The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 48 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Samani: Bitcoin is nonsense and not an inflation hedge
“No. Bitcoin is nonsense. It does not, there are so many ways to, you can choose to have a productive asset or a nonproductive asset. And then there are many assets that are naturally good hedges against inflation. The obvious of which is like Walmart and Amazo…”
Samani: Bitcoin has no productive value and produces no economic utility
“Bitcoin is a strictly financial construct. Bitcoin has no economic value. It has, it is no, it's not productive. Excuse me. Bitcoin is no productive value because it doesn't do anything. It's an asset. There are some interesting properties of that asset, but i…”
Samani: XRP, Cardano, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash are garbage lacking substance
“I mean, look, there's a lot of assets in the top 10 that most people who are sophisticated retail market participants view as, you know, garbage, XRP, Cardano, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, etc. I cannot explain to you how those assets are trading nine, 10 figures a…”
Samani: Solana poses a credible threat to Ethereum's dominance
“Solana is a credible threat to Ethereum and people, they don't like it when they think that they're, you know, their investments they hold have faced a credible threat.”
Samani: Donald Trump will be in jail before the 2024 election
“My assumption is he will be in jail before the election, so I don't know if you can.”
Samani: In crypto venture deals, equity will be worth nothing
“Mechanically speaking, with a lot of the private round market deals that get done these days they're legally structured as SAFs, excuse me, as SAFs with token warrants or equity rounds with token warrants, but the primary asset that we believe will have value …”
Samani: Tokens help distribute wealth rather than concentrate it
“Without question, tokens help distribute wealth.”
Samani: Investment teams larger than 10 people are net value-destructive
“I believe that the core unit of an investment firm is the investment team. And I am of the view that if investment team is larger than 10, you are now net value destructive to the overall investment team process and culture.”
Samani: Ethereum will not have a scaling plan in 12 months
“Ethereum does not have a scaling plan seven years later. It still does not have one today. I do not think they will have one in the next 12 months.”
Samani: Hivemapper mapped 10% of global roads, growing 10x faster than Google
“Hive Mapper has mapped over 10% of the world's roads in one year, and Hive Mapper is now, they have signed multiple customers who are buying this mapping data. They have not publicly disclosed who those customers are, but like, Hive Mapper has built a mapping …”
Samani: Only four insiders knew about the database manipulations at FTX
“There, we know now there were four people who knew. Sam, Caroline, Nishad, and Gary. No one else knew. When you keep the circle small, like, you can keep information hidden, and explicitly, in this case, the information was, go make arbitrary changes in the da…”
Samani: Multicoin absolutely believes in concentration over portfolio diversification
“I definitely don't believe in diversification. I absolutely believe in concentration”
Samani: Value accrual to both tokens and equity creates conflicting incentives
“In almost all cases, there should not be value accrual to tokens and equity. There are a couple of exceptions to that. But as a general rule, that is true. For teams that try and pitch you value accrual to both, it is almost certain that those two things are i…”
Samani: Tokens only make sense for coordinating permissionless public behavior
“Tokens only make sense if you need to incentivize behavior in a permissionless fashion among the public at large. To have them all coordinate on, on some sort of broader shared objective.”
Samani: Helium cuts 99% of traditional wireless telecom costs
“And the goal of this model is, or what's great about this model is you physically remove 99% of the cost from the system. So labor cost goes to zero. Land cost goes to zero. Backhaul cost goes to zero. You just physically remove like all of the costs.”
Samani: Excluding customers from equity will be viewed as a regulatory bug
“The fact that norms today around business are those parties typically have no equity ownership. I think we'll be looked upon, I think in 20 years we'll be looked back as a bug of capital markets regulation, not as a feature.”
Samani: Multicoin only invests if intended hold horizon is forever
“It doesn't for us and the reason it doesn't is we have some basic thresholds for making investments, and one of those thresholds is we will only make an investment if our intended hold horizon at the time of investment is forever. That doesn't mean we can't se…”
Multicoin Capital operates without reserves or formal portfolio construction rules
“We have basically no formal rules of any form of portfolio construction nature. We don't do any notion of reserves and multi coin. We just deploy and raise our next fund.”
Samani: Sector-based portfolio targets in venture capital are value-destructive
“I think it's extremely value destructive to do so because you can't know ahead of time what you, like, we could not forecast helium. It would not, if we had any constraints on what is in strike zone or not, then helium would have been out of strike zone.”
Samani: Multicoin spends 93% of investment evaluation time analyzing markets
“Multicoin prioritizes I'd say 93% of our discussion time is on market. I would like glance at a couple screenshots of the product, but I don't really care. And founders, I only care that the founder market fit is like, makes sense.”
Samani: Multicoin avoids SaaS investments due to weak network effects
“We basically don't do SaaS businesses for this reason. Not like, and I say this as someone who used to be very enthralled by SaaS. But very few SaaS businesses have meaningful network effects.”
Samani: Three Arrows Capital blowup is minor relative to entire crypto market
“This three AC blow up is like bad, but like, again, there, the total cost of blow up here is two, three billion. I don't know, against the total market cap of whatever Eight hundred billion. It's still not, like, a huge number. So yeah, not, not that bad in th…”
Samani: Capital formation innovations, not leverage, drive crypto bull markets
“That's not what creates the bull markets. What's created the bull markets is, yeah, I think actually I should say the last two bull markets has been novel formations, novel breakthroughs in capital formation.”
Samani: DePIN productively channels crypto speculation into real-world economic output
“The speculation can be channeled productively, and I think that's underappreciated. D-PIN is really the kind of torchbearer, I think, on that front, where you can use the collective hive mind of people doing stuff in the real world and funding that collectivel…”
Samani: DeFi rails will eventually replace traditional regulated payment infrastructure
“DeFi payment rails are Objectively better than traditional rails. And you will see economic activity move off of traditional regulated rails to defy rails over time. That will take a while but it will happen.”
Samani: Crypto proved global demand for speculation far exceeds VC expectations
“And I would actually argue probably on an absolute dollars basis, crypto has shown that the demand for speculation globally is much larger than people previously thought. And the manifestations and forms in which people want it are broader and more varied than…”
Samani: Solana is explicitly capitalist compared to Ethereum's public-goods culture
“Ethereum is very focused on public goods funding, Very focused on kind of general welfare. And Solana is like very directly capitalist in kind of the more traditional sense of the word.”
Samani: Multicoin passed on FTX seed round before buying FTT in 2019
“The original reason we passed on the FTT seed round in March, April, 2019 was because we were like, Hey man, no separation of church and state. You can't run Alameda and FTX. People are not going to trade here. And we were like, okay, pass. And then we passed.…”
Samani: Multicoin's early bet on EOS was completely wrong
“Our first bet we made was EOS. That was absolutely wrong. There were a lot of valid technical criticisms that we ignored and all of those technical criticisms turned out to be correct.”
Samani: Every smartphone will have a built-in private key within ten years
“I want everyone in the world to have a private key built into their phone that is secure and that they can use for arbitrary financial movements, whether those are payments or investments and that they can do so across any application. And I have a high degree…”
Samani: Stripe was overhyped for merely processing credit card payments
“I had played around with Stripes APIs maybe a week or two prior. And I was quite frankly, not terribly impressed. I was like, you can take a credit card payment. Like, why is this the most hyped up company in the world?”
Samani: Multicoin holds investments indefinitely and ignores asset prices
“We scrapped the trading, the market, and I no longer look at the prices of anything. We now are 100% focused on thesis formation with our holding period is indefinite.”
Samani: Top crypto assets like Bitcoin and Solana lack obvious DCF models
“The largest assets by market cap, notably Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, et cetera are assets that don't really have an obvious DCF.”
Samani: Token incentives bootstrap physical networks by aligning risk and upside
“This is, I think like the textbook example of using token incentives to bootstrapping network. Where you actually are both able to assign risk and reward and couple those things in, in a real meaningful way. And in which the participants of the network, in thi…”
Samani: Finding truth in investment decisions requires active, intense disagreement
“The process of actually recognizing the truth fundamentally requires active disagreements. Because the human brain is subject to everyone has their own biases and whatever heuristics they're using. And they're, as they write a memo are, some of which are inher…”
Multicoin Capital hires blindly based on writing quality rather than resumes
“Step one of our hiring process is write an essay better than what's on our blog. I actually, I don't read your name. I don't read your background. I don't read your resume. I don't care. I just start reading the first words of your document.”
Samani: Early-stage investors lack rigor evaluating returns to scale
“I think most folks at the earliest stages of investments are not nearly rigorous enough in discussing where the returns to scale come from.”
Samani: Almost all product network effects are sublinear
“Almost all network effects are sublinear.”
Samani: Developers, not retail consumers, are blockchain's true customers
“The customer of a blockchain is, is not retail. The customer of a blockchain is developers.”
Samani: Changpeng Zhao will serve less than 18 months in prison
“I believe consensus is he will be less than 18 months.”
Samani: A Republican president would appoint an SEC Chair like Jay Clayton
“If a Republican is elected, it's safe to assume that the new chair of the SEC that the president will appoint is much more likely to be closer to Chair Clayton in ethos than Chair Gensler.”
Samani: Crypto funds cannot combine trading, fundamental research, and venture
“We cannot be the best at everything. We tried to for our first. 36 months, 24 to 36 months trade the market and do fundamental research and do venture. And we realized you cannot, you just cannot do all of the above.”
Samani: Retail investors have a far higher appetite for venture-like returns
“One thing I've discovered is there's a lot more demand for venture scale return, or I should say venture skew of returns among retail than you would previously think.”
Multicoin Capital IC begins with seven minutes of silent Google Doc commenting
“Once, you know, we are talking about a new asset in investment committee, the subsequent six or seven minutes are silent. It's everyone having a bunch of Google doc comment conversations concurrently.”
Multicoin writes check sizes from $1M to $300M across all stages
“We are stage agnostic. We will write one million dollar tickets. We will write three hundred million dollar tickets and we will do everything in between.”