The Truth About Crypto in 2026 | Market Bubble #1

Summary

• Ansem — Crypto Twitter’s “king of Solana” — owns zero Bitcoin and zero Solana. He bought SOL at $1.50, sold the last of it “right after the Trump [stuff]… around 260,” is “super bearish on ETH,” and flags quantum risk to some long-dormant coins; his current crypto bullish areas are Hyperliquid, perps, stablecoins, and small startups. He hedges that Bitcoin is “not a great place to sell if you do have some” — while Banks says the AI trade has simply been better.
• AI right now is crypto in 2017, per Ansem. ChatGPT went from zero users in 2021 to 900 million monthly actives; Anthropic, founded in 2021, does “like 30 bill annual run rate” and trades over $1 trillion on Hyperliquid versus a ~$380B last round. With Bitcoin’s cap around $1.25T, both hosts favor Polymarket’s 22% “Anthropic flips Bitcoin” market by December 31: “You [__] slam this, no? At 22% I think you do.”
• The tradeable AI play is the supply chain, and Eaton is the named pick. With the labs private and estimated CapEx from the major tech companies “around 700 billion dollars for this year alone,” Ansem likes the ~$150–160B data-center electrical-equipment maker: backlogged, breaking out of a 2024–2026 consolidation at all-time highs, and de-risked from consumer-subscription economics by US power and compute scarcity.
• Both hosts think HYPE flipping Solana at 12.5% on Polymarket is badly mispriced. HYPE’s FDV is ~$39–40B against Solana’s ~$50B; Ansem calls Hyperliquid “one of the most important applications not just in crypto but also globally,” with HIP-3 stock perps for the S&P 500, Amazon, and Intel. Ansem goes further: “I’ll put every dollar I’ve ever made in my life in it. That’s not financial advice, by the way.”
• The show’s macro premise: the middle class may be phased out. Working off CL’s elites-versus-lower-class graph, they argue AI, robotics, and algorithmic media are concentrating wealth toward the top, so the durable-value focus is money, attention, and AI literacy — the move is to “figure out how to get into that higher level,” not wait for Anthropic “to go public at 1.5 trillion and then invest and hope it 2x’s.”
• Dead internet theory “is not just a theory anymore.” Banks’ examples include a fake Tobey Maguire dating post that hit 40M views without truth becoming part of the conversation; Ansem concludes that “the consumer doesn’t give a [__] about the truth.” Ansem’s cat Hops became a ~$100M memecoin the next day in his 2024 “Black Mirror episode.” His trading mea culpa: not understanding rates hurt him in 2022, and stepping away in 2025 meant missing the AI-stock run — “never pigeonhole yourself.”
• Banks’ rebuild thesis runs through GTA 6. Take-Two at ~$40B is his conviction long into launch (“GTA 6 is going to create generational wealth” — Ansem: “I like the chart, I like the spot it’s at”), and his FaZe vision is a Vanoss-style creator roster performing inside the game. Yet he’d slam NO on Polymarket’s 95% odds of a new FaZe content creator before GTA 6: “I know I’m biased and I have way too much information on the subject.”

Deep dive

1. The show’s thesis: money, attention, and AI literacy are the value stack

• Banks’ opening frame: “Politics is cooked, crypto’s dead, dating’s fried… AI is coming for your jobs” — and three things should hold or grow value over the next 5–10 years: money, understanding the attention economy, and AI literacy. The optimism (“this thing’s going to cure cancer”) comes with a warning: “if you’re a paralegal in your last semester of law school and you owe $400,000… and Claude does your job better than you” — the future could get dark for you.
• Ansem’s why-now: he first learned about Bitcoin in a 2016 Georgia Tech emerging-technologies class — “Bitcoin was trading at like $200,” as he tells it — started buying in 2017 as a New York software engineer, but “could never get my friends to buy early.” Banks later frames the communication problem: people focus on the ticker and ignore the rest of a long thesis. The show is Ansem’s attempt to pay forward what Trader Mayne and Cobie, with his BTC/ETH–altcoin–“Cryptopia” pyramid, taught him.

2. The middle class is getting phased out — align with the curve or get left on it

• The anchor is CL’s elites-versus-lower-class graph: post-Industrial Revolution labor unions around World War II were “the birth of the middle class, really” and its peak level playing field; AI, robotics, and advanced social media are now concentrating wealth “in the hands of a few.” Banks’ takeaway is that the baseline may rise, but people need to “figure out how to get into that higher level.”
• Banks’ extension: for most of human history the middle class didn’t exist, and it’s only hard to imagine its absence because “all we know is middle class.” The graph shows elite power with robotics blowing past what kings once held. “I think it’s already happening.”
• Ansem’s leapfrog claim: ChatGPT’s 900 million monthly actives are mostly free-plan users, so if you’re “really diligent with where you’re spending your time, you can just leapfrog and be so far ahead of where your peers are going to be.”

3. AI today is crypto 2017 — and Anthropic flipping Bitcoin is a live trade

• The core comparison: ChatGPT didn’t exist in 2021, now has 900M monthly active users; Anthropic, founded in 2021, is doing “like 30 bill annual run rate” and is trading above $1 trillion on Hyperliquid against a last round of “like 380B,” with talk of a round at 900. Versus 2021 crypto highs priced on projected on-chain revenue that never arrived, “it’s really hard to compare” — these companies are making money.
• With Bitcoin’s market cap around $1.25T, Polymarket’s “Anthropic to flip Bitcoin” market for December 31 of this year sits at 22% — and both hosts favor yes. Banks: “You [__] slam this, no? At 22% I think you do.” Ansem: “I think they will.”
• The access frustration that motivates the whole episode: OpenAI and Anthropic are fully private, so for investors, “you’re supposed to wait for it to go public at 1.5 trillion and then invest and hope it [__] 2x’s. It’s crazy.”

4. The king of Solana owns zero Bitcoin, zero Solana, and is “super bearish on ETH”

• Pressed by Banks for a non-PR answer: “I don’t own any Bitcoin right now. I own zero Bitcoin.” He hedges that Bitcoin is down a lot and “not a great place to be selling if you do have some,” but crypto hasn’t eclipsed many of the prior cycle’s all-time highs because the projected on-chain applications and revenue did not materialize. His Bitcoin-related worry is quantum: breaking the cryptography on some long-dormant coins could allow them to move if their owners are dead.
• He also owns no Solana — bought at $1.50, sold the last “right after the Trump [stuff]… around 260,” effectively the top. What he’s still bullish on is narrower: perps, stablecoins, and small startups, because “what crypto does a better job at than any other industry is enabling speculation.”
• Banks first says he owns zero Bitcoin, but later describes his current book as “Bitcoin… some Hyperliquid and… CryptoPunks.” Malcolm calls it the “rich-guy portfolio.” Banks’ market view is blunter — “stocks have dramatically outperformed crypto… crypto’s like the worst thing you could be in for the last 2 years.”

5. How to actually buy AI: work down the supply chain — Eaton is the pick

• Ansem’s map: labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI → hyperscalers investing in them, chips, and infrastructure — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta — → power → chip design and manufacturing. Estimated CapEx from four or five major tech companies is “around 700 billion dollars for this year alone,” and public companies at the different layers can capture that demand.
• Eaton (~$150–160B): electrical equipment for the data-center build-out, “backlogged a [__] ton,” with a weekly chart breaking out of a 2024-to-2026 consolidation at all-time highs. The de-risking logic: unlike labs whose returns hinge on consumers paying for subscriptions, Eaton sits lower on the totem pole and benefits from how little power and compute the US has. “I think it’s a great buy… I don’t think the CapEx is going to slow down.”
• The distribution corollary — Banks says passive consumers should at least own the companies enabling their scrolling, especially Meta, which dominates distribution and advertising. Ansem adds that Meta may be underappreciated in AI because everyone is already on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook; the average person “doesn’t give a [__] about mythos or opus 4.7 or 5.5.” He makes the same convenience case for Apple embedding a capable Siri AI into iMessage.

6. Hyperliquid is the exception — HYPE-flips-Solana at 12.5% looks badly mispriced to both hosts

• Ansem’s case: Hyperliquid is “one of the most important applications not just in crypto but also globally,” and HIP-3 extends perps beyond crypto to the S&P 500, Amazon, and Intel — with a lot of top-10 volume now coming from stocks and other assets. “Perps are way way way better product than options” for retail. Banks’ bottom line: “Hyperliquid makes money and it’s solving a real problem.”
• The mispricing: HYPE’s FDV is around $39–40B versus Solana at “like 50B, I want to say,” yet Polymarket prices the flip by December 31 at 12.5%. Ansem calls it “way more likely” than the 22% Anthropic market and says, “I’ll put every dollar I’ve ever made in my life in it. That’s not financial advice, by the way.” Banks says he would slam it at 40–50%.

7. Content is in its “fast-food meta” — and the endgame is a feed of one

• Banks’ content arc: a 2008 “how to hack Xbox 360 Gamerscore” tutorial did 700–800k views and paid $500 in AdSense; he helped found what he calls the first-ever content house; he later quit vlogging at his peak with a last video at 11 million views. His earlier vision was that kids would eventually make Avatar-style movies on phones; instead, “here we are, 10 years later, and it’s [] mindless swipe retardio []. Production’s at an all-time low.”
• Monoculture is dead: Twitter was once “this big global group chat,” now it’s fragmented bubbles — “antisocial media… meant to keep you in your little lane.” Hence the Warhol line (“in the future everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes”) and Banks’ corollary: “when everyone’s famous, nobody’s famous.” Proof: Ansem calls Clavicular “the biggest thing online right now” with 100k Twitter followers — unthinkable in the 2010–2017 regime where popping off meant millions overnight.
• Where “for you” goes: real-time AI-generated content addressed to you by name — Banks’ example is a hyper-personalized video that knows you like the Lakers and gambling, runs 20 minutes at high production quality, has one view, and was made just for you. The open question: in that world, do content creators exist at all?

8. Dead internet theory “is not just a theory anymore” — and there’s no demand for truth

• Banks: botting, fake narratives, and the clipping meta are “completely fried,” and AI compounds it — in the future there may be conversations like theirs, with the same overlay, “shilling scam tickers,” and indistinguishable from reality. His exhibit: a fake Tobey Maguire/Mishka Silva dating post hit 40 million views and “the conversation wasn’t about whether this was true or not”; he knows both people personally.
• Ansem draws the harsher conclusion: “The consumer doesn’t give a [] about the truth. We see that in the data.” The prescription is that if content triggers emotion or bears on your career or interests, “do the [] work. Do the research,” because you may be getting rage-baited.
• Banks’ other example is a viral post making it look as if he were Kendall Jenner; it reached 4M views, prompted calls from lifelong acquaintances, and led Tana Mongeau — who could have simply texted him — to quote-tweet, “somebody please tell me this is AI.”
• Ansem’s 2024 “Black Mirror episode”: SOL ran from ~$20 to ~$200, WIF went from zero to a $5B market cap, and after he tweeted his cat’s name — Hops — coins ran to “like a hundred mil market cap the next day,” with his mom fielding Facebook messages. A conference attendee showed him a terminal “down 100k on your cat” after top-ticking it. The counterweight both cherish: strangers, including the coffee-shop brothers who told Banks his NFT calls helped them buy their store, crediting them with life-changing money.

9. Ansem’s trading mea culpas: 2022 rates, 2025’s missed AI run — never pigeonhole

• The 2022 lesson, owned outright: “I had a very terrible understanding of how rates worked” and how geopolitics hits crypto — the riskiest asset class by far compared with stocks, commodities, and others — “it affected us a lot.” Then in 2025 he sold a lot of crypto early and deliberately stepped away because he tends to overtrade after winning, and “missed a [__] ton going on with the AI stocks.”
• The generalization he draws: “you should never pigeonhole yourself into looking at one thing or one sector… it’s all the same thing, especially if you trade mostly using technical analysis” — stocks just move slower, which is “honestly to your benefit.”

10. Banks’ next act runs through GTA 6 and a FaZe rebuild

• Breaking mid-show: Banks saw the boys launch a group and rebrand as the Core Boys, with 34,000 followers and a new house. The name stands for Create, Own, Run, Everything. Banks says their group photo recreates a FaZe image he directed for the old social branding, while noting that some former members are absent.
• His thesis: Take-Two at ~$40B (“Anthropic’s a trillion-dollar company. 40 B’s? Are you [__] kidding me?”) into a GTA 6 launch that “is going to create generational wealth,” with FaZe as a Vanoss-style creator roster performing inside the game. Ansem likes “the chart” and “the spot it’s at.”
• On Polymarket’s 95% “new FaZe content-creator member before GTA 6” market, Banks says he would not take yes and is “slamming no”; he acknowledges his bias and unusually detailed information. Despite people telling him FaZe is dead and the plan will not work, he says he is good at identifying talent and putting pieces together, will do it again, and is now sober and the best version of himself.