Bankless - Can PumpFun be Dethroned? ETH's Pectra Upgrade | Future of Bitcoin L2s | Jon, Bread, & Andy8052

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

In this episode of the Bankless Roundtable, hosts BreadGuy, John Charbonneau, and Andy8052 tackle pivotal issues in the crypto world. They explore the disconnect between institutional bullishness and community despair, with Bread highlighting the plight of altcoin holders amid Bitcoin's dominance. The conversation turns to a scandal involving a token loan, revealing manipulation that undermines trust in the industry.Later, they discuss the upcoming Ethereum Pectra upgrade, emphasizing its potential to improve functionality while cautioning about implementation challenges. The hosts also dive into the meme coin phenomenon, navigating the ethical dilemmas of this niche. As they wrap up, the team reflects on the challenges and hope within the crypto community, encouraging thoughtful engagement in this dynamic market.Jon Charbonneau: https://x.com/jon_charb Bread: https://x.com/0xBreadguy Andy8052: https://x.com/andy8052---📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ---BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFihttps://bankless.cc/Frax🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAINhttps://bankless.cc/unichain🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORKhttps://bankless.cc/Mantle🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELFhttps://bankless.cc/Self🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORKhttps://bankless.cc/hemi---TIMESTAMPS00:00 Intro03:40 Current Crypto Sentiment9:20 Movement Market Making Scandal26:10 Boop.Fun vs Pump.Fun1:00:15 Ethereum's Pectra Upgrade1:16:25 Bitcoin vs Ethereum1:12:45 Closing Thoughts---Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures%E2%81%A0

Welcome Bankless Nation back to the roundtable. Here with me today is the man with glutinous glutes. Zero X bread guy. Good to see you. Hey, guys. Back for another week. And we've also got Crypto's chief, lowercase, our researcher, John Sharbon. And welcome back.

Joe. How's going? And last but not least, the world's most Zen D-Gen, Andy 805-2 is good to see you. Hello, hello. All right. So we got some drama to pack through this week. The movement drama that came out Friday of last week. We're going to talk about that.

There's some boop. Fun discourse, which we're going to do. going to unpack. Maybe something that's actually pretty big that people are under indexing is Apple's new iOS meta in its impact on the commerce economy in the app store, which is inclusive of crypto. When this goes, when this podcast goes live tomorrow, Pectra, the Ethereum upgrade will be live. And so that's where we're going to talk about that as well. But overall, I was kind of just powwowing with bread as we got started here before we hit record about like we started doing these episodes. And then things on crypto Twitter just started to calm down right as we start doing

these roundtables. Kind of unfortunate, but I think we're going to make the most of it. Bread, what are you thinking about, my man? Yeah, so I do a daily show too, right? So we have to talk about stuff pretty routinely, daily, and had the same conversation earlier this week where it's like there's a huge disconnect with like the structural bullishness of the industry right now and like just a general sentiment you have on like crypto Twitter.

I know last week John was even pointing out that, and not only know it was on chatter in the actual conversation is just like, yeah, the alpha on. on CT hasn't really been there recently. So I was like, you know, kind of disconnected myself from it. He was saying that. But yeah, like it's kind of felt that way. And even as someone that's like on the timeline trying to engage, like maintain the conversation lately, it's just like I haven't felt strongly about much of the stuff that

has to the surface. So it was just like drama based. So I avoided or it's just like not really intellectually exciting. So I just like, you know, don't speak on it mostly. So yeah, I felt it too. Mm-hmm. I do think the movement drama has. has kind of hit what might there's probably going to be more drama, but it's really hit a nerve

of people feeling despair about like why are we continuing to get into this place? You said, Brad, structural bullishness, the mismatch between the structural bullishness of the industry with like the despair on the timeline. And that is what I see. I see a lot of people say like institutions have never been more bullish about crypto before. The amount of inbound from Wall Street is the highest that it's ever been. And then like the despair on the timeline is also the highest that it's ever been, which is like an interesting gap that we haven't really seen before in crypto. Do you think it's because we see like, so we see that on the horizon and everyone's kind of like knife fighting to make sure that they're the ones that are positioned to get the

the structural bullishness? Because like I know there's like some self-consciousness right now going on with, you know, Ethereum Solana, like what's the right direction and stuff. And, you know, we feel like we're there, like we're on the precipice of something. But like, you're not sure if you're going to be in the group that misses the wave. Yeah. Yeah, we all know that the music is about to be up and there's only so many chairs left. What's up, Andy? Yeah. Yeah, I feel like a big part of it is just like Bitcoin dominance can explain a lot of it, where it's just like, I mean, I would argue that probably everyone on crypto Twitter, myself included, is under-exposed to Bitcoin compared to how much time we spend in the industry. And like as Bitcoin dominance goes up and up, it's like,

oh, crypto's doing well, but I'm not actually making that much money. and like you see stuff like movement and all these different things and that's just like really disheartening. Or you see like I saw images of like Stark Nets token chart going around this morning going from like $26 billion to a billion dollars and all that. And I think a lot of it would go away and people would feel differently if Bitcoin dominance started going down. You know, there was a, yeah, John get in there and then I have something to follow up on that. Yeah, it's falling on that. I'd say that's like half of it. it gets to the same point of the big split, which is why it makes sense, is all the institutional stuff like sounds great of, yeah, you go talk to more institutional side. Everyone is, you know, peak of positive sentiment for the most part that you've had over the past few years. But the things that all the institutions are interested, one is Bitcoin, which like we said is like CT is just chronically under exposed to. And then the other half of it is I would say like pointing at, you know, somewhat growing concern with a lot of people of like, okay, but what if the institutions come in? And then basically none of our coins win.

And this is basically, you know, like, I've heard people say this a bunch of time, like Robin Hood is just going to show up and be like, hey, thanks guys for building all this open source software. This is sick. We're going to copy all this. And yeah, exactly. And then like Coinbase Robin Hood and JP Morgan end up winning. And like, thanks for building everything, guys. So, I mean, like, there's like, there's definitely some, I mean, there's definitely some truth behind that of, you know, a lot of those businesses are going to come in increasingly and they are going to start to squeeze.

and compete. I'd say a mix also is a lot of the stuff that people are super positive on right now with stable coins. And it's a similar bucket of everyone would love to own a piece of tether right now, but nobody on CT also owns a piece of tether. I mean, circles kind of underwhelming with their financials that they put out, even though they are going to IPO. So a lot of the stuff that is going well is just like it's not the stuff that CT and a lot of us are actually exposed to and spending time on the investment side. Bitcoin is the one that like everyone can. And it's the one that everyone just choose not to own enough of all the time. Yeah.

So the revelation that I had are maybe just like coming to acceptance of was, you know, the bullish case for smart contract platforms for me over the last few years are just like, Tradfai loves yield. They love yield. We're going to create all this new yield that they're going to want to come a part of. And then as like as the ecosystem has matured the last year, it's less that we are creating our own useful yield and more that like, They just want exposure to the yield that they've always had exposure to, just in a more efficient form, which is like stable coins and, you know, just a few treasuries that they're doing.

Like, that's, that's nothing we do. That doesn't plug into, like, the defy the same way as like we do. It doesn't do the Dgen games. It's just like, yeah, bittle fund. Yeah. Stable coins get exposure to treasuries and therefore they're like, it's a really successful business model. But, like, yeah, it's not the games that we have played and not like the, like, euphoric future that I had envisioned, even as recently as like, two. years ago. It's practical. It makes a ton of sense in retrospect, but it was not what I had foreseen.

I was going to say the tough part about generating yields means very literally we need to actually generate users paying fees to decentralized protocols and at a high level that that is just currently lacking in the industry. And pointing again to that point of like what CT actually has exposure to, even the most, you know, what is the thing that, you know, people in the transit is on chain are using and paying for is pump on and is once again a thing that no one has exposure to, which we'll also get into like in our topic later on talking about like boop and these other platforms. But it gets to that same point of it. Yeah, I like the reality is a lot of this, you know, decentralized protocol activity, people like actually paying fees to use these things.

It's still small to tradify. The reality is like most of the yield is it's getting people to hold dollars and like, hey, we can clip the yield on like treasuries on the back end, stuff like that. The idea that the institutions are going to come and buy our bags has been this like perpetual motivating force in the crypto industry. like we are so early, the institutions are going to come. We're going to get so rich because we own the rails. We own the tokens before the institutions do.

And this was the dominant narrative in 2017 when some of the looking back at the tokens that I own, based on that narrative, I was an insane person. Like those, no institutions was going to come and buy those tokens. Those were just the temper. Did you own denticoin, you know? Aeon net, like Iota, like these, these, you know, in hindsight were just like casinos that people gambled on in the time had narrative of like, oh, yeah, these are the future rails of the internet. And I think right now in this moment of time, the reason why there's despair on the timeline is, is like, multifold, right? There is the rails that institutions are actually using are not ownable. They are not ownable by us, or it's

Bitcoin. And so that Bitcoin's not going to give us that like 100x that we're looking for, or it's Tether, which is a private company. And then like the middle of the market, I think we've talked about this before, the middle of the market where like there's a lot of, you know, people's jobs and the the tokens that, you know, represented the speculative gamble that existed in 2020 and 2021. We are people are now realizing that that's just not likely to be the infrastructure that supports the future of finance. And so we are creating this stable coin Bitcoin barbell with a meme with a meme coin, uh, kicker for those who wants to speculate on the meme coins. And then the things in the middle, which represents.

like the livelihood of people who work in crypto is just hollowed out. And so you add to all those things together. I feel like that's how you get all the despair that we feel. No, I mean, I totally agree. I think like it just feels like we're kind of at a point where it's hard to see what's going to change that in the short term. And so it'll be interesting to see just how despairy we can get. Okay. So speaking of how despairy we can get, you guys ready to dive into the movement drama, because I've got a pretty robust set of notes, chat chit-t notes. So let me run through the facts of the details

and we can unpack it together as a group. Okay, so November 27th, 2024, is when Rentech, which is a shell entity, asked the Movement Foundation to loan it 5% of all Move tokens. The General Council of Movement called these terms, possibly the worst agreement I've ever seen. Later, a tweaked version of that agreement still lets Web3 port a different entity via Rentec borrow the 66 million move tokens and also

liquidate these tokens if and once the FDV of the move token hits $5 billion FTV. The signing of this agreement happens one day before the token goes live. Then later, December 9th through 10th, move lists on Binance while it's connected to Web3Port, which is the market maker, unloads the full $66 million in under 24 hours, pocketing $38 million, crushing the price. and then Binance later banned this offending marketmaker, which is the news that kind of rippled around the industry that everyone's like, yo, that's not normal, like what's going on over there?

They flagged, of course, market maker misconduct. And now movement starts an internal review in this March to understand what's going on. As a result, with the $38 million that was confiscated by Binance handed back over to the Movement Foundation, they announced a $38 million U.S.Buy back to repurchase the dump tokens and they have cut ties with Web3 port, the market maker. So this is to sum up all of the reasons why people are calling this nefarious behavior,

Rentech, this mysterious entity, appeared on both sides of the contract. So once as Web3Ports subsidiary and once again as Movement Foundation's agent. So they are basically on both sides of the contract. They are negotiating and they're also the client. So the same people get to dictate the terms, the lending terms and the trading strategy. So they said, okay, you lend us five million tokens and we get to dump them at a $5.50, $5 billion FDV market cap. So the same entities setting the terms, the perverse incentives are already in there. The idea that you get to dump 50% of the tokens if the token hits $5 billion is just a

contractually obligated pump and dump scheme. There's no lockup. The 66 million tokens were immediately liquid. And despite the council's red flags, the deal still got passed through governance and was still somehow signed. So where do things stand now? There's an independent audit still in progress. Finance and reportedly U.S. regulators are gathering info. The foundation is, like I said, buying back the move token on the open market to recover the $38 million, inject it back into the chart. And then also Rushi Manch, the CEO of Movement, has been suspended and the board is considering

additional governance reforms. So I think this is really that some of this is, is like we all, as an industry, knew that there were these boogeyman market maker deals out there, but no one had really ever seen it so explicitly and put into actual real contracts and then those contracts were ended up being circulated. And there's extra weirdness about the relationship between the market maker and the foundation. That I think is like the unique thing that allowed this to kind of explode onto the scene. But overall, now people are understanding that like this has become become productize and structure structurally systemic across the industry. And we have seen this so many times,

but now we have evidence of it. And now it's just got a little bit too real for people. And that's why people are reacting the way that they are reacting on Twitter. I'll just throw this to bread. Bread, what are your thoughts, what are your reflections? What are you thinking? I don't know if you saw it on the timeline, but there was some people from within the movement team. I think it was a dev real person specifically coming forward and giving like a gut wrenching like post-op of like guys, I was blindsided by this too. It fucking sucks to have tried to build all this stuff, get the encouragement of builders and like build up his ecosystem. And then like people are calling me dumb because I wasn't aware of it.

So like, uh, one element of it is like the, yeah, feeling sympathetic for genuine people that are caught up in this stuff because they just weren't made aware of it. The other is there's a shit ton of, uh, hashes that were put on the timeline over the last, like, week of like things to be revealed later that I'm excited to see several from like Tor Grill who works at Fluent now. I think Kobe put out one on a movement post a couple, a couple of weeks ago. So he revealed those. Did he?

What was it? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, can we talk about it? this mechanism, what does it mean to put a hash on a tweet or publish it on the internet? Like, why are people doing that and what's behind that hash? Yeah, it's almost like a predictive thing, right? So you can just go to like any Shaw-256 generator, put in any amount of text.

That text will give you a hash string. And you just post that string. And like the ability to like brute force reverse engineer what that actually represents in like readable text is basically impossible. So people are posting things to say like, I know something about this or I'm predicting something and I want to have proof that I can predict this. they posted on the timeline and then after the point where it's no longer impactful either to the markets or the prediction has come true or whatever, they will go back and say like this string of

text is what reveals or what that hash translates to. So they're just claiming that they know something. It's like a clout thing. It's like I'm claiming that I know something without actually revealing it because if I'm if I'm right and it moves the market or if I'm wrong and it moves the market, then that has consequences. But if I just hide this for now, it doesn't move the market, but I get to claim clout at the future date. Is that kind of the idea? Yeah, basically. Yeah. So like Maybe if you have further damning evidence, but you're not sure of it and you want to claim it or it will have market impacts that you just don't want to impose until after it's revealed by someone else, you don't want to be the person that says it. It just gives you that ability to do that and, and, yeah, show that you had insider information and or were on to something before other people were. Okay.

And then, John, you said that Kobe revealed his hash. He revealed what it said. Maybe walk us through that. I don't remember the exact wording of it, but yeah, he posted it a couple weeks ago and then he revealed it in the last few. days or so. It was just saying, I think that he, I think the prediction was that Rushi would be removed within the next 28 days for like fraud or misconduct or something like that. Okay. And he revealed it in the past week, which was, he was correct. Okay. Yeah. I know the other main culprit was like, again, Torgo, we're going to affluent.

He's like, he has gone publicly after movement a lot and they throw him out at each other and basically just said, I had a bunch of stuff in my DMs. I'm not willing to reveal, but he's just posting a bunch of hashs that, you know, maybe will be the reveal of whatever those DMs are. I'm not an investor myself. I don't have a lot of C deals anywhere, but the general thing was that people recognize early on that there's maybe some of this going on, but they saw it was a money-making opportunity anyways, and they went forward for that reason. So, you know, it's just a lot of questions around, you know, how much is that worth to people, right? Like, are they willing to to jeopardize or give up on some of their values? If they think something is wrong, if it comes with a couple dollars,

you know, how prolific that was or like the amount invested under those pretenses, I don't know. but I have heard that just, you know, through the grapevine. So commentary on the space. Yeah, the interpretation of like, or evolution of Rushi, the character, I think is also super relevant here because, like, Rushi was one way at the very beginning and he grew into the Rushi that we know today or have seen on Twitter today. And that was a character arc. That was a development arc that I think everyone in the industry kind of watched in real time.

And he's one of those, like, very, um, he attracts attention. He tracks a lot of attention. He does bold things, those bold things to attract more attention. And I think he kind of like leaned into those things over time to kind of create. I mean, in addition to all the things that the leadership things that he did behind the scenes, that was that was the cult of personality that was Rushi on the timeline. One thing off of Brett's comment that I'll say, this is definitely not a rule for everyone. But I do think people do sometimes overestimate how much investors know on these kinds of things. I mean, we weren't investors in movement. We looked at it and we decided not to. But, I mean, the reason that we decided not to is what my sense is most investors, like, at most know on this kind of thing is like, ah, the vibe seemed off. Like, it didn't seem that serious. Investors, at least to my knowledge, none of them knew that like these were the explicit contracts that were going on.

I mean, very literally investors are also like trying to be dumped on in this case. Like they were trying to use these high markups, for example, to like literally raise from investors at high FDVs after the fact. and like they were literally sound like the investors you know the early vCs and whatever like weren't cashing out with these prices um like they they were locked up and they were trying to sell to other vc's on the premise that you know oh this is a 10 billion dollar token and you you know you're buying it at an 80% discount what a great deal but you know it's a fake price um so i like the varying degrees of that I mean there certainly were some investors that like knew some stuff at least based on what was tweeted out um but like I I do think that a lot of people do overestimate how much most of the

investors in this probably new. Most people did not see these agreements. Like this is, these are not normal market making agreements. Like, this is just crime. Like, people,

like, a lot of people who invest in something like this, like, especially if you're, even funds, if you're not, like, leading around or something.

And my experience on the other side of it, like, you write a check and every once in a while, you send a telegram message and you're like, hey, how are things going? You want to do a 30-minute call and you do it. And then you move on.

Like, it's pretty rare that these funds are like, doing serious due diligence into the financials and things like that. I know that changes as you raise more and more money. But then even in those cases, like, it kind of comes at like the goodwill of the founder in a lot of ways. And so even then you could very easily be lied to. Yeah. There's a different level of work and diligence expected of the lead funds and like most of the other people who are investing in this. And that's also something for people to realize is that It's fair to have a different view on those different parts for these different deals.

But yeah, I mean, like most investors are like, you're not going through all the financials of the company and like figuring out all these details and asking for all the docs. Like, you just can't do that particularly as a smaller investor. Yeah. I think it also shows some funny stories around, like, just some of the world of like investing when when you're not leading around and you're just like, oh, this XYZ company is leading around. Like, sure, I'll throw in money. I don't really care. Yeah. Uh-huh.

I was just going to say it has echoes of the eclipse fallout. I think it was whenever Neil was removed. And everyone after the fact the funds came forward like, hey, we knew about this. Hey, we didn't know about this. And I was like, well, if you knew about it, why the hell didn't you tell everyone about like these things going on in the background that were material to like the actual effect of the project? So it's like there is, there is impacts to the individual funds and like the trust that you build up and whether or not you do release in this stuff. because some of it is hearsay, some of it, like, you actually do have the actual understanding of. So without having that first source, as long as it's not coming from the source, like, you can't speak on a lot of these things, even if you are hearing rumors, because it can materially damage something.

And if you're wrong and you're seen as someone doing that stuff and you got it wrong, like the fall out of that is almost as worse as the other side of it. Yeah. Yeah. Broadly on that one, too, I would say the same thing. I would say just as a broad rule, most people over assume how much. people do going into that and especially for this movement one I do I do have a lot respect for people who uh publicly with a public profile were tweeting stuff out going into this um people like to rule who were like knew or saw things that were off and were just like putting their name on it and saying like

like yeah this is a problem um because yeah i i i am not a fan of when people clout farm after the fact and say like oh yeah of course i'm new right right right right but like i'm just like you know now like but I knew. Yeah. That's like, that's not helping anyone. I have seen Togrel get like, like,

like vicious about enough projects and then be proven right to the point of like the next time Togrel gets vicious about something. I'm like, oh, don't go there. Don't touch that. He has, he has been a pretty consistent,

like, source of information at least on, on stuff like this. I think one of the reasons why this just escalated to be as big as it was, was because, movement was the only move-based layer two that I'm aware of. And so you have APDOS and one of the sui say one of the other ones. Sui.

Sui. Sui. So APTO, Sui, move. It was those three. They were going after the move programming language. Move was the only one doing it as a layer two. And so there was all of this like free real estate that Rushi was able to capture the movement ecosystem was able to capture.

Like, okay, well, if we believe in layer twos and if you believe in the move programming language, like that's the movement project. You don't have to think about it any further. I think that's the only move layer two that I know of. Are there anyone, John, you're the layer two expert. Do you know of any other move layer twos? Is this now just an open field now? I don't know.

I think so. Get me curious. I'm out of go look now. I mean, is there a ton of, you know, are there just like a bunch of devs chomping at the bit? Like, oh, I really want to build on a move-based platform, but it has to be secured by Ethereum. What we have right now is just not. good enough. I think the Venn diagram of those people, it's not a lot. Yeah, yeah. It is pretty incredible that the MOVE FDB valuation is still at $1.6 billion valuation right now. I mean, it's coming down.

I think there's just, there's no sellers, right? Like who, who actually owns tokens that can sell them right now? That isn't like the move foundation. There's like some guys on Twitter who airdrop farmed and have like $50 worth of move and say like G move every morning. but otherwise, I don't think there's really any sellers on the open market. Well, then where's all the volume coming from? Because there is volume. I mean, David, we just talked about their illegal market making deals. Imagine a world where your day-to-day banking runs on a blockchain.

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Okay, we ready to move on to Boop fun, boop. fun. Andy, I think I need your help on this one because I'm actually unaware of what was going on. Maybe you can walk us through the boop. Fun drama. Yeah, I would say that it really has. hasn't been a ton of drama. It's mostly just, I think, like, kind of interesting. Brett and I've

actually been talking about a good amount in DMs over the last week since it came out. But Boop is a pump fun competitor, a meme coin launchpad. They just have some, what I think are like pretty interesting tokenomics, whether or not they're perfect or, you know, are going to work in the long run. Who knows? But essentially, like, probably the first part of it that was interesting and garnered a of conversation is they had like a really big air drop for people based on their Kato or Zipkato or Kido. Kido. Kido. All right.

Kido. Based on their Kido scores for like meme coin stuff. And in order to claim your air drop, you had to launch a meme coin, like linked to your platform. And so that like... You had to write a tweet. You had to tweet a tweet that linked to your meme coin. You didn't have to tweet about it.

Okay. But you had to, they basically like two options. of how you can launch, and one is on the platform and one is via tweet. But you had to create a meme coin that then like on the platform, it says, you know, Andy 8052 made this meme coin. And so there was just a lot of conversation around that of like, this is kind of a pretty big air drop, but I don't want to make a meme coin. What should I do?

And like I think bread could probably add more color here on this part than I can because I was just like, yeah, I'm going to do it. Who cares? I'm just going to make a meme coin that says. I think you're very well suited for that. Yeah, but bread had a bit more of a, yeah, I painted myself in the corner is what you're trying to say. I, I posted on it. I was like, okay, so game theory, smart, right?

So like he said, the tokenomics or the air drop itself targeted Kyto specifically because they worked with them. And it wasn't just like mind share. So it was like the higher you were with mind chair up to your tier that you were able to get into for an air drop, tier one, like people that were strong. mind share, but also tweeted specifically about meme coins and trading and stuff like those type of accounts. They were tier one. They were getting air drops at present day value at like $200, $250,000, right? The thing is, it has to vest for 30 days. If you don't, if the coin that you launch does not do anything, right? You launch it. It has to bond. It has to hit five, 10, 15, and then $20 million market cap in order to get like a fully unlocked. And like, so then that means you're actually capturing

$250,000-ish. Tier 2, tier 3, whatever. I think Andy and I are both tier 3. So our range was at present day value, like, I was like 80, $90,000 roughly. So like decent air drop, right? It's pretty damn good. Yeah, I saw that, but like not knowing, like, knowing like I'm not, I don't meme coin, I don't trench. It's like, I'm not going to tweet about this thing. It's like the chance of me getting an unlock today is zero.

The chance of me getting an unlock in 30 days. It's worth anything just above zero, but still really close to zero. So I tweeted that out. I was like, yeah, you know what? I'm over it. I'm not going to post it, right? Easy. But then I started breaking down the actual tokenomics of it.

And, you know, we alluded earlier about getting ownership of these protocols. and you see the flywheel and send him to the game theory that the platform actually has. So it's led by Dingling. Dingling is kind of a prolific. He was prolific in the NFT space. Now we're starting to learn that he was actually founder of or one of the founding teams of Pancake Swap and worked with CZ specifically on Binance. So that's where he's sourced a lot of its funds from ever learning. It explains a lot of his lore. So he's on the founding team. And the tokenomics associated to it is if you have Boop, which is, is the platform token and you were to stake boop, you get lifetime 1% or pro rata,

1% of all trading fees, both pre bond and post bond of all the meme coins on the platform. Every time a token bonds and goes from the launch pad to just the open radium pool, it takes 5% of the supply and gives it, again, pro rata to the people that have boot staked on the platform. So if you have the platform token and you stake the platform token, you basically just get an index exposure on all tokens that are launched from the. platform in perpetuity, right? And you can claim those separately and do a bunch of stuff. So I was looking at that stuff, it's like, okay, the flywheel is kind of here. Like, I can kind of see why

people would want to accumulate this thing. There's a non-zero chance. This thing's actually worth some money. I already tweeted that's like, I'm not launching this fucking thing. It's like, I really want this. And I do I want potentially, you know, five figures of exposure of the main token? I was like, I probably do. So I had to come back and do a mea culpa of like, all right, guys, I lied. I'm launching one of these things. Don't buy it. So I launched it the next day. And then I actually saw it like John had one on there. Danny had one.

Like it's like, okay. So I'm not the only one. But I fucked up because I posted about it beforehand instead of just like silently doing it in the background and and just like accumulating tokens. But yeah, it's interesting. Volume still out there. I'm generally not bullish on teams encroaching on pump fun.

It's just such an established platform. But the tokenomics itself had me interested enough that I went over and launched one. Yeah. Bread's a nice guy. He was hesitant. I had absolutely zero moral qualms. I immediately went and tried to launch on the only theory. And it took me a few hours is because the website wasn't working. The president of the United States has launched a meme coin. I will. Yeah. I like I had absolutely no problem with it. Like I mean, to me genuinely, though, like it was like it was kind of funny. I mean, I saw a bunch of people who were going through the same thought process that you were going through. The first one that I saw was, I don't remember the guy's name. It's like bold Leonidas. Whatever the one that Kobe replied to, you had like a gigantic one. And Kobe replied to him. Because the guy was saying, like, oh, I'm not going to do it. And he was like, Kobe was replying to him. Like, what are you talking about? Just launch the thing and like just say, hey, guys, like, I'm not going to talk about

this thing ever again. Just like, assume it's going to go to zero. Like, you're literally going to lose your money. I'm just like clicking this button so that I can claim like a life changing air drop. Well, that's like, that turned into copy pasta that people started to share around. That's literally what I put in my token is like I called it a scam. And then I like copy pasted like Kobe's tweet into the thing and like put it in there of like, you're literally going to lose all your money.

Like to me, it was funny that like people. like, would have a hesitation of that because, like, what are you doing at this point is you're literally just launching a like fairly launched, you know, safe token that you're just openly telling to people like, hey, like there's no value to this thing, like, whatever, just like if you want to buy it, like go ahead, buy it. But like, you literally should not buy it. Like, you're literally just going to lose your money. At this point, this is like the most fairly launched straightforward. Like, you're just launching a token. Like, this is just technology. Like, there's nothing extractive or problematic about this. Like, you should be willing to launch this token with like absolutely no. moral qualms in my mind at least like i get why people are hesitant first like you are like you know putting it next to your profile or whatever but like you literally just say like hey like don't buy this thing i like i'm never going to talk about this thing um yeah i realize it was like arms arm's reach from the coin it stuff that that desi was trying to do because like i i was looking at this stuff and i think erc 20 and like it's just an erc 20 and i was imbueing a bunch of like negative sentiment from like the the extractors who might be in the meme coin who might do the pump

and dumb stuff into a neutral standard like it's literally just a token it's just a whatever And so I was seeing this and I after sleeping on it the next morning and like actually wanting something like I'm like yeah what like what am I doing? Like why why do I care so much? It's literally just like a thing. I did I did Frentec. I was deep in the Frentec trenches. Same shit.

Right. I was there. I was, I was, you know, people were buying my stuff and like, you know, you do the dance and it's like I had no moral qualms about that after the fact. Like I feel good and like knowing I participated that in good faith. So as long as you're not like misleading people and like saying like, oh, this thing, I'm going to pump this thing to Val Hala. You're going to make a bunch of money.

me keep buying my shit. And as long as you're not doing some of that, then, yeah, man, just participate. Participate. I think the thing that we're all sensing from crypto-twitters is that crypto-tweater is hyper-sensitive to hypocrisy. And so, like, if I had gone and launched that token, I think I would have been absolutely just, like, shredded by the average, like, trenchmen of crypto-Twitter just because, like, my past relationship with meme coins, which, like, I, like, I've had this.

relationship with meme coins two years ago, one year ago, and that is not the same relationship that I have with meme coins today. And I would say that there has been like a more than marginal shift of just like once was complete rejection. And now it's been like, okay, rejecting meme coins is not the right strategy. I should be more accepting of meme coins. It's not the biggest shift. And even that shift has triggered so many people of like David is duplicitous. He's a hypocrite. He only likes meme coins when they're on Ethereum, like all this kind of stuff. And so like marginal changes in your stance becomes like just targets of

crypto Twitter just you'll get you'll get shredded there and so like Brad yeah you painted yourself into the corner you said you were going to do something but hey you know as soon as a $90,000 air drop comes up like all of a sudden you're not going to do that thing anymore like that's not really no longer what you what you believe and so I think it's really the hypocrisy that crypto Twitter will absolutely just like tear you apart for

that's why I had to post on it because like I made that claim of like I'm not doing this and I was like man if people come and like I even had someone like the second I did it before I posted like all right fuck it I gave in like this is why I gave in all this stuff I had people coming back to my original post and just like laughing at it like LOL you gave in I was like yeah I know like I'm yeah coppo sorry guys like I'm an idiot I'm diving back in if had I not done that I just would have been in silence I feel like part of that that's like frustrating for me with crypto Twitter is like there's like a fine line between being a hypocrite and then like changing your mind with more information and that nuance is

basically always completely lost on crypto Twitter. And so it's like if you ever change your mind about something, you're a coward. You have, you have like no backbone versus like, I feel like that's something that should actually be praised that you like are able to have an opinion and then continue to evaluate that thing and change your mind. I think it's one of the more frustrating parts of crypto Twitter for me. Yeah. Well, it's, there's a lot of connotation there about like the motivations for why minds are changed in the context in which minds. are changed. And so, like, I became, like, more into the idea of meme coins downstream of clanker, discovery of clanker. And clanker, I thought, was cool because it was this bot that minted a token

for you in this very easy, uh, ux of just you would, you would add it on Farcaster. And I thought that was interesting. And then downstream of that, the token would be created. And like, I guess that's a meme coin. But that was like my first public, like, foray into memeery. And then, like, the salon of people, it's like, oh, as soon as meme coins are on base, like David's happy about it. Yeah, it's more high-brown meme coins, yeah, rather than just like the 4chan aesthetic of pump vun versus the whatever the aesthetic is a forecaster. I find the aesthetic of farcaster more like palatable for me personally. That's more my speed.

And so that makes sense for me when I find meme coins on this platform more enticing and tweetable about. But then all the salon of people is like, no, David didn't change his mind. He just wants to pump his Ethereum bags. And so there's there is like tribal relevancy to like the nature of how and why. my minds get changed. I had a mint on Twitter through banker bot this week. You could, uh, similar setup just on Twitter. And so I was able to just tweet at something and minted some, some NFTs for me,

which is pretty fun. Morality part or whatever we want to call out of the boop stuff side. Should we hit on the business side of a little bit? Yeah, because this one is an interesting one to me. I'm curious, Brad, because I think you've looked at the numbers a little bit more than me. Um, but, but a lot of this, I mean, relates as I would say, like, higher level, even than poop. It's like pump on and like, how strong is their moat and being able to disrupt.

that. Because I have been surprised, like, if you look at the numbers, Pump Funn is still just printing money. It's ungodly. They have not fallen off nearly, I think. Yeah, they have not fallen off nearly as much as you, like, oh, the meme coin hype is past. They're still running at like a $600 million plus annualized run rate right now. Most of that coming from their launch pad. I think it's about like 13% of it is coming from the AMM pump swap that they launched at the end of June to basically just compete and kind of kick out where radium was. But right now, like, Pump Fun Funn is keeping all of that, obviously. Like, that's just going to the company. And they're just like sending just gigantic clips of Soul over to Cracken, basically. And I assume that they are cashing that out.

Like, good for them. They built a great product. They're making a bunch of money. And now it's time to like, okay, like, are people going to disrupt this? Like, the analogy that I'd seen people drawing, which I think is like a reasonably representative one is like, and this would be kind of, I would guess, the bare case for Pump Fun if you want to call it this, I guess, in hindsight of like it looks a little bit like OpenC. I mean, open C had this just gigantic run for a while during NFT mania where I mean they were just

absolutely printing money. They were keeping... How old it 10 billion or something at the top? I don't remember what the number was, but they were, I mean, just tons of money that they were taking out. I think it was higher than 10 billion. Wow. Yeah. Like there was a period where they were, I mean, they were just printing money.

And I mean, God knows how many millions they were making at the time. I don't remember what the exact numbers were. But same thing of like they kept all of it. They didn't feel pressured into launching a token. And then over time, they lost their mode. The market fell away. Competitors chipped away at them, blur and all these other ones came in. And so Pump Fun is kind of like at this position now where they have a dominant market position. They're printing money on this big thing still. And this is where Boop is coming in. Of like, I mean, there's nothing like that innovative in my mind to what they're doing versus

pump. The very simple pitch that they have to people is like, hey, we're going to give you the money back. We have a token. And you know, you can get this token. And this is going to have a lot of fees going to is one of the few things in crypto that, like, people actually pay for to that conversation that we were having earlier. There's, like, there's actually real money that'll go to the token. And then we'll use this to incentivize people. And this is what I saw some of your tweets were, where I think, to remember the exact numbers I had it of like, they give out like a million boop a day.

Was it 10% goes to the graduating token launchers? 90% goes to the graduating token holders. So they were explicitly, like, using the token to explicitly incentivize creators and holders in a way that, like, Palm Fund is not doing right now. And so the question, because, comes like, like, is this the edge that like, you know, is able to push someone over the top and kind of like chip away into pumps lead? Like, does pump feel the pressure on them now to, you know, do they need to launch a token? Do they need to start using incentives? Stuff like that going forward. Because I mean, we've seen different analogies in this crypto. I mean, like a different one, but somewhat similar was like Uniswap. Obviously, like when sushi launched their token and they started to try to incentivize and pull away, like you did give into the pressure. They launched a token. It's created a lot of problems in hindsight between equity and the token and all that. A lot of compliance. but like they they won the battle by doing so very handily you know they won that market and so so that's the main thing I'm interested to see here is basically how does pump respond to this stuff

going forward do they feel like they need a token that they're going to need to incentivize people like do they see a real risk here going forward or do they just try to do some other form of like creator monetization sharing where like oh yeah a portion of new launches are going to go back to creators because they've sort of hinted at some of the stuff like this so yeah I'm curious uh you guys take this especially bred like having looked more at the numbers of this kind of like what's going through it. Yeah. So I actually put a post out trying to like, I've been trying to work with some people building Dune dashboards to try track some of it because it's a little opaque right now. And whenever I did that, dingling actually sent me a message that like said, hey, some of your numbers are actually need to be refined because like they haven't released all the stuff.

So we're just digging on change to figure it out. And the 24 hour stats that he showed me at the time was fees earned by bloop by boop stakers. So this is 24 hour numbers was 11,500 sole. So 1.6 million. 1.7 million. Trading volume of all Colts created was 356 million. There were 440 Colts graduated and 21,000 total Colts created over that time period. So that means if this was over 24 24 hour period, 440 Colts, that means 1 million Boop, which I think at times was between like $150 and $300,000, depending on the price of Boop, was going out to people daily split amongst those 440 Colts graduated. So that's 10% of that. What is that, $35,000? across 440 different people. I know, but from talking to the ecosystem,

there are people who are specifically trying to game this and automatically launch and bond tokens so that they can eat up or saturate the bonded token market and just eat up the portion of that 1 million boop. How successful it is. I think most of the people that I talked to just saw it wasn't a profitable endeavor. And I had talked to like several people who were working on this. So I don't think it's necessarily being farmed at least too heavily.

But I agree with you. I got Emron actually, Emron, the founder of Alliance style, which is where Pump Fund came out of, right? So you presume that he's a investor inside of Pump Fun. He had mentioned kind of alluding to the sushi swap stuff

after this had come out. He's like, hey, yeah, you know, whenever the pressure is felt, you know when people start to have to launch tokens, all this stuff. So everyone's like, oh, Pump Fun token coming. Like, is this alluding to a future for us? So everyone's getting a little excited about that.

But yeah, like the all of the incentives that you just pointed out, If that's enough to get people incentivized to launch their token, to just simply move their token launch from Pumph to to Boop. Like that's what that marketing budget is for, right? That daily drop to try to get people over. I haven't seen it pulling a ton over based on just like the dashboards and stuff that we're tracking. If 440 graduations in a 24 hours, if that's actually the true 24 hour numbers, which I'm hoping it is, that's pretty good. But, you know, it's just a really sticky thing.

have to watch it for over a couple weeks to see if any meaningful amount actually comes over. But I think the structure is there to incentivize people. It's just about educating the market and changing behavioral patterns, which is always the tough part. Yeah. It's so interesting to me because, like, unlike Opency, which we were kind of comparing it to, like, the life cycle of the time in which people use Pump Fun is, like, so minimal and it's so abstracted away, like, as someone who trades meme coins and low-cap meme coins, I don't ever go to PumpFund's website.

Like, whether you launch your meme coin on Boop or PumpFund or Bonk fun, whatever, like, I still see it on Axiom or any of these other tools that you trade with regardless. And so it's like you're not getting as a meme coin creator some structural advantage of, you know, publicity by launching on pump fun. And so, like, it makes it even more confusing why people still do it when you're literally getting paid to do it elsewhere. And so that would be the one thing that I'm curious to see if over time people's, you know, patterns can change there.

But I think the big thing, too, with it is just most of the meme coins that hit escape velocity or have, like, meaningful traction are significantly more premeditated than the average pump fund launch. And maybe there is more like tooling or like structural reasons as to why those are being launched on pump fund because of sniping and bundling tokens and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's literally just industrial scale farming around and like a complex built around pump fun. It's like it's been printing so much money for so long.

Like you have entire entire teams operating around the specific mechanics that are pump fun. So it's just, you know, once you have that stuff in place, the cost to move is just not really worth it unless they actually have exposure to poop. We saw the same thing with Frentec, right? Frentek was like whenever it came around, it was expensive as shit, 10% fees both ways. Like it was gouging people racked up $50 million in fees. And everyone spun up a copycat protocol. It's like, oh, guys, come over here. It's cheaper fees. We have a token, like all this stuff.

And no one moved because just like first mover has such a crazy advantage in this space or can. Whenever you've perceived as the clone, like there's just some psychological component to that that rarely plays out. It doesn't, Nick, there are instances where it works out, but John. I would say no one moved in that circumstance, but I would say people moved and that Frontex sort of just died and everyone left, which is like slightly skews the example. There wasn't like a market to take from versus with Pump here. Like they clearly just still have a ton of users who have stuck around for an extended period of time.

Like they have a ton of people who are still just like launching your trading tokens. So there is a large sustainable market or at least somewhat more. sustainable than friend tech that is around to be competed away at versus friend tech there there wasn't just like a lot left to pull away yeah i kind of feel like we'll need to see like whatever would potentially unseat pump fun more seriously i feel like it would need to be something that you know no disrespect to boop but i guess a little bit even if i say that like is a little bit better like i don't think something that is just as good as pump fun with

some novel token mechanics is going to be enough. When I think about the open sea and blur kind of situation of things, if you were trading NFTs at the time, there were other platforms that came out that tried to unsee open sea as well

and do similar things like looks fair. It was also launched by dangling. Yeah. And they just weren't good enough. And then you had blur come around where it was. Like it was actually better. It was a better platform to use. And so I think that that will really be the needle mover is if someone, and I don't know what better means here. If I did, I wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be building it. But I think that that'll really be what's required to seriously unseat pump on.

Every single token launcher has come to the table marketing with, we return fees to the traders. We return fees to the token holders. And so, I mean, everyone has identified that that is like the attempt, but that has not worked. Like, Flonch has tried this. It had their week of success in the Ethereum community. Clanker was not like this and then pivoted to returning fees to users. Like Bup is now doing this as well. Pump Fun has also moved in that direction too as well.

And so they have kind of like front run this and they have taken a reduced rake on when the tokens graduate. And so the fees, the take rate from Pump Fund has actually come down because I think that they are front running this. But I think, you know, the meme coin vertical, the meme coin industry has proved to be completely sustainable. It's going to be, I think everyone understands that this is here. It's a part of crypto. It's a part of what makes this industry.

And so now this is not like the open sea of 2021. This is now trying to compete with Coinbase in 2013. And so this is, I think we are just going to see continual evolution and attempts at dethroning pump fund just because it has proven to be such a sustainable cash. cow. And so I think you could, you could probably count on a meme coin launch pad launching once a quarter for now and to, you know, the end of time. Oh, for sure. And yeah, I think like, like, I'd be really interested to see someone try to come in and disrupt things in a way that's more like a complete trading experience or something that feels more like axiom or these different things or like trying to come out from a different angle than just like we also have a web page where you can input a couple fields and press launch a token. I think that stuff around trying to not come at it from the one place that everyone has tried to of lower fees, give back to the community is probably going to be what's required for something like super interesting to come out. Yeah. Yeah.

And alongside that fear reduction, David, that you mentioned, which was like with the pump swap. I remember they did at that time to say they tweeted out, which I don't believe anything is happening yet, but at some point they said it was. it was coming soon a percentage of protocol revenue will be shared with coin creators. So they do feel the pressure, which I mean, at minimum, I think this is just good. I mean, we are just reducing the pressures of like a very large incumbent and it's printing a ton of money right now. Like, this is a good force going forward at minimum of you're just going to be able to redistribute that value better and they're going to be squeezed a little bit more to give money back more to traders and creators, which I think is generally a good thing. On that point, Andy, of like, you probably need more of a real, just something that's totally different. better in some way as opposed to just, you know,

we have a token with incentives, we give you money back. The other thing I've mentioned to you guys, I'm guessing that I know your opinions on this, but I'm curious for anti-fund that had, they came out a couple days ago at some point I'd seen. They were trying to go in this direction of doing something like actually different. I mean,

the very TLDR of it for anyone who hadn't seen it was basically they batch execution of like all of the trades and the bids on these things over an epoch where creator can set whatever up like. So you could say like, hey, I'm launching a token. epoch is one minute. So basically everyone who puts in a bid for that thing in that time, like all the back, the whole batch like clears at the same price.

So you get rid of snipers who like, oh, no, no, the launch is coming and they put it in that millisecond. And then they like, they dump on you after. You get rid of sandwiching stuff like that, which is good. And so this is a theoretically like much better mechanism. It gets rid of a lot of these problems. It was something that we talked a little bit about last week of like, but like, I don't know if it's like actually what users want.

And I'd seen some tweets along this line with. Flanch had this. Flaunch did this. Yeah, you could open up a 30-minute, one-hour-long window. Everyone could get in at the fair price. And it's, you know, there's no sniping. It's so much more fair. But then as we talked about, like, the marketing around that is just not nearly as viral as the incentive of like, oh, I am person number three to buy this. Let me share a link with my friend Andy. And then Andy passes his friend. I'm number four. Let me pass it to my friend, Brad, who's number five. And so, like, there's no, there's no, there's like, positive. it a feedback loop crescendo of marketing around the tokens and a fair launch just like yoinks that. Yeah. And the most cynical version of that, I would say, it was a tweet from Joe X-Ox-Osperey for anyone anyone doesn't know on Twitter. He said, unpopular opinion that I'm willing to change my mind on. Meme coin launch pad tokens would be way less successful in aggregate without sniping by

sophisticated actors slash cabals. Their incentives to propagate the meme is often a requirement for it to reach escape velocity, which is very cynical, but like unfortunately, probably meaning. frankly correct statement. Is it game of incentives, baby? That's what this whole space is about. It's funny because I'm in a lot of, you know, D-Gen trading chats and stuff. And there's kind of this like ongoing joke of like, oh, we can, you can, there's pretty

good tooling and stuff to see if a coin is bundled and, you know, the supply is cornered and whatever. And it's just when you see that, it's the question of like, is this a good supply control or bad supply control? And it's like, when the supply control is good, that's an incredible, you want to be in the coins that are bundled. that are like bundled supply control cabals when they're not going to dump it on you. But when it's bad supply control and then it goes to, you know, half a million dollars and all of a sudden it's at zero.

That is not quite as fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was the entire argument about the Brett coin on base. It's like everyone's like, what the fuck is this meme? No one uses this. No one talks about this. But it's like, it's at $2 billion and it's the number one meme going over there.

And it's like, because it was bundled out the gate. And then like, but they're good bundlers. So therefore they manipulated it in the right direction and we love them. They manipulated it for us for posterity. Yeah. I was going to say this is that meme of like the two sides fighting. It's like our glorious supply control, like your wicked manipulation. Yeah.

But yeah, the anti-fund thing, it's all just like the mid-curve take on on what meme coin should be. Like that's, yeah, unfortunately, it's just not going to not going to be successful. We talked about it last week or whenever that was. I think that there is like an interesting version. like I think it's interesting for particularly like event-based meme coins where there's like a thing that happens and everyone wants to trade this thing that has now like captured attention. I feel like those have always kind of like existed in a weird kind of timeline next to more regular meme coins like fart coin and things that aren't tied to an event or a thing.

Because they're like there is demand and you see it with coins being created. and stuff for like Trump just said this funny word, let's make a coin for it, which like everyone who's buying that kind of knows that in a day or whatever, it'll be dead, but it's fun to play that game of chicken. And I think those actually have like a much better case for something like the anti-fund where it's like, watch this thing. You have five minutes anyone who can get in because like snipers are not going to be looking, like actually not having snipers on like the Trump word.

thing could mean that that 24-hour trading of this coin is way more fair and fun. And everyone kind of already knows that it's not going to $100 billion or whatever. That's just not really a part of the game. And so I could see it being more useful for things like that that are maybe more ephemeral memes versus things that are like trying to be just like cults. I still like binary markets. Like polymarket, like as someone who rode the Bowden wave, I am more into like markets that actually have an outcome that I can. make a decision on versus like trying to like choose one of 75 coins that are loosely associated to the event that I'm trying to bet on and then ultimately the market deciding to rug me

even though I was directionally correct in the thing that I was buying like that so you know like one of the one of the apps that we're like we've been incubating that people are starting to play on the timeline and noise kind of trying to get closer to this right because like you're what you're ultimately trying to bet on with something like that is you're you're trying to bet on this thing gaining mind share or having an outcome that like getting attention right like AI bots or whatever caught a huge wave you could buy a ixbt you could buy zero bro was kind of one you had like 90,000 different like slot bots that came out and you could have bought one of 75 of these tokens that were kind of associated with this sector that you thought was cool and then they could be rugged like instantly

because there's a lot of like countervailing forces in that the vehicle that is a meme coin right you have people that bundle it that just don't give a shit about the thing they're trying to make money and like even though you're directionally correct in the thing that you want, even if it gains mind share, you can go to zero while everything goes up goes to Valhalla, right? Because you just chose the wrong one of the thing. Keito kind of is trying to get closer to this with their like their mind share thing because they they have an algorithm that kind of prunes some of the the noisiness of this stuff and allows you to bet that. And that's like what the noise platform is trying to like build a protocol in the back end around. It's like, okay, if we can have this asset that actually does take the cumulative conversation around this thing. and it can go up while everything else goes down.

Like that's appealing. And the market seems to be enjoying it. But it is a new asset. And like whether or not you can have someone that takes the other side of that trade, which is a problem that Polly Market has with a lot of these things is the next question. Those are cool. And I like remember David, you had the poster on this. Like orderly attention markets is like the basic idea of what people are trying to get at.

My main like hesitation with these kinds of things still is I think all of them again, they make sense. and then my concern is are they somewhat of the slightly mid-curve in the way that anti-funn is of like yeah they definitely make more sense for the thing that I'm trying to express I haven't seen one that I'm like fully confident isn't just but like it seems more fun if I just buy the meme coin man um right and just like all of the virality and everything that goes along with that as opposed to hey we have like this very structured derivatives market and like you can express this directional thing that you have I'm like that makes sense but like maybe I just want to buy the meme coin for the guy

And that at least so far, I mean, that's what we've seen. It's like, I mean, those just have been bigger. But that is the really difficult thing that I think people are trying to balance is like, you're trying to make this like very structured and specific things so that you could, you know, express exactly this directional bet that you have without it just falling into very directly. Okay, you're just making a prediction market on an event or like a single Oracle that's just like, it's just a prediction market at the end of the day. Like trying to balance those things of like the memeability, the virality, the somewhat subjectivity of it.

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of these episodes. So let me pivot us out of meme coins into something on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, which is the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. That will go live for us, for everyone here on the panel in about 12 hours. So for listeners, it will have already gone live. So Pectra is live in the morning of May

the 7th. There's a bunch of new EIPs that are going to go live. Too many to really list off. And of course, some of them are just long tail. But the three all drive of attention to is 7702, which means that all zero-x wallets, all EOAs, to basically become smart contract enabled. They have smart contract wallet functionality. EIP 7691, that is expanding the blob capacity, doubling it from 3 to 6 as the target.

And then the last one, 7251 is max effective balance. Validators can stake a range of ETH between 32Eth to 2048Eth, rather than just a rigid 32 eth. I think it's 7702, which is the kind of the big upgrade here. It's a huge Ux upgrade for all wallets. And so really what this enables is all zero X addresses can just run this one-off contract code, execute that code, and then revert back to being a vanilla EOA. That's what happens in the background, and this is what enables account extraction abilities for EOAs. The first nice thing that comes with this is batched transactions. So we can remove the approve pop-up.

Every, you can, you know, tie together a series of eight transactions, including the approve and consolidate it in just a one-click experience. And this also removes superterea for failed transactions. And then you can also have sponsored paid token denominated gas. So that means that Layer 1 apps can pay for their users gas fees. It means gas fees can be paid in tokens, mainly stable coins,

but, you know, any token, but most likely stable coins. And so these two things, I think, are just a huge UX upgrades for Layer 1 user usage of Ethereum. removing that approved button, I think. No one really realized that the approved button was going to decimate billions of dollars of market cap from Ethereum, but I think we all kind of understand the how that happened. John, let me throw this one to you as the researcher of the group. What do you see when you see Pectra?

I'll give the two sides of it. The first one is probably closer to my 60-40 honest take on it is Pectra took a really, really, really long time to ship. there's a lot of fighting over what was going to go in it. Most of the stuff you probably didn't need in hindsight and some of it ends up being underwhelming. I think that's like this was not operationally the best work that Ethereum has. Like it took a long time to get this together.

It was a pretty messy, kept getting delayed. A lot of problems there. That's, I would say, the sort of pessimistic, hey, this is what we need to improve going forward. And I think that those lessons have been learned from there. And I would say, so pivoting into the positive side of it is one is I do think those lessons have been learned. And that is what you were seeing with, EOF is dead for Fosaka effectively at this point. And it looks very likely that Fusaka is just going to be Pyrados. Or like very possibly

at minimum that is like the, you know, that is the 99% focus of it. And they want to ship it faster. Like there is at least an attempt to get it shipped later this year, not even next year. That would be a super aggressive big change of, you know, hey, we realized in hindsight, like, man, like Petra took a really long time, bunch of shit got thrown in there. Everyone thought ever what to go in there. But like, hey, We all agree that Pyridos is the super important thing. We should just do that and just ship this thing as fast as possible. So the lessons were learned, which I think is really good.

And then the positive parts about Pectra are kind of what you said. And I would summarize it as I think we talked about it last week. Basically, you know, the best way to summarize now what Ethereum's goals are is like the three-prong, scale the L1, scale blobs, improve U.S. Petra has two out of three to a very meaningful degree there. If this is going to scale blobs pretty meaningfully, and 7702 is going to be meaningfully important for UX. like having to sign multiple times like for approve and then swap like all this is just annoying. So hopefully the wallets like do really adopt us and improve the UX meaningfully. And this is like an actual improvement of more blobs.

So I think there's a little bit of both like in hindsight. This was definitely not the best fork that you wanted. Like you would do things very differently with the benefit of hindsight if we went back, you know, 18 months or whatever it was from the last fork. But there is some good stuff in here. And there's a lot of lessons in here for the next work going forward. I don't remember the exact amount of months, but it was a long time. could check exactly what it was. But yeah, it was a pretty long one. I'll say blobs get scaled

meaningfully at a percentage term, but not in a raw term. Absolutely. Yeah, we get three more blobs. Yeah. It's, we're like, we're talking peanuts here. Like, I've tweeted some of these numbers before. Like, if you put these numbers next to like Celestio or I can DA or any of these things, I mean, these are like many orders of magnitude apart. So 2x is great, but you're still like, you know, one percent of these other things. Just for like reference for people who haven't seen the charts, Like, it's mostly, like, what was it, right now? Ethereum is pushing, what was it, like 15 kilobytes or some ridiculous low number to megabytes that are being pushed on Celestia today. Celestia is, like, 1.33, getting ready to go to three.

Yeah, correct. Like, you just view all this, it's bandwidth requirements, right? Like, all these chains need to put their data somewhere, so you need to send data over the network and store it somewhere so someone can make it available. That means you need something that can receive that information, store it cheaply or, you know, relative. cheaply and then make it available so that you can actually like reconstruct the the state of the chain and like see if someone's lying whatever right so like if you look at the raw numbers it's it's kilobytes to megabytes and even you know if you look down the road with pyrdus and and uh full dang sharding all this stuff right like even then like the ethereum

state is uh i don't have it at the top of my head i just know that uh you like you're barely getting at what a lot of these alt-a platforms are doing today uh relative like and that's three years from now, right? So it's like, they're going to continue to scale. They're going to be orders of magnitude to hire. Like, if you think this, this industry is going to require more data, more throughput, more bandwidth, then Ethereum is just not going to be able to keep up, frankly. And, like, if it comes at the cost of all the storage on the nodes and then requires

them to, like, jeopardize how valuable their actual blocks, like the call data side of the block spaces are, like, I don't think that's a good tradeoff. I don't, like, especially when you see how, you see how, uh, at will, the, posting patterns are for a lot of these chains that post to Ethereum, right? Like, they just simply, like, they're never going to do it in a time of high fees because it doesn't impact their users. They can just avoid posting, wait. You know, I think Linnea told me that they straight up wait 30 minutes is the max old all themselves right now to just like stop posting blobs because it doesn't impact their users. There's no real security concerns up until that 30 minute

window. There's no social like repercussions to not posting blobs. They're just like, yeah, we just, you know, it saves us money. It saves our users money. It's a good business decision, which fair. Like it is. And I will continue to expect these people to behave in this way because that is the rational thing to do as these actors. And I just, I don't see it's a as a great value accretive thing for Ethereum to fight on that vertical. One of the thing, John, you may actually have numbers on this. With the stake increase, going from 32 to was it 20, 20, 52, something like that, right? I know there's some gossip overhead that actually comes with that, right?

You reduction of having to maintain all these. validators that have to communicate with each other. So, like, that is indirectly a performance increase of the network where it's a little leaner, right, when you have all these, these large institutions that have to run a thousand of these validators as opposed to just like one box that holds all the ETH. Do we have any idea of, like, what that overhead reduction is? That's why there is a blob count increase in the same hard fork. And so the max eB reduction translates into the doubling of the blobs in the same hard fork. That's where that resource bandwidth went.

well sorry resource bandwidth in the way of like in the people implementing it or resource bandwidth as a like the actual network itself so with max eb and we get to consolidate all the validators down to fewer boxes so there's less gossip so there's less bandwidth overhead so we can take that bandwidth overhead and apply it to growing the blob such as why that's happening the same hard fork making the change because it comes with that reduction okay so you can roughly equate that that size is what you're saying no I don't I'm not technical enough to be able to say that but I know that like that like Like when I did this episode with Tim Beko, he was like, yeah, we were able to comfortably scale more blobs because we have a bandwidth reduction from MaxEB. I think, and they're likely being conservative here. So there's probably more blobs that they could introduce because they just don't know how much bandwidth overhead that they are saving and is also not going to be instantaneous. And so there's a transition period for everyone to consolidate their validators. And so bandwidth is going to come down incrementally over the weeks and months.

And maybe there's a long tail. And so where there will be increasingly more bandwidth overhead unlocked. as time goes on. So it's not immediately available day one, but they are making that tradeoff like, okay, we feel safe doubling blob bandwidth because we know we are saving bandwidth from max EB. But in terms of actual numbers, it's more of just like, we need this to actually like wait and see. Nice. Nice. Yeah. And part of it comes down to nobody really knows exactly where we're going to end up. I mean, you can make some reasonable assumptions. But after it goes live, we'll just have to see how many people consolidate to what extent and over what time period. Because you're probably

probably not going to see everyone just consolidate right away as much as they possibly can, because they either just don't need to or don't care. Coinbase is not doing this on day one. Yeah, exactly. That's just not going to happen. So, yeah, so we'll end up to see where it goes. But yeah, to the point we were talking earlier on bread there, which I definitely agree on of like, yeah, when you put these number in context of like compare these like, all right,

the numbers that Ethereum is talking about doing three, four, five, whatever years down the road is like literally where other chains like Celeste here are today, like, where Igan DA and these avail and these others, like you go ahead a few years. I mean, these other chains could be orders of magnitude ahead. A lot of what kind of color is my view somewhat on the prioritization of like L1 scaling versus blob scaling and stuff like this is you need to ask yourself, if you, if you accept that as just a reasonable order of magnitude statement of fact, but hey, Ethereum is like never going to be this thing that is doing a gazillion transactions. It's like everything. There's no place for Alt-DA or at minimum. This is not happening in the

medium term. Like if this happens, this is like a decade away or whatever where you figured all you're a fancy cryptography, whatever, end game stuff. Like, it's not happening anytime soon. The thing that you kind of need to ask yourself then is like, all right, if we accepted that like Ethereum is never going to be the end game for all of this stuff for like the most part, like there's going to be a bunch of other providers that are just doing orders of magnitude more scale. What is the more valuable market for you that Ethereum can provide and own? Is it premium execution or is it premium DA? Like which of those is a more valuable market that Ethereum is better at? And I think it's definitely premium execution. That it is like,

Like absolutely winning on that. It is a way more valuable market in general. And it's a much stickier market to keep onto those network effects. So that's why when I'm like, I'm like, I prefer like if you had to pick, like do we scale the execution budgeted or add a few more blobs, you know, double the gas limit on the L1 versus double the blob limit. I actually think like most of the L1 scaling stuff of like reducing block times and increasing gas there actually gets you a lot more bang for your buck. Just because that is just like a much more valuable use of that same commodity that you have. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think the, even when I asked Donkrod in the episode that we did with Tankrod and Namsgar, I asked about, like, how can we, like, lower slot times?

And even despite being very bullish on increasing the gas limit, lowering block times, Scott pushed back just for technical reasons. Yeah, it's hard. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's hard. And it's hard with, well, preserving Ethereum's level of decentralization. But, like, I think lowering block times is more important than raising block size. because of all the benefits that come with trading. And, you know, despite all of the pushback I've given Solano over the years, the decentralized NASDAQ line looks really good when Wall Street is trying to come on chain.

And Ethereum does have this very strong advantage of all of the MEV infrastructure, all the MEV, the very sophisticated MEV mitigation infrastructure that it has built in line with the layer one. So, like, the Andy 805-2s of the world don't mind to give. the 10% MEV of the Solana blockchain because he's going for like a 1 million X on his meme coin token. But Wall Street definitely cares about like bips of extraction coming out from middleman in their execution. And that is Ethereum that's something that Ethereum has invested in. And we should repurpose that and like turn that into our narrative for what Ethereum can bring to Wall Street and why assets should be minted on the Ethereum layer one. And in order to really maximize that, Ethereum needs to lower block time.

It needs to have faster blocks. So trading can happen faster because that's what, you know, a decentralized NASDAQ needs. That's my hot take. That's I don't think that hot, actually. Yeah. And, you know, I'm constantly reiterating that it doesn't ever have to be the decentralized NASDAC in the same way that Solana is trying to be. But like, you know, we mentioned the properties of like your MAV mitigation, your decentralization, all those things.

Like, those are hugely valuable things. So, like, there's potentially a world that, you know, once you hit a certain threshold of value, you're like, okay, I want to put it in a place that is incredibly neutral, that is live. that like all of those things make sense to be done on, like you talked with the Biddle Fund earlier, right? You'll put treasuries on chain. Maybe it makes sense to put them in something that, uh,

that is, you know, has all of those properties as opposed to something that is just like, we'll settle, you know, five seconds faster or whatever, right? They mentioned that the actual movement of the,

the black rock, uh, wallets is, you know, very infrequent, right? They're not on there, degenning with that stuff daily, right? It's not,

it's not something that's highly active, but it's highly valuable, right? And like, that's, that's the key thing. And this kind of like, you know, I know all of us are basically on the same side when it comes to this conversation,

but, you know, we had their recent Solana upgrade that, like, everyone's having controversy around whether or not you draw those lines, you know, as a, like, being a determinant of whether it's centralized or not is a separate conversation. But, you know, if people are doing it inside of Ethereum, maybe there's a few people outside of our ecosystem that would draw those same lines, you know, correctly or incorrectly, whatever. And if that line can be drawn, if that narrative can be a narrative, then like, you know, maybe people would draw their line and stand on the Ethereum side and use that as a reason to put all of their funds on Ethereum because of this one event, even if they don't agree with it or we don't agree with it. As far as this, you know,

what is the type of market that Ethereum can win, even in the world where it's never going to be the fastest? The kind of like implicit assumption in there is that you're assuming all of the activity doesn't naturally gravitate to that other place that's faster anyway, even that doesn't strictly need it. Because the world where you can see that happening is, let's just make it really simple. It's just Ethereum and Sala and say that, okay, Sala's the faster ones. So very naturally, all of the actual decentralized NASDAQ, like most of the, like all of the stuff that really requires, like low latency trading, whatever, everything goes over there. Everything naturally gravitates there. So if all the trading is there and all the users are progressively,

a lot of users moving there over time, do you just naturally end up having this momentum of like, okay, all the lending stuff naturally moves there too because people trust it with the side value stuff and people are going there. My guess is that that's at least directionally true. It's definitely net positive, but to what extent is that true? Does it pull everything? Like what time horizon does that actually happen on leaves, like in my mind in general, just a very large market segment, if nothing else,

that Ethereum like should be capitalizing on now. Because it's definitely not the case now. And I don't think it's going to be happening anytime soon that, you know, when the, you know, you're just putting treasuries on chain or whatever, like, oh, it has to go on Solana because like they have better trading infrastructure. than Ethereum L1, like, and better than everyone else. We're just not there. Like, there's clearly a big market edge, like, at minimum for you to grab there.

Understanding that all the stuff is permissionless, we're talking about, like, just the market structure of all this stuff. I saw Eric Wall made a post because he's in the Bitcoin world, and Bitcoin is now starting their journey of, like, really getting into these L2 architectures, right, or these multi-chain architectures. He said, you know, what lessons learned should we take from what happened here? Like, how, if you were designing from scratch, How would you implement a multi-chain roadmap, understanding that it's all permissions, right?

People are going to build however they want. We're likely going to see some fractals over there of the exact same stuff that we saw here. People are going to say, I'm going to build a chain that is going to be the hub of a bunch of chains on top of the chain. And that's going to rerun itself. But how would you guys, what are the lessons learned of Ethereum that you would implement in a Bitcoin multi-chain world? part of my concern is just in general over analogizing between the two because I do think that you have at least like pretty and I mean this was a lot of like what I'd written in like the Bitcoin L2 thesis post that I had written of like I do think that at least some parts of this will end up playing out meaningfully different in Bitcoin L2 versus Ethereum L2 because I think that you have a fundamentally just different user base across the two of like users are just looking for a different thing when I'm going to go use a Bitcoin L2 versus an Ethereum L2. of like Ethereuml2 is mostly like I want to go do this thing faster and cheaper that I can kind of do on the L1 and just like going for a different kind of use case there versus Bitcoin.

Like most of this stuff is a pretty zero to one of like, hey man, I can't do any trustless basic defy stuff with my Bitcoin if like I want to swap or do lending or just basic, you know, deposit into a vault, whatever. Like I got to go try block fire or whatever to go use the thing for the most part. So I'm somewhat hesitant to over analogize on these things because I do actually expect the market to play out a little bit differently. I do think that users do actually want to do different. things. And then another part of it is also the constraints just technically are very different

of like Bitcoin is like way smaller blocks. This is even than Ethereum. And it's way, it's way slower. It's got proof of work. You, you don't actually have the EK verification right now. So I, I'm hesitant to just overdraw like too many analogies on the way that like Ethereum has played out so far. The notion of Bitcoin users always, uh, always that flows a flag in my minds. It's like there are no users of Bitcoin. There are holders of the Bitcoin asset, but users of the Bitcoin blockchain, I'm not sure that that is a cohort, a TAM. People who trade ordinals. Yeah, but those people are the same people who came over to Ethereum to trade NFTs and are happy to trade meme coins on Salana too. So I think the overlap between Bitcoin Ordinals traders and like

pump dot fund memecoin traders on Salana is actually pretty high. And then people always look at the market cap of Bitcoin. Like, man, there's so much like potential here. There's so much like we could put into into Bitcoin D5, but that implies like the existence of this like large Bitcoin user base that I don't think exists. I still think desires one to one. I'd go against you on that, John. I think like, like, because if you think about the overlap with Ethereum, it's not just desire to be clear.

It's what it's what fundamentally like can they do and already not do? Like, Ethereum is already servicing a lot of the stuff that Bitcoin L2s will need to fundamentally service because Bitcoin can't do it. It's not just like user desire. Like, I don't think BTC and Eith holders actually have that different of a desire across their holder bases. I think that Ethereum and Bitcoin provide like very fundamentally different things. And so that changes what L2 should do in reflection. So it's not a user desire thing. It's like, I think that everything is downstream of what the L1 looked like. So the L2s need to

provide like a fundamentally different thing. Yeah. In addition to renaming this show, the meme coin show, I think this is also going to have to be renamed to the bread versus drawn Bitcoin Layer 2 show as well. That is also a recurring theme on this episode. Brett, Andy John, it's another week. Really appreciate you guys coming on and joining the roundtable. and I look forward to talking to you guys again in one more week. Thanks for having us, man. Until thank you. Bankless station, you guys know the deal.

Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but nonetheless, we are headed west. This is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're all with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.