Animoca, Nansen, Coin Bureau founders talk Bitcoin ETFs, Ton, memecoins

[00:00:08] Gareth Jenkinson: Welcome back to another episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph. I’m your host and managing editor, Gareth Jenkinson. This podcast was recorded at Cointelegraph’s exclusive Longitude side event during Token2049 in Singapore. In this conversation, Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu, Nansen co-founder Alex Svanevik, and Coin Bureau founder Nic Puckrin discuss major trends of 2024 and if we can expect a big bull run in 2025.

[00:00:39] Gareth Jenkinson: The title of this panel was called “Bull Run 2025: What to Expect.” 2024 has been a really interesting year, and I’m just going to start it off. At the beginning of the year, news of Bitcoin ETFs finally being launched in the US was the biggest talking point, where nine months later, what a year it’s been. Nic. Your thoughts?

[00:00:58] Nic Puckrin: Yeah, I mean, the Bitcoin ETFs was a seminal moment in Bitcoin’s life and Bitcoin’s history. If you think about the three things that it made was, if we think back to last year, would you have thought that we would have had Bitcoin ETFs by now, at least spot ETFs, with the current SEC? I don’t think we did. And the fact that the SEC approved these things in terms of like credentializing it for the rest of the investor space, it’s amazing, right? So that’s one thing, is credentializing Bitcoin as an investment that everyone and the nocoiners could invest in. Then there’s, of course, the fact that it was a superhighway for Bitcoin investment because people could invest in it in a way they could never have beforehand, in their stock trading accounts much more quickly and efficiently, right? So people knew. It was familiar to them. And then there’s, of course, the fact institutions as well. So, on the retail side, it was familiar for them. Institutions, they can invest in it in a way that was within their investment mandates, was in a regulated, compliant fashion. So it’s been an amazing move for Bitcoin, and it’s obviously led to a lot of adoption and price action as well.

[00:01:50] Gareth Jenkinson: Yat, your thoughts?

[00:01:51] Yat Siu: To me, it heralds kind of the institutional era of crypto in a way, right? It’s a way that it brings in a new group of people that were always curious or wanted to enter, but couldn’t do that before. If you’re a family office, you don’t get fired for investing in a BlackRock ETF, but you would get fired if you end up buying some Bitcoin and put it in some wallet that might possibly get lost. So I think all these things actually matter. But outside, of course, the institutionalization and the value and everything that was mentioned before, I think this sort of bleeding into the institutional era goes beyond Bitcoin. So it’s just the beginning. But then we’re seeing Ethereum, and then from that, I think you expect altcoins. And I think that actually opens up the space for the institutions to enter crypto broadly, not just actually through the stock market.

[00:02:31] Gareth Jenkinson: Alex, you mainly have your eye on Ethereum with Nansen and the wallet labeling that you guys do, but I’m sure you’ve had a keen interest in the Bitcoin ETF this year and what impact that had on the markets.

[00:02:40] Alex Svanevik: Absolutely. I mean, I think the guys summarized a lot of the points well here. To me, it’s a little bit ironic, too, because the future that I’m excited about is one where we tokenize all assets, and ETFs are kind of the inverse of that, right? You’re taking tokens and then making them into products that can be accessed by institutions and retail investors and so on in different forms. But yeah, we have tracked the flows, especially for ETH ETF. Hasn’t been maybe as exciting as the Bitcoin ETF in terms of the inflows and the enthusiasm around it. But I do think it, both of these mark pivotal moments for crypto overall. So, yeah.

[00:03:17] Gareth Jenkinson: We probably haven’t seen the full effect yet, right? I mean, there’s still a lot of institutional money that needs to flow. I think asset managers have only just been able to begin to offer these products to their clients. And if you listen to the Anthony Scaramuccis of the world, that’s what they’re talking about. Like, finally, the guys on Wall Street that are good at selling products can go and take Bitcoin to the masses. So that’s why I titled this panel what it is. You know, bull run 2025, is that where we really see a load of capital flowing in?

[00:03:44] Yat Siu: Well, I think what you’ll see is a lot of capital flowing in from countries that have been sort of hesitant around that and basically fund managers around the world, whether they’re in Europe or whether in other parts of Asia, saying, why does the US have to have all the fun, right? So, Hong Kong ended up sort of moving very quickly with their Bitcoin ETF and then Ethereum ETFs as well. In fact, they were actually slightly ahead. But of course, you can’t compare. When it comes to the size of the ETF market, the US is obviously the juggernaut. But expect maybe possibly things to happen in other parts of the world, be it sort of, you know, maybe Australia is looking at things. There’s obviously, you know, maybe in Germany, you know, of course, Middle East. All these places can now start doing this because it’s been validated by essentially the most respected TradFi companies in the world.

[00:04:21] Nic Puckrin: Yeah, I think the fact that we’ve obviously got ETFs now gives a lot of easy access to invest in it, but we also obviously need the narrative for Bitcoin in terms of investing in it for the next year. So yes, the ETFs will allow them to actually invest in it, but the question is like, is the liquidity that we’re going to see, we can obviously chat for it later in the panel, but like, are we going to see the narrative demanding people to actually invest within cryptocurrency ETFs and Bitcoin ETFs?

[00:04:43] Gareth Jenkinson: Nic is the co-founder of Coin Bureau. I’m sure many of you guys know the YouTube channel. You used to be in TradFi, right? So this was the game that you were playing a long time ago, and now you’re seeing it many years later when you left for DeFi.

[00:04:54] Nic Puckrin: Yeah. I mean, I would never have thought this. Like back when I was in TradFi, like Bitcoin was still a nascent asset even then, and basically, like no banks would invest in it. And now banks have like dedicated trading floors. We’re dealing with digital assets. Every single bank has it. Obviously, there are also now all the ETF providers, as many of them are providing it. So, and I think it’s because the ETFs, like I said at the beginning, right, prior to this, you could never actually, as a TradFi institution, invest in crypto because you needed to have a regulated custodian. You needed to have a way to do it. You have investment mandates, and the CIO would be fired if you invest in Bitcoin and crypto. So now, it’s the opportunity for them to do it.

[00:05:28] Gareth Jenkinson: Are you guys surprised no one’s talking about the Bitcoin halving anymore? And what sort of impact does that have for a potential bull run in 2025, considering that there’s a lot of capital and interest from the ETFs, in particular?

[00:05:39] Alex Svanevik: The halving is kind of a weird thing, right, because it’s a totally predictable event. And then every time it happens, you discuss, you know, is it priced in or not. And so, in some ways, it’s kind of an uninteresting event, but the sort of meta on top of it makes it interesting somehow. But yeah, I think my guess is that for every halving, we’re going to be talking less about it. So that’s probably the trend we’re seeing, I would say.

[00:06:00] Yat Siu: My view on having is a little bit like Christmas. It’s a tradition that we have in the crypto space. It doesn’t have any meaning, really, but it’s a way to keep it in our mindshare. Oh, look, it’s the halving. And then everyone speculates as to things happening. And it’s right, it’s wrong, it doesn’t really matter. We just keep talking about it. So, I think of it more as a tradition that will never die. It’s always going to be there amongst the die-hard people, and we will celebrate it in its funny ways. And that’s really all it does, I think.

[00:06:24] Nic Puckrin: I got a hot take that’s whether the halving has actually ever mattered in the past, because the halving has coincided with a lot of other events in general liquidity and market cycles that has led to the price increase in Bitcoin. And there was actually an Outlier Ventures report that was released about two weeks ago, and we’ve done a video about it that’s coming out in the next few days, that argues that the halving itself hasn’t ever really had an impact because it’s happened at all these times. So it’s not correlation is not causation, right?

[00:06:48] Yat Siu: Yeah, actually, I agree with that, and that’s why we like to refer to it as Christmas, because it brings it into media’s attention every time you talk about it, so the industry stays relevant. But the actual halving in and of itself really didn’t make a difference.

[00:07:00] Nic Puckrin: And increasingly, as we get towards the 21 million block limits, you know, the halvings are going to become smaller and smaller, and then the impact on supply, which is the whole narrative behind the halving, is going to become irrelevant.

[00:07:08] Gareth Jenkinson: Another big narrative that came out this year, I’m going to throw this one to Alex because you’re in Ethereum, and I believe you guys have also now, you know, branching into Solana and keeping tabs on what’s happening there, memecoins, celebrity memecoins, the degenerate casino that it is, if I give you my opinion. What are your thoughts in general about this and how much of a role it’s played on where we’re at in 2024?

[00:07:29] Alex Svanevik: I guess I have some kind of love-hate relationship to memecoins, in the sense that, on the surface, it’s the dumbest thing. But I do think, actually, they play an important role because speculation sort of hardens the infrastructure and the products. And I think this is a story that is true for crypto more broadly as well, that you do silly things in crypto, but all of the infrastructure and products that get created to support those silly use cases can be useful and will be useful for the future of finance. So I typically think of this as all of the NFTs, think of a Pudgy Penguin or any memecoin, you could take the view that these are actually placeholders for maybe more valuable assets. For example, things that are pegged to real-world assets in the future. So, if you’re using like an NFTFi protocol to collateralize the Pudgy Penguin, in the future, you might be using the same protocol, but it’s a house instead. I think the same concept applies with memecoins, because you have to stress test the product so that they’re easy to use, you have low fees, you have reliable data and analytics around it. In that sense, I think I kind of, the gut reflex, the knee-jerk reaction that I have is like I dislike it, but I do think it actually plays an important role to build all the infrastructure and products.

[00:08:45] Gareth Jenkinson: You have like a bird’s-eye view into it, right? Because that’s what Nansen does. You guys are following the wallets and following the flow of tokens, yeah?

[00:08:52] Alex Svanevik: And actually, next week, we are launching Solana support, finally. It’s taken a really long time because it’s a difficult chain to get really solid analytics for. But yeah, we track what are the most profitable addresses, the win rates, the PNLs of every individual address.

[00:09:05] Gareth Jenkinson: So we can tap into you to do some investigative reporting on Solana and the memecoins and where they’re all flowing to and who’s shilling them and making some money. Exactly.

[00:09:14] Alex Svanevik: Finally, we can do it.

[00:09:15] Gareth Jenkinson: Yat?

[00:09:16] Yat Siu: To me, memecoins are sort of a reflection of the times that we’re in. Sure, there’s a lot of speculation and gambling, but I think the other thing is it’s really cultural in context. To me, it’s not that different from people sort of launching Reddit subgroups and chat groups before or mobile apps back in the days of 2009, 2010. Like there’s an app for everything. Or, prior to that, basically message boards and blogs. It’s the same thing. For us, tokens are representations of network effects, and so each of these memecoins are actually ways to draw attention as a network effect. How many cat memes did we have when the internet came about, for instance? They’re actually a version of that. Just now, they have more of a financial nature. But, you know, I like your point. The way I look at it is sort of whimsical, fun and silly things are actually what drive not just our industry forward, it drives every industry forward. In fact, we wouldn’t have the GPUs that actually enabled Bitcoin mining and afterwards AI if it wasn’t for gaming. Gaming was actually a silly thing that we did for the enjoyment of something. And then it gave us basically all the hardware to do what we could do today. For those of you who might be old enough to remember, which is probably not many of you, you know what really drove and broke the internet in the early days was pornography. And that was sort of another thing that one can definitely say, you know what, I’m not so sure about that. But it brought video technology forward. It brought infrastructure forward. It required basically better switches. So yes, I do agree with you that as much as the narrative isn’t really what we want to be known for, which I think will fade away over time because utility will become more relevant, it’s something that we do need to stress-test the system and to basically grow demand for it.

[00:10:39] Gareth Jenkinson: We work in the attention economy, right? Cointelegraph has to cover this kind of stuff. Coin Bureau is doing the same thing. What do you really think about it, Nic?

[00:10:45] Nic Puckrin: I see both sides of the argument. So the one side, obviously, it allows for user onboarding. Like people who would never have got involved in crypto have loaded up a Phantom wallet loaded with Solana and got invested in memecoins. And also, they think that memecoin space is one of the few places where they can actually get a fair shot at a 100x from the beginning because they don’t have access the institutional investors do through accredited investor frameworks. And they view these as the fair launches. They call it fair launches, although we know fair launches means something else. But I do also then want to look at the stats in terms of like especially on some of these memecoin aggregators and like launchpads like Pump.fun. And like there was a stat that like 60% of people who’ve been trading on Pump.fun lost money. So, those people have had a bad experience so far with crypto. And if they’re new to it, then they think to themselves, okay, this is what crypto is about. I lost money the first time I tried. I’m not going to come back. So the question you’ve got to ask yourself is, the people who’ve actually enjoyed it, made money, and actually decided to get involved in the ecosystem, are they going to trump the 60% who’ve lost and won’t come back?

[00:11:41] Gareth Jenkinson: Alex, we had a really interesting conversation in Singapore two years ago, and it was very soon after Terra Luna had collapsed, and Nansen allowed a lot of people to go and do a load of onchain investigating about the flow of funds. Now, you’re about to integrate Solana and be able to look at the funds there. Are you guys going to be looking quite keenly at Pump.fun and these kind of things? Will you be able to do the analytics on this stuff?

[00:12:03] Alex Svanevik: Maybe we should do that. Yeah.

[00:12:04] Gareth Jenkinson: You should, yes.

[00:12:06] Alex Svanevik: Yeah. It’s interesting because we’ve actually had Solana for a long time, but it wasn’t integrated well enough into the product. And then we launched Nansen 2, which is a much better version of Nansen, and that had no Solana support. We’ve had the data, and I guess we could do that kind of investigations. I have seen reports on sort of how much revenue Pump.fun has generated, and then you can sort of think about whether that revenue is extracting from the overall capital, like how to think about that. And I think the point made earlier as well on how many people actually make money? Probably, the majority lose money. That’s something I definitely will want to look at when we get this data out. If I had to sum it up, I’d say memecoins are probably good in the short term because they attract new users, bad in the mid-term because most of them lose money, and then good in the very long term because you get better infrastructure and products.

[00:12:58] Yat Siu: Actually, I think memecoins, the positive of the memecoin is that it actually forces projects to actually try to stand out from the masses, as it were, right? The whole altcoin space almost increased by almost $300 billion over the last 12 months. But when you look at the historical tokens in the space, they don’t seem to perform that well. Many new token launches haven’t done as well as people had hoped, and simply that’s attention dilution. If you have 2 million more tokens in the market, and as an end-user, you’re like, okay, which token am I looking at? I can’t distinguish anymore between what’s reasonable and what’s not because you just have so much attention dilution. So, I think that means that the project founders have to be one level higher. And to me, that’s not different from maturing an industry, meaning the projects that do well have an institutional readiness. As in, they can now just not just appeal to retail, they can also appeal to institutional investors. They can talk to the big funds. They have a certain type of maturity. And then you see different types of price action, which you can actually kind of see with Solana, with TON, even with our own MOCA. If you actually have institutional backing, you stand out. And I think actually in maybe even in the mid-term, it’ll be a good thing because you can start looking at projects that say, oh, this has the backing, and you can now actually determine the difference because you’re actually doing better than the ones that are obviously really just speculation and gambling.

[00:14:06] Gareth Jenkinson: I wish we had like an hour to speak about this, but very quickly, Iggy Azalea was late on stage today. These things happen. It’s crazy here in Singapore. She’s obviously launched MOTHER. What are your guys’ general thoughts on her? Because she’s probably launched and has the most successful celebrity memecoin, just with her celebrity status and the way she’s kinda done about it. Does she care? What is she doing? Should we care about it?

[00:14:28] Nic Puckrin: She’s kept on it longer than a lot of the other celebrities, let’s be honest. Like a lot of other celebrities, they just go and launch their coin and run away and then hope people forget. Credit to her for trying to give it utility, at least, as well. Like which other celebrity has talked about giving their memecoin or their celebrity coin utility?

[00:14:42] Yat Siu: I don’t have a lot to say other than the fact that I think she does seem to know more about the space than... I think a lot of people were dismissive, and I think she’s been actually sort of at it. So that’s good to see. But the jury is out there, right? What I do like is when celebrities really lean into crypto, regardless in which one way or the other, actually what they’re putting at stake is their reputation. And that’s really the only currency that they have. So, in some ways, the deeper she is in the space, the more invested she has to be, the more important it is that it has to work. So, in that sense, I think so far, it does seem like a good thing.

[00:15:11] Gareth Jenkinson: For sure. Telegram and TON. Another very big narrative that has come out for us, and it’s been very heavy in our coverage. Who’s played Hamster Kombat, not Coin? Don’t be shy. Put your hands up. It’s like two people. Unbelievable. I’ve played Hamster Kombat. Don’t judge me. Telegram’s got 900 million users. They use TON as the native blockchain to integrate what they’re doing onchain. The potential network effects of that is massive. Alex, are you interested in doing analytics on TON? Is that something?

[00:15:39] Alex Svanevik: Yep. It’s coming in Q4.

[00:15:40] Gareth Jenkinson: There we go.

[00:15:41] Alex Svanevik: We’ve already started doing it.

[00:15:42] Gareth Jenkinson: There’s the answer. You got it.

[00:15:43] Alex Svanevik: Yep. This one is going to be a little bit faster than SOL.

[00:15:45] Gareth Jenkinson: Okay. So you’re keenly interested in what’s happening there, right?

[00:15:48] Alex Svanevik: Yeah, I mean, more broadly, I think of TON as like the quintessential distribution chain. You have some chains that have natural distribution. Another chain is Base because you have Coinbase. And also you could say BNB Chain has natural distribution where you can basically tap into 100 million users or more. I’m generally very bullish on these distribution chains because, at the end of the day, if you want to get to billions of people being owners of things... By the way, my hope for the future is that you will own something, and you will be happy. The opposite of the World Economic Forum. You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy. And to get to those billions of people, you probably need to have chains with built-in distribution through other ways.

[00:16:34] Gareth Jenkinson: Yat, you’re intrinsically involved.

[00:16:37] Yat Siu: I mean, we’re very bullish on TON. We were big backers of them last year. And, you know, we basically validated, all that kind of stuff. But also, it’s really we saw them as a distribution for games, which we focus on a lot. And gaming, for instance, our own gaming has 100 million users now, almost 100 million users, which was not possible before. One of the biggest problems that Web3 had was the distribution channels, being Apple, Facebook, Google, were actually stopping basically anything related to crypto to enter the space. And Telegram basically just opened up the doors through TON. So I think it’s really good. I think the jury is still out there in terms of the quality of the users, because, in one way, as being sort of this hyper-anonymous network that’s great. On the other hand, that means I don’t really know much about you. But I think this is actually what TON will help solve, because then you can start putting in things like reputation layers and identity layers, and actually, you can get better data around that. And also all these TON, Telegram games actually are making much more revenue today through advertising, which was something that many other Web3 games didn’t have because they didn’t have that sort of avenue. The hope, of course, is that eventually, these users will bleed into the rest of the Web3 ecosystem. Majority of them actually don’t understand anything about DeFi. It’s their first experience. And so I think the next step is telling them about what else you can do in the ecosystem. And it will first happen a lot in TON, and then I think it will bleed into the rest of the Web3 ecosystem.

[00:17:46] Gareth Jenkinson: What’s your general thought, Nic?

[00:17:47] Nic Puckrin: I’m not a gaming professional, but I think what is interesting, and I have spoken to some people who do gaming, is like it’s vital and it’s something that you can, like, addictive for a moment, but it’s not something that you can demonstrate skill for the longer term in terms of like a mobile game, right, for the GameFi space. And in terms of why people are playing it right now, obviously there’s the virality of it, but also the monetary component. So they’re getting paid airdrops and that kind of stuff. So they incentivize to want to play it. So then, how over the long term do you keep on incentivizing them, especially from a tokenomics perspective, because you need to have you paying them in terms of airdrops? You need to think of a revenue component as well. And how do you keep them engaged for the long term, especially on these kind of games which are short-term thing?

[00:18:26] Gareth Jenkinson: Yeah, we went kind of hard on the coverage of Hamster Kombat, in particular. And like shout out to Dima, our head of video, that did a really fantastic, about 12-minute documentary. And they really delved into it, like the for, the against, what people like about it, what’s going to happen when the token airdrop happens. And I’m really interested to see what happens at the end of the month. I’ll be honest with you. Like they’re going to do the token airdrop. Can I give you my genuine opinion? People are going to sell their tokens, and they might stop playing. That might be what happens, you know.

[00:18:51] Yat Siu: Yeah, but I think it’s this first generation of games, basically. I mean, if you look at the first generation of mobile games, what was it, Angry Birds, Mafia Wars and basically idle clicker games. Exactly what we have right now. But what it did do is it brought a whole bunch of people into the ecosystem. And it’s probably true that the majority of them might not stay because they’re just there for the money, but there’s a percentage that do stay. And then it’s up to the products that are to basically say, okay, I brought in a bunch of users, now what can I do to actually make them stick? And this is where games is good, because I might come in for the money, but I’ll either stay for the culture or I stay for the fun and entertainment. And we saw that actually in the evolution of the early stages of NFTs. Sure, the market is smaller today than it was during the bull run, but the people who are still there in the NFT market are damn die-hard because they are there for the culture and for the fun.

[00:19:32] Alex Svanevik: I think Yat’s point is really important, actually, because typically, the way you get into crypto is you buy crypto, you invest in crypto. But GameFi or Web3 gaming gives you this opportunity to actually earn your first crypto, which means you can have a much more inclusive approach to crypto because not everyone has savings and so on, right?

[00:19:50] Yat Siu: Remember faucets? In the early days, that was actually the first kind of airdrop, if you think about it.

[00:19:54] Alex Svanevik: So you can kind of think of Web3 gaming as like slightly more fun faucets, maybe.

[00:19:58] Gareth Jenkinson: If you think it’s fun. Very quickly, the US elections are coming up in about a month’s time. What happens? A Harris presidency: Does the US get a lot more of the same? Trump presidency: Does the US turn into a big orange pill?

[00:20:11] Alex Svanevik: I think none of us are Americans, right? So we can speak freely and independent. I think the scenario is probably that if Trump wins, it’s very bullish for crypto in the US and probably for the rest of the world. If Kamala Harris wins, it’s probably bad for crypto in the US, but it could be really good for crypto outside of the US. I’ve literally spoken to founders and CEOs who have said that they will move abroad if Kamala Harris wins. Maybe this is the equivalent of, like, I’m moving to Canada if Trump wins. But I think there is something to it. And some of the policies that are out there are just inherently sort of anti-venture, anti-startup and anti-crypto at the end of the day. I think you just have to call a spade a spade without any broader comment on political preferences and so on. But yeah, that’s my take. Basically, Trump wins, bullish for crypto in the US and probably the world in the short term. If Kamala Harris wins, maybe bullish for the rest of the world.

[00:21:09] Yat Siu: I think universally, everyone sort of agrees that if Trump does win, which I think is tough, but assuming he was to win, that it would be bullish for the industry, I think. However, I’m not as negative about Kamala winning, partially because she hasn’t really come out with a clear policy statement. So, I think the jury is still out. And when you take a look at what happened with FIT21 and the SAB and basically the way the House and the Senate voted on these crypto bills, it tells me that actually there’s something in the American underbelly that actually the reason why the Democrats had to defect is because they were probably concerned about their seats and their future. I think it’s actually a much more bipartisan issue than we maybe give it credit to. Yes, there’s a lot of media and press that talk about how anti-crypto Democrats are, but when it actually came to the votes, it didn’t show that. So, actually, a more broadly positive. But I think sentiment-wise, I think it’ll be neutral. It’ll be kind of more of the same that we have today. I don’t think it’ll go down, but I also don’t think it’ll necessarily go up, and there’ll be a steady-as-she-goes approach. So, in some ways, you could say actually maybe that’s healthier in some ways because it means that the crypto market will broadly grow in a more steady way rather than have this sort of very volatile thing, which definitely I think Trump will introduce if he does get elected.

[00:22:10] Gareth Jenkinson: What kind of videos are we going to see on Coin Bureau about this?

[00:22:12] Nic Puckrin: Well, we’ve covered quite a bit. We can’t miss it. I mean, we don’t want to cover politics, but you have to, right? Yeah, I think that what you say is a good point. Obviously, Congress is where the laws get passed, right? So it’s not just a single figurehead. You’ve got a bipartisan Congress who believes in the value of cryptocurrency, with some good bills coming to a vote, and that will be good for crypto. Obviously, it would be very good if Trump wins, in general, for the crypto industry globally and in the US, but whoever wins, Bitcoin, I think, will still rally because they’ve both got some massive deficit spending plans. Fiscal stimulus is going to drive Bitcoin up. But yeah, I think that it will be very bearish for the US crypto industry for sure if she wins. I don’t know if it can get worse than the current Gary regime, but you know this is crypto. Anything can happen.

[00:22:53] Gareth Jenkinson: Well, there you have it. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for your time. It was really great to have you here. Give them a round of applause.