by Mr. Z, 168X
The low-hanging fruit has been picked: Alpha is moving from narrative to cash flow, distribution, PMF
Wednesday, September 23, 2026 at 7:00 pm. Crypto is picking up again, and a number of assets such as Robinhood, Perp DEX, Privacy, and RWA are beginning to attract funds again. However, the most obvious difference in this round of the market is that it is difficult for everyone to find a completely unfamiliar new story like ICO in 2017, DeFi Summer in 2020, and then NFT and GameFi. The low-hanging fruit is getting smaller and smaller, and the market is starting to shift from “what story to tell” to “who actually found PMF.”
In this issue 168X invites back old friend Lao Bai (@Wuhuoqiu). Lately, his main focus has been on Robinhood, or, as he puts it, “fishing where the fish are.” This episode starts from BTC, ETH, HYPE, BNB, SOL, all the way to Robinhood, stock tokens, AI Agent, GPU RWA, Fomo, Perp DEX, HIP-3, and then to why the Crypto primary market is almost dead. Finally, he came to a conclusion: If it is the beginning of the bull market, this may be the last "decent bull market" for Crypto. There are only three main lines in this round, namely RWA, Perp, and Privacy.
1. ETH positions will be higher than BTC: the long-term downward trend line has finally broken through
Mr. Z: Let’s start with Bitcoin and Ethereum. You just said that if there is a bull market this round, would you personally prefer ETH or BTC?
Lao Bai: In terms of asset quality, I still think BTC is better, but I personally should put more pressure on ETH this round. I don’t know much about the complex technical indicators of the K-line, but if you look at ETH/BTC on a weekly basis, the long-term downward trend line is very obvious. You can see it by just drawing it, and it will probably break through around 0.03. If this bull market can continue for a few more months, I don’t believe that it will fall directly back after breaking through such a long-term trend line, so my position allocation should be more ETH than BTC.
Mr. Z: So what do you think of this round of BTC? Nowadays, many people will give three sets of scripts: pessimistic, neutral, and optimistic.
Lao Bai: I would look at 200,000 in the optimistic case, about 150,000 in the neutral case, and about 120,000 in the pessimistic case, which is almost back to the previous high. If BTC can reach 150,000, then since ETH has broken through the long-term downward trend against BTC, I think its increase should be 50% or 60% more than that of BTC. But how high ETH can go depends essentially on how high BTC can go, and it is difficult for it to lead the entire market on its own.
2. The low-hanging fruits have been picked: in this round of real new PMF, only RWA is the clearest
Mr. Z: My biggest feeling this time is that there are no disruptive new things like ICO in 2017, DeFi Summer in 2020, NFT, and GameFi. It seems that there is a real new story missing.
Lao Bai: I have posted many times before that the low-hanging fruits have been picked. In the past, Crypto’s innovations were actually pushed outward from technology. We first invented an ICO, invented DeFi, studied how to improve TPS, and then developed various new technical routes. At that time, there is no need to look at data, users or real PMF for the time being. As long as there is a breakthrough in technology, the market is willing to give a lot of room for imagination.
Lao Bai: But in this round, the technical routes have probably been tried, and PMF has basically explored every track, including games, privacy, ZK, Layer 2, finance, sports, cards, everything that can be explored. I think 80% to 90% of the directions have been almost positioned. The rest is for everyone to focus on several directions to continue to make breakthroughs and truly find out the PMF.
Mr. Z: So what do you think you have really found out now?
Lao Bai: The clearest one is RWA. Perp is more like dydx and GMX and continues all the way, but Hyperliquid makes the experience better and continues to expand the space through the combination of HIP-3 and RWA. What is really new are stock tokens, currency stocks brought by Robinhood, and the form of buying stocks on the chain. I even think that Privacy can only be considered half of the track. It is related to the narrative that institutions need a certain degree of privacy after going on the chain. However, it has risen so much this time, so everyone has been educated by the price.
3. How to choose HYPE, BNB, and SOL: three sets of odds: stability, imagination, and flexibility
Mr. Z: After talking about BTC and ETH, what do you think of SOL, HYPE and BNB?
Lao Bai: I think the most stable ones are HYPE and BNB. BNB has been around for too many years, and Binance is the absolute leader, a bit like Coca-Cola in beverages, or NVIDIA in AI. It is definitely very stable, but the room for continued growth will not be as large as some new assets.
Lao Bai: HYPE is relatively the leader in the Perp segment. Although it is already very expensive, if Hyperliquid really achieves the state originally envisioned, permissionless to trade everything, HIP-3 continues to expand, and the data after HIP-4 goes online, then its upside space is still larger than BNB in theory, and I can't see a particularly clear reason for the downside in the short term.
Lao Bai: SOL is the most flexible among the three. It rose from US$2 to US$250 in the last round, fell back to single digits, and then rose back to more than 200. The mass base of this chain is very strong. Foundation, developers, and a group of Western Solana KOLs and users have always been very loyal. Its biggest advantage and disadvantage are actually the same thing, that is, after FTX collapsed, there was no centralized exchange to provide it with an absolute exit path, so many things were completed by the native DEX on the chain itself, which made it very consistent with the feeling of Crypto Native, cyberpunk and grassroots power.
Mr. Z: So if you want to briefly summarize?
Lao Bai: BNB is certainty, HYPE is imagination space, and SOL is elasticity. I also have a portion of SOL, and I’m looking at about $150 in the short term for one or two months. But whether it can truly break the previous high ultimately depends on BTC.
4. Robinhood is like the end of exchanges: one account to trade everything
Mr. Z: Let’s talk about Robinhood. You wrote before that "the ultimate form of all exchanges in the world is Robinhood." What exactly does this sentence mean?
Lao Bai: The company Robinhood and Vlad themselves are quite special. They belong to a small number of teams that understand both stocks and Crypto’s native culture. The culture of retail short squeezes like GME came from Robinhood users, so they understand retail investors, market makers, Crypto, and stocks.
Lao Bai: You see, the development of Robinhood Chain is also in line with their tone. At the beginning, they used Meme like CASHCAT to attract attention, and then quickly found Launchpad, paired the Meme with stocks, and then developed various new things. At least on Robinhood, I see a lot of new ways to play that are not available on traditional Layer2.
Lao Bai: I have said before that the final form of all exchanges in the world should be Robinhood. At that time, Robinhood's stock was only $76, but I didn't buy it. I bought it later when it was over $100, which finally meant that my words and deeds were consistent.
Mr. Z: You mean traditional stocks, Crypto, Perp, and prediction markets, all in one place?
Lao Bai: Yes, it is the Exchange of All Things. Traditional stocks, Crypto spot, Perp, prediction market, I will give you everything you want to trade. If you add all other derivatives, it will basically be Everything Exchange.
5. What will happen to stock tokens in the end: When everyone can access U.S. stocks, the advantages of leading exchanges will come back.
Mr. Z: Offshore exchanges such as Bitget, Gate, and Binance have also begun to sell stock tokens. After everyone has it, what will these exchanges do in the end?
Lao Bai: I think it’s user experience and resources. Regarding stock tokens, if everyone ends up with a brokerage like Alpaca, and then goes to Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange to help you complete the transaction, then it will be difficult for the same stock itself to be differentiated. What you buy on every platform is NVIDIA. The only real differences at this time are the front-end UI, UX, rates and where you originally put the assets.
Lao Bai: So the platform that comes online first can grab the first batch of early adopters, because others don’t have it, but you have it. But after everyone is connected, the advantages of the leading exchange will return. Because if my funds were already in Binance, I would trade both Crypto and stocks, and Binance still has the best currency and depth, so I would most likely put my assets on the leading platform.
Lao Bai: Unless this user only plays stock tokens, then he can completely ignore the depth and liquidity of Crypto and directly choose the platform with the lowest fee or the platform he feels is the safest. When everyone has the same asset, the asset itself is no longer a moat.
6. How to mine Alpha on Robinhood: Understand 5 to 10 leaders first, don’t scan the entire chain for coins
Mr. Z: If a person has not studied Robinhood at all before and suddenly jumps in to take a look, what should be the first thing to understand?
Lao Bai: First understand the leading assets issued on different Launchpads. For example, what are the leaders on PONS, what are the leaders on LONG(), and find out the trading patterns and trends of three or five major assets and what they are doing. I think by studying 5 to 10 coins, you can probably figure out what the Robinhood chain is doing, and you don’t need to scan the entire chain at the beginning.
Mr. Z: Can it also be divided into two ways of playing? One is more like stock valuation, looking at protocol revenue, market value, and TVL; the other is purely to capture attention and narrative.
Lao Bai: Yes. For data enthusiasts, just look at AI and PONS. You can clearly see the daily destruction, TVL, and transaction volume. There are various dashboards. You can probably estimate how much this thing is worth. But for new things like SHROOM, DELTA, HOOKR, ORBIO, and ZZZ, you often can’t estimate them. It’s all about attention and narrative.
Lao Bai: Like ZZZ, as soon as everyone confirms that a great Founder or Dev is related to it, the price may directly double, but it is not necessarily true whether it has actually produced many things at that time. So on Robinhood, you must first distinguish whether what you are buying is a business with data that can be valued, or a pure Attention Trade.
7. The biggest problem with AI Agent: Until today, there is no product that dares to make me spend more money.
Mr. Z: AI Agent is also very popular recently, with Mojo AI, Travix, and SmartX all starting to appear. Do you think AI Agent Trading really has a PMF now?
Lao Bai: At present, I have not seen a particularly mature product that truly breaks out of the industry. I have also used the so-called AI Trading Platform. I threw a few hundred dollars into it and made my own strategy to let it run. There are still many things about the overall experience that make me feel very tricky.
Lao Bai: Sometimes the Agent misunderstands your intentions, sometimes the framework you set is not fully executed, and bugs may occur. The bigger problem is that you don't dare to put too much money into it. I'd put $500, $2,000 on it and it might be okay, but let me put $10,000-plus on it, there's no AI Agent Trading product that I feel comfortable with right now.
Mr. Z: So what do you think is the best combination of AI and Crypto now?
Lao Bai: It’s not a transaction. One is VVV, which does decentralized privacy reasoning. If you have some data or problems that you don’t want to make public or let OpenAI or Anthropic know, you can use this private version of OpenRouter. I think this is a very clear need.
Lao Bai: The other one is ORBIO, which turns AI inference credits into an economic asset. Its idea is very clever, but I don't buy it 100% because it ultimately relies on ORBIO's own trading volume. The transaction generates handling fees, and then purchases the inference quota on OpenRouter, and then distributes the quota to currency holders. If no one trades this Token, the tax will be less, and the amount of reasoning that can be purchased will also be less, so in essence there is still a layer of Flywheel of Attention Economy.
8. The real winner of Agent Economy may not be a certain AI coin at all.
Mr. Z: So what is the real combination of AI × Crypto? If Agent Economy does come, who will get the most value?
Lao Bai: I have actually thought about this issue for many years. I have talked with hundreds of AI + Crypto entrepreneurial teams at the end of 2023, all kinds of decentralized reasoning, ZK verification, Game Theory, basically looking for nails with a hammer. After three years, there are very few that really make me feel that we are well integrated.
Lao Bai: On the contrary, what Crypto has already done is the payment track that AI Agent needs most in the future. We have USDC, we have Ethereum, we have Solana. After Agent Economy truly appears in the future, there is a high probability that stablecoins will be used between Agents to complete payments and transactions on a certain public chain.
Lao Bai: So what truly captures the value of Agent Economy is not necessarily a project called “AI Token” today. It may instead be Circle, or public chain infrastructure such as Solana or Ethereum. X402 is similar. It is just a possibility for Agent Payment. In the future, there will be Google, Visa, and Stripe's own protocols, and various on-chain, off-chain, and semi-chain options will appear.
Lao Bai: AI Agent is likely to need Crypto in the future, but needing Crypto does not necessarily mean that it needs a specific AI coin.
9. GPUs can also do RWA: USDAI and Dawn are betting on "semi-standardized assets"
Mr. Z: In addition to RWA stocks, you have also recently seen GPU and AI infrastructure assets like Dawn Protocol and USDAI being listed on the chain. What do you think of this set?
Lao Bai: Dawn can be understood as an expanded version of USDAI. USDAI is more focused on GPU staking, and Dawn may expand to memory, Edge Computing and other revenue. The essential business models are similar, which is to use AI infrastructure-related assets for mortgage lending and Project Finance.
Lao Bai: I would divide RWA into three types. Treasury bonds, stocks, gold, and crude oil are standardized assets and are easiest to put on the chain. In the past, Centrifuge dealt with music copyrights and various single cash flows, which were very non-standard assets. I think this is the most difficult thing to do.
Lao Bai: GPU is in the middle, it is considered a "semi-standardized asset". Because there are only a few models such as H100, A100, and B200, a unified framework can be used, but the pricing, payback cycle, and depreciation of each model are different. Therefore, it can be used for mortgage lending, which is easier than completely non-standard assets, but it will certainly not reach the scale of treasury bonds and stocks.
Mr. Z: So there’s a start, but it won’t turn into a particularly huge track?
Lao Bai: Yes. In essence, it is still Fixed Income and Project Finance, and it earns interest rates. But the scale of AI infrastructure itself will be very large in the future, so even if you can only capture 1% or 2% of the financing needs, you can still form a market of a certain scale.
10. What Fomo really wins is not Apple Pay: it compresses the order from ordering to placing into one moment.
Mr. Z: Fomo is very popular recently. My own feeling is that the most powerful thing about it is that ordinary people can buy Meme immediately by pressing Apple Pay without having to worry about wallets, cross-chains, and gas fees. What do you think of it?
Lao Bai: I agree with this summary. But I think where Fomo really wins is not just Apple Pay, but Social Trading. You can see the drivers you follow, what they are buying and when they are buying it, and this information is real-time.
Lao Bai: In the past, for example, if you followed Daewoo (@BTCdayu), he bought a coin, and it might take a while before he posted his views on X. After you see it, you need to understand his logic, then open the trading platform, and then place an order yourself. Fomo almost completely suppresses this time difference. The moment he buys, "Daewoo bought a certain Token for US$200,000" pops up directly on your phone, and you can follow it immediately.
Lao Bai: In the future, we can even do copy trading directly. This experience is completely different from "I will verify it myself after reading his tweets and then place an order." I think this is where Fomo really wins.
Mr. Z: So it and X might end up in the same place?
Lao Bai: Yes. Fomo is a bit like a simplified version of X. With X Money, Token K-line, and transactions, X will become more and more like a complex version of Fomo. The last thing is to put the three things of placing orders, looking at the K-line, and buying on the same platform.
11. Perp DEX latecomers have only two options left: hold on to the big guns, or push execution to the extreme
Mr. Z: Perp DEX Now that Hyperliquid is so powerful, how can the emerging projects differentiate?
Lao Bai: It’s difficult. You either have channel advantages or have particularly strong organizational capabilities. At present, I have seen two examples that are really established, one is Lighter and the other is Variational.
Lao Bai: Lighter initially focused on ZK and zero handling fees, but this itself did not form a particularly big qualitative change with Hyperliquid. The zero handling fee attracted many farmers in the early days. What really brought its valuation to a higher level was when Robinhood later selected it as one of the bottom layers. You suddenly embrace a thigh, and there is an external platform to guide you. That is the order flow that Hyperliquid cannot capture. This is differentiation.
Lao Bai: The other one is Variational. You have a very strong institutional background and capital capabilities. You can bring slippage, execution, and institutional trading experience to another level, and you can also carve out your own market.
Lao Bai: So you can’t make something “similar to Hyperliquid” and then expect to steal its users. You must have channels that it cannot copy, or you must make the execution experience of a certain user group better than it is unwilling or unable to do.
12. The biggest misunderstanding of HIP-3: It’s useless to grab a ticker, Tradexyz can copy you the next day
Mr. Z: What about HIP-3? Entropy, Tradexyz, and various HIP Deployers are all competing for tickers. What do you think of this model?
Lao Bai: HIP-3 theoretically gives many teams opportunities, but the ticker itself has no moat. If you find a demand for a stock today and put it on the ticker first, Tradexyz can put the same ticker on it the next day.
Lao Bai: Then it originally had more users, deeper liquidity, and stronger market makers. For the same ticker, why don’t users go to Tradexyz? This is a bit like a centralized exchange. After Binance has the best depth, everyone will naturally go to Binance for the same currency, because the slippage and depth are the best.
Lao Bai: So I agree that what HIP-3 Frontend should really strive for is not ticker or liquidity, but Distribution and User Experience. If your front-end can be made into a form that Tradexyz does not have at all, or if you master a certain group of users that it cannot reach, then you will have a chance.
Mr. Z: So there is actually no use in going there first. You are just helping the leader verify the demand?
Lao Bai: Yes. You go online today, Tradexyz sees that you have the volume, and copies it tomorrow. Then as soon as it goes online, the liquidity directly exceeds yours, and you immediately feel uncomfortable. It's not Edge that's grabbing the ticker, it's Distribution.
13. Why is this the worst bear market in history: VCs, market makers, and the primary market all failed together
Mr. Z: Why do you feel so bad during this bear market? I think it is completely different from before, especially the primary market is almost dead.
Lao Bai: This is the biggest difference. No matter how bad things were in the past, the secondary market was miserable, but the primary market was still innovating. In 2018 and 2019, VC also invested in Uniswap, Compound and other infrastructures that later became DeFi Summer. I joined ABCDE in 2023. At that time, I looked at an average of 4 or 5 projects every day. The most exaggerated number was 9 projects a day, and I talked about more than a thousand projects in more than two years.
Lao Bai: But after the last round, a large number of Asian VCs were shut down or transferred to second-tier companies, and second-tier and third-tier European and American VCs were basically shut down. Only leaders like Dragonfly and a16z still have money to invest. Small projects cannot raise money, and small VCs cannot raise LP. This bear market is particularly scary.
Mr. Z: Why is the old VC model suddenly unplayable? Is this anti-VC narrative of Hyperliquid a catalyst?
Lao Bai: Yes. The typical gameplay in the past seven or eight years was actually that VC invested in the project, the project issued coins, listed on the exchange, the market maker controlled the liquidity and distribution, then raised the price, and then let retail investors come in. In fact, the price and fundamentals of most projects have little to do with each other.
Lao Bai: But the problem is that there are more and more projects. We looked at more than a thousand projects at that time, and finally invested in more than 40, but many of them ended up being zero. The scale of VC Tokens that the market will unlock in the next few years is too large, but retail investors’ funds and attention have not grown with it. Too many wolves, too little meat.
Lao Bai: Then Hyperliquid demonstrated another way of playing to the market. How much is earned, how much is repurchased, and how much is destroyed is written directly into the smart contract. People begin to look at Tokens like they look at the price-to-earnings ratio of stocks. Coupled with liquidity shocks, injuries to market makers, and the huge wealth effect of the AI market, the three things stacked up have resulted in this particularly tragic bear market.
14. Crypto is becoming a U.S. stock: Looking at revenue, repurchases, and cash flow in the future, the four-year cycle will become weaker and weaker.
Mr. Z: So if the old VC + market maker + narrative market model comes to an end, what will happen to Crypto?
Lao Bai: It’s becoming more and more U.S. stock-oriented. Now when everyone buys a project, they will start looking at Revenue, Cash Flow, Buy and Burn to see if there are real users. You have to produce real data before everyone will buy your Token. In the past, many people used the "market-to-market ratio" to value a project, but now it is becoming more and more like a stock.
Lao Bai: At the same time, US stocks are becoming more and more meme-oriented. If you look at the Rally of some AI, semiconductor, and storage stocks this year, it is very similar to the previous Crypto market. So there is a very interesting situation. Crypto is becoming more and more U.S. stocks, and U.S. stocks are becoming more Crypto-oriented.
Lao Bai: If the market really turns out to be like this, the big bulls and bears that come around every four years may become weaker and weaker. Each project looks at its own revenue, growth, and data. Each one has its own ups and downs, just like stocks, instead of all projects having a carnival together every four years.
Mr. Z: So you said earlier that this might be the last round of "decent bull market"?
Lao Bai: Yes, I am not saying that there will be no bull market in the future. What I'm saying is, if you look at it as a bull market right now, this could be the last decent big bull market for Crypto. Because the technical route has almost been explored, the PMF direction has also been almost completed. After all the cryptocurrency stocks, Privacy, and Perp are speculated in this round, what else can be speculated in the next round? It is very likely that we will go back to lending, DEX, and Meme, and recycle mature things.
15. Finally, for the ticker: RWA, Perp, Privacy, what to look at next
Mr. Z: Let’s be more direct at the end. If we look at it from the perspective of tickers, what should everyone layout and see now?
Lao Bai: The main line of this round is extremely clear, and I think a consensus has gradually formed on X. The first one is RWA, the second one is Perp, and the third one is Privacy. The final things launched by Launchpad will still focus on these themes.
Lao Bai: Needless to say, BTC and ETH are basic assets. Privacy Currently I would look at Zcash, Zama, NEAR. The popular saying in the market now is that Zcash is "privacy Bitcoin", Zama is more like privacy Ethereum, and NEAR is "what Ethereum should be like". These three are relatively straightforward tickers on the Privacy track.
Lao Bai: Perp is HYPE and LIT, but these two are no longer cheap. Especially HYPE is already very high, and I think it will start to struggle if the space goes up further. If there is an obvious correction in the future, I think I can take it with more confidence, but I can't give a specific point at this position now.
Lao Bai: RWA is a bit embarrassing. ONDO is the most typical tokenized asset project, and the Token itself has a relatively weak Value Accrual, so I don’t like it very much. More directly, I would look at UNI, because a lot of Robinhood's on-chain stock-related transactions go through it, and it can eat the growth of the combination of stock tokens and AMMs at the same time.
Lao Bai: In the direction of AI, I will put VVV and Bittensor on the watch list. Bittensor is the leader, but narrative is stronger than data; VVV’s current data is indeed good, but it has also risen a lot. If the price drops in the future but the data does not drop significantly, it will be worth re-looking at that time.
Mr. Z: So in conclusion, this round is not without Alpha, but Alpha has changed from "who can make up the next new story" to "who can really run out of PMF, who can really make money, and who can return value to Token." If this round is really the last decent bull market, the most important thing may not be to find 100 coins, but to look deep enough into the few pools where there are real fish. Thanks to Lao Bai for coming to 168X again today. We really talked a lot in this episode, and I hope everyone can find the most worth-watching opportunities in this round.