Innovators
3 Curated Dialogues
Qiao Wang
Key Views & Dialogues
Qiao Wang on Counterparty: Bitcoin, AI, Zcash and IPOs
Wang’s Bitcoin thesis rests on fixed supply and government money printing; today he favors underowned crypto over crowded AI, while remaining bullish on AI over five to 10 years. He puts AI’s immediate cryptographic threat below 1%, while quantum risk may emerge in five to 10 years and require governance consensus to address. Zcash is his preferred hedge, but team abandonment or irreversible cryptographic failure would invalidate the thesis; he avoids mega-IPOs amid adverse selection and six-to-12-month underperformance.
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- Wang’s Bitcoin optimism rests on a three-to-five-year horizon, with no forecast for next week or next month. Government money printing and Bitcoin’s fixed supply remain intact, so “the thesis for the last 15 years remains the same.”
- He prefers underowned crypto to crowded AI today, while remaining bullish on AI over five to 10 years. Poor relative performance against Nasdaq and gold underpins his positioning argument. Crypto would still suffer if stocks fall; the relative upside case is that on rebounds, “maybe crypto goes up more.”
- Wang separates AI’s immediate cryptographic threat from quantum’s longer-term governance challenge. Explicitly not a cryptographer, he puts irreversible AI-driven cryptographic failure below 1%; quantum is “maybe five to 10 years from now.” Surviving AI makes Bitcoin “more Lindy,” whereas quantum requires agreement on technical changes and Satoshi’s coins.
- Wang calls Zcash “probably the best hedge” for Bitcoin’s privacy and quantum risks. His Bitcoin-to-Zcash allocation moved from roughly 5:1 to 2:1 as Zcash appreciated; he prefers not to sell and pay taxes. “Bitcoin that adapts, that is agile” captures his thesis; project abandonment or irreversible cryptographic failure would invalidate it, rather than a price level.
- His equity holdings favor defensible businesses, with further semiconductor buying conditional on a substantial decline. He retains NVIDIA, TSMC and all four hyperscalers, whose existing businesses provide a fallback if AI disappoints. NVIDIA, TSMC and maybe ASML might become attractive after a 50% fall, “assuming the fundamentals don’t change.”
- Wang will sit out Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs because sellers control both price and timing. That creates an “insane amount of adverse selection”; he says mega-IPOs lose on average over the following six to 12 months. He passed even on SpaceX and would consider buying later after substantial price declines or profitability; Anthropic also fails his leadership test.
All Eyes on AI. Where Does Crypto Fit? | EP 77
Imran Khan calls the violent rebound “the first inning of a new cycle,” citing OG selling, failed dip-buying expectations and sidelined capital. Tokenized stocks revive onchain speculation through global access and underlying substance, while Robinhood’s retail interface outperforms Coinbase’s institutional-trust franchise. Computer-use agents expand software’s addressable market, pressuring new SaaS startups to build physical, networked or proprietary advantages.
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- Imran Khan reads the violent rebound as “the first inning of a new cycle,” though he allows that he could be wrong and that the market might consolidate. His evidence is positioning: OGs sold Bitcoin in the $60,000s, much of the market waited for $40,000 or an October bottom, and sidelined capital remains substantial. He has also come back around to the four-year cycle because it still appears intact.
- Qiao Wang argues that tokenized stocks have revived onchain speculation by opening assets globally and giving meme-token games a sliver of underlying substance. His “crypto alchemy” example pairs a meme token with a stock token, then redirects creator fees into stock-token purchases distributed to meme holders. Imran asks whether the structure is a flash in the pan; Qiao says most onchain activity is speculative, but stock-paired tokens are an improvement over pure vapor.
- Robinhood is winning the consumer front end because it understands retail trading, while Coinbase retains the stronger institutional-trust franchise but has built an app “made for neither persona.” Qiao and his non-crypto-native wife both struggled with Coinbase’s interface; by contrast, Robinhood has refined trading products since 2013 and knows “the trenches.” Their broader conclusion is that Robinhood, Coinbase, Solana and Hyperliquid can all provide exposure to onchain trading because the ultimate winners have not been crowned.
- Qiao Wang’s Zcash case is less about an AI slogan than a Bitcoin-like asset that can adapt when threats and user preferences change. He calls it “the compliant Monero” and “a different Bitcoin,” not a better one: Bitcoin’s ossification strengthens fixed-supply and immutability guarantees, while Zcash’s capacity to change makes it a hedge against quantum risk and rising privacy demand. Imran separately argues that privacy matters in an AI-saturated world and that Zcash is Bitcoin capable of change.
- The Zcash price case is explicitly speculative: Qiao floats roughly $3,000–$5,000 as a short-term target, with an imagined 80% drawdown and a later run toward $10,000. His two-to-three-year base case is Zcash reaching 5%–10% of Bitcoin’s price—$10,000 if Bitcoin reaches $200,000. Qiao describes a level similar to Solana and XRP as his base case; Imran says top-five market capitalization is his base case. Reaching 20% of Bitcoin or Ethereum scale would require serious institutional adoption; flipping Bitcoin after a quantum failure is only a “very small chance.”
- Computer use, not benchmark-solving, is the AI development they see producing the largest near-term economic shock. Their agents already triage email, investigate senders and founders, make reservations, retrieve tax forms, fill IRS documents and draft replies; Qiao says the addressable market is “at least an order of magnitude higher than coding agents.” The investment implication is harsh for startups: “SaaS is dead” unless the product reaches into the physical world, owns network effects, or builds difficult proprietary IP.
- They distrust the AI labs’ apocalyptic messaging as a mixture of regulatory capture and fundraising, yet still assign a meaningful probability to catastrophe. Qiao labels the messaging “regulatory capture,” while Imran agrees and expands on the funding incentive. Qiao accepts an Anthropic alignment estimate of a 10% extinction risk, while Imran echoes that the probability may be slightly lower and argues for strong trust-and-safety guardrails. Their most memorable framing is Imran’s: “Dario is Thanos,” Sam Altman is Loki, Elon Musk is Iron Man, and the unresolved question is whether agent behavior is consciousness or extremely convincing simulation.
Is The Bottom In? What The Lads Are Buying!
Jordi Alexander is “97% confident” Bitcoin bottomed at $60k, while Justin Bram’s diminishing-returns math sees roughly $185k and questions entering at $82k for potentially 2x. FOMO’s 40,000 daily App Store users—mostly mobile—support a mobile distribution thesis and IPO endgame, while Zcash’s supply case gains price confirmation amid unresolved crypto-native inflows and financial-rails catalysts.
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- Jordi Alexander is “97% confident” the bottom is in at $60k Bitcoin, arguing the volume traded there, the time spent, and the fact that “literally everything was thrown at it” mean a retest would need “something really bad” to happen. The macro setup does the rest: once bond vigilantes forced the Fed’s hand, “gold and Bitcoin are the two things” that respond to dollar-debasement talk, and another speaker cites an all-time-high gold–BTC correlation with Bloomberg reporting investors buying both together.
- Justin Bram makes the bear case, and his math is specific: if $60k was the bottom, last cycle’s $68k→$125k move plus diminishing returns implies maybe $185k — “is it really worth entering here at $82k for like maybe a 2x?” He also flags that no new cohort is joining crypto-native assets — the flows are AI/memory traders rotating back — and that every prior bull thesis was a financial-rails catalyst (VCs, ETF, DATs) with nothing obvious left.
- FOMO’s representatives offer evidence that new money exists — just not where crypto natives look: ~40,000 new users a day from the App Store, ~39,000 of them mobile, while Se says July’s total growth spend was ~$150k. Of ~1,500 daily support tickets, roughly 1,450 are from people who “just don’t understand what’s going on” — evidence of inexperienced users — and the endgame is an IPO, not a token: FOMO wants to be “the canonical social graph of finance.”
- Zcash is a major long across the discussion: Qiao Wang calls it “the simplest, the clearest, the cleanest thesis” in crypto and holds only BTC and ZEC in his personal account. The supply argument — early investors and team have distributed, mining emissions fell, and buying pressure may now outweigh distribution and supply — plus a rising shielded-pool metric and a $50M whale sale absorbed without much price impact, all support the trader argument that ZEC has Bitcoin’s supply cap at roughly 1% of the price.
- Thiccy’s structural thesis: crypto’s distribution weakened as Twitter declined and the next cohort lives on mobile — crypto gachas earn a tenth of what mobile app gachas print (“a billion dollars a year type deal”), and meme-coin trading is “a funner game than Candy Crush” because you can actually win money. That’s why FOMO appears to have an advantage over Pump.fun: “whoever does the mobile side better just typically tends to win the consumer side.”
- On AI and building, a host forecasts only two developer types: app-layer builders who “understand the customer really really well” and “super deep infra” developers — “everyone else in between is basically obsolete.” The discussion’s vector metaphor says AI has reduced the importance of magnitude or raw labor while making direction, taste, and agency more important — “the laborers have been nerfed.”
- Positioning disclosures: Jordi is core Bitcoin plus HYPE he’s trimming into strength, and he’s demanding disclosure on how Trade.xyz fees flow back to an approximately $80B FTV HYPE asset — “people don’t want questions asked when they’re holding a bag.” Thiccy says he and the team hold NEAR and GRASS; another guest describes a treasury-bill-plus-Pokémon-card barbell with roughly $3M in cards; and Justin has illiquid AI-related venture exposure alongside his crypto holdings.