I've been thinking a lot about a concept that I believe is going to define this next chapter of crypto. It's something that Multicoin Capital recently named in their 2026 investment thesis. They called it Entertainment Finance. And the more time I spend with it, the more I think they nailed it.
Let me try to set the stage.
The cost of the American Dream has never been higher. Depending on which estimate you believe, a middle-class life in the United States now runs somewhere between $3.4 and $4.4 million over a lifetime. Median home prices have tripled relative to median income since the 1980s. The average college graduate enters the workforce carrying six figures in debt. These aren't abstract policy numbers. This is the math that an entire generation runs in their heads every single day.
And the conclusion most of them are reaching is pretty simple: the conventional path doesn't work anymore. Save diligently for 40 years, invest in index funds, buy a house, retire at 65. For most people under 40, the expected value of that plan has turned negative. The math broke.
So what happens when the conventional path stops working? People don't stop trying. They start taking bigger swings. Not because they're reckless or financially illiterate, but because the alternative is worse. Grinding for decades toward a goal that keeps moving further away is not a rational strategy. Taking a bigger bet on yourself, on a trade, on an asymmetric opportunity? That's adaptive.
This is playing out everywhere right now. Sports betting volumes have doubled since 2020. Retail options trading hit record highs. Meme stocks became a cultural phenomenon. And crypto markets have absorbed hundreds of billions in speculative capital from first-time participants.
Multicoin's framing is worth stating directly: when long-term goals feel out of reach, people take bigger swings. Crypto is the primary market for doing that, with fewer intermediaries taking their cut.
That last part matters more than it sounds. The reason crypto has absorbed so much of this energy isn't just that the assets are volatile or that the culture is permissive. It's that the infrastructure is fundamentally cheaper. Traditional sports betting operates on a 10% vig. Stock brokerages eliminated commissions but still monetize through payment for order flow and wide spreads. Credit card processors take 2-3% on every transaction. Each of these intermediaries represents a tax on the act of taking financial risk.
Crypto rails are killing that tax. Onchain trading settles instantly, operates 24/7, and runs on fee structures that are orders of magnitude lower. The venue for entertainment finance is now global, permissionless, and nearly free.
The vig is dying. And that changes everything.
So what exactly is entertainment finance? I think it's pretty straightforward. It's what happens when financial risk-taking becomes a form of leisure. When having skin in the game is itself the product, not just the means to a financial outcome.
Poker is entertainment finance. So is sports betting, fantasy sports, day trading, and horse racing. People have always been willing to pay, in expected value terms, for the experience of competition, risk, and the possibility of outsized reward. The global gambling market alone is worth over $500 billion annually. Add retail trading, prediction markets, and fantasy sports, and you're looking at a TAM that dwarfs most sectors crypto builders obsess over.
What's changed is the cost structure. Crypto collapses the fees, removes the geographic barriers, and eliminates the gatekeepers. No sportsbook skimming 10%. No brokerage routing your order to a market maker. No payment processor adding its toll. The infrastructure for taking financial risk has never been cheaper or more accessible.
I think about entertainment finance in crypto across three dimensions:
- Trading as sport. Memecoins, leveraged perps, narrative-driven momentum trades. Nobody is buying a dog-themed token because they've modeled out the discounted cash flows. They're buying it because the trade is memetic. The discovery, the timing, the community, the P&L swings. The token is the ticket to the game.
- Markets as content. Prediction markets are the clearest example here. Polymarket isn't just a betting platform. It's a media product. The prices themselves are information. The act of trading a prediction market is simultaneously consuming and producing content about the underlying event. Sports betting works the same way. It makes watching a game more engaging because you have a financial stake in the outcome.
- Speculation as social. Leaderboards, copy trading, trade sharing, livestreamed sessions. The trade becomes a shared experience. You're not just managing a portfolio in isolation. You're performing, competing, building a reputation. Your P&L is your content. Your track record is your social proof.
These three dimensions are converging. And the products that sit at the intersection, where trading is the game, the market is the content, and the social layer is the distribution, are going to define this cycle. I hold high conviction on this.
The biggest shift happening in entertainment finance right now isn't better order execution or lower fees. It's the merger of trading with content and social media. These used to be completely separate activities. You traded on one platform, discussed it on another, and consumed financial content on a third. That entire stack is collapsing.
We've already seen previews of this in traditional markets. Robinhood turned trading into a mobile game. WallStreetBets turned stock analysis into memes that moved markets. The GameStop saga in 2021 was a financial event and a cultural event simultaneously. You couldn't separate the trade from the narrative from the community.
Crypto takes this further because the assets themselves are natively social. A memecoin isn't a security with cultural appeal bolted on. It IS cultural expression with a price feed attached. The token is the content. When you buy a memecoin, you're making a financial bet and a cultural statement at the same time. The virality of the token and the price action of the token are the same thing.
But the next evolution goes further than assets that happen to be cultural. It's turning the act of trading itself into live entertainment.
Think about what happened to poker.
Before 2003, poker was a private game played in backrooms and casinos. Dedicated audience, but niche. Then ESPN started broadcasting the World Series of Poker with hole-card cameras. Small devices that let viewers see each player's hidden cards. Overnight, poker became must-watch television. Viewers could follow the strategy, the bluffs, the reads. They could see the information asymmetry in real time. Prize pools went from $2 million to over $8 million in two years. The entire poker industry exploded, not because the game changed, but because the spectator experience did.
Hole-card cameras turned poker from a participation sport into a spectator sport. I believe the same transformation is starting to happen in crypto trading right now.
This brings me to Bullpen.
For context, Bullpen is a trading terminal co-founded by Ansem, one of the largest and most followed traders in crypto. It unifies Solana spot trading via Jupiter Ultra, Hyperliquid perpetuals, and prediction markets into a single interface. Smart execution, MEV protection, whale tracking, runner detection for catching breakout tokens before they trend. Solid product.
But that's not what makes Bullpen interesting to me.
What makes Bullpen interesting is Market Bubble.
Market Bubble is a livestream feature where traders broadcast their sessions in real time. Viewers watch positions open and close. They see the P&L move. They see the entries, the exits, the sizing decisions. And they can trade alongside the streamer from the same interface.
This is the hole-card camera moment for crypto trading.
It solves one of the hardest problems in crypto adoption: the cold-start problem for new participants. Most people who are curious about crypto markets don't know where to start. The learning curve is steep. Wallets, slippage, gas fees, liquidation mechanics, bridging between chains. Documentation doesn't fix this. Tutorials don't fix this. What fixes it is watching someone who knows what they're doing and learning by osmosis. Market Bubble turns experienced traders into live instructors without requiring them to do anything other than trade. The content is the activity.
The business model follows directly from the product. Bullpen monetizes through order flow and volume. More viewers create more traders. More traders create more volume. More volume creates more revenue. The content drives the commerce. No ad model. No subscription paywall. The financial activity itself is entertaining enough to attract and retain an audience.
Here's the deeper insight though. In a world where product is easily copyable, your moat is content, distribution, and authenticity. Any team with good engineers can build a trading terminal. The execution layer is increasingly commoditized. Jupiter handles the routing. Hyperliquid handles the matching engine. Jito handles the MEV protection. That product surface is replicable.
What isn't replicable is Ansem's audience, his track record, the trust he's built over years of public trading, and the culture that forms around his streams. Bullpen understood this from the beginning. The product isn't the terminal. The product is the ecosystem of attention around it.
When Ansem streams on Market Bubble, he's simultaneously creating content, generating trading volume, and demonstrating the product. That loop, where the founder's core activity is also the company's core marketing and revenue driver, doesn't exist in traditional finance. It barely exists anywhere. It's a structural advantage that emerges specifically from the entertainment finance model.
Zooming out. Why should builders and allocators actually care about entertainment finance as a category?
Because the TAM is bigger than people think. The total addressable market for "financial services" is large. The total addressable market for "financial entertainment" is larger. It includes everyone who bets on sports, plays poker, trades stocks for fun, plays fantasy sports, watches financial content on YouTube and TikTok, or follows traders on social media. That's not millions of people. That's billions.
Entertainment finance is also the most natural onboarding vector for mainstream crypto adoption. Nobody is bringing their non-crypto friends into the ecosystem through a DeFi lending vault or an airdrop claim page. But a livestreamed trading session where someone's making money in real time? A prediction market on the Super Bowl? A memecoin that your group chat is passing around? Those are entry points that work regardless of technical sophistication. The entertainment is the onramp.
The regulatory environment is cooperating for the first time. The passage of the GENIUS Act, the SEC's Project Crypto initiative, CFTC harmonization under Chairman Selig. The US is actually building a real framework for digital asset markets. Prediction markets have legal precedent through Kalshi. Trading terminals operating on compliant infrastructure have a viable path forward.
And there's a capital formation angle here that connects directly to why I think about this at Novora. Protocols and products that understand entertainment finance will win the attention war. In a market where every token competes for mindshare, the ones that make participation entertaining attract more users, more volume, and ultimately more capital. The best IR strategy in the world can't save a product nobody wants to use. But a product that people are watching, trading, and sharing organically? That generates its own distribution. That's the compounding loop.
Crypto killed the vig. The intermediary tax on financial risk-taking is collapsing toward zero. What remains is a pure market for human appetite: risk, competition, status, and entertainment.
The winners this cycle won't be the protocols with the highest TVL or the most comprehensive documentation. They'll be the products that people actually want to use because using them is fun. The ones that turn trading into a sport, markets into content, and speculation into a social experience.
Entertainment finance isn't a sideshow. It's the main event.
Bullpen is building at the center of this. A unified trading terminal, a livestream product that turns markets into a spectator sport, and a founder whose core activity is indistinguishable from the product itself. That's entertainment finance in its purest form.
We are still very much in the early innings here. There's a lot of work to be done as it relates to product, distribution, and market structure. But I hold high conviction that this category is real, it's growing, and the products being built at this intersection are going to define what crypto looks like for the next decade.
The vig is dead. The game is just getting started.