FRTW 5/25/26
The Rim Never Moved
Front Run The Week
The Rim Never Moved
Gold. XRP. PAXG. And why I’d rather be on the bench before the crowd shows up thinking they’re going to win this game as one big unit.
In my humble opinion, I think physical gold needs to be a lot taller than where its price sits. Like from Kyler Murray needing a step ladder to see over the offensive line to Victor Wembanyama staring down the rim like it’s another player on the hardwood, or something.
I say this not because I’m an expert on gold or even the stock market, but because when I slam a Premier Protein and think hard about it — and I ask myself why the rim has never been raised in the NBA but players just seem to be the size of a cell tower — I also ask myself why the USA doesn’t make iPhones in house even though they could, making things a wee bit better for the economy.
The iPhone is the most desirable consumer product over the last 20 years, and yet we basically import it into America as if we’re grateful it made it to our shores or something. At the end of last year, gold was the United States’ biggest export. We no longer seem to manufacture much of anything to share with the rest of the world. And it seems the richer some people get, the more they act like outsourcing is a noble thing. It’s my belief they’d be super rich regardless. It’s also my belief that it crushes the middle class, a goal of the wealthy 1 percent that includes a new “mobile class” to service their interests.
So here’s the connection I keep coming back to. We export the thing that was already in the ground. We import the thing we could build ourselves. The rim never moved but players have the wingspans of Cessnas, and at some point the math on gold has to catch up to what’s actually happening in the world.
No charts or graphs or seasoned voices from Kitco News. Just me thinking something is off. Way off.
Like 7’8 Olivier Rioux gripping a basketball like it’s a baseball, and all the other college players looking like kindergartners standing beside a human windmill.
I’ve written about this before and I’ll share it again because I think it matters more now than it did then.
When the iPhone 6 debuted, the cost of the phone at retail in terms of XRP at the time was 131,000 tokens. Ten years later, when the iPhone 16 came out at retail, it was not 131,000 XRP but roughly 320.
Sit with that number for a moment because no bench-warmer at CNBC will.
You couldn’t buy an iPhone with XRP back then — you still can’t today in the traditional sense. But knowing what you know after following me, would you agree that sooner than later you will be able to? Some would say Bitcoin, but my thinking is that you need everything for that transaction to happen cross-border, under five seconds, maybe millions of transactions per minute. The closer we get to a 1 to 1 ratio, the closer I feel that the transaction will settle on chain.
If NBA players only get taller and the rim never moves an inch even after 100 years of little or no innovation, there is no going back. And seemingly there is no cap.
It’s just interesting to think about how gold factors into this. Gold is mined, it’s refined, and then sent through other channels. Watch any Kitco segment and there’s more than I could ever say on any precious metal. But I think about the iPhone and I think about XRP and I think about gold in a way that maybe others don’t.
Gold was already in the Earth. It just needed to be found. The iPhone needed to be invented — or maybe lifted from the Palm Pilot. Gold needed to be refined. But it was always there, if you know where to look.
Which brings me to PAXG, and why I think it’s worth focusing on when there’s so much noise out there and not enough Signal.
PAX Gold is a token backed 1:1 by physical gold held in professional vaults. One token, one fine troy ounce. You get to move it like crypto but what’s underneath it is the thing that was already in the ground before any of this existed. Having exposure to gold through tokenization should really be thought of as a privilege now. Not a trade, not a flip — a privilege.
Tokenization itself represents the future we’re moving into. First the dollar, then whatever is next. Gold is already there on-chain. Most people just haven’t noticed yet — but the numbers are starting to speak for themselves. The global market cap of real-world assets on-chain recently hit $65 billion, a 44% increase from the start of the year. Asset managers are bringing tokenized assets on-chain at an accelerated tick, and every major blockchain is competing heavily to attract institutional capital. The infrastructure isn’t coming. It’s here.
Here’s where I’ll be honest about my own thinking on timing.
I’m much more comfortable aligning with crypto right now than I will be after July. I’d rather be satisfied with where things stand before August than still be building when retail comes back loud and everyone thinks they’re going to get rich together. If you’ve been following me you already know why July matters. I’m not going to rehash it here.
That’s not me calling a top. That’s just me knowing what that energy feels like when it shows up, and I’d rather be done before it does.
The research is starting to catch up to that instinct. K33 Research recently diagnosed what they’re calling “unique pessimism” in the market — an overly defensive stance that looks more like a bottom than a breakdown. Bitcoin’s 30-day average funding rate has been negative for over 80 consecutive days, meaning traders have been betting on declines even when prices rebounded. K33 put $60,000 as the floor for this cycle. The pessimism itself, they argue, is the safety net.
I’m not here to tell you what the bottom was or wasn’t. I’m telling you that when that pessimism flips — and it will — the energy that comes in behind it is the energy I want to already be positioned ahead of.
So when things do get good — and I think they will — and something in the air just doesn’t feel right because new retail is showing up thinking they’re going to get rich together, PAXG is where I’m thinking profits go. Not because I’m walking away from the thesis. But because I think gold could be a lot higher, I just don’t know when, and PAXG lets you stay close to that without staying in the casino.
It’s a quiet position in a loud market. That to me is worth something.
Another way to think about the future is to really consider what others might know, or not know.
If you ask any living person what YouTube and Bitcoin are, you’re bound to get an answer and not a look from your dog when you gave him twelve cookies already but he makes you think that was yesterday. But if you ask someone about Substack and much of what’s on my Signals, people might look at you with a strange expression and no information. That gap is the opportunity. It always has been.
If you’re curious about crypto and you’re doing all of it on a mobile phone, that’s a good way to get gamified. Set up a desktop or laptop and work at it like you’re in business not to go broke. Treat it like a boardroom decision, not a notification you tap through half asleep. That’s how I look at things.
Web3 is a skill, and mobile is a tool — not a lifestyle, and not an opportunity. The mobile class will ultimately be REKT, subsequently rent forever, and forced to offer up their crypto as collateral on loan deals.
Signals and TTN Members — join me Monday 5/25 at 6PM MST for the next livestream. We’ll talk through everything in this newsletter and what’s moving on the stack.
PS.
Speaking of going back to the days of dial-up with a thick computer screen and tickers slow enough to tap your pencil to — I built a Chrome extension called Substackly, and the reason should be obvious by now. It’s brand new to the store, and I built it because the way most people navigate Substack — especially across multiple publications — leaves a lot on the table. If you have Chrome on a desktop or laptop, you can use the free version to save Substacks and take notes. The upgrade has unlimited saves and highlighting. Using the Explore button on the Substack main page, hovering over what you want to read, it will let you know if the publication is Substackly friendly — meaning it runs on a Substack subdomain like tokentrust.substack.com. It’ll take you back to the page and even the spot you last stopped, including on a video. Know it exists, know I built it for readers like you, and know that using the right tools to navigate the right information is exactly what this newsletter has always been about.
The Lindy Effect says that if something has been around for a period of time, the chances of it continuing are higher than something new just getting started. Front Run The Week has been published every Sunday for over a year now. There are 85 Signals members, 18 of whom are in the TTN. If that’s not you, feel free to grab the 7-day look or get the protein any time.
The rim never moved. But you can still choose which side of it you’re standing on.
— Chip
Share with someone who won’t know tokenized gold is the real digital gold until someone taller than me in this game says something.
That point you made about the iPhone—exporting what's in the ground and importing the finished product—is a prime example of what's wrong with the economy right now.
You're basically describing what happened when we walked away from the American System of economics. For decades we were sold this idea that outsourcing everything and just moving capital around was the ultimate goal. All it really did was gut the middle class and trade a physical, production-based economy for a global financial casino.
Tokenized assets and Web3 are great lifeboats but a country actually has to make stuff to survive.