Tulip King
Key Views & Dialogues
Tulip King - Zcash to a Trillion, Onchain Options & AI-Secured Bitcoin
Zcash is Tulip King’s highest-conviction monetary bet, with privacy demand, price reflexivity, and wealthy buyers potentially reinforcing one another. Derive offers differentiated convexity as open interest reportedly grew four-to-eightfold, fees increased, buybacks began, and V3 approaches. Hyperliquid or Lighter gaining traction in options would challenge the thesis, while Pearl remains highly speculative, inflationary, and difficult to access.
View summary (7)
Tulip King argues the market’s edge has shifted from frantic meme-coin “trench warfare” toward concentrated, thesis-driven positions that can compound. Making $1 million on one researched trade is easier than making $10,000 hundreds of times, while burned DeFi veterans remain overly cautious. His demand: “Start believing in something” that could still exist in a year.
Zcash is his highest-conviction monetary bet because privacy demand, price reflexivity, and wealthy buyers could reinforce one another. With ZEC around $1,430, he sees a plausible path from $1,000 to $10,000 over a long horizon and ultimately calls it “a trillion-dollar coin,” while warning that leverage can destroy holders before the thesis plays out.
The thesis depends on Zcash being private money, not merely privacy middleware. A private Ethereum could strengthen Ethereum and protocols such as Railgun, but Tulip King says ETH itself is not money because users increasingly transact in stablecoins, tokenized Bitcoin, and tokenized gold. His stark rotation scenario has Zcash at $1 trillion while ETH falls to $600–$1,000, SOL to $25, and BNB to $300–$400.
Zcash may attract capital “from above” because the richer someone becomes, the more wealth they want hidden. A $1 billion holder can use a $20 billion privacy pool in a way that $100 cannot use a $10 pool; as the shielded pool grows, privacy improves together with its ability to absorb larger flows. “There is an exponential return on privacy.”
Derive is Tulip King’s overlooked options bet because perpetuals cannot replicate options’ convex payouts, hedges, or volatility structures. After rejecting a Synthetix offer and issuing roughly 50% more supply to continue building, the team reportedly grew open interest four-to-eightfold, increased fees, began buybacks, and prepared V3. Thread Guy notes a market cap around $228 million and asks whether the leading onchain options venue is worth at least $1 billion, while explicitly declining a formal target.
Hyperliquid is the central challenge to that trade, but Tulip King thinks its small team is rationally focused on its dominant perpetual-futures engine. He owns more Hyperliquid than Drift and concedes HYPE might reach $100 or $200; he would reassess Derive if Hyperliquid or Lighter launched an options product that gained traction.
Pearl, or PRL, is the highly speculative “AI-secured Bitcoin” call: replace SHA-256 with matrix multiplication and subsidize verifiable AI computation through block rewards. Thread Guy and Tulip King discuss roughly 5% verification overhead, Together AI integration, and an estimate that capturing 1% of AI compute could produce 20 times Bitcoin’s hashrate. At about $170 million with high mining inflation and difficult access, Tulip King’s advice is blunt: if the research or purchase process is beyond you, “don’t buy this damn thing.”
Tulip King - Why Memecoins Stopped Being Easy
Tulip King sees a trader’s market where capital is separating profitable on-chain businesses such as HYPE and PUMP from tokens that neither earn nor return value, even as memecoins become a permanent but brutally difficult asset class. Solana’s activity may not accrue to SOL because Pump captures revenue and Phantom can redirect order flow, making PUMP a cleaner value-capture expression unless Solana produces another Pump-scale application.
View summary (6)
Tulip King sees a trader’s market where selection matters more than broad exposure. Capital is separating profitable on-chain assets such as HYPE and PUMP from “a bunch of junk” that neither earns nor returns value. His cycle signal is unforgiving: “It’s not enough for me to win, I need my enemies to lose.”
Solana’s activity does not automatically accrue to SOL, making the token a weak expression of its own ecosystem’s success. Pump earns substantially more, Phantom can redirect order flow across chains, and Hyperliquid and Lighter already challenge the “decentralized NASDAQ” thesis. Unless Solana produces another Pump-scale application, Tulip King’s trade is simple: “They literally dump Solana to buy Pump.”
Hyperliquid changes crypto portfolio construction because it earns money rather than merely claiming monetary premium. Tulip King’s preferred barbell pairs BTC and Zcash as “cash” with HYPE and PUMP as profit-generating assets, replacing the old BTC-ETH-SOL basket of three debatable forms of money. He calls this the “most blue-chip exposure” available in crypto.
Memecoins have matured into a permanent but cyclical asset class, even if trading them remains brutally difficult. Tulip King says permissionless capital markets inevitably produce memes—“If NASDAQ allowed anyone to list anything, NASDAQ would have memecoins”—yet his own immense effort generated roughly $4. Investors can specialize in individual memes or own infrastructure such as PUMP or stocks such as Robinhood.
PUMP’s advantage is not merely its launchpad but a widening stack that monetizes issuance, trading, order flow, and potentially social activity. PumpSwap kept revenue from collapsing with memecoin volume, while the Pump app can charge no trading fee because the business earns elsewhere. Tulip King therefore views PAWNS as less an existential threat than an earlier-stage competitor without comparable expansion optionality.
Tulip King is unwilling to chase AI equities despite refusing to short them. His 2000-era analogy is that infrastructure spending has arrived before enough productive businesses, while debt, equity issuance, Chinese scaling, and political opposition to data centers could tighten the economics. His positioning is deliberately asymmetric: “I’m not betting on AI going down because I don’t want to end my life, but I’m not betting on AI going up either.”
What Actually Broke In ZCash.. - Tulip King
Orchard’s ZK circuit exposed a potential double-spend path through “invalid-state transactions,” requiring roughly 24 hours of soft-fork rejection before a corrective hard fork. The turnstile limits withdrawals but cannot establish that private accounting was never corrupted, leaving hypothetical over-issuance and slow extraction as unresolved risks. The repair demonstrated Zcash’s centralization tradeoff: operators could suspend Orchard and move users onto new rules, even as ZEC rallied.
View summary (7)
- The Orchard incident involved a potential double-spend vulnerability in its ZK circuit, not merely routine maintenance. A security engineer associated with Zcash found logic permitting what the disclosure called “invalid-state transactions”; Tulip King’s plain-English reading was that someone might exploit the circuit to spend the same amount twice after entering the shielded pool.
- The emergency response fixed the vulnerability while exposing a centralization tradeoff in Zcash’s design. Operators were asked to adopt a soft fork rejecting Orchard transactions for what Tulip estimated was roughly 24 hours, followed by a hard fork with corrected circuit logic. Tulip concedes that blocking exploitation was right, but finds it troubling that Zcash could “ping everybody” to suspend a privacy pool and quickly move everyone onto new rules.
- The turnstile limits how much ZEC can exit Orchard, but privacy prevents certainty about what might exist inside it. With 1 million ZEC deposited, an attacker might hypothetically create 17 million private units yet withdraw only the available 1 million—or avoid detection by taking “1,000 ZEC every day” and treating the pool as a permanent dividend.
- ZEC rallying on the news told Tulip more about positioning than technical safety. He thinks traders “hate Bitcoin right now” and interpreted the response as an ordinary upgrade, normalized by Ethereum, Solana, and Hyperliquid. His objection is that money should not depend on a founder being able to change the rules or freeze funds; he says he never wants to wake up to a Zuko blog announcing such a change.
- Tulip has moved from 150–160% Bitcoin exposure on margin to roughly one-third BTC, one-third HYPE, and one-third ZEC. Much of the initial reduction happened because gains elsewhere expanded his portfolio, but after closing his Bitcoin-backed margin he sold BTC for the first time. He framed ZEC as a hedge against Bitcoin’s approach to privacy, while also discussing Bitcoin’s quantum risk.
- His altcoin framework now demands both real revenue and credible alignment between cash flow and the token. HYPE must keep demonstrating that “revenue actually matters,” with revenue and buybacks on-chain rather than discretionary. He sees potential multiple expansion among $10 million–$50 million projects, but only if revenue persists and grows and leadership routes value to holders.
- Despite selling Bitcoin for the first time, Tulip’s long-run BTC thesis remains almost absolute. Even a hypothetical quantum theft could reinforce the principle if Bitcoin simply kept producing blocks without seizures or rule changes: “This currency is what it is, take it or leave it.” He still calls $1 million BTC “destiny” because it remains harder, more politically resistant, and more rule-bound than everything else he has considered.
Why Prediction Markets Are Taking Over… (Tulip King)
Tulip King frames prediction markets as a general-purpose financial primitive, with the edge shifting from isolated forecasts to cross-market structures such as Lighter’s 91¢ pair that pays whenever either leg resolves true. The broader thesis links stablecoin growth to sovereign-scale Bitcoin demand, while Hyperliquid faces structural margin compression and quantum computing remains a tail risk to monitor.
View summary (7)
- Prediction markets are not the next memecoin trade; Tulip King sees them as a general-purpose financial primitive that can subsume sportsbooks, political betting, options, and insurance. DraftKings is “the calculator” while Polymarket is “the iPhone”: once binary and multi-outcome settlement exists, each vertical becomes an application rather than a separate business.
- The emerging edge is not predicting isolated events but trading relationships between markets whose combined probabilities are inconsistent. His live Lighter structure paired “no airdrop by December 31” at 16¢ with “TGE above $1 billion” at 75¢, paying 91¢ for two legs where only one must resolve true; the losing state is a launch below $1 billion.
- Prediction markets can change the events they forecast because their payouts function as bounties. At 0.5% odds, a mayoral candidate could spend $100,000 distributing twenty $5,000 positions, each potentially worth $1 million if the campaign succeeds: the market finances the effort to make an unexpected event happen.
- Bitcoin’s weak 2025 performance—minus 7% versus gold’s plus 60%—reflects its arrival in the “major leagues,” where hedge-fund and corporate buying is no longer enough. At roughly $1.8 trillion and the eighth-largest asset, Bitcoin needs sovereign demand, but Tulip argues gold’s roughly $30 trillion size made it the only reserve asset capable of absorbing countries diversifying away from dollars without crippling slippage.
- Thread Guy’s forward Bitcoin catalyst is stablecoin supply accelerating from roughly $306 billion through $1 trillion, $2 trillion, and $3 trillion, potentially toward $5–10 trillion. His chain is that stablecoin issuers must buy Treasuries nearly 1:1, governments therefore favor adoption, and surplus digital dollars may cycle into Bitcoin until its size permits progressively larger sovereign allocations.
- The Hyperliquid bear case is terminal margin compression, not a denial that it was an excellent product or trade. Tulip argues permissionless code, token-funded cold starts, and instantly portable capital let competitors attack incumbents repeatedly; he softened “everything goes to zero” into “grocery-store margins.” Thread Guy countered that a competitor’s existence does not itself invalidate Hyperliquid, while Tulip said continuous product improvement could preserve its lead.
- Quantum computing is the unresolved tail risk inside Tulip’s otherwise maximal Bitcoin conviction. A soft fork might let active holders migrate to quantum-resistant addresses, but inaccessible legacy coins—including roughly one million attributed to Satoshi—create a hard-fork dilemma between confiscation and theft. Tulip entertains a one-day 90% drawdown; Thread Guy says, “I’ll ride Bitcoin to zero.”