Vinny Lingham on markets, Bitcoin, and building with utility

On episode 22 of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, entrepreneur and blockchain enthusiast Vinny Lingham joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. to discuss his digital currency hedge fund, the utility (or lack thereof) in the industry, and his new Carnivore diet documentary.

Vinny Lingham on his hedge fund and what it does

Lingham starts by telling viewers about his new Carnivore diet documentary ‘Animal,’ which will come out on June 20. He follows this diet and seeks to expose the lies at the heart of mainstream nutritional advice. He encourages everyone to look out for it and asks us to rate it on Apple TV and elsewhere.

Within the industry, Lingham has a hedge fund called Praxos. They don’t take market risk but think of the digital currency space as a casino and of themselves as the house. They make “boring 30-40% returns” annually and have 1.5 years of wins behind them.

Lingham rightly notes that people always want to borrow so they can go short or long in the markets. They stick with BTC, ETH, and SOL trades because there’s plenty of liquidity, and they make money on rate arbitrage between exchanges. The idea is to “take the cream off the top,” Lingham says.

Civic, utility, and the limitations of BTC and Ethereum

Wuckert reaffirms that he believes in utility: the tech should be used to solve problems. He says Civic, one of Lingham’s ventures, was a rare example of a utility that came out of the initial coin offering (ICO) boom. He confirms it is still running, millions of identity passes have been issued, and it’s still solving customer problems today.

When building products with utility, Lingham and his team tried to build on BTC, but realized it was impossible because of the fees. They then went to Ethereum, and things were even worse: the average price of onboarding a customer was around $500 at one point. Eventually, they realized Ethereum’s limitations and moved to Solana. Nowadays, they’re multi-chain and will use whatever works.

The dangerous debt load at the heart of ‘crypto’

Lingham says the entire space has become toxic, and too many people who have no business involvement are making boatloads of money. He’s still focused on creating value. He thinks Solana is the right chain to build on right now.

Solana’s scalability and why BSV fees are too cheap

Picking up on his praise of Solana, Wuckert asks Lingham if the downtime, which always seems to happen when they hit new scaling records, worries him. He shrugs it off, noting how the Internet has downtime, but we keep going. He believes Solana will eventually flip Ethereum in terms of its market cap, and he’s convinced it’s a powerful chain with momentum behind it.

As for BSV, he notes it can scale to a million transactions per second (TPS), but he thinks the fees are too low to make it worth it for miners. Yes, fees of 1/10,000th of a penny are great for the Internet of Things (IoT) industry in the future. However, right now matters as well, and many more miners would be interested if the fee revenue was 10x or 100x higher.

Wuckert agrees that the fees only need to be that low in some instances and that extra revenue would be great for everyone. Like Lingham, he’s all about utility, but BSV also needs adoption, customers, and a bigger community to succeed.

“The best tech doesn’t always win,” Lingham warns.

Signing off, Lingham says those interested in hearing more from him can find him on X and reminds us to check out his upcoming documentary ‘Animal’ on June 20.

To hear more about agent provocateurs in BSV, the upcoming BSV startup spotlight in Boulder, Colorado, and more questions answered by Wuckert, check out the livestream episode here.

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