Chapter 1: What unique market intuition does Gen Z possess?
ThreadGuy, welcome to Bankless. Thanks, man.
Chapter 2: How are sneaker markets influencing Gen Z's trading behavior?
I'm excited to be here. How are you? Really good. Really, really good. I'm excited for this conversation, mainly because I think you have probably the largest audience that is also the most non-overlapping with ours, with mine here at Bankless. And I want to, like, learn a little bit more about what's going on over there.
Chapter 3: What role does social proof play in onboarding Gen Z to crypto?
Maybe to get that started, ThreadGuy is what you are known as. That's your pseudonym. I don't even know if people know your actual name. Michael. It's Docs if you want to call him Michael.
Chapter 4: What two financial paths are emerging for Gen Z?
Nice to meet you, Michael. Likewise. I've only ever known you as ThreadGuy.
Chapter 5: Why is crypto considered an opportunity engine for Gen Z?
Yeah. Would it be fair to call you the Gen Z face of crypto? I will take it with a smile on my face. I will absolutely take it, yeah. Something that I watched slowly happen in 2021 was there was a lot of people that came into the industry that cared about different things than what we were expecting. There was really only Bitcoin and Ethereum back then.
And that kind of has slowly manifested into its own like pillar of the whole entire crypto industry. And it's really centered around like a new generation of crypto entrance, crypto market participants that have like a very strong like Gen Z. It's like very Gen Z coded. Very, very. I'm guessing that's when you more or less came into the industry around 2020, 2021.
So I have a lot of perspective on this that I, as time goes on, I realize not everyone came in at the same, you know, people here for different reasons. Not everyone understands my side of the world the way I understand it. But I, I came here in 2020 for Topshop to trade.
Chapter 6: How is entertainment finance reshaping traditional markets?
Top shot NFTs on the Flow blockchain because I was in the internet reselling game and the hottest game in town was sports cards. Basically the whole summer into early fall of 2020, sports cards were the game. Hottest game in town. I should have been buying Bitcoin, trading crypto. I didn't even know it existed. And the sports cards community was up in arms over these fucking top shots.
NFTs are stupid. They're not real. They're not real cardboard. They're real connoisseurs. And I'm like, man, everyone's so angry and upset about these top shots. I should go buy a couple. And, you know, one thing leads to the next. And next thing you know, you're buying board apes and you're in the NFT scene full fledged. But I wasn't here in 2017.
Chapter 7: What does the term 'trading mimetics' mean for valuation?
I wasn't here in the early, early days of crypto. But I think 2021 with NFTs and then 2024 with Solana meme coins were the two periods of hyper growth on chain of people that were coming like exclusively to trade. They weren't really necessarily here for the cypherpunk ethos or for stable coins or decentralization. They were here to trade. And it's kind of like an interesting development.
I think that's happened amongst crypto. Yeah, I think maybe listeners are like gearing up like, oh, OK, this is going to be a conversation, a cultural conversation about how crypto is leaning into just like the casino and like the financial life. And I don't really think that's what the conversation is I want to have.
I want to have the conversation about like what Gen Z is like naturally disposed to and what parts of crypto that resonates with the most. And I think part of this might be every single generation is more online than the previous, but also the important factor here is COVID. Like COVID happened to Gen Z at an earlier stage in their life. I think it was like 25 or 26 or something.
It was my senior year of high school.
Chapter 8: What future trends are predicted for internet capital markets?
Yeah, you were in high school. My senior year of high school. I was 18, yeah, in 2020. To what degree do you think like COVID... like shepherded it in Gen Z into like the online trading culture. So I think COVID accelerated timelines significantly. Yeah. But to understand there is this... This is kind of the internet I grew up on. There's this...
group of, now it probably skews younger, but this like Zoomer cohort, people who are like 18 to 25 now, in the heyday of what I call like sneaker reselling Twitter. 2015,
2016 2017 into like all of the Yeezy Kanye hype into all of the like Off-White Virgil hype and then blow off the top of the COVID is I think this is one of the first generations around my general age demographic that has grown up trading things on the internet that has grown up like in your blood.
I'm 14 going home from high school early, my freshman year high school to like bought Supreme and flip Supreme, right? During like study hall. And so there's this whole generation of kids that for the first time were exposed to these like niche cultural markets in a way to make money out of the system, right? Like when I was
Sneaker Twitter was the first time you find there's a 15-year-old kid that coded some sneaker bot that's making $100K a month. And it's like, whoa, you can make $100K a month. You can make $5K a month on the internet, right? I remember the first time I bought a Supreme Box logo, CDG, Supreme Box logo t-shirt for $59 retail and sold it for $450. And it was like my world shattered.
And so I think a foundational level-setting concept is that My generation and then everyone that comes after us grows up in a world where it is standard to make money out of the system in weird niche ways that your parents don't understand, that your aunts, your uncles, your family doesn't understand on the internet amongst these Discord, Twitter, like niche communities.
And so I think that prior experience set the stage to be able to see something like NFTs and be like, oh, I get this. Or to be able to see meme coins at 2024 and be like, oh, I get this. And then you can work backwards on crypto ideology and why blockchain, decentralization, self-sovereignty, why all of this matters. And so I think there's this whole generation that's
working backwards to what you probably have to work forwards to on some of the cultural NFT meme coin stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of what you said is like the learning to make money on like the margins of society on the internet, like not getting a job, not doing the standard thing, not going to college and like learning to make money on the internet.
all of the examples that you gave, I noticed were all cultural stuff. Because one of the classic early examples that is very similar that I was used to hearing is, oh, some kid just coded up a trading bot or an MEV bot and made a bunch of money. Those are the stories I was used to hearing. But the stories you gave are like,
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