Bankless - Can Crypto's Broken Moral Compass Be Fixed? | RSA+DH

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

On today's episode of Bankless Takes we're exploring the current state of crypto's social layer. Are we in this for the right reasons, or has crypto lost the plot? ------ 🖼️ Borrow ETH or USDC with an NFT on NFTFi https://bankless.cc/NFTFi_pod  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo    🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku    🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC  🦄 UNISWAP | SWAP SMARTER https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Start 05:16 The Worst Memecoins 10:37 How We Got Here https://x.com/reganbozman/status/1769775181722190293?s=46  13:56 Have We Lost The Plot? https://polynya.mirror.xyz/ptscXuh3J3KOj2uJAn0vrEanpn2nauwA7iytYZ4cM9U  19:39 Celebrating Criminals https://x.com/laurashin/status/1772407168760713454?s=20  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1772313252183126314?s=20  https://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1772428935206183082?s=20  26:55 Long Term Focus https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1772320119504449592?s=20  31:10 Don't Ignore The Bad, Pursue The Good https://twitter.com/nic__carter/status/1771980083667861734?s=20  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠ 

Bankless Station, we've got a David and Ryan takes episode today, and we're going to talk about crypto's a broken moral compass. Okay, this was a post that was issued this week. And also, racist, Solana meme coins? What in the world is going on over there in crypto on Solana specifically? And the big question, I think, in our minds, the context for this conversation is, has crypto lost the plot? Before we get into this conversation, which I'm pretty excited about, I think there's actually more under the hood than what meets the eye. We're going to talk to our friends and sponsors over at N. NFT-5, where you can use your NFTs to get a loan. You use your NFTs as a collateral to borrow

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give me that loan. We can meet on NFT5, actually. There you go. As you get into this conversation, I think there's just some things I think listeners should know. Of course, if you are paying attention to the crypto meta, meme coins have taken a turn for the worst. There you. are kind of spiraling out of control. But there are our incentives that I think are worth understanding as to why. And it goes back to the role of narratives and attention in crypto. But we're also going to talk about like the purpose and meaning of meme coins. Why crypto deifies some of the worst leaders in the industry,

which is something that we also saw this week, Ryan, on crypto Twitter. And then like you said, crypto's seemingly lack of moral compass. I think there are some data points, some dots that we could all kind of smash together to put in just a little bit more understanding as to like why human behavior is the way that it is in this part of the market cycle here in crypto. All right, guys, we're getting right into that conversation. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible, including our recommended exchange for 2024, the way you transfer your Fiat into crypto.

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All right, so the context for this is I think crypto's broken moral compass. This was a post I read from Pellenia. And I think stuff like this, what we are looking at on screen, which we have blurred out for the audience because... It's blurred out. We can't even say it. It's most things, most tokens, we cannot read the names. We won't do it. David, I think tokens like this, meme coins like this, kind of the underlying mania are breaking people.

Notably, our friend and previous bankless podcast guest, Pellena, who's been a long time crypto writer and advocate wrote a post this week called Crypto's Broken Moral Compass. And we'll get to that post in a minute and tell you exactly what Pellania said. But I think it's stuff like this. So I know it's blurred out. but for the audience, what are we looking at here? What is this air quotes meta right now? Yeah, so this is some individuals portfolio of meme coins that they have that are all themed racist.

They're all racist themed using words that we will not be able to use on the podcast, nor would we ever want to. And the funny thing is, is every single one of these meme coins, this gentleman is up in profit on his meme coins, on their meme coins. And so not only are they racist meme coins, but they're also profitable meme points. And this is the intersection that I think many people are finding disenjoyable, the intersection between profitability and racism or just egregiousness or crudeness, things that we would, is that normal civilized society would call distasteful. Why is being distasteful also profitable? Why are these two things intersecting at this moment of time?

And I think this is, people are like, this is a moment for reflection for the is like, how did we get here? My answer for this friend is, well, meme coins very quickly realize that this is a game of attention. And so when 10,000 meme coins are all being born every single, like, hour in the crypto space because we just had a few meme coins go to a billion dollars. And then all of a sudden, with the tools that we have, you know, the ability to mint tokens, it becomes a very big competition for any amount of attention whatsoever.

And so I think over the last two weeks, that meta has been unearthed and people realize that the more egregious, the more crude, the more just like shocking, you can name your meme coin, the more attention you can get. And so this has devolved into like one of the worst metas in terms of like public perception that I think crypto has ever had for itself. Yeah, a few things I'll know is actually. So the idea of people getting rich on like racism is like a thing that's happening. and Plenty has gone farther than even the comments that you just made. We'll get to that post in a minute. Calling this evil, basically. And I think this is the type of thing that sets people over the edge is, are we just degrading to a bunch of short-term attention games that are now like devolving into racism?

Why? Because like we can make a profit off of that. Is that what crypto really is? And people are looking at this as the social layer. And they're basically saying, this is gross. Like I don't want to be a part of this, right? If this is crypto, then I don't want to be a part of crypto. And this is kind of like where I think the attention economy can devolve,

or at least it has devolved right here. I guess a few things I'll say, which is, you know, I would say some ironies. One thing for these, like, racist coin collectors, I will note is that none of this is private. So again, we're not on any, like, private layer ones here. So, you know, like whatever coins you own in your Solana address, that can be AML, KYC, probably linked to you, right? There's like all sorts of chain alices type of. Your base address too, like has nothing to do with Solana.

People know who you are. Like, they're going to know who you are. This is actually not super private, right? Sudenonymous, but not private. So maybe there will be some kind of like social cost for doing some of these activities. Like, can you imagine if a notable crypto influencer or like a VC firm got caught with things like this in their wallets? It will cost them reputational.

And deservedly so. I mean, that's what society sort of does, right? Even if it's not technically illegal, we can like, socially pressure people through like mores and norms and just say, hey, we like, we don't stand for this. This isn't, this isn't cool to do. And I wonder how much of that will come to pass. Also, it presents an interesting, I think, juncture for not necessarily the base layer of validators on Solana in terms of whether they process these transactions, but at least at front ends, right? If you're a front end and you're like kind of like a Jupiter or some sort

of exchange with this set of tokens on Solana, do you screen this out? I think probably the answer is like yes for almost all of them. And so that's like a call I'm sure many applications are making today. Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah. I mean, it's really a matter of just like how much do we want to guard our public image in crypto. Like we like to have permissionlessness. Like we like to have like permissionless open finance that anyone can partake in and enjoy. And so this is like a natural byproduct of that. And so but also at the same time. It doesn't have to be though, right? Like, it's just... We could curate and we could manicure and we could, like, put a more polished...

Censor? Like, yeah, censor. We could do that. I don't think anyone's suggesting that we do that. But then we have this. Then this is what's going on as a result. So let's talk about this tweet that you included in this section, David, which is like the context of maybe how we got there and why there's some sort of like profit incentive, a number go up incentive to get to de, to de, generate to the level of like now people are actually trading like racist meme coins and who knows how it'll devolve from there right like it could get even worse what what tweet are we looking at from from regan here yeah so this is actually like kind of in an adjacent uh topic this is an adjacent tweet thread the very first tweet in this thread says it's widely accepted that the way to make

money in vc is to be contrarian and right and regan continues and says this is absolutely false in crypto venture all that matters is your ability to front run the narrative and so this is actually how a thread about how crypto VC is different than normal VC, whereas in normal VC, you are focused on like cash flows, revenue fundamentals. But Reagan says in crypto VC, it's actually about narrative. And they unpack this whole entire thread. They unpack like why this is true. And like halfway through this tweet thread in tweet 20, we can't read the whole thread.

Really good thread. Link in the show notes. Tweet number 20 says, your your crypto VC terminal liquidity comes from. retail. And something that's nice about crypto is that generally startups do a pre-seed, a seed round, maybe a Series A, and then they issue a token. Whereas in the traditional finance world, this, you know, going public on the stock market, it's like series A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and then the retail is left to buy the bag on the open stock market. So at least in crypto, we are going public sooner and retail can get some upside here. But when our terminal liquidity comes from

retail, Reagan says, whatever you do at seed, you need to more or less underwrite that a retail audience is going to be excited about buying that thing on the open market, which is wildly different for terminal liquidity than traditional venture capital. This brings us to the second major distinction between crypto and normal venture. What do crypto markets value? I'll give you a hint, Reagan says, it ain't cash flows, crypto markets value attention. And so this attention, this focus on the attention economy where attention is liquidity really warps the incentive of both crypto VC and, you know, crypto meme coins. And so this is, we're seeing this happen with the warps incentives around crypto VC and now we're actually seeing it show up in like

the form factor that our tokens come in. Yeah, I think that's the main point. And anywhere where Reagan said VC, I think you just substitute investor, right? And it kind of makes sense. But this, it really nails it crypto markets value attention. So what we're seeing in these meme coin markets is basically attention markets, right? And it's not necessarily true

that these have underlying fundamentals, we talked about the past, but they do have some sort of spotlight on them. It's kind of weird though to have this effect of like racism is trending and therefore somebody is making money or there could be some incentive to actually produce like racist coins

or unsavory coins in some way just because you can make a profit. it. That is kind of like, I wouldn't say uniquely crypto, but the ability to monetize on top of this attention economy is something that crypto is providing sort of out of the box. And that's where I get to, we get to, I think this conversation about, well, have we lost the plot? Is that all we are? Like all that it is here? And I feel like almost the meme coinery of the, you know, the past few months, the past six months or so, this like prices go up in a way that is not, necessarily commensurate with all of the fundamentals probably according to people like

polenia or are very much looking at like actual use cases of the blockchain and is it is it helping people out in the real world you know all the real world stuff they look at this and then kind of the you get throw racist meme coins on top of it because why not and so plenty comes at this and it's like this industry is broken i rage quit so at the end of this post is basically like a rage quit i'm like not going to write about crypto anymore and and keep in mind this is just one individual but I think exemplifies maybe some perspective that a lot of people feel. And also, this is a very talented crypto analyst, right? Somebody that I've been reading for a very long time.

So when they say that we've reached a breaking point, crypto is evil, are some of the words in this post, and I'm rage quitting. Like, I paused and I read this on Monday morning, and I was like, wow, okay, what do I think about this? How do I process it? why don't we actually get into this post and kind of dissect it a little bit, David? Yeah, I think I'll start reading from this section here. The DeFi Ponzi's, the meme coins, the ugly JPEGs of 2021.

It's the same story every time. There's some grandiose narrative for what's nothing more than a pure casino. Can't get much worse, right? Sadly, nope. Things have hit an all-time new bottom with 2024, racist, sexists, and other shit-headed memes, which are merely a vehicle to transfer wealth from the many to the most obnoxious people on the planet. So why has there been such a sharp decline? I think it's pretty simple. The crypto community lacks any moral compass. The same defensiveness and cope gets on repeated. Everything is a Ponzi

is as a justification for what we're doing here in crypto, which Pellonia responds. This is obviously false. There are many productive assets worldwide. Organizations had invented products that led to significant increases in productivity and the quality of life. Scammers are everywhere, like claim the crypto people. Crypto's no different. To which Plenia responds, yes, Crypto does not have a monopoly on scammers, grifters, and opportunists. There are industries that are almost entirely free of scammers, and then there are industries in which scams run rampant. Crypto is absolutely on the extreme end of the latter spectrum.

And then there will always be a demand for casinos, to which plenty of response. Yes, but crypto is really a terrible casino. And then they link a talk by John Wu in which John Wu talks about all the ways in that casinos are actually really good casinos, very fair, like legal. compliant organizations that really punish cheaters. They have some checks and balances, whereas crypto you can get completely rugged by... Exactly.

Yes. And then the latest one, racist are everywhere to which Plenia doesn't even dignify it with a response. So basically saying like, hey, like sure, like permissionless open system, fine. The scammers everywhere are fine. But also it doesn't really matter anything that you list like crypto is always on like the worst end of that

spectrum. So therefore, peace, I'm out, says Pellania. Yeah. So what was your take when you read this, David. I'm not sure when you read it, but I think you published this over, or they published this over the weekend. And I just caught up with it on Monday morning. I heard some conversation about it. What was your take when you read this? This one line that comes right after the part of I was reading, I thought like, oh, that's me and you, Ryan, that he's talking about us, which is others clearly know that this is all very, very bad, but we give it a wide berth. And we just say, hey,

let's just focus on the good and we'll ignore the very, very bad. That's not only what I say. do. It's what I do. Yeah. That's how I live with myself in this industry. I wasn't even looking at this corner of crypto, Twitter and meme coinery until like, you know, like it was drawn to my attention. I just ignore it. One more sentence or two is, Pellania says, even when the people who are willing to speak up back then, back then, which is like post-2020, after that, all that bad stuff, people who were willing to speak up back then, then have said nothing about this latest wave of insanity. At this point, this evil in crypto is banal and normalized. And for me, as I put was 2022, I do personally sometimes just feel at quite a loss of all of the

terribleness that crypto promotes. And so that's what I've done. I've just kind of like, well, it is what it is. I have no power over it. People are going to do what people are going to do. And I'm going to focus on the parts of crypto that I see good. And that's like, that's what I got. Well, what Plenia is saying though. So, okay, yeah, I remember. And I remember it. I mean, we were right there in the depths of 2022 where, like, you were really, feeling it and actually had an emotional moment on the on the bankless weekly roll-up. And I think we were talking about like all of the billions of dollars that were lost by retail and specifically like how we're not learning anything from it and sort of this

existential wondering of like, uh, are we doing here? Are we on like team good or and Polenia is making the case that like at a certain point, if you're involved in this social layer and you're pushing these technologies, then Plenia is saying at a certain point you are culpable. If you are not actively pushing back, resisting, I guess maybe like tweeting or creating podcasts or something like this to say that this behavior is like wrong is not true crypto. It's not enough to merely ignore that. Like I think Polonias is making the case and focus on the good. They're saying like you actually have to actively try to boost the autoimmunity of the system here and the social layer here.

And if you're not doing that, you're culpable at some point you have to walk away. That's why I'm walking away. What do you think? Yeah, I think it gets really, really hard. And crypto Twitter has such a strong, I think, role in this because this is where a lot of the attention games are being played. And maybe to even kind of continue Polenia's point, something that happened this week was a photo of Doquan got surfaced coming out of the Montenegro jail as he's like on his way to

being extradited. And there was a Laura Shin article that was written. And I want to pull out a quote where many observers, and I'm assuming these are observers are where crypto Twitter is, where the commentary is, many observers suggested that Kwan's buzz cut and hardened visage were noticeable improvements on the embattled crypto founders' looks. And this was kind of the meme of this week, was that Doquan has this one photo that came out where, like, people are saying, like, oh, yeah, he looks like a hardened Chad. And he's going to run it back and do it all over again because he's been disciplined by jail.

Yeah, they're basically saying, like, this was a great thing. Now he's going to come back and do a new kind of like blockchain startup. We're all going to get rich. This is kind of the sentiment, right? Yeah. Then Suu, another scammer grifter criminal, puts out this tweet saying, I keep telling people that prison is the dopamine rehab slash discipline maxing that you need. And then he says, don't fade while he's tweeting out the picture of Doquan.

He's saying don't fade Doquan. I would like to remind people, this is not Doquan coming out of jail. This is Doquan going to jail for the first time. And people are already like, don't fade Doquan. Like he's getting to run it back to Roebo. He's going for, he's going to jail. He's doing it again. But like, no, he's not, he's going to jail for the first time.

Yet people are like simping for this man because he like looks jizzled. He like lost 30 pounds in jail and now all the crypto twitters in love again. Kind of gross, right? Kind of gross. By the way, if prison actually worked, I would contend A16C would have figured this out and done like prison startup school. So you just send your founders to jail. If dopamine rehab was actually a thing. Yeah.

Yeah. So like, but okay, let's consider the source here, right? That is coming from Suu, who is trying to be someone that kind of like normalizes like,

uh, incredibly risky behavior and it has 1,700 likes. Okay. And so like, again, we could get into Twitter bot traffic and like what's real and what's not. But like, let's say,

uh, you know, portion of this is legitimate. The source is somebody who's trying to normalize this behavior. I just want that to be said. because this person, Suu, is, I'm sure, entertaining, like going on a Zen retreat, maybe going to jail, maybe not. I don't know what his status is going to be eventually. And then, like, returning to crypto as a hero.

And I think that, like, that's the source of this. But we put these people on a pedestal. And when I say we, I don't mean bankless. Okay? I'm talking about Pellinias perception would be the crypto at large. And some of you have done this to a greater extent than others. like, again, back to everyone's done it to some degree.

Everyone's done it to some degree, right? And so, like, we're all kind of complicit in it. And, yeah, what about this? What about this idea of, I think your tweet here was, was maybe Plenia is right. That's what you said when you were observing, like, this Suzuti take on Do Kwan saying, like, prison's a good thing.

Yeah, we just don't seem to have very good immunity. I mean, immune system. to resist some of this like degeneracy. Like we like we are DGens as in we are taking like leverage and we are taking risk and that is totally fine. But then we are going even further and being like kind of degenerates with like our moral compass. Like we don't seem to be able to resist that. It seems like if somebody gets rich at least in the kind of crypto, Twitter social layer,

then it gives them a pass to do anything because like obviously they were right. And if you speak against that, well that's just cope and you're jealous. Right. And like don't you think that is a. embedded into some of this underlying, like the thing that Plenia is really resisting is this just degenerate feeling of just we're putting these basically criminals and grossly irresponsible people on a pedestal. And not only do we do it once, it's just like we never freaking learn. We have like the memory of the goldfish.

And in fact, it actually becomes like a target because it keeps on working. People. Funded it becomes a target. Right. Like yeah. So like being criminal becomes like something to be like enjoyed so long as you get. rich. And of course this is not the actual norm. It's like blown out of attention by crypto Twitter. It's blown out of attention because it's just like an egregious thing and now we're talking about it. But this is like kind of what the attention economy and crypto kind of rewards. And it also like with the undercurrents of nihilism, like doing unlawful, unsavory, racist, sexist things. So long as you get rich, right? So long as you get out of the rat race, so long as you get yours out of

crypto, then it's okay. I don't think this is a problem, by the way, just with crypto. It's just like kind of manifesting in crypto. Like this is a just a cultural, we've called it before like financial nihilism as has Travis Kling who's kind of like popularized that term. And this is sort of more of that. But like everything in crypto, it's on steroids, right? It's just like it's massively amplified by kind of the financial primitives. And so you kind of go back to a Plenia and maybe you go back to a Molly White. And then maybe you go back to some of the other crypto skeptics like we've heard from in the first place, just saying, like, on net, this thing is more bad than it is good, right? And so, like, that's what you have, like, that's, that's, that's, that's the charge.

That's, that's the criticism. There was an old tweet that I remember that's always burned into my brain about, like, why we have four-year cycles, why we have cycles at all, and, like, why these cycles are so violent. And it was something about, like, a crypto bull market is when all of society's attention turns back into crypto. Oh, I forgot about this crypto thing. Let's like reprice Bitcoin. Let's reprise Ethereum.

It's had four years of fundamental growth. Let's pay attention to it and reprice it. And then we get bored and the attention like bull market happens. But then like all the bad stuff happens. And so that goes away. And then it forgets about it for four years. And then society once again remembers four years later that like crypto exists. And the attention turns back and reprises crypto.

And that's how like these cycles work. It's really determined by so society's like attention on crypto. And so, like, it's actually been a tension that has, like, fueled all of these cycles. But that's also why you see, like, the worst degeneracy in bull markets is because, like, everyone knows it's fleeting. It's attention-based anyways. There's no fundamentals. Crypto's confusing, so it allows grifters in.

But, like, this whole, like, long-term arc of crypto is, like, punctuated by, like, massive amounts of attention that we call bull markets. Yet, nonetheless, the fundamentals improve along the way. So there's a tweet that you threw out yesterday in this in this conversation. One line in it really, really stuck out to me. So I want you to unpack it. But the line to me was the short term stuff will boil off and evaporate and the long term stuff will endure and get stronger each cycle. And so like this is how I feel.

This is my justification for like being in crypto. I was like, oh, in the fullness of time, the short term stuff will boil off and the long term stuff will stick around. Yeah. I mean, another take on that is like maybe a little shit is needed to make. the flowers grow, you know? And I think we see that shit manifest most particularly in every single bull cycle. And then what, what persists, what remains and like the foundation gets kind of set during the bear market. This is why I will say bull markets can be hard. Like I found 2021 actually to be, and into 2022, I'll say the first part of 2022, to be one of the most challenging

In all of my times in crypto, right? Because I felt like, like, no one cared about the real reason we are here and kind of like the real value proposition. We're trying to scale the centralized block space. And you guys are all caught up on this Algo stable coin saying it's completely riskless. And like, Doquan's a god and like getting tattoos of like wolves on your, you know, the shoulders. And like this thing is just on shaky ground.

why aren't we talking about kind of the real stuff? So I guess maybe I'll reflect on Plenia's take. I think that Plenia's right that if all we are doing here is PVP Ponzi games, then like, it's useless. I guess, you know, burn it all down if that's all that this thing is. The truth, though, is it depends where you look. I think some of the loudest voices are the ones engaging in kind of like this attention oriented economy, and you can get completely warped if that's what you're focusing on, and social

media will just amplify all of these things, too. But the truth is, I am seeing in crypto, more legitimate building than ever. Like, this is the first time in all the time I've been here, almost like 10 years, that we are actually scaling decentralized block space in a scalable way. Like using fees, we're not just doing it on issuance. We are actually scaling decentralized block space. This is the first time where U.X. the user experience is getting to the level where it can actually be used by ordinary people, where we can actually start to like bank the unbanked. And this as well is getting built during this cycle.

And if you look at those projects, if you look at everything kind of like the different layer twos are doing and all of the pockets of defy are doing, you can see that we are in spite of all of the generacy around us actually scaling a decentralized open property, right system for the world. The other thing I'll add here, and this is maybe an ugly truth that some people haven't fully locked into with crypto. But here's the thing, it's always been about greed. It's always been, crypto has always been a movement that harnesses base human greed towards something good and productive. It's almost like the mechanism, the protocol of capitalism in that respect, right? So when we talk about like Bitcoin and Ethereum, go up. It sounds very short-term, temporary, I want to get rich, all of these things, and it is that.

But what we are doing is a byproduct of that and the end result of that is we are creating a decentralized property rights system that is, I mean, someday able to resist nation-state attack, where we actually preserve privacy. And we wouldn't have any of that without greed, human greed, as the fuel. So, like, at some level, it's always been a story of meme coin, Ponzi game, shit coinery, you know, in the short run. And in the long run, we are actually creating a, like, incredible financial system for the world. And we're not doing that in crypto. Who else is doing this? Who else is building an open permissionless financial system that anyone with an internet connection can do?

Because nation states aren't building it. So it's ugly the way we're getting here. But is it wrong to say the ends justify the means? Like the outcome that we're going to get is going to be net beneficial to the world. And if you just ignore the short-term stuff, just let that boil away, then you can really focus on kind of the end mission goal. And I do think we're achieving that cycle by cycle. And a take from Nick Carter here is when he was reading the Plenty article.

He says the solution is not to ignore the bad, but to pursue the good with such fervor as it makes the journey, obviously worth it. And this also reminds me of another conversation one day I was just reading on crypto Twitter, loss of the history of crypto Twitter. But it was this one founder who was talking about one of the biggest mistakes that they ever made while being a founder was ignoring DGens because they wanted to build for like more pure use cases. And in a side of a bear market, that was a huge mistake because the DGens were the only users left. In fact, actually, there's some synonymous nature with users and DGens in crypto. Like DGens, are the blood. They are the heartbeat of a lot of the people who are going to use your DAPs first.

They're going to be the first people to put TVL in your app. So, like, DGens aren't inherently bad. They have this, like, bad connotation because we are literally calling them DGens. But, like, DGens are actually the thing making, like, economies happening crypto. They're on the frontier. They're pushing the limits. They're testing the limits. They're doing, they are the users. DGens are users. Anytime you're, like, do you have ETH in some, like, LRT protocol? that's also getting yield on Pendle, you might be a Dgen. It depends on how DGEN you want to go. And so, like, really, I think it's when we see people speculating in, like, racics, sexist, shitheree meme coins per like, like, Plenia's, like, words,

it's, I think it's just because we actually haven't built more productive things for them to do with their time. So it's actually always going to be a call towards the builders to actually build structures, build apps that harness the DGens and focus the DGen energy and satisfy the DGen needs in ways that aren't sexist and racist and in meme coins. I guess that's my big takeaway from this thing. Yeah, I think I'll end with maybe some practical advice or thoughts and just a reflection on what you do about this. I think that the crypto social layer, especially the social layer that gets amplified,

not on like ETH research forms, but on crypto. Twitter specifically is exhausting. It's absolutely exhausting. Sometimes it's demotivating. Sometimes it will make you question your sanity or like the industry you're surrounded with or or why you're here and all of these things. And I also think it gets co-opted by people who are grifters and scammers, right? So there's a certain point where I remember in kind of like me, uh, NFT mania, or I just like didn't really want to be associated with NFTs for a while. Even though like I was very excited. about them in, you know, 2017 when it's like this new primitive, it's like a JPEG. But then the culture veered off and was co-opted by a whole bunch of grifters and like just it became like,

I don't know if I, I'm not an NFT bro, you know, like that's somebody else. But if that gets to be too much for you, then my advice is just like take a break. Like log off, log off Twitter, log off the social media, disconnect from what you perceive as like, you know, crypto social layer. And it kind of goes away. It kind of evaporates because I don't think that the meme coin that don't have real traction or something behind them will persist, that'll just kind of like evaporate and fade away. And what will be left with is the good stuff, like scale, decentralized block space, wallets that actually work, you know, high throughput transactions per second, all of the good stuff. And that's a discipline that I learned personally in the last bear market.

Yeah, I'm just reminded of this Elon Musk tweet that went out this week where he was asking some crypto Twitter account, like, hey, why did Vitalik leave Twitter? when Vitalik went to Farcaster. And it was just funny to me that Elon Musk seemingly couldn't just like comprehend the fact that like Vitalik wouldn't want to be on Twitter. But instead would want to be like where there's a lot more just like quiet signal in Farcaster rather than like the degenerate noise competitions that is like crypto Twitter. Yeah, it's loud out there for sure, guys. So, but you don't have to be part of it.

You could ignore all of the noise and like remember why we're really here. We'll just end with our standard risk and disclaimers, David. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we're headed west. This is not for everybody, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Mantle, formerly known as BitDow, is the first Dow-led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network, a brand-new high-performance Ethereum Layer 2, built using the OP stack, but uses Eigenlayer's data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum Layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle Network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces

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