Bankless - Exposing Binance's Listing Fees | CJ Hetherington

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Binance listing fees, finally out in the open. CJ Hetherington, Founder of Limitless, published the offer he received after no NDA. 8% of total token supply and $250k. We dig into why the founders accept deals like this, the hidden sell pressure, and how onchain price discovery can replace CEX gatekeeping. CJ also breaks down Limitless on Base, instant-settlement price markets, and the path to Coinbase via Aerodrome. ------ 📣IMMUNEFI | CRYPTO SECURITY OS https://bankless.cc/Immunefi ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAXNET | MINT, REDEEM, EARN https://bankless.cc/fraxnet 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR L2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌳KGEN | REQUEST A DEMO https://bankless.cc/KGEN-podcast 💠BIT DIGITAL ($BTBT) | ETH TREASURY https://bankless.cc/bit-digital We’re being compensated by Bit Digital (NASDAQ BTBT) for this segment promoting their company and BTBT. The compensation is paid in cash as a one time payment. You can find additional information about Bit Digital and BTBT on their Investor page at https://bit-digital.com/investors ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Centralized Exchange Listing Fees 3:08 The Binance Drama Unfolds 3:41 Introducing Limitless 5:00 Conversation with CJ 15:28 The Hidden Costs of Listing Fees 25:17 The Future of Onchain Markets 28:44 Building on Base 32:39 Limitless: A New Prediction Market 43:43 Exploring Limitless Features 53:10 User-Generated Markets & Censorship 1:06:10 How to Engage with Limitless ------ RESOURCES CJ https://x.com/cjhtech Limitless https://x.com/trylimitless ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Welcome to Bankless, where today we are talking about centralized exchange token listing fees. There has been some drama on the crypto Twitter timeline as it relates to probably one of the more important subjects when it comes to the release and liquidity of founder on tokens, newly launched tokens. This drama got started when the founder of a prediction market project on base released the details of an offering that he claimed he got from Binance about the token listing fees. for what it would be required to launch his token on Binance. This token doesn't exist yet, but it's in the project of a TGEE. And apparently, the token listing team at Binance

sent this individual, this founder, CJ, who you're going to hear from on the podcast today, they sent him their offer of, this is what it takes to get listed on Binance. And they did that before they sent him an NDA. And so he just released the offer on Twitter. Now, everyone knows that there are centralized exchange listing fees, and everyone has murmured about the gargantuan take rate that Binance charges startups,

about their tokens. If you want to get listed on Binance, this is what you have to pay. I don't think these deals are cookie cutter. I think every deal is kind of made based on the facts and circumstances of the project, but broadly, people understand these things to be very, very large. We've never really gotten confirmation or details or, like, explicit truth. about what a deal like this looks like because no one has released this information.

But it seems like because of a slip-up on the Binance side, the NDA was not sent and therefore this individual was free to disclose on Twitter in public what exactly that deal was. And the deal was egregious. This particular startup for Limitless,

CJ, was charged 8% of the total token supply in $250,000. That was the offer. CJ, sounds like that. He's not taking it. And instead he just took that offer to Twitter. It'd be like, look Twitter. Look what they are asking for, which is kind of egregious.

Now, plenty of founders have taken this bet. And I ask CJ why he thinks that is. Why give, you know, 8% of your total token supply up to finance? And the calculus behind that. And, you know, the conversation is pretty important. C.J seems like he's a pretty big on-chain maxi and thinks that like, well, does finance really need to be charging these things? And this is even good for founders at all.

And if you are a founder that believes in your project, why would you give up 8%? And he does illuminate that the calculus does shift if you're a founder who doesn't believe in your project and you are trying to join Binance and kind of just getting cashed out. Overall, that's kind of the theme of the drama on crypto Twitter over the last 48 hours.

If you go on to crypto Twitter, CZ and Binance are explicitly naming this startup founder, kind of a big PR mistake from from Binance. And it's like the 800 pound gorilla in the room who owns all the liquidity kind of going after the

startup founder on base. And so it's entertaining at the very least. And I think this is also a very important discussion for liquidity and fees when it comes to startup founders trying to find liquidity for their new token to attract investments.

It's pretty important conversation. I think CJ does a great job. giving his perspective as a founder and just giving his advice to other founders in the space who are also going, like him, going through some of these conversations.

So before we get into the conversation with St.J. And in addition to everything I just said, we're also going to talk about Limitless, his prediction market startup on base. We're going to talk to some of our friends and sponsors over at Immunify,

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There is a link in the show notes for you to get your app protected. If you have an app that has customer deposits, you need protection. Don't go without protection. And so there's a link in the show notes for you to learn more about immunifier. With that, let's go ahead and get right into the conversation with CJ. I'm here with CJ from the limitless prediction market, CJ. How you doing, man? Hey, David. How are you? Thanks a lot for having me on the show.

You are the main character today, at least over the last 48 hours on crypto Twitter. How do you feel it? I definitely don't want to be the main character, so that's not necessarily a bullish signal. Maybe that means I should tone it down a little bit. Okay, so for listeners who aren't on crypto Twitter, there's been an ongoing conversation about the role that centralized exchanges have in providing liquidity to tokens, especially when it comes to listing fees. And this concept of centralized exchange listing fees has kind of been this nebulous topic

that no one has ever been really able to define because no one knows what the true listing fees are. And, you know, Jesse from Base will go on Twitter and say, Coinbase has no listing fees. And then representatives from Binance will be like, Binance has no listing fees. But then in the background, anyone who's ever talked to a founder is like, oh, yeah, centralized exchanges have totally have listing fees. When Jesse from Base says that, I kind of believe him.

I don't really have that same sort of relationship with finance, or I don't really know anyone in the finance world. But like everyone, everyone talks about the magnitude of Binance. is listing fees, but no one has ever been able to put numbers behind them. Like, what are these things? What are the actual fees? Now, the story, as I understand it, CJ, is that you have a startup. It's limitless.

We're going to talk about limitless prediction market on base. And you are exploring your TGE, a future incoming token. A sale round was going around on Kido. And so I would imagine you talked to finance about like, hey, what about getting my future incoming token listed on finance. And it sounds like, as I understand it, they sent you the listing fee information, but they forgot to send you the NDA

that would legally bind you to not disclose the listing fee information. And so then you just put it out onto a tweet and everyone on crypto Twitter is like, we finally have the numbers. And the numbers were like egregious. It was like 8% of the total supply of the tokens plus like a quarter million dollars,

on top of that. And so finally for the first time, we were able to look at these numbers and be like 8% of a total supply of a project. Holy hell, that is a lot. I'll pause there and give you the microphone in case I got anything wrong or if you want to add any color to that. But I think on behalf of the crypto industry, I think everyone's kind of like, hey, thanks for publishing, for posting that information. Would you have any color you want to add to that? Yeah. So I mean, the first thing I would love to say is I really respect CZ and I really respect Binance. And, you know, I really hope that this is a window for not only Binance, but for centralized exchanges in general to be open to construct a feedback from the community. Like, yes, I'm a builder, but before I was a builder,

I was a community member. I think it's very important that this feedback is heard by centralized exchanges. And I think it's very important that if centralized exchanges want to exist five years from now that they really take heed and start to adopt, you know, more sustainable and fair and equitable models. In terms of the situation, like what happened, I mean, in terms of the NDA and all of that, well, FOMO is, you know, I mean, you probably understand a lot about this in your capacity as a venture investor. Forma is a very interesting emotion that drives us to do very wild and unprecedented things. And I mean, during the token 2049 was very wild time for a limitless.

I mean, coming from like six months ago where almost nobody wanted to fund us and I was, you know, having a very hard time trying to secure funding for the future of the company to, like right now, you know, we had our Caito sale, which was like 200 X over subscribed, like 200 million in community pledges. also venture funding around. There was like 2.5X over subscribed as well. And so I think that

I didn't apply for any finance listing. I didn't submit any due diligence forms. I think usually what happens is projects engage finance through their listing application or through their due diligence form channels. And if I'm not mistaken, as part of the

due diligence forms, there are some kind of like confidentiality. clauses or something like that. But the situation between Binance and Limitless unfolded a little bit differently and I would say was probably driven by FOMO in that exchanges

are looking to list tokens that generate demand and trading fees for them naturally, right? And so I think they were potentially like just excited and open to work with Limitless and that's why

you know we kind of have this situation where the proposal was shared without, you know, any confidentiality agreement in place. Now, I don't actually begrudge, you know, Binance for doing that. In a way, I actually respect their hustle. Like, you know, we're a startup, right? We appreciate, like, moving fast and, you know, not getting tied up and, like, red tape and, like, corporate processes. So I appreciate, actually, that they did that. And I think, The reason, it's not right to say that, you know, this information has never been made public before just because of confidentiality agreements.

I also would say that, you know, and this is something that, you know, we maybe don't want to admit, you know, necessarily, but it's not only centralized exchanges that are at fault here, right? I mean, there are also a lot of founders and market makers who have kind of been part of this, process and part of this like, you know, manipulation and extraction games. And I think like this is kind of, you know, a well-kept secret in a way that this is how these things work and how they operate and how they play out.

But honestly, Limitless is not really interested in that. And, you know, we're not in the space for that. And I think, you know, you're the same as us in that way. And that, you know, we're building on-chain apps some marketplaces because we believe in the power of them and what they can actually do. And we don't think that like, you know, giving away a huge percentage of supply and rationalizing that with kind of a mega dump on retail is actually the best way to move this industry

forward. And probably that's why, you know, we've been able to share this information. And I really hope that, you know, this is a turning point for the whole space. And like I said, you know, I really respect CZ and Binance for everything they've done so far. But the current status quo, if we want to make it as an industry, in my opinion, it's not good enough. And we need to level up. And at limitless, we have a very open, hard feedback culture. I mean, with each other, with my co-founders, with our team. And that's, you know, what helps us to improve and get better. And this is something that we would like to see applied more broadly to the industry, especially when, you know, essentially, you know, real hardworking people

with skin in the game that we're talking about here. Yeah, it's probably worth highlighting why this fee is allowed to exist in the first place and why founders historically have taken this fee. Whereas just like, you know, liquidity on finance, which is also, you know, distribution, distribution for your token is incredibly valuable. It can add tens, hundreds, perhaps even a billion dollars of market cash. cap onto a project. And so, you know, what's 8% of a sacrifice if you're going to add $100 plus million to your potential market cap? Granted, it might be a deal with a double

over the long term, but like so many founders are trying to just go from zero to one. And maybe they think that that 8% token supply listing fee to finance is the way to just like to get ahead. And also to Binance as credit, like as you've highlighted, you know, finance as a single institution has probably brought more people into crypto than anyone, anyone ever, not even close. And so, you know, they have helped grow the industry, distribute the industry, make the industry save, you know, haven't lost any customers funds. And so, like, we could go on and on and on about the value that Binance has brought to the table for the industry, which is why they can say, hey, like, 8% is the entry fee of your total supply of your token.

That's as illustrative of the value that they are bringing to the table. table. I think what we are thinking now is like the value is starting to flip and it's starting to be more extractive than than what should be fair. And perhaps one of the reasons why this open secret has remained, you know, pretty well behind. Like we knew as an industry that these fees exist, didn't really know about them in detail. And like, why is that true? Well, finance has no incentive to illustrate how much of a fee that they are taking, how much cream they are just cutting off the top. Founders probably don't want to disclose

that they gave 8% to finance. Like they did that? Like, that's kind of like, you know, they just don't want, no one in the inner circle, like market makers, they don't want to talk about how much of the share of the token

that they received either. No one wants to really reveal these details. It's not in anyone's best interest. And so this secret kind of just stays quiet, it stays a little bit mum, even though everyone on the outside kind of knows the contours, the loose broad contours of what's happening.

No one really knows and no one's really incentivized to kind of like give up these details. CJ, when you posted the tweet with like kind of line items of just like, 1% of tokens go to this, 1% of tokens go to that. $250,000 goes here.

I'm assuming they gave you an actual document. Why not actually just release a document itself? Well, I did in the end, I did in the end share the, it was in a telegram group chat, actually, a very, very crypto-native way of sharing a proposal. And by the way, I do believe that there was room to negotiate. And that there was also was expressed. And so potentially, you know, the deal terms could have been improved somehow. I think that centralized exchanges almost rely on the fact that a lot of founders are not very familiar

or very well-versed in liquid markets and they kind of use that through their advantage and I would even go as far as saying that the way the proposal is structured, it's kind of inherently pretty confusing, right? You have to just like kind of sit for a minute and understand exactly like, okay, there is this percentage there, there's that percentage there,

then there is a cash feed, then there is a security deposit, and kind of piece it all together. And, you know, I would probably suggest that that is also kind of intentional. And I think that a lot of founders actually don't know what they're getting into with the kind of deals that they make with centralized exchanges. And like, you know, they just probably assume like, okay, that's like what it costs and, you know, that's it. We actually, you know, we want to go, um,

go with a different approach. You know, we believe in, like, on-chain capital markets, on-chain capital formation and community building, and kind of driving acquisition and activation of our product through skiing the game and co-ownership with the community. And we think that, you know, centralized exchanges need to, you know, if they want to, you know, last, they have to become a gateway for the on-share-exchanges.

world and not just kind of be this almost gatekeeper, right, which is, you know, using, you know, this flaw to extract maximally. And, you know, like the situation that just happened with this like cascading, like liquidation event, I mean, it's impossible to blame anyone directly for that, but I don't believe that that was kind of healthy or ordinary market activity. You know, in some cases, like liquidity was completely vanished from different artifacts. And I think that there was pure market manipulation.

And it was a pure orchestrated assault on retail. And, you know, there was the case where hyperliquid has been reported as having the most liquidations in terms of like dollar amount. But it's also kind of, you know, another well-kept secret that centralized exchanges under-report their liquidations for the sake of like community sentiment. And I truly think that moving these markets on chain makes them more transparent and makes them more fair

and equitable by default. And that's actually what we believe in and why we're here. We don't just want to recreate the same wall garden from the traditional financial system, but throw in a few blockchain calls here and there because that doesn't actually meaningfully upgrade anyone's life or the underlying infrastructure. Yeah, and really just to add on to that,

you know, Binance has a number of like trophies, like relics, like golden gooses that they get just because of how dominant they are, like 80, 85% of like total volumes are on Binances. volumes and also derivative volumes. And when that happens, like there are just like a number of like second third order consequences, effects that Binance gets to, gets to enjoy.

One, being the very high token listing fees, like if you have all the liquidity, you could charge very high fees. Two, a lot of like startups and even like Ethereum protocol development considers like sex dex arbitrage. Like what that really means is like the price on Binance versus the price on uniswap. And we are considering the price on Binance

versus the price on Unoswap. When we think about, when Sorella Labs thinks about how to design their decks or, you know, UniChane is thinking about TEEEs and going at like 200 millisecond blocks to go very, very fast, all of this, many of much of this is motivated by the fact that Binance has pricing power. They, like, price discovery of Bitcoin, of ETH,

of any material asset happens on Binance. because it doesn't happen on chain. And like where are tokens getting listed and where are fees being paid, being paid to Binance because that's where liquidity is because it's not on chain. And so like in 2025, the year of our Lord 2025,

like centralized exchanges still have so much bargaining power because price discovery and liquidity is on the is on Binance, is on Binance. It's not even like a sex versus Dex illustration. Like if finance went away, would it go to Coinbase? maybe. But it's really just like Binance versus like, I mean they have Binance chain, but even finance chain doesn't have the volumes that Binance has. So like price discovery

moving away from Binance and centralized exchanges and formulating on chain, it's just good for everyone because then the whole system is auditable. The whole system is transparent. You know, what are Hyperliquids listing fees? Pretty sure it's zero. In fact, I think you actually can get paid to list of tokens because you get some of the trading fees. And that's like, that's what we're here to do. That's like, yeah, you, like, you should get paid to list your token, not the other way around

because that's the nature of what on-chain is. Like, there are so many different on-chain applications that should be competing for CJ, for you to, like, list your token on hyperliquid or base or whatever. There's no question there, but like, what are your sentiments about that? Yeah, for sure. I think that, like, fundamentally all markets will move on chain.

Of course, I'm excited about prediction markets, but I'm also excited about like markets as well I think they're a great way to continuously price real world assets as well as crypto assets and yeah I think we're really at

a turning point and I think centralized exchanges like Coinbase are kind of you know making really like welcome steps forward here because you know doing things like putting Aerodrome inside of their main application

and giving users access to like Bitcoin lending that's built on top of a defy protocol. I think this is very much the way that the world is going. And I think it's very much like kind of get on board or get left behind kind of situation for a lot of the current incumbents. And also, I mean, in terms of, you know, what you mentioned with Binance having a monopoly on flow,

I mean, I would also take a look at the Korean exchanges, like a bid and bid hum. I think that there is also a lot of users in Korea who actually don't use Binance. I think from our Caito sale around 30, or more than around 30, 35 million of the total pledges actually came from Korea, which was the largest for any single jurisdiction.

And so there were a lot of users, retail users and retail flow in regions like Korea who don't even use Binance. And I'm not sure that the market share is 80 or 90% at least for perps, I think it's more like 60%. I haven't actually checked it recently. I know Hyperliquid has been doing a really good job. But I think in general, like you mentioned, arbitrage, because you have very much

kind of Pareto principles here, where a small number of customers drive the majority of, like, volume and revenue, like, jump pays like $15 million per day and fees to perfect exchanges or something crazy like that. Obviously, they're making way more than that, but also, like, one of the core ways that they monetize is from trading, like, spreads across different exchanges, right? And so I think that's why we always kind of do see multiple venues emerge with deep and comparable, like, liquidity and open interest. And I do think that, you know, as more and more retail flow and attention actually comes on chain,

which is very much bottlenecked by, you know, like regional regulations and like on ramping infrastructure and stuff like that, I think as these kind of barriers are slowly broken down, we're going to see more and more users on chain. And we're going to see, you know, less and less need for these gatekeepers. And that's what I'm deeply excited about. And yeah, I just hope that exchanges, not only Coinbase, but other major exchanges can also be open to this constructive feedback and can embrace the on-chain world and the kind of revolution, I would say, which is happening. Introducing FRAXUSD, the genius-aligned digital dollar from FRAX.

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Visit unichane.org or follow at Unichane on X for all the updates. Are you worried at all, CJ, that you kind of have like, the hornets nest. There's an 800-pound gorilla, and it's called Binance. And now, Binance doesn't like you. And they've made some, like,

PR blenders along this path here. But, like, nonetheless, like, you've picked a fight with CZ. You've picked a fight with Binance. Does that scare you at all? Like I say, you know, I really respect CZ and Binance for everything they've done for the space.

And, you know, 800-pound guerriller fighting with anyone generally is not a good look for the 800-pound guerriller and so I probably I probably would I probably would not recommend to keep engaging because I don't think that it has gone so well so far your limit list is built on base

in your in your tweet where you disclosed all of the deal structure for the finance listing fees you concluded with and this is why I build on base throwing a very favorable bone to Coinbase and Base and Jesse, can you just like

illustrate that, give that a little bit more color? What has been what's it been like being a builder on base? Yeah, I mean like even if we just like abstract away like all of the context and like absolutely everything else and I just compare just the experience of like

you know like what Coinbase would ask for. for a listing and what finance typically asked for. You know, that was just a pure comparison that I wanted to make. And I know that, you know, there have been like some tweets online like the Andrew Cronje from Yerun 1 or X-Yerun, rather, that was kind of, you know, saying that Coinbase had charged in millions back in the day.

And then you also have people saying that they were listed on Binance for free and all of that. And I think that probably both of those instances are actually true. And I think we're just saying that like, yeah, probably that is true. So why would we give you 8% of our tokens that? And yeah, in terms of base, you know, they've been really supportive for projects that are building like natively on base. And we've kind of seen this pathway where, you know, you have the aerodrome like on-chand launch, price discovery, fast follow with the Coinbase listing. And yeah, they literally don't ask for anything. You know, I can kind of confirm that, at least if you're a meaningful part of the base ecosystem

and you actually, you know, build something that matters and have real users and bring value to the ecosystem and community in some way, which I think it should be all about, right? So it's like I just don't understand the calculus unless you are trying to go out there and like dump a bunch of your tokens on day one, which fundamentally we're not trying to do because we actually believe in limitless, you know, long term. And so, you know, we're not trying to just generate a bunch of liquidity from a Binance listing and kind of sail away into the sunset.

Now, if that is your goal, I understand, you know, the calculus behind why you would do that. But for us, we're like, we want long-term value alignment. we want to be part of an ecosystem which believes in, you know, all of the important, you know, values about crypto, about decentralization, about building on chain.

And like, actually, we want to be here for the long run. And if we think about this from a more longer term perspective, then, you know, earning 8% of supply for a day one listing on finance, just isn't a good calculus. I don't know if you have, I know you're pretty early on your TGE process and all of that,

but I don't know if you have like a plan or a roadmap. I think like if I was building a base app, an app on base, I'm approaching my TGEE, I would, it would be something along the lines of do the TGEE, put the token into aerodrome, see liquidity.

And once it's an aerodrome, it's available on the front end of Coinbase. Now it's not listed on Coinbase, but nonetheless, like retail consumers can find it on Coinbase and purchase it on Coinbase using an external wallet. Maybe it's a little bit more cumbersome

than if you just had got listed directly on Coinbase. But nonetheless, like it's pretty sick to be listed, quote unquote, listed on Coinbase on day one just via Aerodrome. Is that your plan? Or are you just like still kind of formulating this idea? So we're definitely preparing for like a fully on-chan launch and fully unchanned price discovery.

and that's kind of our strategy and I believe that we'll set an unprecedented with this and many will follow but on the other side if you are building a meaningful app app on base you absolutely can get a day one Coinbase listing

I'm not talking about Aerodrome I'm talking about Coinbase listing The real listing with real market makers for sure that's on the table so if you actually build a meaningful app on base you can be listed on Coinbase on day one and they will support you. So it just depends on kind of, you know, your preferences

and also how you think about design. And again, you know, there are a lot of bad actors in this space. And, you know, even like a lot of tokens and communities suffer because of, you know, bad deals that are made between not only centralized exchanges, but also market makers. And so I think that the launch strategy and the amount of supply,

which is kind of debt on day one, is a litmus test for, does the founder of this product or company or community or ecosystem, do they actually understand liquid markets or not? Because if they don't understand liquid markets, then the chances are that they're getting fucked by market makers, they're getting fucked by centralized exchanges,

and in the end, that translates, to retail ultimately facing, you know, the hardest consequences. Yeah, yeah. I do want to get into Limitless and just kind of pop open the hood of Limitless and see what's under the hood there. But I have like one last question on this whole listing drama. There's a thought out there that like, Andre from from Yearn, when he listed, created the Yern token, it was the coolest.

thing since sliced bread back in 2020. Oh, man. What a time. Yeah, crazy time. Like very nostalgic. And so then he earned that like finance listing for free because like everyone wanted to trade your anyways. That's not the typical case. The typical case is probably something, uh, closer to, to your startup where you have

a relatively new startup that's gaining traction. Uh, and a like a finance listing would actually be a huge win for your startup. And so the founder is like considering. doing that, considering paying that fee, paying that 8%, maybe it's higher, maybe it's lower. You said it potentially is up for negotiation. In theory, you could negotiate it down. But then also in theory, you could see another startup being offered, like,

give us 15% of your token supply. I don't know, something like that. And a lot of, like I said, a lot of founders take this bet. They just take this gamble that like, okay, this is an acceptable trade. This is like positive EV for me, and that's why I'm going to do this. The thought is that because of so much of the token supply goes to, like, you know, inside of the finance ecosystem. Like, and what are they doing with that?

In the fullness of time, they're selling it. And so that's 8% of cell pressure that your startup has to overcome in order to survive. And so, yes, you get the liquidity, you get the day one pop. Maybe you even get the year one pop. But eight, like anywhere between 5% and 15%

of like cell pressure is hard to overcome. I don't know if you have any, like, you're, again, Limelis is pretty young in its, you know, TGE arc. But like, I would imagine that that would be, almost destructive for projects, for many projects out there. Just like, can you overcome 10% of your supply getting sold before, like in the first one to three years of your startup?

And like, maybe this is just like actually kind of a trap that maybe founders think that it's positive EV, but it's actually negative EV in the grand scheme of things. Again, I don't have any experience here. I've never listed token. But I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. So, yeah. So this is, this is pretty. rough, but

it's, you're right, it's impossible for this to be like positive EV, like, I mean, of course there can be like insane amount of, of buy pressure, which does happen for, you know, some, for some tokens. I think

like Solano probably is a great example of like an absolute kind of home run like from zero to hero and like random test of time, right? But like, the thing is, you're expecting that founders are actually thinking about this game from a two or three year perspective.

In fact, what they're doing is dumping on day one. So the calculus, the founders. The founders. Marketmakers founders. So everyone. Oh, so the founders in on it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's actually when you understand that the space is even worse than you thought it was.

because, and that's why. And so if you go and you look at my mentions, right, over the last 24 hours, the founders who are like backlashing me for this are guilty. And the founders who are, you know, supporting exposing the truth are much more value aligned like with you and I. But probably, collectively we have

they say they never meet your heroes right like collectively we have higher expectations of people than what is the reality and the reason why this calculus makes sense is because they're dumping on day one right so however they structure that is you know very much a gray area

but that's why people are taking these deals because they are also dumping right So this is positive EV, but in a sense, it's almost like blood money, right? It's positive EV for a specific founder, but at what cost to the community. Right. And that's what I'm trying to be for a smaller circle of people. It's negative EV for the long term of the health of the project. They're not thinking about like two, three years can we recover from this?

Right. They're thinking about like, can I buy another Porsche next week? And that's what I'm trying to call out here. You know, I want us to be aware of that. And I want us to be open about that so that we can move the space forward and kind of drain the space of these bad actors. Okay, okay. So, yeah, it's not just finance charging good actors.

It's not just centralized their fees. It's bad actors who are also saying, hey, I don't care about that fee. because by the time that chicken comes home to roost, I'm out of here. Yeah, and that's what changes the calculus. So when you think truly that doesn't make sense, that's why it makes sense,

because people are worse than you think. Yeah, if anything has, crypto has taught me anything, it's that people are worse than I thought. Yeah, exactly. And that's what we're trying to call out here. Like, you know, and when you see people are going against, stars on this?

Probably now you clearly understand why. Because we're not just going against the centralized exchanges, we're going against bad activities in general. Well, TJ... Of which there are many. Yeah, it takes some grande Cajunas to go after Binance and CZ. And so I think at the very least, thank you for the entertaining 48 hours on Twitter.

And then also hopefully thank you for what can be, hopefully a turning of the ship moment for the crypto industry. Like sometimes we just need details and we need information for us to all be able to like, yo, we are all looking at this. We all know that this is true. Everyone else knows that this is true now. Let's adjust our strategy broadly and let's not like continue on down this path and let's, let's do something different.

So if that's what gets catalyzed as a result of these, just the last 48 hours on Twitter, that would be a huge level up for the industry as a whole. So for the very large role that you played in that, thank you. Thank you for doing that. Yeah, thank you for supporting. And yeah, I think

I really hope that from this, we can, you know, from this transparency and from kind of like ripping off this banded, we can start to rethink, you know, token designs and the relationships that centralized exchanges have with on gym world,

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Kalshi. How is limitless different? What should people know about limitless? Well, limitless is limitless, first of all. Nice, nice. I think that we are the simplest way in the world for our, users to get access to high leverage. What I mean by that is they don't have to learn about liquidations or funding rates or

configure stop losses or learn about options pricing Greeks. So the learning care for limitless is very, very insignificant in that everything that you need to know to get started is inside of a single mobile optimized page. Right now we focus on like daily and hourly price markets. So it's basically like, will Bitcoin be above this price in one hour? Or will Tesla be above this price in one hour? Now, because it's a kind of vanilla prediction market in that it trades from like zero to 100 cents

throughout that time frame, if you look at like Bitcoin, for example, you might have a basis point move in underlying Bitcoin price in 20 minutes, but you might have bought prediction market shares at like one cent, and they went all the way to 100 cents. And so we call this implicit leverage. and that there's not a margin lending in a traditional sense,

which is very high, you know, leads to a lot of liquidations and also has high chance of manipulation, as we saw recently. These are fully collateralized swaps. But because of the time decay and the kind of binary payoff structure, it means that, you know, retail can get access to potentially, you know, very high returns. Of course, there is a lot of risk as well. and I think users are comfortable with that.

But instead of having to go on this years-long herogenity of trying to figure out how to trade and losing money anyway, all the user has to do is come to Limitless on their phone. They can be like hiking a mountain or in the metro or in between sets at the gym and all they actually have to do is pick aside. And picking aside is a fundamental human behavior.

We love to pick a side. We love to support a football team or like be a fan of like a music. music group. And this is something that comes naturally to us. And we get emotional and defensive and fiery about. And all the user has to do is choose above or below. So, for example, will Bitcoin or will Tesla be above or below this price? And you'll be surprised the amount of conviction that a casual user can build in any of those arbitrary statements. But you'll also be surprised that some of the extent of the payoffs and the amount of returns, I mean, just yesterday,

I posted a screenshot on X, someone made 5,000% ROI on an hourly market, betting that B&B will go down after these tweets. And so it's very, very simple for average user to get involved in this thing. And we think that this can be a giant new derivatives category that will drive trillions of dollars in volume in the coming years. And something else that's interesting

is we just did kind of analysis. we're exploring to build like a suite of structured products on top of these kind of price prediction markets, what we found is over a 72 day period is you'd held Bitcoin, I think you would have been down around like 5%. If you invested in a covered call strategy using Deribit options, you'd be up 3%. And if you invested in a synthetic cover call strategy that accumulates limitless prediction market shares instead of options contracts from Derribut. a bit, you'd be up 49%. So not only can we give

this super simple trading experience to casual users, but if users don't want to trade at all, we can also give them access to high yield products where all they have to do is deposit stable clients and be done with it. And then also, you know,

after this like, you know, crazy cascading liquidation event, which happened where we actually saw, I believe, more liquidations than we ever saw before in crypto, which again is In my opinion, this is an orchestrated assault on retail, and this is pure market manipulation. But we actually saw that Deribit,

who Coinbase has just acquired for like $3 billion or whatever, actually it was cheaper and more efficient for you to come and bet on daily Bitcoin price using Limitless than Deribit, which is a $3 billion entity. And so, you know, this kind of is an upgrade and a, a very kind of new kind of market structure that we're very excited about and we're basically focused on

like leading mainstream adoption of this around the world and particularly right now focusing very much on the Asian market. So regions like South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc. I want to understand a little bit more about this mechanism. So I'm on the page, right? And every hour this updates, right? And so right now we are six minutes past the hour

at the time of recording. And so right now there's a baseline Bitcoin price of $11,000, $146. So that's the price to be above or below. And right now we are basically at that price. So $1,146 is the price. Oh, we just popped up. Now we're at $11,163. And so right now, like a share on will it be up or will it be down is about 50-50.

But you're saying like when it goes down, when it goes down very, very low, it might be the price between a yes. or above or below share would be dislocated to like maybe 9010, 95, 5, and that's where the leverage comes from. Is that how it works? Yeah, exactly. So like, again, we talked about formal earlier

and how that drives people. Another very kind of powerful behavior is fear. And I think that, you know, as you mentioned, it's pretty close to the baseline. Now, imagine it was close to the baseline, but there was 30 seconds to go instead of 50 minutes to go. Oh, I see. You know, with that time decay,

that's when things start. to get a lot more kind of fun and wild and crazy. And we start to see those kind of more, more exceptional return profiles. You were talking about being a, like comparing purchasing Bitcoin spot, purchasing Bitcoin on Derbett, holding Bitcoin on Derbett,

or doing this through limitless. But these markets turn over every hour. So how would I be like a Bitcoin investor if this market closes every hour? We also have daily markets and weekly markets, monthly markets. It's just that hourly and daily

markets are by far our I mean I would describe them as kind of self-sustaining atomic network trading communities where I actually see like self-reinforcing network effects and people just kind of have a huge demand for these markets and they keep coming back for these markets like our week

one retention is over 50%. And so and we don't have like punch notifications yet like we're a startup right we're trying to build as much as possible as best as possible and test as many assumptions as possible as fast as possible and as few steps as possible. But ultimately it takes time.

And so we're far from perfect. You know, we have a far from perfect product. And like we don't even have basic things like passion notifications or email marketing or we didn't introduce like gamification yet or social features. And we have very compelling retention just because user is fall in love with this kind content form factor and they keep coming back and they keep wanting more of it. And so I think there's really a way to go in terms of of improving, like, limitless as an offering and the core product experience that will

kind of strengthen these metrics and this retention and engagement level even more. And at the same time, as well as kind of improving the product and trying to make it more sticky, we're going out and we're trying to solve much deeper liquidity for these markets so people can trade in larger sizes. And this is kind of an ongoing, like snowballing process. Like, it just had great meeting today with one of the largest, like, training firms in the world and we're actually going to be the first prediction market that they're integrating with and that's super exciting but more on that later. I think all prediction markets have to cross this chasm from being a like niche retail

gambling platform for again like very niche instruments. And that's where all prediction markets start. And then all prediction markets want to become a financial instrument. that like is CFTC approved and Wall Street leverages because it helps them express a trade in a particular way and they are pumping billions of dollars of volume through that one prediction market and like Colchie and Polymarket are on their way there but they're not even close to getting that far yet of being like a Wall Street like a financial instrument that Wall Street is accustomed to and is part of their like you know daily exercise and like daily routine and part of

their overall broad strategy. Limitless, like, I go on the website and be like, okay, like, what do I want to gamble on? Do I want to gamble on Bitcoin being up or down over the hour? To me, like, that looks like, oh, I'm just going to like have some fun at the casino. What is your conviction? Why are you, why do you have conviction that we can get limitless to a, like, hardened financial instrument that Wall Street will be able to use? Why is this a financial instrument and not just like a gambling platform?

So I think fundamentally Wall Street will go where the people go ultimately, right? Love it or hit it. And our focus today is actually not on Wall Street. Our focus is like I would say, like on people. Not actually right now in the U.S. Although we are building our licensing, as I mentioned, we're focusing heavily on Asian markets right now and in like that particular part of the world.

but trading is so hard and so complicated like perps are hard to use and you know for URI you know we may sit and argue that you know they're actually not that hard or whatever but that's also quite a I would say like out of touch position from the average user because

it is hard for people to understand like what is an art book or what is a stop loss or what is a funding rate or why they should pay it or why they just got liquidated like I literally remember when I was 16 years old and I discovered somehow BitMags and I was like wow 100x leverage like surely I'm going to be rich by tomorrow and like I'm done with everything like I can get 100x more bang for my buck like what is the where is the catch here right and then obviously within about five minutes

or maybe even in one minute I got liquid it and I can't instantly that's that's the cash like I got it okay don't have any money now like my pocket money is gone right And, you know, I think that trading product, like, I mean, have you, like, Robin Hood is pretty good, but, like, have you ever used, like, the European, like, brokerages? Like, did they suck, man? Like, they couldn't suck anymore. I have no interest in using a European brokerage, let me tell you. But, like, if you try to build a bad product, you would build a better one than, you know,

most of the, you know, with the exception of, like, for example, in Singapore, they also have of kind of like pretty decent, like retail brokerage products. But like if you use like internet brokers like in Europe, I mean, like it doesn't even make sense. You can't even buy the SPI, right? You have to buy some like obscure version of it that has a pricing delay. So because of the like European market hours or whatever, it has like a one day lag on the actual pricing.

So if you bought based on news, you actually would lose out, right? and all these kind of like, I would say like systematic modes of extraction and of rigging the game against retail. And so like the trading experience like globally is like broken. Perps are like not that bad in comparison, but they're still very complicated. If you want to learn how to trip perps though, as I said, you know, you need to understand like all this stuff like funding rates, liquidation, stop losses. or the bugs.

Then like also options. Like I mean, it takes a long time to understand how options pricing Greeks work and what they mean and like how to trade different like, you know, condor or butterfly strategies or whatever. It takes a lot of time. It takes years probably to master it.

But as I mentioned, you can come to limitless and instantly, intuitively understand how to play and how to participate. You know, and you, and you can get started with a couple of clicks. And because we're building on Chen,

we have stable clients. We're instantly in hundreds of markets, you know, globally without having to go and grind, you know, licensing in each particular jurisdiction. And I think that's a huge unlock. And I think that, you know, these factors together means that Limitless will actually build the largest exchange in human history.

Yeah, big statement. So will Limelis always be focused on these pricing markets. Because again, not to compare you guys to call it a shier polymarket, but again, this is what listeners, this is with their frame of references, they go onto polymarket and they see like, are the Seattle Mariners going to win the World Series, like 37%.

So like, you know, truly anything. So are you focused on these like pricing markets or like are there other theoretical markets that you haven't introduced yet? Or like, what's your plan there? So I believe there is trillions of dollars in volume in price prediction markets only. Right now we focus on hourly and daily markets. I also want to introduce like five minute markets, one minute markets,

50 minute markets. We recently introduced like 30 minute markets. But there is a lot of experimentation to be done in terms of durations. There's a lot more tickers to be added. And then, you know, and so I do believe that that just by itself is a giant thing. Also what we see is like users who like sports markets want more sports markets. Right? Users who like geopolitical markets want more geopolitical markets. Users who like prices markets or even it goes more granular on that. Users who like hourly markets want more hourly

markets. Users through like daily markets want more daily markets. And so we kind of see like network effects forming for the specific like different categories. But look like limitless is a very powerful underlying infrastructure and I certainly don't rule out expanding to other markets in future But right now we believe as a startup, you know, we can kind of have the best experience for end user by making a very concentrated bet on a particular thing that they like and won't more else. How much like volume or just like user interest?

Talk to me about the traction of limitless so far. Yeah. We did around like 80 million in volume last month. We almost at 80 million already so far. far in October. So it looks like we're going to... We're halfway through. Yeah, so it looks like we're going to bug some solid growth.

As mentioned, we have very compelling retention, like 50% first week. And also, yeah, we had around like 40,000 traders last month and this is kind of growing exponentially. Very cool. Well, congrats on all the success. I want to pop open the hood and talk about the on-chain component of Limitless. what is actually on chain? There are USTC deposits and it's on base. But like what other logic is on chain?

Yeah, like all of the custody, all of the execution, settlement and like resolution of markets is like a real-time price feed. I think another core problem with prediction markets actually takes a little bit of time to get your money back due to the whole kind of resolution games that are going on. where the limitless is much simpler, right? And the markets resolve instantly and people kind of keep going into the next market.

Right. I would imagine if I'm betting on like an hourly market or a five-minute market, I might want to bet on continuous five-minute markets over and over and over again. So you need to resolve very quickly so I can have my money back so I can bet on the next one.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah. And you get that from just price oracles? Yeah, exactly. We're using Pith Network right now. And they have a lot of different assets, like not only crypto, but also stocks, commodities, like, you know, gold or SPY or basically anything.

Okay, so Limonless itself is bankless. You know, it's a non-custodial platform, so everyone's self-custodies. Everyone brings their own wallet. The price oracles are autonomous and, you know, resolution autonomous. So what, like, layers of trust are left inside of the system? Well, we have order matching, which is off-chain,

just because it's a very kind of high-performance thing that's hard to put on a standard EVM blockchain. So right now, order-matching can happen off-chain, but all the execution, settlement, and custody happens on chain. And that's the same for Polymarket, too, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, okay. So you guys have a pretty much similar trust set up.

to like polymarket where the execution is on chain it's non-cosodial, USC deposits, polymarket doesn't have oracles because it's not price and so they're oracles you like UMA but that's only in the unhappy case and the happy case I think it just resolves sounds like a pretty similar trust setup to

polymarket. Yeah with the exception that we have the kind of instant price feed resolution but obviously we don't have the more subjective markets currently so much easier to deal with. Yeah, yeah yeah. this might be like outside of the realm

of like what limitless like focuses on but I'm really into I guess maybe in this way it's what it won't be the conversation of censorship resistance and prediction markets I think is actually pretty important to me and I think is under discussed in the conversation of prediction markets both Kalshi and Polymarket

don't let users spin up their own market and there's you know plenty of good reasons why but also there are plenty of good reasons why you should allow users to spin up their own market. Like, prediction markets are truth-speaking mechanisms. They're the connection of markets and truth. And maybe with pricing actually is, like the asset pricing is actually the first,

maybe a first prediction market where, you know, you could give users the power to like, hey, like, there's not a market for this. Let's give that power to the users. Have you thought about that? Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's definitely a low-hanging fruit. Actually, when we started, you know, building in prediction markets, one of the initial assumptions we were super excited about

was user-generated markets. Kind of like as a means to scale user's choice and uncover like more information and can it be like almost like an Amazon of prediction markets? I mean, I still see like companies now raising precedes for similar ideas. I think there was one of them like just like a week ago or something. The problem is when you have long-tail informational markets,

there are no conventions about how you price those markets. except from using entire information. So, like, how do you price whether PDD is a rapist or not? Or if, like, it's a pretty hard thing to price, right? Yeah. Or, like, if, like, Taylor Swift album going to, like, sell X amount of copies. I mean, like, you can build models for that, truly. But there are no kind of conventions.

And there's also no way for you to, like, hedge your exposure. Because a lot of market makers, like, to run delta neutral strategies and can of, you know, earn from the spread. And so that creates like a new set of problems, which is like how do we actually kind of create liquidity for these markets? In academia, right, the assumption was always that you should pay people for reporting information. So because inside your information is effectively how these markets are priced,

you should put up like a pool of money that can incentivize people to come and report information. to the market. And so it's very much like either put liquidity and lose like 99% or a good percentage of it from people who actually are better informed than you

or kind of subsidize this in some way to get it started. And so our calculus was like, well, okay, instead of subsidizing this forever, right, probably we should look for like a more sustainable model and as our own kind of creator of markets, we had a set of market,

which was like, what will the price of Bitcoin be on Friday, at like 4 p.m. Eastern time, for example. And then, like, my co-founder said to me, like, oh, why don't we, like, test these markets daily to see if it boost retention? I was like, sure, why not? Like, so on a Saturday I created a market,

like, what will the price of Bitcoin be today at 4pm Eastern time? And then we started to see that these were basically, like kind of zero days to expire options and there was a lot of latent demand globally for such products and then, you know, since then we also kind of branched out to

hourly and saw breakout like demand and traction for those as well. So it's been a very interesting story. Well, CJ, well, it's been a fun arc to watch Limitless grow. If people are peaked about Limitless, where should they go to learn more or go use the app?

Yeah, just go to Limitless. exchange and start trading. Pick aside. Pick a side. Pick a side. That's a great line. And I mean, maybe they just want to learn more about you or I don't know if they want to go join the community, read the docs. Maybe there are some like perdition market nerds.

Where else can they go? Yeah, like just go to learn a lot of let's start exchange and you'll find, you'll find a way further. Well, well, CJ, thanks for coming on the show today. And again, appreciate all of the information that you've given the community. on Twitter and also the app that you're building on base as well. Thanks a lot, David. Thanks for having me. And yeah, let's keep in touch. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal.

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