Tantra Talks

Tantra Talks is the house podcast of Tantra Labs, and it makes no secret of it. CTO Russell LaCour hosts. Co-founder Kagan Atkinson joins him as co-host in several episodes, and the two keep it loose and chatty, down to a closing jab at Kagan for barely getting a word in. Episodes open with a disclaimer that everything said is personal opinion and should not be taken as a reason to make any particular investment. A run of episodes carries monthly-update titles, named for April, May, August and September, along with an October installment billed as a bull market edition. The market comes first. Bitcoin's rallies and retreats are read as a maturing asset that reverts toward a mean, much as stocks do. The hosts expect bear markets measured in months rather than years. They argue that a longer downturn would more likely come with a broad pullback that drags the S&P 500 down too. Money from pension funds and boomers pouring into crypto gets flagged as a top signal, though they add that it is too early to call the top. One update looks at the May 2021 slide and fits it into a pattern of black swan events that the host says hit crypto every six months, going back to the March 2020 liquidation. In this telling, volatility is good news for the firm. NFTs get a warier hearing. There is real innovation, the hosts allow, but also hysteria and mispricing, and blockchain games deserve a hard look at their convexity before anyone buys in. A protocol like SushiSwap, by contrast, can be valued on transaction volume and total value locked. DeFi comes down to arithmetic: a worked example with ten thousand dollars in Bitcoin shows how supplying liquidity to a trading pair pays differently from simply holding, and why young protocols reward liquidity providers with newly minted tokens. Tangents happen, including an enthusiastic aside on Tesla's AI Day and its Dojo machine learning training system. Then the talk turns to the company: new quantitative analysts and web developers, a beta waitlist, a newsletter, and a chat in the Tantra Labs app. One cold open carries a pitch for the firm's interest offering on Bitcoin or Ethereum. The guest episode 'Bitcoin Maximalism and NFT's with Brekkie' covers Bitcoin's slow, layered approach to scaling, with the Lightning Network and Liquid among the examples. It suits a listener who wants to hear a crypto company's own people read the market, sales pitch included.