Dan Smith

Uniswap’s proposed fee switch could be structurally positive for UNI, but Smith does not yet see an obvious long-term trade. Thread Guy explained that a hypothetical $1 swap fee could move from 100% to LPs toward a 95/5 or 90/10 split, finally giving the DAO revenue that could fund buybacks, burns, or staking distributions. Turning off Uniswap Labs’ separate front-end fee and exploring MEV internalization matter; burning roughly 10% of supply that was already unissued does not — “it’s just that you get to say you did it.”

ORE has turned proof-of-work mining into a one-minute, 25-square roulette game with an unusually aggressive token sink. Each round adds 1.2 ORE to the winning square, while a 1-in-625 “motherlode” compounds by roughly 0.2 ORE per missed round. ORE takes 10% of SOL wagered as revenue, then directs 90% of that revenue to buybacks and burns and 10% to stakers.

ORE’s million-dollar revenue day is real traction, but the entire machine is brutally reflexive. As ORE rises, subsidies and jackpots become more valuable, bets increase, and buybacks accelerate; Thread Guy said he thought it had fallen from roughly $600 to $300, making the game worth half as much. Smith remained extremely long and saw the next several days as the test: revenue near $800,000 after the 50% price drop, versus the prior day’s $1 million record, suggested the game had not immediately broken.

Smith’s framework is that fundamentals raise a token’s floor, but revenue allocation must balance the product and token holders. Thread Guy cited HYPE’s Assistance Fund buying back roughly 99% of revenue while holding no USDC buffer that might help prevent ADLs: “Who are you prioritizing, the users and traders or the token holders?” Narrative assets such as Bitcoin and Zcash can escape fundamentals, but most apps cannot reliably manufacture that cult-like outcome.

Smith framed Zcash as a trade with a transcendent privacy narrative and no cash-flow ceiling. Thread Guy agreed with the privacy case but raised the concern that the same tools could help hostile states; Smith admitted he had not thought through the issue and did not have a clean answer. Smith disclosed leveraged Zcash exposure on Hyperliquid, while Thread Guy said his exposure was through Coinbase.

HumidiFi’s prop-AMM model may be one of the strongest undercovered pieces of onchain market structure. Smith said it handled roughly $2.4 billion of volume the previous day — potentially more than Uniswap or any other spot DEX — while offering tight spreads and deep SOL/USDC liquidity. Thread Guy called it “onchain Citadel,” with “a massive grain of salt,” and flagged its planned token launch through Jupiter.

The lending endgame may be permissionless modular vaults, but DeFi still communicates risk disastrously. Morpho lets curators allocate deposits across strategies, whereas Aave emphasizes shared liquidity and strict asset listing; the failure of what Thread Guy recalled as xUSDT or xUSD exposed the modular model’s tail risk. Thread Guy likes Morpho’s architecture but finds its north-of-$1 billion FDV rich, while Spark is a potentially cheaper exposure.

Crypto’s current opportunity is less a broad alt season than a hunt for new pockets whose launch valuations have already reset. ORE, ZEC, Zora, football cards, and AVICI show that isolated products can catch fire even while majors and memes stagnate, but most activity has not been sticky. The longer-term ICM bet is ownership: MetaDAO’s appeal is genuine control and potential treasury recovery, while Pump.fun’s challenge is using its war chest to graduate from product-adjacent memes into ownership coins that create value for PUMP.

🔗 Original source & video: Dan Smith: ORE Explained, Crypto’s Future, Blockworks Data and More | TG Podcast