Transcript was automatically generated.

Frank Curzio 00:01

Lark Davis, thanks so much for joining us on Wall Street Unplugged. How’s it going, man?

Lark Davis 00:06

Going good. Thanks for having me back on.

Frank Curzio 00:07

You know, I had you on here it was a while ago, and I think when I first had you on, you were just getting that career starting out, pretty much. You had a pretty good following. I said, “Listen, I like what this guy’s saying. I love him. He’s killing it.” And now I look at you and I see how far you have come, and I just want to show everyone this: 638,000 followers on YouTube,right,

Frank Curzio 00:29

talking crypto all the time. I mean, man, congratulations on your success, and it’s been really crazy. What a ride.

Lark Davis 00:38

It’s a crazy industry to be working in and to be building in. You know, we’ve got different stuff going on. We’ve got our newsletter and all that sort of stuff. And just the ebbs and flows of building in crypto and trying to have a business in crypto, you got to be a crazy person, I think, sometimes, because everything’s so market-driven.

Frank Curzio 00:57

So you say everything’s so market-driven. Let’s start there, because I love having you on now. A lot of people, when I see in interviews I’ve been doing this for 15 years, I probably interviewed most of the people that you see on CNBC. Everybody wants to be interviewed when things are great, and right now we’re seeing crypto get hit. To me, I want to turn to people that have been there and done that, and you’ve been doing this for a long time, and get your thoughts on it.

Frank Curzio 01:16

When you say market-driven, you know, what do you mean? What’s driving the market now? Because it seems like when you’re looking at commodities and yes, we’ve seen, you know, some of the commodities pull back a little bit, but have had this monster run over the past few months, pretty much for the same reasons why a lot of people would buy Bitcoin. How would you explain that in your words? Because I’m surprised that Bitcoin has not continued to go higher, and not hasn’t just continued to go higher.

Frank Curzio 01:37

It’s pulled back significantly, especially over the past few weeks.

Lark Davis 01:41

It’s very fascinating to see everything that’s going on right now. There’s parallels in history of gold and silver running first and then Bitcoin catching up after that. So we can look at that as a potential bit of hopium that, hey, maybe things won’t be that bad for that long. But it is frustrating because part of the narrative of Bitcoin for all this time has been that, well, it’s protect yourself as a hedge against,

Lark Davis 02:01

you know, the debasement of currencies and all that kind of stuff. And here we are. Here we are. We’re in this great debasement trade where metals are absolutely ripping. You know, gold and silver have had incredible rallies, and maybe those need to cool off a bit more, to be honest, before things get a bit reasonable out there. But it’s frustrating to see that happen and Bitcoin,

Lark Davis 02:22

in particular, do so poorly in this scenario. Bitcoin has been trading in a very weird way ever since the 1010 liquidation event. And before that, we were kind of, let’s say, detaching a little bit from the macro factors that were driving everything else. You know, we started detaching a bit from the global liquidity cycle, for example.

Lark Davis 02:42

But those sort of short-term divergences are kind of normal, and it wasn’t anything to really be considering too much in the grand thesis of things until the 1010 liquidation event happened. After that, nobody’s wanted to have anything to do with crypto.

Lark Davis 02:57

It’s been absolutely just a bloodbath since that point because people lost a lot of faith in the industry because they realized that it’s a hard asset class to trade when everything can go just so horribly wrong because one exchange has a temporary glitch. Coins literally went to zero in seconds,

Lark Davis 03:17

and the Bitcoins even had huge drops. And after that, a lot of people just got knocked out of the game completely. Big traders, big market makers got absolutely wrecked and carried out on that one. And ever since that point, we’ve significantly diverged from all the sort of macro factors you might be able to point to and say, “Hey, well, this is the sort of scenario that Bitcoin should be doing well in.” But it’s trading not like tech stocks,

Lark Davis 03:38

which you could argue, okay, it’s a proxy for the NASDAQ. Well, it was a proxy for the NASDAQ. We’d be near all-time highs. Bitcoin would be at $150,000right now. If we were a proxy for, hey, the great debasement trade, Bitcoin should be at $150,000right now, looking at the gold trade, for example. And it’s been a weird cycle because you come to crypto for the asymmetric upside,

Lark Davis 04:00

and there’s been, if you’re willing to take extreme risks, there’s been meme coins and stuff that have made overnight millionaires, but that’s more exceptional than sort of sound investing in an asset class,right? And it’s been frustrating to watch that happen while some of the more fundamental coins in the market have really gotten very little attention. And so if you look at the risk-reward for crypto,

Lark Davis 04:21

this cycle, unless you were hyper-gambling on all these meme coin launches, there wasn’t as much opportunity. There were some short-term narratives that did very well and all that sort of stuff, but you could have bought silver at the same time that you bought Bitcoin back at the end of 2022, and you could have got the same returns with a whole lot less bullshit,right? And you could have bought Nvidia at the same time,

Lark Davis 04:43

and it would have outperformed Bitcoin by three times with less BS, less volatility, and more upside. So investors are seeing all that and having a bit of a moment here in the markets where they’re saying, “Is it really worth continuing to risk money in these markets where there’s so much manipulation,

Lark Davis 05:03

where there’s so much that can go wrong on a regular basis, and where we’ve largely underperformed tech stocks?” I mean, look at tech stocks. Look how much some of this stuff has rallied. You could have bought data center stocks and got a 30, 40, 50X return on your money instead of buying Bitcoin back at the end of 2022, again. Or even from the tariff dip, some of these things went much harder than Bitcoin,

Lark Davis 05:23

much harder than Ethereum, much harder than Solana, and much more than most of the altcoins, which during that whole period basically underperformed. So altcoins have been in a bear market since January ’25. Bitcoin since October, Ethereum since October. So it’s a pretty rough market cycle to be in, think for investors.

Lark Davis 05:42

And it’s the kind of sentiment and frustration that you tend to see closer to market bottoms than at, of course, hot times in the market,right?

Frank Curzio 05:52

So what are your thoughts on some of this? Because they always say the cream rises to the top, and I’m a stock market guy for 30 years,right? And there’s been so many opportunities. If you pull out of a long-term chart of the S&P 500 since the ’50s when, you know, the S&P 500 became 500 stocks, it’s like this secular growing chart that goes up. And you’re going to see like the credit crisis. You’re going to see COVID. You’re going to see,

Frank Curzio 06:11

you know, back, you know, some of the recessions and stuff in the past. But there’s this nonstop like, “Hey, you’re buying the best companies.” And I think the question I have to ask you is when I researched this industry, which I’ve been doing six, seven years, I realized a lot of the altcoins are BS, which I know you realize as well. But there are amazing technologies behind these companies. What do you think is the explanation?

Frank Curzio 06:31

Because not only are we seeing leverage come out of the market, the market coming down, but we’re also seeing it out of the best names as well. I mean, we’re not, you know, okay, take out Bitcoin, take out Ethereum. We have, you know, BNB, you have, and I’ll bring some of these up, like just some of the names that have gotten really hit. Solana’s amazing. Tron, you know, Cardano. I mean, you’re looking at the cream of the crop. I feel like this is like the S&P 500.

Frank Curzio 06:52

Are you focusing on some of those and saying, “Hey, you know, this is the time?” Because to me, those times that the market pulled back, I felt like my investors needed me the most, and it turned out to be one of the best buying opportunities. I’m not saying it’s a buying opportunity for every crypto, but some of these names have real technologies using and real cases using along with the banks and partnering with the banks. And even though it’s again, he smoked.

Frank Curzio 07:11

What’s your strategy here? Is it more just like, “Hey, you know, these bear markets create amazing opportunities,” or you’re very selective in what you’re investing in?

Lark Davis 07:21

Well, you should always be selective in what you’re investing in in crypto. If we talk about investing versus short-term swing trades,right? In terms of actual investing, yes, be selective. And I think that there’s been this real disconnect over the past couple of years. I think a lot of investors have wisened up to that disconnect too, is that a lot of these coins do not really have any value,

Lark Davis 07:43

and the market’s correcting to that reality, whereas other ones probably should have more value than they have. And, but because of the way the crypto trades, if Bitcoin goes down, everything goes down. There’s not a lot of areas in the market where you’ll see outperformance, like in the stock market. Okay, you know,

Lark Davis 08:02

oil stocks doing good one day, defense stocks doing good another day. Everything kind of slowly goes up over time, whereas when one major sector of crypto pukes, everything kind of pukes together, and it’s a very problematic place to be because of that. But a lot of these coins, and we’ve seen this with some recent acquisitions,

Lark Davis 08:21

for example, the tokens are actually completely useless and are just a fundraising mechanism for these teams to get more money after they raise from the VCs. The reality is that a lot of these guys will sell equity in their companies, and then they’ll also release a token on the market. The token’s sort of an afterthought is like,

Lark Davis 08:41

“Well, we can do that too, and somebody’s probably going to buy it, so we can dump that on the market and make more money out of that.” And that’s a bad model,right? If you look at crypto-first teams though, and we’re talking about the people like Aave, Sky, which was formerly Maker, Chainlink, people like this, these were crypto-first companies,right?

Lark Davis 09:00

And they’ve had a real dedication to trying to create crypto products, drive value to their crypto tokens. And so if you’re looking at things that will probably hold value in the future and crypto protocols that will probably still be here in 10 years’ time, stuff like that is probably a worthwhile place to research and to consider putting money into,right?

Lark Davis 09:21

Whereas obviously a lot of this sort of flash in the pan stuff is very much a different story. And over the last two years, we’ve seen another two dozen layer one blockchains launch, and they don’t have any users.

Lark Davis 09:35

You know, we’ve had Blockbuster ICOs where they come out at $5, $10, $20 billion valuations, and it’s basically down only from there because there’s just not the demand for the token. And even for some of these older networks, I’ll share a quick story with you. The guys over at Avalanche, you know, nice blockchain. They’ve got some good economics to their blockchain, all that kind of stuff.

Lark Davis 09:56

There is very, very little demand for their token in the market. And it was really revealed by the fact that when they launched digital asset treasury companies for Avalanche, it was funded or they bought directly from, I should say, the foundation who sold it to them at OTC prices because the foundation’s sitting on all this AVAX.

Lark Davis 10:17

They can’t sell it on the market without completely wrecking the price. And so they’re kind of stuck because there’s just not enough organic demand for this network. And AVAX is a top 20, 30 coin most days,right? And so if a coin like that can’t do well, which, you know, has users, has DeFi, has all that kind of stuff,

Lark Davis 10:37

it’s been a real tough bid for these new networks coming in, which are trying to create something out of nothing, essentially. So we’ve had a flood of coins in the market that we didn’t really have any demand for or need for, and the market, to an extent, is exposing that realityright now. But also there’s just no hype in the market.

Lark Davis 10:58

There’s no retail buyers. VCs are not buying cryptoright now because why the heck would they? I mean, for the by and large, we’ve seen venture capital funding in crypto absolutely decimated over the last sort of 18 months because AI has been the better place to put your money.

Lark Davis 11:13

Okay, you could have invested in random blockchain number 522, or you could have invested in OpenAI or Anthropic or Figure AI or any of these companies two or three years ago, and those would have been the better bets to make.

Frank Curzio 11:27

So when I’m looking at these different trends, like you’re saying, because when I look at crypto and you’re looking at level two, then you go into DeFi, you go into AI, you know, tokens around AI, and now it’s prediction markets, real-world assets. Is there a certain trend that’s going to get people excited or certain technologies or innovations that have you excited from like a macro standpoint where, you know,

Frank Curzio 11:45

DeFi game changer, obviously, and you know, that was brought to the forefront. But there’s just so many technologies when I feel like, when I always look to crypto, and the reason why I think the previous administration wanted to sit it, you know, shut it down, I get it because there’s a lobbying dollars for the banks because a lot of this stuff threatened the banks,right? I mean, you’re making a massive amount of fees, and a lot of this stuff could do without fees. And that’s what’s fascinating me.

Frank Curzio 12:04

And is there any macro? Is there any something that maybe people aren’t talking about? That might be a tough question to say, you know what, this could really change the landscape of crypto, kind of like what AI did. People don’t remember like 2022, 2021, 2022. I mean, we were trading high valuations after COVID. Yes, the government, you know, put a ton of money into the market and, you know, lift all asset prices across the board.

Frank Curzio 12:25

But if it wasn’t for AI, just adding this new growth layer, kind of like what Cloud did, whatever, 10, 15 years before, it really like everybody, this is a game changer,right? This is a revolution. This is something we’ve never seen before, increasing productivity. You can’t even see the, you can’t even look forward and see where the scalability ends, which is remarkable for some trends,right?

Frank Curzio 12:44

When you look at scalability, iPhones or anything that comes out, you could say, okay, scalability is based on how many people are going to buy them. You can’t even see it at the end, and you keep seeing these companies spend money. My question to you is, is there something like that where AI changed the landscape? I believe in the entire stock market. Is there something that you see that could change the landscape? Is it prediction markets? Is it real-world assets? Is it tokenization, which we know Larry Fink,

Frank Curzio 13:03

$13 trillion in assets under management, he’s really behind this saying this is the next biggest trend he’s ever seen since ETFs?

Lark Davis 13:14

I would say AI in crypto, particularly AI agents, which have gone through wild swings of popularity.

Lark Davis 13:21

But I think that’s a very interesting area because as we start building out more AI agents in the real world, the most logical means of exchange for AI agents will become crypto networks, and the validations necessary will come from things like Chainlink for, you know, decentralized, honest Oracle markets to tell you one thing or the other happened.

Lark Davis 13:42

Prediction markets are very interesting. Obviously, they’re super popular. And part of the reason why a lot of altcoins and meme coins and stuff like that have suffered price-wise is because they’re just better places to gamble your money, to speculate,right? Why buy a meme coin that’s likely going to go to zero when you could go and bet on a sports market or a politics market and get nice upsized returns potentially too?

Lark Davis 14:02

So there’s more competition now. But AI agents, I think, will remain to be a very interesting space in crypto. Obviously, it’s absolutely wreckedright now because everything is, but I think that’ll be a strong comeback area and a very interesting use case for cryptocurrency technologies. And yeah, tokenization, tokenization of stuff, which also again puts more pressure on altcoins because when you can trade equities on chain,

Lark Davis 14:24

when you can trade housing markets on chain, rare art on chain, all that kind of stuff, which is coming and is already here to some extent, it puts more pressure on, well, why would I trade this frog coin if I could trade actual stocks on chain in a decentralized manner for my wallet, which makes things easier and settlements easier and all that kind of stuff.

Lark Davis 14:43

So the tokenization aspect is literally going to bring trillions of dollars into the cryptocurrency industry,right? And that’ll get used in all kinds of fascinating ways. People will take their stocks and they’ll put them into DeFi platforms and take cash loans versus them to farm yield and to buy meme coins and all that kind of stuff.

Lark Davis 15:03

So the money’s out there. The money’s coming. It’s just not hereright now,right? We’re going through this corrective period, which makes a lot of people pessimistic, obviously, for good reason. Prices are down. It’s not very exciting. When prices go up, everyone’s excited again. I get it. It’s a simple human psychology.

Lark Davis 15:21

But if you look at the fundamentals of what’s being built and all the stuff that’s coming like the Clarity Act, for example, and it’s interesting to see the Clarity Act and the points of disagreement where they, did you see this article the other day, Brian Armstrong, now the most hated man on Wall Street or something like that?

Frank Curzio 15:35

Yes, Wall Street Journal, yep.

Lark Davis 15:36

And of course, he’s the CEO of Coinbase.

Frank Curzio 15:38

Yep.

Lark Davis 15:39

For anybody out there. Yep. And for anybody who doesn’t know, he’s the CEO of Coinbase. And he was basically arguing that, well, stablecoin providers should give yield back to stablecoin holders, but the big banks don’t want that. Last thing the big banks want is for people to have a better deal somewhere else because do you go to the bank, go to JP Morgan Chase, what are you getting on your moneyright now?

Lark Davis 15:57

0.1% on a savings account or something like that? It’s a crime. Essentially, they’re taking your money and keeping it. And so crypto’s disrupting that, and it’s being foughtright now. And the fact that they’re calling Brian Armstrong the most hated man on Wall Street is a good thing. It means our industry is winning and that there are big stakes at play here.

Lark Davis 16:18

And when you understand the value of this technology beyond the short-term bullshit that’s going on, when you understand the value of this technology, it is fundamental and it will be a major pillar of the future of the internet despite all the short-term turbulence.

Frank Curzio 16:33

Yeah, that was an amazing article too. And that was just a few days ago. What amazed me is you could see who puts that out,right? Because the disruption of banks, banks haven’t been disrupted maybe ever. Yeah, you have online banking and stuff like that, but it’s been this boys’ club where they could charge fees, whatever they want. It’s the only industry where the four top banks, you can’t have a regular bank go in and break into that,right? Which no matter what it,

Frank Curzio 16:52

you can’t have like a Facebook, you can’t have a Google, you can’t have someone like come out of nowhere and dominate an industry. They don’t allow it. The more assets you have, the higher the tier ratios. We saw New York Community Bank actually almost go under because they did a great thing. Their assets increased to a hundred billion and they got punished. So they had increased their ratios. People said, oh, there’s a run in the bank and the bank absolutely crashed because they raised those assets.

Frank Curzio 17:11

They were getting bigger. So I understand that part. I guess I have to ask you, when you’re looking at someone that follows crypto and you have a lot of investments within crypto, are you looking at the opportunity from the stock perspective as well as the Coinbases or maybe the Galaxy Digitals, which again are the previous administration, they were told that they were definitely going to get the NASDAQ listing. They qualified and they just said, no, too bad.

Frank Curzio 17:29

Now they have it. Robinhood’s another one that’s very disruptive, disrupted the whole entire industry with fees. Yes, we know they get charged on, you know, percentage of how much they make on each, you know, but still you don’t have to pay the initial fees upfront. Do you look at some of these stocks, like some of these bigger names as a place where it might provide a little more safety and also carry the upside?

Frank Curzio 17:49

Because one, the safety comes from maybe a little bit more transparency that they’re registered, SECs, more you could see, but also they’re going to participate as well if Bitcoin and the rest of the market goes higher.

Lark Davis 18:00

Yeah, absolutely. Look, crypto stocks have been very interesting. Data centers obviously have been huge winners over the last year, and that’s because of them being able to pivot and say, hey, we’re also going to do AI data center stuff. We’re going to do AI compute power, and we’re also going to keep mining Bitcoin onside. So those stocks have been absolute winners.

Lark Davis 18:18

And if you look at things like Coinbase, I own Coinbase. I like Coinbase, and I think Coinbase is only getting better. They’re now doing prediction markets. They’re now doing futures trading. They’re bringing stocks,right? And so that’s a platform that has over a hundred million users. So that’s a big deal. You know, if you think about them as a stock trading place where they’re bringing more and more stocks in,

Lark Davis 18:37

which is exactly what they’re doing, that then becomes probably one of the biggest stock brokerages in the world. I’m not sure how many people like Charles Schwab and stuff like that have, but it’s going to be an absolutely massive, massive player here. And so is the current pricing of Coinbase based on what is coming correct? I don’t think so.

Lark Davis 18:56

Is it correct based on it being a pure crypto play? Yeah, probably, but it’s not a pure crypto play anymore. And even if it was a pure crypto play, they still make truckloads of money. So I think something like Coinbase is a pretty decent stock to add on big dips,right? As an example, and I’ve been holding that. I think my average entry price is 80 bucks or something on it like that.

Lark Davis 19:16

I bought, I actually bought a little bit post-IPO and then added a whole bunch during the bear market. So there’s definitely good opportunities in the crypto space. But for me personally, besides sort of, you know, I’ve got a little bit of Coinbase and a little bit of a couple other crypto stocks, but most of my stock stuff is non-crypto related because I have so much crypto already.

Lark Davis 19:36

Why would I want to add more stress to my life holding more crypto proxy plays? But I think some of them are really good and do have great potential. That being said, I also think there’s a lot of companies that will IPO over the next year because we are going to have a huge IPO season.

Lark Davis 19:50

Obviously, you saw this chart recently, just sort of the top 20 IPOs that are coming are worth like $13 trillion or some crazy number like that. It’s just we got huge, huge amounts of IPOs coming, and IPOs only happen when the market’s hot. And the fact that all these companies are planning to IPO in the next six to 18 months means there’s a general expectation that Trump’s going to run it hot,

Lark Davis 20:11

that the economy will be hot, that the markets will be hot, and that there’ll be exit liquidity. Okay, you guys have to understand the IPO game. There’ll be exit liquidity for the early investors in the IPOs. Now, it doesn’t mean you can’t trade the IPOs when they come out. Okay, there’s going to be opportunities. IPOs are going to pump. We saw it with Circle,right? It came out at 60,

Lark Davis 20:30

70 bucks on listing day and it went to 300 bucks within two weeks or something like that. So there’ll be opportunities to trade those, but I won’t be rushing in to get any of these IPOs when they come out for long-term holdings. I’ll be looking to wait for the next bear market and pick up things like Anthropic at a 90% discount because that’s what’s going to happen to these hot AI stocks when the bear market comes.

Lark Davis 20:51

They’re going to get absolutely slaughtered, and it’ll be a great buying opportunity for those when they come.

Frank Curzio 20:56

So staying with this stock perspective, as someone who’s followed crypto for such a long time, was it a laughable moment? Did you take it serious when you saw these crypto treasury companies that, you know, they’re buying Bitcoin? This is a, you know, MicroStrategy’s strategy, which he did it very early. The company’s called Strategy now. He did it very early and benefited. And yes, crypto’s down.

Frank Curzio 21:16

It’s below his cost base a little bitright now. That’s fine. But a lot of these guys late, they started going to Ethereum with Tom Lee. He started going to Solana. He started going to other things where the treasury company is based on buying it. I never understood what’s Ethereum because when you have something, if you buy a treasury company and you want to hoard something at a higher price,

Frank Curzio 21:35

you usually do it if there’s a limited supply. So I get it with Bitcoin. I never got it with Ethereum,right? Because you could just keep issuing more supply and they burn tokens they could eventually. But, you know, I never realized that. Did you look at some of this stuff and being like, man, this stuff’s going to be a disaster? It just seems like, you know, you’re buying the stock based on them buying Ethereum. Why don’t you just buy Ethereum and probably have much less risk?

Frank Curzio 21:54

Because if you look at that, how far Ethereum has come down, these treasury companies have come down a lot more. And even when Ethereum started going higher, some of these periods, you didn’t really see these companies go higher outside of the quick IPO because they bought a big name on them. I wanted to get your thoughts. Are these serious companies? Are these things that you just shake your head and you’re like, what the fuck’s going on here?

Lark Davis 22:12

I think a few of them are serious companies. Strategy is a serious company. You know, Michael Saylor’s building a Bitcoin bank essentially. So that’s a serious company, and I would not, you know, bet against that. I think that BitMine is a serious company because they have been expanding out beyond just buying Ethereum. Now they’re $6 billion in the red under Ethereum buys. So,

Lark Davis 22:30

I mean, they’re feeling the pain without a doubt, but they’ve also been buying lots of other stuff on the side. So they’re doing more than just being an Ethereum treasury company. And being an Ethereum treasury company, I get it. I get it. Makes sense. Why not? You know, it’s its own sort of unique asset. It’s not Bitcoin,right? But it’s a unique asset that’s got value and it’s got huge metrics within the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Lark Davis 22:52

It’s got staking rewards that you can bring back to the people and, you know, provide that yield in the form of the staking rewards. So I get that. But one thing I was saying when we started seeing all these companies come out, I was like, it’s going to end badly. And of course, it ended way worse, way quicker than I thought it was going to. Honestly, I thought the digital asset treasury company would have a little more legs to it,

Lark Davis 23:12

but man, we basically had six weeks, two months, something like that of all these treasury companies getting launched. And when you started seeing, I thought there was a Dogecoin treasury company that got launched, I think, you know, and it started getting down to really just random altcoins as well. And it’s like, that’s not going to end well. Of course, that’s not going to end well. You know, it’s just problematic. If we go back to the Avalanche example,

Lark Davis 23:33

they’re basically launching companies and finding novel ways to get exit liquidity for foundation tokens. And that’s, you know, hey, don’t hate the player, hate the game,right? You know, no shade on Avalanche. I think it’s a decent blockchain, but most of these treasury companies, as the market is bad currently,

Lark Davis 23:54

and if it gets worse, I think we’ll see a lot of bankruptcies, a lot of forced capitulation at the bottom where these assets will be either sold OTC to someone like Galaxy Digital who will buy up the blood in the streets when it comes,

Lark Davis 24:09

or they’ll be forced to just liquidate assets at the bottom and drive prices lower and the crescendo of treasury companies capitulating. Maybe what puts in the final bottom for this current bearish cycle we’re going through. We shall see. But I think everybody, every time, I just want to say real quick, so every time the price of Bitcoin goes down a half percentage point,

Lark Davis 24:28

everybody tells you that MicroStrategy’s going to go bankrupt. It’s not. MicroStrategy’s not going bankrupt. Saylor.

Frank Curzio 24:33

He’s not going bankrupt.

Lark Davis 24:33

He’s a crazy person. You have to understand he’s a crazy person. I heard him talking about Bitcoin one time, and some lady asked him something like, so what happened when he found Bitcoin, whatever? And he was like, almost with tears in his eyes. He’s like, I finally found purpose in my life. I found the thing. I was like, oh no, you don’t bet against that guy. That guy’s like completely orange pill to converted.

Lark Davis 24:54

He’s going to be fine. A lot of these other companies, they were just riding the hype wave. So yeah, I would say most of the digital asset treasury companies are completely uninvestable. They were uninvestable then. They’re certainly uninvestable now.

Frank Curzio 25:05

So let’s get into talking to Lock Davis with Mastery. I want to talk about this really quick because I think it’s important. It’s relevant. So we have a big audience. We also have some younger investors, entrepreneurs and stuff. Before I got on, I said, listen, congratulations on your success. Last time I interviewed many years ago and see, you know, the growth and just the following that you have is incredible. And thank you so much.

Frank Curzio 25:23

I think you’re doing this from Dubai, which is crazy, which is awesome. Talk about that journey because I think entrepreneurs today, especially if they’re younger, I think they think it’s going to be easy. I think that they’re like, hey, you know, they’re not used to failure and you fail a lot and you get to learn a lot more from your failures.

Frank Curzio 25:40

I don’t know anyone who has an incredibly successful company who hasn’t failed along the way,right? And you know, you go around, you tell between your legs, you learn. It’s tough. It’s a humble experience. But talk about that experience for investors out there because I think a lot of people might look at you and say, wow, look at this guy. He built this site to 600,000 subscribers. And see, it wasn’t easy,right? I mean, talk about that journey. I think people really appreciate that.

Lark Davis 26:03

Yeah, well, it’s taken eight years,right, to get where I amright now. And if I could go back and do it all over again, I think I would build in a different industry. But you build the industry you build and you do the things that you do. Just because crypto is so crazy, man. Oh my gosh. But look, the reality is you will have a lot of setbacks doing anything.

Lark Davis 26:21

And there’s been just the amount of times I’ve just been kicked in the balls by business,right? Because this is a business at the end of the day,right? I mean, I love what I do. I love my job. It’s fantastic. I get to come and talk about something I’m interested in and passionate about every day. Talk about markets, talk about crypto, talk about stocks. It’s a heck of a lot of fun, but it is a business.

Lark Davis 26:40

We’ve got the newsletter. We have our private community,right? And I’ve been kind of bored in the markets recently, so I’m starting to think about other businesses to launch too. And entrepreneurship is an absolute grind and you will fail. I failed terribly at things.

Lark Davis 26:55

We tried launching a stock investor newsletter back in early 2023, and it failed terribly. Now, I think there was definitely theright idea, but the wrong implementation. And the company I was working with to try to do marketing,

Lark Davis 27:14

they were just getting the wrong people to sign up to our list essentially. And we were just not converting them into paying customers, and they weren’t clicking on the affiliate links and stuff. So we were just having, we were spending a lot of money and not really making any revenue. And so that’s just, you know, quarter million dollar experiment down the drain. What are you going to do? You will have setbacks in the entrepreneurship game,

Lark Davis 27:34

and you have to accept them as interesting learning experiences. But when you commit yourself to the process, when you commit yourself to the process and say, you know what, this is what I am. This is what I do. This is the life that I live. You know, I do these business things. And when you sort of say failure is not really an option, I will always find a way.

Lark Davis 27:56

It changes things because if you’re always looking back over your shoulder saying, well, I could always go back to that. I could always do this other thing, you know? And if you have the mentality, burn the boats, take the island kind of thing,right? Then you will succeed. But not a lot of people want to commit to that because that’s fucking terrifying,right? Going off into this unknown and, you know, it really is.

Lark Davis 28:17

It really is. And of course, now it’s even crazier because there’s so much competition now, and AI is disrupting so many things. So many people that thought they could build some kind of freelancing life online are getting completely disrupted, you know, whether it be editing for videos, editing for thumbnails,right?

Frank Curzio 28:34

Software industry has been annihilated.

Lark Davis 28:36

I spent a lot of money on thumbnails. Yeah, absolutely. I used to spend a lot of money on, you know, human editors to make thumbnails. Now I can make four thumbnails for a dollar using AI. It’s crazy what’s changed. But as a business person, if you’re not, for example, keeping up with the latest AI trends,

Lark Davis 28:55

which is like drinking from a fire hose every day, it’s unbelievable.

Frank Curzio 28:58

It’s true. It’s crazy.

Lark Davis 28:59

Then you’re falling behind. You’re falling behind,right? But this is the thing. The opportunity to make money online has never been better. It’s interesting. I’ve actually been making money online since I was about 16, I would say. Back in the day, this is the late 90s, early 2000s, flipping stuff on eBay back in the day. It was a good time.

Lark Davis 29:20

And so, you know, going forward over the years and getting now into content creation, all this stuff, it’s a wild, wild, wild game to work in. And look, the hardest thing, I say, anybody who wants to be famous on the internet, rethink your life choices, okay? Because the hardest part about making content is the key man problem,right?

Lark Davis 29:40

If I want my business to continue moving forward, I have to show up and make videos all the time, which I love. Don’t get me wrong,right? But it makes it hard to do certain things, go on holiday or something like this. So if you are going to build a business, if you’re listening to this thing, man, I need to build a business with something, doing something,right? Maybe I’ll be famous on the internet.

Lark Davis 29:58

Find a way to do it where you don’t have to be the number one employee,right? That would be the thing to do, you know? Soright now, for example, I’ve even started a few faceless YouTube channels, and they’re going, they’re young, but they’re starting off well. And so just interesting things where you can have more impact without less of your own time being having to put into it.

Lark Davis 30:19

So yeah, yeah, I love it though. Don’t get me wrong. I love doing what I do.

Frank Curzio 30:24

Yeah. I mean, I would say the most successful business, and a lot of people share this with me, is when you could operate the business, walk away from it, and it still operates, it’s going to pay you for the rest of your life, which is perfect,right? So you want to be the face of the brand, which you’ll always be, but you know, everything goes through you because I deal with that too with our platform too,right? A lot of that stuff goes through me.

Frank Curzio 30:43

I’m starting to pass out and delegate a little bit more, but that makes a lot of sense. So listen, we have a little bit more time left, and thank you for sharing that. I really do. I think that that’s going to help out a lot of people listen to this. You have a site, Wealth Mastery, which is really cool. And what I love is you have, so you have your free, you can put your email address, and you get a lot of your stories for free.

Frank Curzio 31:02

You talk about technical patterns. You have a lot of other people like helping out and contributing and stuff. It’s awesome. I’m on it. I’ve been on it for over five years. And then you have paid services. Talk a little bit about that because I wanted to ask you some of your favorite plays, but I don’t want you to give away anything that obviously you’re giving away to paid subscribers. But talk about the site. And I’ve done that.

Frank Curzio 31:20

People ask me what my favorite things are. I’m like, I can’t tell you everything. I can tell you it’d be general in some here and there or maybe something you’re up a lot on, but you always want to be careful and serve those paid subscribers the best. But talk a little bit about your site.

Lark Davis 31:32

Yeah. So our newsletter, it’s a fantastic product. It’s just been, it’s got better and better and better over the years. And the amount of value it’s provided in the free newsletter is absolutely insane. You know, there’s trades of the day and DGEM plays and prediction markets and all this kind of stuff, actionable insights,right? Because we don’t want to just give you the news. You can get the news anywhere.

Lark Davis 31:51

You want to know what the news means, what’s actually going on. That’s what we try to do with the newsletter, and that’s free. The value is absolutely insane. And it’s interesting actually to talk about the grind of entrepreneurship and stuff like that. The newsletter, at some point, I’m not there yet, but at some point I hope will be a self-sustaining business that will just kind of run on the side,

Lark Davis 32:10

but it still requires a lot of regular input from me, let’s say. But it’s a fantastic product. I’m just so happy with our newsletter and the quality of the newsletter and all that sort of stuff. Now, there’s also the upgrade to a premium product where we do like a weekly stock report, a weekly altcoin report, stuff like that. You know, look, we don’t get everythingright.

Lark Davis 32:29

Nobody ever does,right? But we’ve got a great team of researchers. We’ve got some really killer plays recently, like Micron Technologies stock up a hundred percent since we shared a report on it. Cantonne, this is like the hot coinright now, despite the fact the rest of the market’s absolutely puking its guts out. This thing’s up over a hundred percent since we shared the report on it. So there’s still opportunities to make money out there in the market,right?

Lark Davis 32:50

You just have to have theright sort of perspective. And what we try to do is cut a little bit through the noise that you’re hearing on social media. Go to X and it’s just everybody’s chilling their bags, which is fine. I get it, man. Work for your bags. I’m not hating, man. Not hating. Work for your bags. But if you want to actually find, okay, what’s stuff mean? What do I really need to know?

Lark Davis 33:09

Because I see so many news stories that get shared that nobody cares, man. Nobody cares. This, you know, some company acquired some other company. Who cares? It doesn’t mean anything for my bottom line. You know, I can’t trade that. I don’t own that. I can’t own that. Nobody cares. What’s the point,right? So when it comes down to information that’s actually going to help you make money,right?

Lark Davis 33:31

Help you make better investing decisions. That’s kind of our goal.

Frank Curzio 33:36

You know, I’m looking through because I have it in my email. I was going to put it up, but this is, you know, again, when you get this, this is for free. It goesright to your email box. And just the stories, like you said, like the topics, New York Stock Exchange launched 24/7 tokenized trading. I see this in our industry all the time, Larga, as you know, where, you know, people want to provide something free. You’ll look at it and then you’ll hopefully subscribe to your paid services after they get to know you, which is normal.

Frank Curzio 33:56

But the value that you provide from this free newsletter is absolutely incredible. I mean, you got a chart a day. You talk about different ideas. You know, it’s just, it really, you know, congrats on having a free product and everyone, you’re going to, a lot of people sign up to these things, you know? But to have a free product that has that much information in it, it makes you think like, hey, if I subscribe to your paid product, you’re going to get, you know, much, much more value.

Frank Curzio 34:16

But I love the fact that how much you put in there. And I do read it often. So that’s a great product.

Lark Davis 34:21

Thank you. I appreciate that you’re reading it. It’s a product that I’m extremely happy about, and I think it’s absolutely fantastic. And our goal with the free newsletter is always to provide insane value,right? And then the reality of that is that if you go to the next step, there’s a whole nother mountain of insane value to get. But we don’t want our free product to just be something like,

Lark Davis 34:41

oh, well, you know, just a couple of news bits or whatever. And no, it’s got to be something that you want to open that, not just for the memes. Oh, we got the good memes, guys. Don’t worry. We got great memes. I like thinking a little bit of it for the memes, but stay for the actual insights.

Frank Curzio 34:54

Yeah. And it’s good because look, crypto is just one area that I cover. I cover all industries. I worked for Jim Craner for a long time, for five years, helping out his research department. A while ago, we had to cover every single industry, every stock back then, which was cool. So these newsletters are helpful to me,right? You got a free newsletter on crypto. I got two free newsletters on AI. Just to look through them to see what’s going on really quick,right?

Frank Curzio 35:14

Because I’m so busy. And then if I see something that I like, I really dig in. I’ll read, you know, your perspective on it, and then I’ll go even further, ask questions. I have lots of people in the industry that I rely on as well, which is cool. I guess the final question I think everybody wants to know is, do you have ideas, things that you invest in that you’re not giving away? And if you don’t, it’s perfectly fine. Some people are like, well, you know, it’s for the paid subscribers. But even if it’s part of the bigger ones or within crypto,

Frank Curzio 35:36

becauseright now everything has gotten annihilated. It doesn’t even matter. People always say, I’ve been told this for a long time, and I disagree with it, that the most important part of a business, if you’re going to back it, is leadership. Make sure you’re backing theright person. And I don’t care what person is on these crypto companies or who the main person is. They’re all down. They’re getting annihilated,right?

Frank Curzio 35:54

So you have to look at the macro conditions and what’s working sometimes. That’s very important too, because as ofright now, you could have the best leaders in the world. And if your sector’s down and getting crushed, it’s a liquidity event or something like that, you’re going to see you get hurt. What are some of the things you’re seeing, the opportunities, even if it’s sector-related within crypto, that you’re like, allright, I got to go in now. Because if I have a year or two outlook, I mean, we’ve seen it before.

Frank Curzio 36:14

Some of these things that go 5x, 10x. It’s always why I said with speculative money, you can’t see the gains in the stock market that you could see in crypto because these companies IPO at crazy valuations. Most of the growth’s already taken place. There’s not like cherry picking here. You can go through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of 10x, 20,000x winners. I’m sure you shared some of them.

Frank Curzio 36:34

You had some of them on your books. What are some of the things that you like within the crypto sector now that it’s down? Are you saying, hey, if you have a 12, 24-month outlook and you’re not going to look at this, believe me, you’re going to be really happy.

Lark Davis 36:44

Yeah. So two things that I think would be very interesting to keep in mind, maybe three. We’ll give you three. One would be Solana. Solana has incredible potential. It’s really one of the best blockchains out there by far. And I know the Ethereum people’s heads will explode. The Bitcoin people’s heads will explode. But I think it’s massively undervalued compared to Ethereum.

Lark Davis 37:05

By most metrics, it’s currently beating Ethereum. Now, Ethereum has picked up a bit with recent upgrades. So, you know, hat off to the Ethereum developers because there was a while there where the Ethereum developers were just like, shut up, everybody. We’re in our ivory tower. We don’t want to hear it. How dare you ask us to do anything for this blockchain? And then they kind of started listening and making some big upgrades. And those big upgrades have had big impacts. So Ethereum’s still worth paying attention to.

Lark Davis 37:26

But if you like Ethereum, why the heck wouldn’t you like Solana? If you look at the relative valuations and the metrics of Solana, I think Solana’s a good bet for the next time crypto heats up. And I’ve been buying it recently and will continue buying it. So that’s one. The other, Pump.fun. We’re under a hundred bucks.

Lark Davis 37:46

Look at that. Pump.fun. Now, this perhaps a slightly controversial pick, but as long as human greed remains, which is probably not going anywhere anytime, I assume, then people will keep going to the meme coin casino and rolling the dice, okay? And they have a super aggressive token buyback model,

Lark Davis 38:05

which over time, I think, has a real impact. And so you see every time the market bounces a little bit, this thing tends to run pretty hard. So that’s one of the.

Frank Curzio 38:14

Is itright here? Would you say Pump.fun?

Lark Davis 38:17

Yeah. Pump.fun. That’s the one. Yep. So this is one that probably has a pretty good potential when things turn around to have decent price appreciation, okay? And then really, I think anything with good tokenomics,right? Because a lot of stuff has absolutely terrible tokenomics or no tokenomics at all. So if you look at good tokenomics coins,

Lark Davis 38:37

we’re thinking about things like maybe the SKY ecosystem or something like that, but one that’s been super popular and one that has aggressive buybacks and is a great product is Hyperliquid, okay? So Hyperliquid is one that if you see great bear market discounts on that one, probably is going to come back next cycle.

Lark Davis 38:56

Now, there’s no guarantees. Things die during the bear market. People give them walk away. But I think that’s one of those ones where the founder is pretty based and gives a crap about what’s going on and likes crypto and is a crypto-first builder, which again, you really need to think about, is the person who’s building your crypto product a crypto-first person or are they just kind of a,

Lark Davis 39:17

hey, I’m just going to come in here, extract some money, give it all to the VCs back in San Francisco and screw everybody? Because that’s what happens for most of these things,right? But I think Hyperliquid’s a definite differentiator in that because it is a crypto-first builder and it’s got big backing by a lot of people and a very hyper-aggressive buyback model,

Lark Davis 39:37

which makes a difference to the long-term impact of what that chart looks like.

Frank Curzio 39:42

I mean, it’s amazing because you look at the chart and this is one month where everything has gotten annihilated and see where this is. But you know, I can’t leave because this is so important and this is one of the biggest things I say in our crypto newsletter is the token economics are very important. Talk a little bit more about that. What else do you look for for token economics? Because you could have, the way I explain it, you could have the greatest company on earth and Microsoft could come and say,

Frank Curzio 40:02

hey, I’m going to buy this company for 30 billion. You get nothing. I mean, you’re not getting an equity stake in this,right? So you’re tied to the economics of how this token works,right? And how it’s used and the buyback facilities, it’s like buying back shares. You eliminate them.

Frank Curzio 40:14

If you have a limited supply or, you know, a fixed supply, where you’re not allowed to just continue offering more and more tokens, talk about some of the things within that because that is really the key to investing in the sector, I think. Outside of, you know, if you’re going to trade,right? You could trade momentum and stuff, but if you’re really going to buy something that you think is going to be something a year from now, you know, talk about that.

Lark Davis 40:34

Yeah. It’s got to have tech that is actually relevant being used. Chainlink, for example. And Chainlink’s got better with their token model over time. So fair play to them. They’re starting to do buybacks and stuff years down the line, but they finally started doing it. So they have staking and buybacks and stuff now. So that’s not only fantastic technology, but also now interesting tokenomics. But you want to look for buybacks.

Lark Davis 40:54

I think buybacks are probably one of the biggest things because this is the thing, when you own a token, you own nothing. You have no rights, okay? You’re not going to go govern the platform. Come on, be real,right? You’re not going to go govern Uniswap. And even if you did with your 10,000 tokens or 500 tokens, guess what? The VCs and the team own most of everything anyway, and they’re really going to decide the direction of what’s going on in most cases,right? So don’t fall for governance.

Lark Davis 41:17

The biggest things that probably move the market are real use cases, real demand, obviously, and very aggressive tokenomics like Pump.fun or Hyperliquid has, where they have incredible buyback metrics that are literally buying back millions of dollars of tokens every day from the market, okay? Because most tokens have none of that.

Lark Davis 41:39

They might give you governance rights. And that’s terrible. That’s a terrible reason to buy a token, okay? Now, there can be moments to speculate on those coins,right? Meme coins. Meme coins. You know what was great about meme coins? Meme coins did away with all the bullshit. They didn’t come out and say, oh, we’re going to have this super duper technology. Oh, we’re going to let you govern our platform.

Lark Davis 41:59

Like, no, it’s a picture of a frog. They put a hat on the dog. Trade it. That’s it. There’s no expectations here,right? So meme coins are just more honest about their bullshit. You get these VC coins. They get this whole big white paper and their pitch deck, and they get a chain with a bunch of, you know, false transactions on it. Look how cool we are. Nobody cares, man.

Lark Davis 42:17

No one’s using it. And there’s no demand for your token. So look, I would say out of the, let’s say, thousands of quote-unquote serious crypto projects, because there’s technically millions of coins, and people like to throw that number around like, oh, there’s 27 million tokens or something like that. This is true. There are. But 99.9% of those,

Lark Davis 42:38

maybe even higher, 99.998% of those were just garbage tokens, launched as meme coins. They got to a $10,000 market cap, went to zero. It’s not serious stuff,right? If we look at the actual serious quote-unquote coins, I would say that in crypto, there’s at max a hundred investable assets. Max, max. It’s probably a lot.

Lark Davis 42:57

It’s probably 30 max that are like actually have the fundamentals and the technology to back them up. And so it makes you realize we are still early to this entire industry. The industry will get a lot bigger. Crypto’s not going to die. We have these wild moments of extreme excess followed by extreme depression. It’s what happens in crypto, okay?

Lark Davis 43:16

When you’re investing in crypto, you ain’t investing in stocks, okay? I love stocks. Big stock fam because it’s a fundamentally different game where you actually own something. It’s not to say there’s not volatility in stocks. It’s not to say stock companies don’t do fraud, that they don’t go bankrupt. Sure. All that stuff happens too, but at a much, much, much lower rate than happens in crypto. So if you are coming into crypto,

Lark Davis 43:36

do not come into it with rose-tinted glasses. You will get your ass handed to you, okay? Come into it with skepticism. Come into it with a healthy bit of everything’s bullshit until proven otherwise, which is why Bitcoiners are so sort of skeptical of everything because they’ve been around so long and seen so much. And most of it has been BS,

Lark Davis 43:55

but not all of it’s been BS. And you also can’t let yourself get blinded,right? Because it’s easy to get blinded and say, well, everything’s bullshit and therefore I’ll invest in nothing. You would miss out on incredible opportunities too. So there you go.

Frank Curzio 44:09

Nah, it’s perfect. And listen, we’re going to end there. And I really appreciate you coming on. Again, I know you’re in Dubai and you could see a little bit of, you know, which is great. 99% of the sound is great, but sometimes it might cut in and out. But I really appreciate you doing this. And if someone wants to learn more about you, we talked about a YouTube page, which is amazing,right? So you can just go to Lark Davis, just, you know, YouTube.

Frank Curzio 44:28

But if someone wants to find more information, Wealth Mastery, how could they do that?

Lark Davis 44:34

Just come over and find me on X. I’d say it’s probably the best place. We’re sharing all the information over there and you can find links to the newsletter and stuff over there too. So find Lark Davis on X, verified account, and I’ll see you there.

Frank Curzio 44:45

Allright. Sounds great. Listen, I really appreciate coming on. I know how busy you are and hopefully you join us again soon, man. Appreciate it.

Announcer 44:52

Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its host and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money, and your responsibility.