of the hardest things for smart people to do is to not do anything.
Kyle Samani (03:44)
Yes. We like to joke internally in Multicoin that the Multicoin special is doing that.
Slava Rubin (03:48)
I love it. mean, that's right out of my own playbook. But I really like something you said there, which was my entire net worth was Ethereum. This was what, like 2017 or something?
Kyle Samani (03:59)
Yeah, late 16, early 17. Yeah.
Slava Rubin (04:02)
So that's a great segue as to your net worth. So not needing to know the actual number, but typically when people think about investing their net worth, the traditional way of thinking about it is 60 % into public equities, 40 % into bonds, 0 % into anything else, which is considered alternative investments. Obviously crypto is in that as well as other asset classes. How do you invest your net worth using those same buckets? How much of it is into public markets? How much is into bonds?
and how much of it into what's called alternative investments. We'll dive in into that slice of alternative investments in just a second. But can you start with those three percentages of 100?
Kyle Samani (04:37)
On my balance sheet, I consider real estate zero because I only own what I want to live in and I'm not owning it with an intent of selling it or as an investment asset. So I mark it a zero on my for practical purposes. I own zero bonds and equities probably under 5 % of my net worth. And then yeah, the rest is crypto.
Slava Rubin (04:46)
Yep.
wow, that low.
And the rest is crypto. just for the sake of putting it out there, no private credit or art and collectibles, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. So, uh, really you're pretty much all crypto with 5%, uh, equities. Is that right?
Kyle Samani (05:13)
Yeah,
five is probably too high, but yeah.
Slava Rubin (05:15)
Amazing, amazing. So just to dive into that, if now we're 100 % in your alternatives, which is really pretty much 100 % crypto, how do you think about diversifying inside of crypto?
Kyle Samani (05:29)
⁓ I don't. Look, we have our theses within crypto that we believe in with a very high degree of conviction. And like we own those theses with size. Multi-coins hedge fund is called, well, it's now called Multi-coin Master Fund, but the name of it actually when we launched it was Multi-coin Concentrated Fund. We changed the name, we didn't change the strategy. And so I think that tells you what you need to know.
Slava Rubin (05:31)
for your net worth.
So I guess even within yourself though, if we were going to for the sake of conversation, let's consider Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana to be very like established and a bit more stable. And then there's something maybe market cap 580, right? Which is going to be much more volatile. Are you putting any of your net worth into that? Let's call it higher volatility, more crazy stuff.
and considering more of the blue chip assets as part of your stable portfolio or do not really.
Kyle Samani (06:22)
Yeah, mean, Solana.
Yeah, Solana is by far my largest holding. That's well known publicly. And then you have a meaningful percentage is in the weirder stuff. Probably in the like 10 to 20 % range or something like that is in the weirder stuff.
Slava Rubin (06:37)
Okay,
that's a great answer. Thank you. So.
Are you thinking it's going to stay this way in terms of how you're investing for the next decade or two? It's really about let's call it 80, 90 % crypto anchor positions, Solana and other maybe anchor positions, and then maybe 10 to 20 % kind of high vol crazy stuff all within crypto the whole time.
Kyle Samani (07:02)
you know, all my friends and family tell me I should diversify. I generally not listen to them. I don't think that's going to change.
Slava Rubin (07:09)
So probably pretty similar. Okay, we'll have to check in in the years to come So you have an incredible view on the market, right? You're getting to see responses from the actual crypto, you know prices every day every minute and you also get to see the trends from when you start getting into it in 2016 What would you say is today your point of view on the market on the economy on crypto? It's a very open-ended question that you could take wherever you'd like. So we'd love to hear Kyle's point of view
Kyle Samani (07:39)
Yeah, I'm not a macro guy, not a market timing guy. I am a thesis formation guy. So I'll comment on that. mean, look, crypto is today. Probably the best risk reward it's ever been. Because I think the risk side has come down precipitously. And asset prices have come up some but actually not that much. I mean, if you look at
if you just assume kind of November 5th or 6th of last year is when the risk changed, prices are up 20 % since then, 25, so not that much. The risk side has come down dramatically. Obviously the White House, the president has signed multiple pieces of legislation. Congress passed the Genius Act.
I think most people probably underappreciate the Genius Act. The Genius Act is almost certainly the most consequential piece of financial legislation since Dodd-Frank. Dodd-Frank is either 2009 or 2010, so about 15 or 16 years. And I suspect when we look back in 50 years that the Genius Act will have a far more prominent place in history books than Dodd-Frank.
Slava Rubin (08:50)
Sorry, for our listeners that might not know all the details, can you give us maybe the three major points as to why the genius act is so important?
Kyle Samani (08:56)
Yeah, so the genius act in one sentence, it legalizes stable coins, like that's really all that matters for your practical understanding. And so stable coins good, con companies can issue stable coins that they can distribute them, you can put them in software. Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, all around. That's all you need to understand. And, you know, the reason I think with that the genius act is so underappreciated is
You know, there are eight there's a hypothetical I propose to pose to people. There are 8 billion people on the planet Earth roughly. And my suspicion is that if you could go to each of those 8 billion people and ask them the following question privately, and they could answer the question without fear of political persecution in their local jurisdiction, I suspect almost all of them would say US dollars. And then the question is, if you could denominate your net worth and any asset, what asset would you choose? And it could be bars of gold, it could be Bitcoin.
It could be S&P 500. It could be Nvidia, it could be Apple, can be yen yuan, or whatever, like any index or asset out there. Commodity, equity, FX, whatever. My suspicion is probably 60 to 80 % of people in the world would say US dollars. And to the extent you agree with that statement, that's why the genius act is so important. Because the genius act now makes it possible
for every software company to embed stable coins natively. Apple and Google inevitably are going to embed stable coin wallets into iOS and Android. I don't know when, but like it's inevitable that they will. Maybe it's 26, maybe it's 27, maybe it's 28. You know, I don't know. Pretty unlikely in my view that it's further out than that. They'll obviously have native APIs in their respective operating systems. And then every application developer on the planet will...
be able to do these things. Obviously, some governments will push back and fight back and stuff. I'm not saying it's gonna be like clear, sailing, but this is gonna happen. so, when we look back in 50 years, the Genius Act, think, will be remembered as the thing that truly accelerated the adoption of crypto in a way that nothing else ever could have. So your original question was like,
you know, what were you excited about? What do you think about markets? And I think it's like the genius act passed. People don't appreciate the magnitude of it. And we also got SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said, he gave a speech titled project crypto on July 31. I encourage you to Google the speech and read the speech. It's five minute read. And in the speech, he said unequivocally, we are moving us securities markets on chain. Chairman of the SEC doesn't get any more clear than that.
Slava Rubin (11:27)
Right, pretty opposite of what Gensler was saying before.
Kyle Samani (11:28)
⁓
Yeah, obviously, again, Gensler was, you know, very combative with crypto industry. And so, you know, I just look at these two facts combined, and I'm just like, it just seems like the easiest trade in the world is like to go long crypto. If you have a long horizon.
Slava Rubin (11:45)
Sorry, let's double click on that just for a second. To go long crypto if you have a long horizon. So what would the listeners, would you advise, obviously it's not investment advice, this is just a conversation. What would be the ideas as to how they can go long crypto? What is the thing they could buy?
Kyle Samani (12:03)
Yeah, I mean, look, MultiCoin is, as a firm, most famous for its Solana investments. I led the seed round in Solana. I led the Series A in Solana. I led the round after that in Solana, back in 2018 and 2019. ⁓ I have been a very loud and vocal proponent of Solana for a very, very long time. That continues to be the case. I wrote a blog post earlier this year titled, The Solana Thesis, Internet Capital Markets. I encourage you to read it. So I think...
Slava Rubin (12:14)
It's a trend.
Kyle Samani (12:28)
you know, the way to go along the genius act, would, and, also project crypto, Solana is likely a substantial beneficiary of both of those things. Interestingly, neither of those two things are like, ⁓ that direct implications on Bitcoin other than just like generally pro crypto and like general awareness kind of a thing. And I do think there are like spillover effects. so I do think that that is non-zero in effect, even despite, you know, Bitcoin's market cap.
But like obviously the genius act and Project Crypto are like wildly pro Solana.
Slava Rubin (12:58)
and use the phrase a long time horizon. What are you considering a long time horizon, which is the appropriate time horizon to get the right risk reward from investing into crypto in this situation Solana.
Kyle Samani (13:10)
I mean, years, plural, you know, we'll see how fast things go. These things tend to go slower than you want. And then when they happen, they tend to go faster than you expect. I suspect that's likely to be the case here. Probably the moment again, when you look back in 20 years, the obvious moment is when iOS and Android embed stable coins natively in their operating systems.
Slava Rubin (13:33)
which you think
will happen by 2027.
Kyle Samani (13:36)
It seems likely to me that happens in the next three years. And once it does, that seems to me like the just the vertical line kind of moment.
Slava Rubin (13:46)
Just to double click on that, why do you believe that Android and Apple will have those stablecoin wallets embedded by 2027?
Kyle Samani (13:55)
because people want them and because they can make money from them and because Apple and Google have made it very clear they want to profit from financial services. Obviously there's Apple Wallet, there's Google Wallet, these are probably used by more than billion people, it may be two billion people already around the world. It's just very natural to embed stable coins in that existing product suite.
Slava Rubin (14:13)
Awesome. And then back to the macro for a second. I know you say you're not an expert, but we do like to ask all the folks on the show their opinions here. High level, like, do you think that 12 months from now, inflation is up, stable or down in the US?
Kyle Samani (14:31)
Probably up. I mean, it seems like the strategy of the administration is to inflate the debt away. So that's my guess.
Slava Rubin (14:37)
Unemployment, up, down and flat.
Kyle Samani (14:42)
probably down. Again, they're trying to lower interest rates, they're trying to pump the stock market, like these things are all good for, you know, capital markets and GDP, which leads to people getting employed.
Slava Rubin (14:54)
federal fund rate up, down, or flat 12 months from now, what do you think? How much?
Kyle Samani (14:57)
down.
⁓ I don't know. mean, I don't follow the whatever the cut forecast and stuff. It just seems to me going into midterms, the Trump administration is very clearly incentivized to make number go up and to make sure people have jobs. ⁓
Slava Rubin (15:04)
Okay.
that makes
a ton of sense and layering all that into then recession. Are we in a recession 12 months from now or not?
Kyle Samani (15:21)
I'll get unlikely. I'd say unlikely because I think the administration is doing what they can to mitigate that outcome. so I'd say, yeah, yeah, unlikely. I did see a thing, more recently and I haven't dug into this, but it struck me as correct, just based on my anecdotal observation that it seems like basically the economy is bifurcating and they're roughly the top 20 % and roughly the bottom 80%. I'm whether that's measured as a function of wealth or current income. I don't actually remember, but,
Slava Rubin (15:22)
which is obviously right before the election.
Kyle Samani (15:47)
Look, inflation and pumping the stock market are good for asset owners, which is, think, roughly the top 20 % of the country, if I recall correctly. that's, inflation is objectively bad for, you know, people who have a day job and live paycheck to paycheck. So it seems that that analysis roughly corresponds to like my anecdotal observation and just basic understanding of macro.
Slava Rubin (16:09)
And you think maybe more of that is happening 12 months from now. Meaning the top 20.
Kyle Samani (16:12)
I think
the process has already started and is very likely to continue.
Slava Rubin (16:17)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So out of all those points of view, then roll up into your perspective on the public markets as a price, you know, 12 months from now, is it up, down, flat? First, the public markets.
Kyle Samani (16:31)
US equities, I have no view. have absolutely no no alpha there. crypto, I think as the genius act, and these other things all start to roll out, I do think crypto ends up being that up over the next 12 months.
Slava Rubin (16:44)
any perspective on what kind of amount we're talking about.
Kyle Samani (16:47)
It's too hard to know.
Slava Rubin (16:50)
Okay. Sounds good. So there's so much to discuss and so many topics you could cover, whether it's the details of multi-coin, what you're interested in AI, what you're interested in crypto, you know, why you got into forward industries, why you're creating a DAT. Where would you like to cover first?
Kyle Samani (17:06)
⁓ I think it's going to like solana and forward.
Slava Rubin (17:08)
All right, let's do it. So obviously these digital asset treasuries has been somewhat of a trend. We already have them for Bitcoin and Ethereum and people were asking what's the right one to get into Solana. So you stepped up and you're chairman now for one of these. Can you tell us how this happened and what makes it interesting?
Kyle Samani (17:27)
Yeah. So it's funny. People have been asking me to do this for about a year now. and I said no many, many times. and then obviously I changed my mind and said, yes. there are two things that, that led me to that, this decision to change my mind. ⁓ the first is when I under looked more deeply into the capital structure of strategy from the, from sailors team. I realized he was issuing these preferred shares.
that have a coupon payment and the principles not do. that's a fundamentally risky, it's like, it's just levering up. You know, it's levering up to buy Bitcoin, but you don't have any cash flow to support the coupon payments. With Solana, you can stake and participate in DeFi and earn yield. And so it's actually like the the entire premise of the flywheel that Sailor pioneered is actually much more congruent.
for Solana than it is for Bitcoin. And then the second thing that I realized, and this really is the one that got me all the way there was when SEC Chairman Paul Atkins announced Project Crypto. Because then I thought to myself, well, what is it going to take for Project Crypto to come into reality? And that's going to require the DTCC and ISE and NASDAQ and the brokers and the banks and all these people to like
whatever, do stuff to make project crypto come to life. It may involve the issuers, you know, I don't know if public company, probably some public company boards will be more involved or not than others. And it occurred to me, well, you know, if if if I control a public company, then I can actually help accelerate project crypto. And that that to me is ultimately why I got out of bed to do this has obviously been a lot of work to get this thing off the ground.
But I believe it's important work because if Solana is going to win, which I think it will, and is going to support the trading of US public securities, then someone needs to be first, not only to have their stock tokenized on Solana, but also then to do all of the other things. And what is all of the other things? That means having RFQ engines where market makers are quoting. That means you're having limit order books on chain. That means having these assets and liquidity pools and used in borrow lend systems.
That also means shareholder governance on chain, the ability to do dividends on chain, the ability to buybacks on chain, the ability to do stock splits. Like there's all of these other matters of like having your stock, you know, your, your security, your equity be a fully functional asset in the context of a blockchain that are like all in principle, like easy things to understand, but in practice don't exist yet. And so
⁓ It's very reasonable to expect that if we do not raise our hand and do all of those things first, that it gives other companies reticence to do those things. Because most companies don't want to take risks, especially in areas that they don't fully understand. And so we kind of look at it as our mandate on behalf of the industry as a whole and specifically in support of Solana to raise our hand and do all of these things.
Slava Rubin (20:13)
So does that mean that the forward industries, the DAT is going to be the guinea pig using Solana technologies to try to accelerate all those functionalities? Amazing.
Kyle Samani (20:22)
Yes, explicitly.
We already announced a partnership with a company called SuperState a few weeks ago. We're tokenizing our equity using SuperState's technology on the Sloan blockchain that'll go live soon. Once that's live, we then seek to do these other functions in capital markets once our stock is on chain.
Slava Rubin (20:39)
I mean, sounds pretty genius actually. Not a surprise to you, but for a lot of our listeners, that's really compelling. Is anybody?
Kyle Samani (20:45)
We
are here to help, we help accelerate crypto adoption, both via capital allocation. We help startups succeed and get off the ground and such that, you know, do the work. And then in this case, the work is actually like a capital markets work. And so we are kind of naturally positioned to do that work. So here we are doing it.
Slava Rubin (21:04)
So a lot of the listeners are already invested into Solana and for the others, they know they could probably buy a SOL somewhere on one of their ⁓ different platforms that they can invest into. What's the ticker for this DAT?
Kyle Samani (21:16)
Yeah, so Forward Industries is a NASDAQ listed company today. The ticker is Ford F-O-R-D. Yes, like the car company. And it's available obviously on any US brokerage.
Slava Rubin (21:26)
Awesome. And did that just go live three weeks ago, you said?
Kyle Samani (21:28)
⁓ I believe the pipe transaction closed on September about a month ago, roughly was the announcement.
Slava Rubin (21:32)
Okay.
super interesting. What's your point of view on DATs in general? where are we at in that cycle? my opinion is, you know, there's definitely becoming maybe too many and we're probably going to see, some sort of pop there in the years to come, or if not even the quarters to come, there's definitely could be some winners. I think there'll be a limited amount of great winners and a lot of chasers that lose. So,
What's your perspective against that?
Kyle Samani (22:03)
Yeah, I generally agree. The market has no reason to have, you know, 10 Bitcoin DATs. That's obviously silly, especially the Bitcoin DATs as far as I can tell have no difference in them other than just like, ability to do financial engineering. And it's pretty clear that Saylor is in a league of his own. mean, he's so much larger than the all the other ones. It's not even close. ⁓ Yeah, yeah, I just scale. mean, people want liquidity, you know, if you want
Slava Rubin (22:21)
Meaning a league of his own, that's like a compliment you're saying in terms of scale and ability. Yeah. Yeah.
Kyle Samani (22:28)
If you believe in the thesis of using intelligent leverage to amplify Bitcoin holdings, strategy is objectively a better instrument, MSTR, than the other alternatives by a country mile. And then you look at the other ones in Ethereum and Solana and the other ones, those are actually the opportunities for those teams to do interesting things, which is what we're doing. I obviously talked about kind of the ethos side just a minute ago of what we're doing, but we believe we look at
Slava Rubin (22:36)
Yep.
Kyle Samani (22:52)
forward industries as a publicly traded permanent capital vehicle. And we have a balance sheet and we're to put that balance sheet to work to earn yield for our shareholders. We've already started that now. We're staking our balance sheet. We own 6.8 million and change. we're increasing that over time via staking, lending and other activities. We are going to be deploying our assets on chain into DeFi very soon so that we can earn even more yield for our shareholders.
⁓ so there's all these cool things we can do with the balance sheet, that like natively tap into Solana and kind of everything around Solana.
Slava Rubin (23:22)
Do you think that each of the top 50 tokens will have their own DAT and is that the right thing?
Kyle Samani (23:28)
No, think that's quite unlikely. I think really only a handful of these assets can really sustainably support a DAT. Yeah, I mean, look, it's like if the market cap of an asset is $5 billion and like the DAT is, if it has $500 million, means the DAT has 10 % of the token supply. That's just a lot.
Slava Rubin (23:39)
Does that mean because it doesn't have enough liquidity?
Kyle Samani (23:54)
And then even if it does, it's like, that's a $500 million equity that's quite small for modern US equities. There's not going be a lot of liquidity on that name. You're definitely not going to have the scale to tap into the more bespoke instruments like Preferreds and Converts and all those other things. So because obviously you're talking about a fraction of 500 million now, right? So I don't think that the majority of those will sustain. Moreover, I believe that
for basically all of the subscale ecosystems, and I think there's only two ecosystems that are at scale, those are Ethereum and Solana. I believe that those assets will ultimately trade down to deep discounts to Nav, and that those management teams will eventually just say, hey look, it's just better to sell this thing. And so I think that's kind of inevitable.
Slava Rubin (24:40)
Okay, so you're obviously Mr. Solana. We've heard that here even on this podcast, but you do run Multicoin. You're doing more than quote unquote, just Solana. What's interesting right now?
Kyle Samani (24:54)
Um, yeah, I mean, a ton of things, uh, we invested, uh, quite some time ago in a protocol called Camino. Camino is the leading borrowing protocol on Solana. you can just think of it as a bank basically. and it facilitates people borrowing and lending assets to earn or an yield, uh, or to lever up and borrow and such, um, great product been alive for a few years, no hacks, no downtime works phenomenally well. Um,
So we were like very excited about things like Camino as an example. We recently invested in Kalshi which is one of the leading, leading prediction markets, ⁓ fairly high profile these days. We think prediction markets are incredible. They're gonna be a very cool part of the future. I think in the not too distant future, you're gonna start to see prediction markets not just on kalshi.com or polymarket.com, but you're gonna see prediction markets embedded natively around the internet.
me with the obvious example being you're reading about interest rates in the Wall Street Journal. And at the top of the you know, the top of the article will not just be a screenshot of the price chart on Kalshi it will be a live price chart updating in real time. And there will be a buy and sell button.
Slava Rubin (25:59)
Right, almost like an ad unit, a different engagement.
Kyle Samani (26:01)
I
wouldn't call it an ad unit. would I would say it's actually embedding finance natively around the internet. For the entire history of finance, you had to go to some sort of dedicated finance portal, whether that was E trade, or Scott trade, or Robin Hood, or Coinbase. Or if you're a crypto person, a phantom wallet or whatever, those were all dedicated basically wallet portfolio management systems for you know, different kinds of assets. And for the first time, we are now seeing
Slava Rubin (26:06)
Sure.
Kyle Samani (26:28)
We are now seeing finance become a first class citizen of the internet and being embedded natively around the internet in places that are not just dedicated portfolio management systems.
Slava Rubin (26:40)
So if Kalshi was last, what was it, a five billion valuation?
Kyle Samani (26:44)
I think that's around those just announced yes.
Slava Rubin (26:46)
So how big can that become?
I'm not talking so much about Kalshi specifically. Obviously we are referring to it, just like how big can that market become and then how big can a five billion, can that become 50 billion, 500 billion, five trillion?
Kyle Samani (27:03)
Yeah, I do
think I do there's a path for Kalshi to exceed 50 billion for sure. We invested in the round prior to that. And, you know, I think the right way to think about TAM for Kalshi is, you know, Tariq is from Lebanon, and grew up speaking Arabic in Lebanon, Tariq is the CEO. And the name Kalshi means everything in Arabic. And his vision is ultimately to have the everything exchange.
⁓ And he has a grand master plan that'll take I think five plus years to execute on this plan But a plan ultimately to trade every asset class around the world on the Kalshi exchange So the the TAM here, I think is exponentially larger than what you would otherwise probably perceive
Slava Rubin (27:46)
Awesome. Kalshi is a great example outside of the Solana ecosystem. What else is interesting to you right now connected to AI?
Kyle Samani (27:56)
you know, we made a number, a couple of investments, in platforms that facilitate, renting of GPUs for inference, but the specific angle that we were most interested in were in, uh, these decentralized GPU platforms. So obviously you have core weave, you have Google cloud, you know, Apple, uh, Oracle, et cetera. Uh, there's been this vision for a very long time of can you do large scale computation in a distributed way?
where people at home or people maybe not necessarily at home, but with like some sort of fairly small scale commercial operation can rent out their hardware per seconds or per minute or something, but like per very small unit of time to anyone who wants to buy it, right? ⁓ For that computation. So this has been like a kind of a dream in, in software for really the last 30 years. This is not like a particularly new idea. ⁓
Slava Rubin (28:49)
Goes back to a
SETI at home, right?
Kyle Samani (28:51)
Correct, yeah, there was a bunch of, the commercial rails never existed until crypto and so the early versions of this, such as Folding at Home, which was built into the PS3, there were SETI at Home, there's been a couple of other of these that were just donation based. There's never been really commercial versions for a bunch of reasons, but one of which was the commercial rails really couldn't facilitate this. We're now seeing this happen today with one of our investments called io.net.
⁓ we invested, think two, roughly two years ago, maybe two years ago and change. ⁓ they launched their token probably about a year ago. and, IO, is facilitates what I just described. I believe there's something like 30 to $50 million, of, commerce going through the IO net system today. and they have GPU clusters all over the world that are powering primarily AI inference is the primary workload. If you go to their website, they obviously, I think I have maps and documentation that you kind of dig into all the details.
⁓ but we, we, we've always kind of thought that was the most natural intersection of AI and crypto was, was just the base layer infrastructure to facilitate, you know, more people to participate on the inference side.
Slava Rubin (29:50)
What's the future for your fund? Where are you headed with this? Like, are you gonna be doing this for another 20 years? Is there only one fund ahead of you? Where's Kyle headed?
Kyle Samani (30:01)
Yeah, you know, so Multicoin today has two funds, we have our hedge fund vehicle. And we are currently investing out of our third venture funds. We certainly anticipate, you know, raising future venture funds in the future. We love we love that side of our business and have no intention to stop. We've joked about other idea, you know, fund strategies we could deploy. Obviously, we have we've only done those two. We may or may not add others in the future unclear, but but definitely not not something we have definitive plans to do at this time. But we continue to kind of revisit those those theories.
I think the correct way to think about multi-coin over the next decade is the genius act passed and we have this mega trend. We actually don't think about this mega trend as crypto. I think that's like an incorrect understanding of it. I think the correct understanding of it is internet capital markets. And we intend to be long this mega trend in a lot of different ways.
And we have two of those ways now and I suspect we'll get more creative in other ways to go along this mega trend
Slava Rubin (30:54)
Sorry, when you say two, you mean the hedge fund and the VC fund? And you might have some others, even though you could argue you already have a third, which is forward industries.
Kyle Samani (30:57)
correct.
Correct. Forward Industries is technically owned by our hedge fund. I don't think about it as like separate from that regard. It's not a separate Multicoin vehicle. But yes, you could argue that that's a third way.
Slava Rubin (31:11)
Awesome. So if there's listeners that are like, wow, this sounds awesome. Is there a way that they can invest into multi-coin or what are the thresholds? What are the minimums? What are the entry points as to how to get involved?
Kyle Samani (31:23)
Yeah, unfortunately, I'm not allowed to solicit so can't talk about any of that stuff. But look, we have a website, you can go read about us. I think there's a contact us page and go from there.
Slava Rubin (31:31)
Awesome. is there anything else that obviously you could talk about so many topics, but is there anything else that you'd want to cover to make sure that our audience knows about the world of crypto, internet capital markets, what's happening in these trends that you want to make sure you share?
Kyle Samani (31:45)
⁓ No, think we've covered kind of everything today. This is really a super interesting, this vision for internet capital markets, think, once you really see it with clarity, it's very exciting and enticing, especially for people who are naturally investors to begin with. And then the more you look at how broken the financial system is, both in the US and outside the US, it just makes that investment opportunity more exciting. The challenging part about
the thesis is when you look mechanically at well, what is crypto today? On the surface, there's a lot of nonsense like an objectively, there's a lot of nonsense and a lot of people get caught up in that and they just stop looking further than that. So I encourage people to try and look beyond the noise and to try and see the substance of what's happening underneath.
Slava Rubin (32:21)
Amazing. You're obviously a super smart guy, very curious. What is it that you like to watch or read or listen to that makes you you that you can share with others?
Kyle Samani (32:31)
don't really watch TV, ⁓ other than white Lotus is probably the show that me and my, my wife liked the most. but not much of a TV guy or movie guy. reading wise, I read, ⁓ aggressively, kind of my email, newsletters, Twitter, et cetera. ⁓ let's
Slava Rubin (32:44)
Is there a newsletter or two
that you might share that you like?
Kyle Samani (32:48)
yeah, I mean, in crypto circles, I think the block works guys probably have the best newsletter. Um, and then for general tech news, I love tech meme. Uh, I think it's wonderful. Uh, and then, you know, listening wise, I listened to a lot of podcasts, both crypto and non crypto, but you know, my, podcast feed is a combination of business and technology.
Slava Rubin (33:08)
Can you give me again two podcasts you really like?
Kyle Samani (33:10)
⁓ yeah. I mean, if you want to go deep into crypto, I think the good game podcast from the Alliance guys is phenomenal. I think the I love listening to all in podcast, of course. I love BG squared with Brad and Bill. So there's probably three of my favorites.
Slava Rubin (33:24)
Amazing. And we always put everybody on the spot here, which is to give us a pick for three years out. We asked for one public markets pick and why, and then one non-public markets pick and why. I think I have a guess as to whether that's going to be for you. But what is your ⁓ public markets pick and why first?
Kyle Samani (33:41)
⁓ I'll go with Kalshi on the private side. I think this vision of prediction markets is incredible. And again, it's one of those things that on the surface when you go look at it, seems you can be underwhelming. And so I encourage you to dig deeper. And then second on the public side, probably say Camino. The opportunity to have
Slava Rubin (33:57)
Right.
I'm going to push back on Camino for a second because we're looking for a U S equities. And I know this is outside your bounds, but that is what we're looking at. Just on like a simple, you know, it doesn't have to be simple IE mag seven, but just something that's in the public markets.
Kyle Samani (34:04)
⁓ I see.
yeah, I think, ⁓ look, I generally like being long AI. Nvidia is not my preferred way to play play that I do think, I'm skeptical Nvidia's valuation will sustain where it is today. I think the benefit, the obvious beneficiaries of AI are Google, Amazon, and Facebook are probably the three that have the most obvious room to gain. And
kind of like, like all three of those names. I'm, I'm a Elon fan, so I'm partial to Tesla. Eyes wide open. The valuation is quite aggressive, but, ⁓ it's pretty obvious that like, when we look back in a hundred years, two of the most important innovations ever will be FSD and Optimus like just so obviously those are just like two of the most consequential technologies ever invented. and I think their Tams will be much larger than people think.
Slava Rubin (35:00)
So full self-driving, meaning people can drive by themselves through a robot and the actual robot, which is Optimus, just for the audience.
Kyle Samani (35:08)
Correct. mean, I have a Tesla and like I'd say when I'm in my Tesla, I drive under 5 % of the time.
Slava Rubin (35:14)
Nice, but you don't have a robot yet, is that fair?
Kyle Samani (35:16)
I do not have an Optimus in my house yet.
Slava Rubin (35:18)
Soon enough, soon enough. Well, Kyle, you have covered a ton of content with us, starting from programming as a kid, finance at NYU, and then you decided that you had to get into Bitcoin at 2016. That wasn't enough, so you went deep into Ethereum, and that got you into the world of Solana and more. So you have zero real estate, zero bonds, zero of a lot of things, a little bit of public equities, and a whole lot of crypto. Obviously, everybody knows you as Mr. Solana, but you actually have 10 to 20 % is in other crazy stuff.
and a core holdings is in Solana and the other core. You did mention some really interesting stuff, which is there's two huge movements that are happening. One, Project Crypto from Paul Atkins, and then obviously the Genius Act, which is really legalizing stablecoins and it accelerated dramatically over the coming years. So between now and the next 20 years, there's probably a huge opportunity for what's happening with stablecoins. Your prediction is by 2027.
We're going to have both an iOS and Android stablecoin wallets, which will be huge as to both the usage of stablecoins, the usage of crypto and what happens for the world at large. You're not a macro guy, but you did play the game. You told us that inflation is going to go up in 12 months. Unemployment is going to go down. Fed rates will go down all because the election is coming up. Recession is unlikely. US equities, you pass. And crypto, you said it's probably going in the right direction. But you did give us some really interesting insight, which is really a bifurcation of the market.
20 % who are asset owners at the top are doing quite well and the 80 % that are not asset owners might be struggling as this inflation continues. We got to talk about forward industries, which was awesome. Obviously, this is a whole new way to play the markets. There are a lot of DATs, but there wasn't one that's crushing it for Solana. But Solana is trying to change the world of the financial markets. And here's a great guinea pig coming into the public markets to be able to do all these different functions. Because right now you're not able to get, let's call it Apple or some other company to do it with you.
So it's like, we gotta prove that it can be done, which I personally love. The ticker symbol is quite funny, which is Forward, F-O-R-D, the car company, even though this is definitely not a car company. You gave a lot of props to ⁓ Strategy, the DAT for Bitcoin, and you did say that probably a lot of the other DATs are gonna struggle and not be able to make it. You gave us a killer pick on the private markets, which is Kalshi and said everybody should open their eyes around prediction markets.
And you went a little bit different, which is you didn't pick Nvidia. You actually say you're going to be a little short on Nvidia, but more long on Google, Amazon, and Meta. And of course, a lot of love for Elon and Tesla. You also gave us a few interesting ideas like renting GPUs with io.net. The fact that so far you have three plays in the market, the hedge fund, the VC fund, and even though you didn't call the third one Forward Industries, I do think that's the third one. We all need to read about internet capital markets. And you give us lots of good content. Kyle.
Thank you very much.
Kyle Samani (38:04)
Slava, it's funny, I didn't realize how much we covered, but while you were talking, I was like, wow, we covered a lot in 40 minutes, so thank you for having me.
Slava Rubin (38:11)
Absolutely.
