Bankless - Launchcoin & Believe | ETH's 50% Candle | Coinbase Listed on S&P 500 | Jon, Bread, & Andy8052

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

In this episode of the Bankless Roundtable, host David Hoffman is joined by crypto enthusiasts Zero X Bread Guy, John Charbonneau, and Andy8052 to discuss the recent surge in Ethereum's price, which skyrocketed nearly 50% this week. The panel analyzes the impact of the Believe app and Launchcoin on internet capital markets, Coinbase's entry into the S&P 500, and Robinhood's new Layer 2 solution. They explore the implications of these developments for investor confidence and market liquidity, alongside the rising interest in meme-based tokens. The conversation wraps up with thoughts on Ethereum vs. Solana and the importance of community engagement in the evolving crypto landscape. Jon Charbonneau: https://x.com/jon_charb Bread: https://x.com/0xBreadguy Andy8052: https://x.com/andy8052 —- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 ETH vs SOL vs BTC 5:40 Internet Capital Markets https://x.com/gabrielhaines/status/1922293923420000346 https://dexscreener.com/solana/yrrustgpugdp8bbfosqdefssen6sa75zs1qjvgnhtmy https://www.believescreener.com/ https://x.com/believeapp 22:19 Memecoin Launchpads https://x.com/believeapp/status/1922075588115775489 https://x.com/zhusu/status/1922178773375418733 30:32 Ethereum Up 50% https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ethereum 46:25 Coinbase Listed https://x.com/coinbase/status/1922046840528113880 53:47 Robinhood Acquires Wonderfi https://x.com/hanni_abu/status/1922341347844841611 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Welcome back to the Bankless Roundtable. Back with me here today with a man with a glutinous glutes, 0x bread guy. Good to see you, my man. Hey, friends. Crypto's chief lowercase R researcher, John Charbonneau. Welcome back. Cool.

How's going? And at least, and last but not least, the world's most Zen, D-Gen, Andy 805-2, it's good to see you. Good to see you too. Pretty, last week we were talking about how, you know, we started these episodes. It got pretty quiet. This week was not one of those weeks. We have quite a lot to talk about, so we're going to move pretty fast here.

We got ETH almost at 50% up on the seven day, a 50% weekly candle, and then some post-pectra conversation as well. There's this thing going around that people are meming about internet capital markets, this Believe app, this launch coin. People are making consumer apps and slapping tokens onto them. We're going to talk about that. Coinbase has joined the S&P 500. It's also acquired Deribit.

And then Robin Hood is CTOing a layer two. Apparently they've got a ZK Sync layer two now that news just came out just before we started recording. And then if we have time, which we probably won't, maybe we can squeeze in some stripe and stable coin conversations. But before we kick off this episode, I would like to throw it to John in order to get this episode started, John. I'm going to need you to say one nice thing about Ethereum. Do I get something nice from you about Bitcoin or Solana after? Sure. Yeah. I'm happy to play this game. You can take your pick of the two. Okay. One I'll go with for Ethereum is still the most reliable chain. If you told me I got to put some money on a chain. So I'll go, I'll go with

USDC because like neutral can be out in a bunch of different chains. And I got to leave my money there for 10 years and I got to go get it back in 10 years and throw away the keys in between and go get it then. I'm picking Ethereum still. Okay. I love it. I got I promise some people on the timeline that I have to like defend or be the counterfactual to a lot of your debates. For people who haven't seen it. Yeah. Well, so like, well, yeah, our delivery is that is the difference. which I respect the game. You catch a lot of heat. I think we have the same general positions.

I saw some people in time that are like, oh, I'm not even going to listen because John's there and I can't stand it. And I was like, well, if you're, if you listen in, you'll know that like, as David has alluded to, it's probably going to be like a Bitcoin L2 fight for between he and I for the vast majority of this stuff. So if you guys hate some of the things, his stances, like you're probably going to see some back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think I've caught some flack John from the ETH diehards.

The inner circle? The ETH inner circle, yeah. Uh-huh. And the way I say this is like John is somebody representative of somebody that Ethereum needs to convince and he, as a rational investor, is open to being convinced. And as soon as we, as the Ethereum community, convinces John that ETH is a good buy, that to me is good signal. Yeah. Yeah. I'm chaotic good. That's how I would qualify you as chaotic good. I'll happily take that. That's the goal.

Okay. All right. My nice thing, I'll do both Bitcoin and Solana. Can I do two things? Definitely. My first nice thing about Bitcoin and Bitcoiners is that their vision for the Bitcoin asset, which many of them articulated back in as far back as I can remember in 2017, 2018, that has played out to a T.

They're like, we're going to meme Bitcoin into the central banks of governments. And back in 2018, I'm like, you guys are fucking crazy. Like, there was no way that that's happening. Did you see Jack Muller's little recent interview where he was like in his closet that was totally totally empty? His closet is always empty. Why is it always empty? Yeah. It's a cathedral of a closet.

And it was bare bones. And yeah, you're just talking about like Bitcoin is not a fix. It's not a hedge against inflation. It is the solution. Like it's like just like the max of the maxies. It's respectable that you've held. it for this long, you know, willed it new existence. So that's my nice thing about Bitcorners.

And then my nice thing about the Solana camp, I'll say I'm writing an article, I think a handful of you guys have read it that comes out. It'll come out tomorrow. And it's about like, oh, the strategy shifts that Ethereum should do and what we should, what we should think about and how we should execute this like, you know, pivot for Ethereum. And I'm like, yeah, a lot of this is just taken leaves out of Solana's playbook. Just like integrate the layer twos, bring them closer to the layer one, talk about the layer one, push everything onto the layer one. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, this sounds like, I've heard

these words before. Yeah, although, like, I would say that's not even a design intention from Solana. So I would say, like, yes, it is, it looks like where Solana has ended up, but that was not like the design goal, right? Solana is just like, we're going to make Salana big. We're going to make Salana valuable. We're going to make Salana, we're going to make Salana, whatever. And then everyone else tacked on to Solana, the ecosystem and just like, all right, well, you know, if they're going to not seed any ground on that. We have to come in elsewhere. We have to, like, be a network extension is obviously the mean that that was formulated. And it's like, okay, we have to cover ground that they're not going to give to us that we can actually, like, expand the pie on. So like,

the same end goal, which, like, we're all building the same thing. I know that's been a meme for a long time. It's just like the path to get there is a little different. Yeah. And I think part of it, too, is just like there was a level of open-mindedness there of, like, what that meant of, of, like, expanding Solana that, I think. was pretty cool where it's really grown and changed over time and kind of built its own little, not little anymore, like niche and community of apps and things that, you know, when tried on ethel twoser things, haven't really worked, but worked on Solana. Yeah.

Yeah, maybe apps that are working on Solana that can bring us to our first subject of the day. Now that we're wrapping up Crypto-Twitter drama. Internet Capital Markets is this meme that's going around Crypto-Twitter. I don't really know where it came from, but, you know, the Crypto-Twitter's best content producer said it best. That's Gabriel Haynes of you build a consumer app, you launch a token, you slap them together, and now you have internet capital markets. This is all downstream of this one token called launch coin, which has done 1,000% in the last 24 hours and even more than that, going back just a few days, a cool 15,000% over two days. This Believe app, Believe Screener,

it's like the new Pump Fund, but it's different. And Andy has been tracking this, meta for a while now. So maybe Andy, you can kind of just explain to us like what's going on and how this has crescendoed all the way up to crypto Twitter. Yeah. So it actually like kind of started back in more like January of this year, but it was very small. So if you remember Jelly Jelly, which has had some other funny stories of it now with like the hyperliquid trade stuff and all of that. But that was kind of the one of the first iterations of this. And the idea was basically to you have like a startup and you make a meme coin of the startup with there's no promise of equity there's no anything else it is just a meme coin of the startup and like what is that worth and in the case of

jelly jelly it went to like 200 million in like a day and then down a lot um but i think and then from that people got yeah as crypto does um and i think people kind of just were like oh that was silly that was stupid. And in a lot of ways, it was silly and stupid. But it also obviously got some people thinking about things slightly differently. And so what we've kind of seen come out now with launch coin, which was previously Clout. If people remember that, it was clout.me was the domain and name of the app. And it was like a socialify token app. And so they pivoted to launch coin, or the app's called Believe. And launch coin is like their token. But you tweet at it to make coins and the idea is that you are making coins for, like, products or, you know, apps and things like that.

And what's unique about it compared to, like, a pump fun is there's no way to, like, snip your coin, really. You can after, if you, if you, I'm sure there will be tools soon enough where you can, or maybe there already are that people don't know about. But for the most part, you, like, just tweet at a bot and your coin comes out. And the big kind of selling point is that there is a higher trading fee. It's like a 1% trading fee. And the half of the fees from that go to the creator. And so the idea is that if you have attention and interest, you can start funding your app just from this meme coin and, you know, add utility in different ways if you want to or not, whatever. And I think it's very like, it's still very unknown.

It's most of these are not legitimate or, you know, rugs or things from apps, like things from devs. It's supposed to use vibe coded stuff, right? Yeah, a lot of vibe coded stuff. A lot of the jokes are like, oh, people failed at raising their seed round, and so they made a launch coin instead. In Web 2, specifically. Yeah, it's like they're, it's getting these like young, vibrant, like viral marketing style builders that are just like creating these things. I think it's another one where it's just like trying to take over TikTok or whatever is, you know, it's this type of stuff. A young founder that has like 3,000 followers on Twitter, but has a couple posts that hit like 200,000 impressions because they sent some some viral stuff. and then they also now have an app associated to their thing.

And yeah, this is a way to bootstrap some capital, right? Yeah, and we've seen, but now I think what's kind of come of it is we've seen a few apps that I would like consider pretty legitimate make coins. So the biggest one is dupe. Dup is pretty cool and I had seen it prior to I was familiar with no relation to crypto. I had just like seen it on TikTok, watching TikTok with my wife.

But the idea is that you like, it's like an AI app and you give it an, item you want and it will find like dupes of it for you to save money. And so this was, this is like by far the largest market cap coin other than launch coin that's come out. But again, it's just associated to it, right? Like there is no equity. There is no claim to anything. It's like what if I own dupe the coin, what does that do for me? So it's interesting because we're starting to see kind of like in real time the creator of dupe try to figure out what that means, whether it's like get fees back in dupe coin from the fees that they generate or all these different things. Yeah, there is no explicit value related to it. It's a lot of trading

attention. So what's the difference between launching a token on pump fun and launching a token on Believe? How does Believe know that there's a like an app there? Like where what's the association between the actual product, the website dupe.com and the token? Yeah. So I think this is, this was actually a big part of why I was excited about it. is like, there isn't. But the difference is, the difference is the, one, the way that the fees are generated. I think there's like, people seem to like it for some reason, this idea that like the dev's not going to dump on you. They're just going to, like, earn fees from the trading fees.

Right. I'm not sure that I really. It's been the narrative for all launchers, right? Yeah. That also means there's just zero incentive alignment too. Like they're just incentivized to generate trading. They're not incentivized to like keep the token out. But I think, I think the actual answer.

answer is that the creators of this app are significantly more web two. I think the reason it took so long for it to kind of catch on is because they're not really plugged into the crypto world. And people like Nikita have been sharing it a lot and is obviously very invested. And so I think that they just have a network of people who are not the traditional people who would launch a coin on pump fund. The people who are doing this, I don't think there is ever a world where they were launching a coin on pump fund. And so it's just a new game of different people different apps that just like feels different and so people are having fun with it and like it. Yeah, I'm with breadshake in his head a lot in this one. It's the same thing in like a different

rapper to me. This is like I really do like I mean, I love the end vision of fundamentally the thing that crypto is amazing at. It's capital formation and you should be able to go raise money for an incredible idea that you have. But this is just meme coins slapped on a different rapper. I mean, we can call them idea coins or founder coins or whatever. whatever you want instead of like content coins or meme coins. But like it's it's the same thing. Just a different group of people. Like this is Zora to pump. It's the same kind of idea. I don't think that there really is a meaningful unlock. I really like the end goal. I think that the reality of this is just I mean, this is just regulatory hampered right now is you just I mean,

you go to their website and it's all the disclaimers everywhere of hey, make sure you know, you are not promising utility. You're not promising people that this tokens go up. But you know, but hey, if you talk about it, maybe the community does really. well. It's this very hand-wavy, hey, we can't launch a security on chain and you don't own any of it. We need to get this to a point where, I mean, you're basically just launching a tokenized equity. A founder actually shows up and says, hey, I own 100% of the tokens. I'm selling 10% and these are the token holder rights. You can buy it or not. Like, here's the price or run an auction for it. Yeah, and I've talked to a couple of the investors in Believe. I haven't talked to the team that much about it.

But I think that the way that they kind of view it is like that is the end goal, just like they literally can't do it right now. And so this is just like, what do you do between? And I do think the, I had something. Oh, I think the other thing that's like pretty funny about this is so now it's been, you know, 72 hours of people trading these things with like any amount of attention. And the largest, the second largest coin behind Dup on there now is a meme coin called Goon Coin. naturally $50 million market cap not bad yeah and it's exactly what it sounds like

it is just it's purely a meme coin it's not even related to a product I don't want to get your show censored David you guys can look it up in your free time but it's there's and I just think it's like a funny way that things go where all of a sudden there's immediately

the second largest one is just a meme coin people think it's funny with this particular coin Gune coin. There's no actual app here. It's actually just straight. We're just back to memes. Yeah, no, I believe it's a guy who works at OpenAI potentially. We don't really know. And his last name is Goon, just made Goon coin. Oh, okay. And the rest is history. All right. All right. It's NFTs all over again. Yeah. If it feels like basically what all of these different flavors of token launch pads are that we have pumped, this, Zora, boop, all of these things that are starting to compete with each other. If the endgame is for everyone to get to, we generally agree, yeah,

you want to be able to basically launch these tokenized equities on chain and do this in a very clean, coherent manner. And the question to your point of what you're saying is, the question is, you know, what do you do along the way? If this is very quickly going to devolve into the supposed utility tokens for a real thing are really just larping and people are going to realize that very quickly, and then very quickly we're just falling back into, hey, the biggest things on here are meme coins. It feels. like we're back at Pump is probably the best positioned at this again. Right.

Because they are just leaning into and focused on, hey, this is the killer market today. And I don't know, but my expectation is they will also want to move into more serious markets of capital formation and wanting serious more serious equity tokens as it's allowable. Didn't it? It already caught a wave like this too, right? There was an initial wave of like teams launching on Pump with like projects inside of Web3. Like it was the same. Like, it was something that went through the AI agent wave.

Like people were going there and like. Oh, we can do a fair launch again. And like every like we did, we did this already. It's just with Web 3 people instead of Web 2 people like six months ago. Yeah. And there was a lot of those projects, those AI projects, AI 16Z being the big one. Oh, yeah. Another other projects, a number of projects all kind of did this thing where they launched the meme coin.

And then they were like, oh, the meme coins went up to, you know, $200, $300,000, $300 million market cap. And they were like, oh, there's enough like economic sustainability for us to really invest in this projects. let's turn AI16Z from a meme to a real project. And so then they tried that and that worked when the token was going up in price. But when the token started going down in price, all of the team realized that they did not have enough of the tokens to be really materially incentivized to work on this as a project. And so it's one thing to launch a meme coin. But if we're trying to launch pseudo equity, which I think we all want, right, like, meme coins, backing meme coins into pseudo equity is like a good. thing to do, but if we're going to do that, we need to do, we need to do, like, capital

structuring. We need to do org chart structuring. There needs to be incentive alignment. The team needs to have tokens. Investors need to have tokens. We need to go back to, like, traditional C-corp, which is a tried and true science, like, way of incentivizing upside here. And you can't do that by launching a meme coin. You have to launch it with, you know, team-owned percentages off the bat. And then you can't just launch a meme coin because then the snipers are going to get the early bid. And the community is not going to necessarily have that same exposure. And so there's a meme coin pseudo equity gap here that needs to be crossed and it's not being

fixed by a token launcher. Yeah. So I think, so here's my general counter to why I still think it's kind of cool, even if it's silly and probably stupid. Is like generally, yes, I would agree. But what this does do is like there is now very real somewhat evidence that like, crypto people are more than happy to ape into your, into your,

like, pseudo equity thing that isn't even really equity in your company. And so what, what does it look like when that, when that is real and it is equity? And so I think it all of a sudden just is like a really, really strong selling point to builders and founders that like, hey,

this, it's not a dumb thing. Like, it's like the end goal here is not stupid and it's real. And there's like money that is interested in investing in your things and getting exposure to your things. and like there'll be scams along the way and a lot of dumb things along the way. But I think like shining a light to a group people who otherwise haven't totally seen that before through something that has a bit of a different lens can be valuable if like they execute well down the line.

Is that new? Like that's we thought in 2017 ICOs. Like this was like it's never been a lack of appetite to develop the thing to do to do this thing to create capital structure online in our industry. so that people can get exposure and have equity. It's just regulatory. Like you literally can't do it. So it's like the desire, yes, is maybe going to be influenced by this a little bit more. But the desire has always been there.

It's just like you just literally cannot do the thing, which has always been the problem. I think it's just like a better framing, better marketing for it than. Yeah, the whole like internet capital markets meme, that's been the whole narrative of crypto from the get-go. That is what crypto is. It's internet capital markets. There's nothing like necessarily new here. I do enjoy the idea of like long-tail projects being able to like issue a financial asset permissionlessly because that's that's what we're doing here in crypto. Like yeah, please launch a token, ignore nation state regulations, you know, not legal advice.

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One of the games that people are playing that I actually did play, so there's actually some utility here, is noodle.g. Andy, have you played this game? I actually haven't played it. I've only seen people play it. I haven't played it personally.

I'm too busy training. You know the worm game. You can go around and eat apples. and your worm gets longer, except everyone's playing worm at the same time. And then you try and, like, encircle other people's worms, and then you make them run into you,

and then you get their money. And so you have to pay 0.1 sole, 0.25 soul, to start off your worm. And if you pay more soul, you start up with a larger worm. But everyone's in this, like, massive arena trying to, like, gobble each other up. And I played for about 45 seconds.

I lost about $20. And that's what I was like, okay, I'm not good at this game. That is fun. Yeah. That actually, yeah, that does sound fun though. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it really has something to do with, you know, internet capital markets as much as it's a meme coin around like a pretty fun game that someone made. Yeah. But I think that's kind of the fun stuff is you just get these like weird experiments of things that like don't totally necessarily make sense. And this like 100% could have launched on pump fun. But like this guy, I don't think he would have ever found his way to pump fun. Yeah. At least not anytime soon. And so it ended up on launch coin.

but it is pretty cool it's fun I have a lot of friends who have been playing it and having fun with it so last week we were talking about boot fun now we're talking about launch coin it seems to be that we're just rotating through pump dot fun like copycats

there's another one that I'm seeing people bull post now bonkbong dot fun and yeah were we talking about bonk fun last week um bonc is the meme coin I don't think we talked about their specific launch pad and that like launch pad has been as at the last like I had a dashboard spun up as at the last few days has

actually been taking up some meaningful market share from from pump fund yeah yeah so like there's there's a little bit of love there but like you know it's hard to tell how much of that is a game and how much of that is like authentic like the whole industries the whole sector is industrialized so like how much is just people incentivize to pump bags pumping bags with automated stuff they had launched on top of the radium launch last thing right is that right yeah yeah that i would say is the kind of interesting part of this is you basically see all these different teams they're competing at the same thing just going from different directions a pump started with the launch pad and then you know eventually decided hey let's kick out radium why are we graduating all the coins to them

launch pump swap and so then right after that radium goes in the other direction of all right we got the amm already that has a bunch liquidity let's go launch the the launch pad i guess launch pad launcher where they allow people like Bonk to go launch their own launch pads on top of them. They're a launch pad launcher. So we're not even just doing token launches. We are a launch pad for launch pads. Yeah. They basically allow you to launch your branded launch pad if you have some good brand on top of them.

Because I think that they realize. Africa kind of genius, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's what Bonk did. Yeah. Because Bonk has the existing brand, but is not, I assume, you know, they don't want to go build out a launch pad slash don't have the expertise to do it. So Radium provides the info to do that.

says, hey, go launch your brand of one on top of this. Yeah. So both Boop and Bonk are on top of that. Looking at the numbers, it's actually, so LaunchLab compared to Pump Fun is actually about the same. It's $860,000 and 24-hour fees for Launch Lab versus $1 million in fees for Pump Fun because I know pump fund fund fund is giving some of it up. So like, it's actually one for one basically right now.

And then you have the AMM of Radium versus PumpSwap and Radium doubles pump swap. So like the strategy actually like right now, or. returns is actually playing out in radium's favor. Yeah, and I think that bonk. Fun in particular, it has an interesting kind of, kind of in the same vein as like a boop or something, but they're committing basically all the fees to buying back Bonk. Maybe not all that might be wrong,

but the majority of the fees are buying back Bonk coin. And so I think that there's also a bit of kind of a narrative at play here of the D-Gens being like, hey, pump fun has. sent $700 million of your, you know, made $700 million that has not gone back into the ecosystem if that had all gone to buying bong coin or, you know, insert whatever a meme coin, like that's at least money that's staying within the ecosystem. And so I think that, you know, I think in some of my chats, people over the last couple days, a bit prior to a bit prior to all

the launch coin mania where like, I'm not buying things that end in pump. I'm just buying stuff that ends in bonk because it's like, you know, more aligned with. with what I want, you know, how long that would have stuck around for, who knows. But it was an interesting thing to see. You guys know where on this chart, I'm showing for the listeners who aren't watching, I'm showing the Salana Bitcoin chart. Do you guys know where Pump Fund launched on this chart? It's got to be those green candles, right?

Like right here. Oh, right here. Yeah, December, like late 2023, right? Nice. So this is a Ben Cowen tweet that I thought was pretty interesting is like when Pump Fun launched and meme coins on Solana really took off. The Salana Bitcoin ratio stopped going up. So, meme coins had taken off on Solana before a pump launched, though.

Yes, but Pump, but Pump like turned it into a structure. Yeah, they definitely professionalized it. Yes. Yes. And so like Ben, Ben Cowen's claim was that with the emergence of Solana meme coins, it's, there stopped being so much value accrual into Seoul because like the capital just dispersed across the meme coins, which is actually the same effect that I think happened with Ethereum and its layer two's because if you go look at the Bitcoin Ether ratio, it also stopped going up around the emergence of layer twos. And so capital stopped being concentrated in ETH, it got dispersed into its layer twos. And that same phenomenon is happening in Solana with its meme coins.

Yeah. I definitely still think meme coins are not good for Solana, like very, very easily. Oh, God, yes, definitely. I've heard people try to argue that Pumpphone is actually, and meme coins have been actively bad to Sol for this reason. of, I mean, you do very literally get a bunch of sole sell pressure of, you know, people are paying these fees and they're selling it,

and they're not buying Seoul instead. But yeah, I mean, not, not. It's still a one. I've not seen the pump fun as parasitic argument yet. Oh, I've definitely seen that argument. Yeah. Really? Yeah.

I've definitely seen that argument. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're starting to see the whole supply chain basically play out of early on, Seoul was probably the most extractive, if you want to call that, of just net profitability was going strictly to Seoul, a lot of it in the beginning.

And then you saw that progression has moved to Pump Fund is making just a ton of money over the past year. And so, you know, margins on something like Sol go down. And now I think we're seeing that next step of finally pump is being like squeezed a lot by all these different launch pads now. And so all of that is going to start shifting towards just more users or plus at the end of the day, which is good. You know, they're going to be pushed to. I mean, they rolled out there. I think they're creator revenue sharing or whatever in the past few days too. The market's just going to need to keep getting more efficient and passing it back to users.

Right. Yeah, the original open source cryptosis of all the fees getting forked out didn't exactly happen like that. It didn't get forked out, but they are just straight compressing to zero across the board. Yeah, and it's just because it takes time to do stuff, right? I think we discussed that in previous episodes where they probably will get forked out at some point. Like they will compress to near zero. It's just that humans are slow and inefficient and disorganized and like it's going to take time for that stuff to materialize. There's a lot of social things that come with it.

I don't think that they will get compressed to near zero. They should definitely get compressed, but this is a just wildly chaotic and inefficient market in particular where I would imagine there's some degree of sustainability on. Like as long as the market sustains itself, you should be able to clip some pretty good fees going forward. Yeah, like pump has some sort of like moat around the brand and volume around it. And it will always have that. And that justifies some sort of fee. like there's not going to be a pump competitor that goes after pumps like five bips of fees, for example, if it does ever get compressed that low, which I don't think it will. Let's turn to the candle that you can see from space, which is Ethereum's 43% candle, 48% seven-day candle.

Eath has rocketed from the low, low price of about $1,50 to where it is now at $2,600. So probably one of the most aggressive green candles in Ethereum's history. And I don't really think anyone knows why. I think there's a bunch of reasons you could say. One reason I think is like, you know, well, ETH is actually pretty solid exposure to stable coins because there's $150 billion of stable coins on the network and everyone's looking for stable coin exposure. One could say, well, the ETHBCC ratio is super oversold.

I don't know if anyone really knows why. John, I'll throw this one to you. What's your take? the part of it that's at least the most interesting to me, I would say, is you probably would have expected seeing just the absolute sheer size of this move, some pretty strong ETF inflows over the past week. The ETH ETFs have been net, I believe still outflows over the past week, which is kind of crazy for just the magnitude of move that we're talking about here.

Like, ethos increased by about $100 billion, probably in market cap over the past week. and the ETHs ETSS, I mean, you wouldn't know it from looking at them. Yeah, they are pretty flat. Yeah, which is very just interesting and somewhat surprising. So, I mean, that gives you at least some information about who the buyer base is, is this is probably not gigantic money managers, tradfied types that are stepping up to the plate as much. And this is probably led more by, I would say, crypto-native type circles of people like us who are, you know, finally at the point of, hey, I think that ETH has bottomed.

I think that there is a sentiment change. I think that there is real change. So I think there's almost a positive spend on it that is really not the ETF buyers, that it is possibly more of a crypto-native bid that has decided that, hey, I think we might have reached a bottom here. People who are paying closer attention to the kind of shift and pivot in Ethereum over the past few months of things are actually going in the right direction. It was super oversold. I mean, just structurally, you had a lot of people who are using ETH as the short leg of just Delta Neutral trades of, you know, either just going long sole ETH or shorting ETH and then long. BTC, stuff like that. So you stick that all together, and you're pretty pronged for a good, strong, short-term move.

We'll see how it goes from here. But, yeah. I had some bids in here to catch this bottom accidentally. There was, I think it was probably about a month, month and a half ago. There was a liquidation concerns on Africa, which exchange it was. But I was like, okay, it was something around like 1800-Eth, 2000-Eth. And I was like, if this thing's going to spike down, I want to catch some of those wicks. So I put in some stink bids from like 1700 down to like 1500.

And after like three days, I ended up pulling them because I was like, well, if this thing bleeds down to those novels, I don't want them. But if it spikes down, I want them. I pulled them. It bled down to those levels. And then that would have been the bottom, bottom, bottom. And I pulled all of my bids for all that stuff. So you didn't hit any of them? I didn't hit any of them.

I would have just scooped them up easily over the course of like, I was like two weeks too early, I think is what it was. So that sucks. But also like another fun consideration this is done for us. like for mega eat specifically. Remember, we did a NFT mint for, and we denominated it in one-Eath, right? So whenever we did that for the first half, it was when ETH was like $2,600.

So as we approach this next leg, we're like, look, guys, like we're getting into a pickle now because like the price of ETH is changing. Like we have a smart contract with one-Eth pricing on it and all this other stuff. And we're like, now it's kind of tough to like have to like do a second mint with the same NFTs and the same contract on the same price, but the price is actually like half of what it was

when we did it the first time. Thankfully, we're now basically back to the same price, and those problems are gone. So I need Ethereum to keep up with what it's doing and then remove some of our concerns because we've been in ETH this whole time. So, like, we've had to weather that storm. I think that is the kind of the billion dollar question here is, is this just like a mean reversion back to some fair value and it was oversold and now it's done now? Or is there like material momentum in the chart?

And like today with Eith, you know, at 2,600. at the time of recording, I think it's pointing towards this is, there's going to be continuation here, there's going to be momentum here. And I think definitely there's some chest dumping in the Ethereum community, which is about, you know, $2,000 too soon, in my opinion. But I don't know if anyone has an opinion about whether this is like a one-time blip or as if this is a return of momentum into the, to the ETH category. Andy, how do you feel about this? Well, I think, like, the hard part that you just don't really know yet is like at least for me nothing is meaningfully changed as far as where I'm transacting daily like where things are happening on chain in the world that I'm participating in which is like mostly still Solana and every once in a while base and so I think like I'm skeptical to feel like there's going to be a major. shift in like the general CT sentiment until things like that start to happen. But, you know,

price going up is the best way to change sentiment or narrative that exists. And so there's like a very real chance where just if there ends up being enough flow to have the price keep going up, then all of a sudden people's the way that they're acting and trading and where they're doing things will change. Because I feel like it's always been this funny thing of like the developers are still there, but it feels like a lot of users are like, I don't really want to transact on these chains or do these things. But if there's money to be made, there's money to be made. I hate that I've blackpilled myself. I don't know if it's like bear market moves. That is like, I've like just been in that mindset so long that I now convince myself. Again, I've been posting

the last week and a half of just like all these things are overpriced. I guess maybe charb is in my fucking head now. But like, you know, you see this move and just like what Andy just said, like, okay, we just had the update of the Pectra upgrade. It's going to take time for that stuff to materialize, right? The 7702s, like that's still probably going to be messy, which walls are even adopting it. So, like, all of these things that we were excited about here in this last week or so, like, it's just going to take a few months for us to play out, which means that's when sentiment comes in. That's when, like, actual behavioral changes come.

Like, that's just going to take a while, right? And then you think about the actual move here. A couple of the jokes on the timeline, like, oh, you know, Ethereum just added one salon to the market cap. And you can look at that and you can go, oh, man, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's, worth so much more. Or you can go, oh, man, everyone's still transacting on Solana and it's still, like, it shows how relatively cheap Salana is relative to this other thing. Like, if we think the activity and the usage and the execution is the thing that is value, Andy is still on salana, right? Hyperliquid is the one that's accruing all the fees and activity. It's, it's,

you know, you can add 10 hyperliquids inside of that so that for me, my mindset goes like, okay, if I do still think that these things all maybe are a little overpriced relative to the actual fees, activities that they're doing, and we're not seeing. And we're not seeing moneyness actually like accumulate for this thing. I see this and I go, okay, that tells me there's more upside in these other tokens versus there's continued upside in the Ethereum of the world. I would love to be proven wrong as I have still have a big bag of Ethereum. I just consolidated all my stuff this past week.

But that's where my mind is going right now. Yeah. Well, I think the Andy archetype, the Andy cohort, which is like the meme coin traders, the trenches, the people who just like live in the telegrams and, and you love it for the fun of the game, is, you know, definitely a very strong representation of, like, the more median person in crypto Twitter today. But we have to remember that that is not exactly what the current meta in crypto as a whole is right now. Like, there's a huge, like, institution, trad-fied Wall Street attention on the crypto industry.

And I think Ethereum does have very strong tailwinds for that. And, you know, one of the metas that we've talked about over the last two episodes is, like, how do we get exposure to stable coins? Like, you can buy Athena, I guess, but, like, how do you get exposure to circle? it's not public yet and it's even just going to launch on the tradfai markets at some multi-billion dollar valuation. You don't want to buy Coinbase to get Stablecoin exposure. Everyone's bullish on stable coins. Well, Ethereum has $150 billion of stable coins.

And maybe it's not perfect exposure, but nonetheless, like it is exposure. And we all know that BlackRock and many other tokenizing institutions are all going to tokenize their assets on Ethereum first. Like all tokenized assets will go to Ethereum first. and that is a huge tailwind that like, you know, the meme coin traders, the trenches are just like indifferent to. It's just like two separate conversations. And so in addition to just the mean reversion, ETH being priced too low, it is, I think, a pretty valid take to say that like, oh, yeah, people, like Wall Street is going to come in. They're going to land on Ethereum first. They're going to put their tokenized assets on Ethereum first.

That's the logical place for them to go. And then Eith needs to re-rate according to that effect accordingly. I think that's a pretty fair take. I think that's definitely the hope. I'm more on Andy's and Bradside, probably unsurprisingly. This makes sense as a short-term move. I have no strong opinion on what happens in the short-term, because I don't think anyone actually knows where prices go in the short-term.

Medium to long-term, I haven't structurally changed my views on wanting to own ETH and relative attractiveness versus something like Sol and BTC. It is still just a tough spot. The thing that I think will need to change for that medium to longer term real re-rating is changing that answer that Andy gave basically of it's not just, ah, people are saying the right things like that gets you some re-rating. You know, there's a little bit of a sentiment change. It's no, our user behaviors are actually changing and we're seeing that in user patterns on chain. It is, I am using Ethereum or I see this gigantic shift. And yeah, all of these institutions are coming on chain and they're all clearly using Ethereum.

They're not using Solana. To the extent that that happens, then you can get actually a structural medium to longer term repricing. absence of that. I think stuff like this along the way is probably the best that you can hope for. We've bottomed out. You can get some little runs that are good. But I don't see gigantic outperformance in absence of just real structural on chain changes, which I think are going to be tough. The other tough part with the stable coins is I agree that the main strength that Ethereum has right now of if you're going to win on chain activity is getting these big institutions, you know, stuff like biddle on chain. People keep their big treasuries, stable coins, stuff like that on chain. The question ends up being how much kind of value does it end up occurring to ETH? And in the eyes of who, who wants to buying that? You know, is that attractive to retail traders who are seeing, oh, all this stuff is going on chain and I want to buy ETH because of that. Because the other side of that is just because BlackRock is putting, you know, Biddle and whatever, I mean, they're putting it on a bunch of chains. But even if you have this big institutional investor who is saying, oh, yeah, I'm going to buy the treasury funds on Ethereum, that doesn't mean they're also going to buy ETH.

Those can just be completely separate things. And I mean, at least in the past week, and just as a general trend, the ETH ETFs, I would say, have been a relative underperformer relative to a lot of people would have expected and how well the BTC ETF has done. So the question of how much that translates into the ETH price is going to be the question. Because you do have this kind of fundamental difference in the types of activity that Sol is getting and the types of activity that Ethereum is getting is the types of stuff that Ethereum is going to be, is good at and is likely to be able to press its lead in. if it's able to, is a more kind of just stock-based model. And Salon is really dominating the flows. The flows business is where you tend to make more money. As you have a lot of people trading on chain, you're generating a lot of M-E-V.

There's a lot of transactions, a lot of trading. You get a lot of M-E-V and R-V that's going to Seoul as a token versus Circle could have a trillion dollars of stable coins, USDC sitting on Ethereum or a giant treasury fund. You know, they're not paying AUM fees over to Ethereum. You're not generating the same level of cash flows. So it ends up being a more difficult question of can you win back flows base activity? Or is the former enough to get you a re-rating anyway of maybe it's not generating a bunch of fees. But, you know, we see all the cool stuff is happening there.

So Ethereum is interesting again. That ends up being reflected in the price. That ends up being kind of the difference in the business models. And we'll see how it gets reflected. Do you see the Coinbase East Strategic Reserve stuff that they're bull posting, things like 300,000, ETH or something, that they were, they were, they were, Coinbase was tweeting? I don't know if it was the people from the base ecosystem or just that it was on the books for Coinbase and they were like touting it as like we're actually trying to accumulate ETH.

I can go back and try to find that tweet, but I think it was like 300,000, 300,000 Eth-ish. Was it basically keeping the sequencer fees from base or something like that? I think low confidence on that. I just told them. My understanding of it was that the Coinbase, their, what is it, their quarterly report went out. Their earnings, earnings went out. And on their balance sheet, their Bitcoin holdings went from like 6,000 or 60,000 to 90,000 or maybe 6,000 to 9,000. And then their ETH holdings went from like a quarter million to like 310,000.

But they didn't say how it got there. And they didn't say that we have a strategic mandate to accumulate. It just showed that they went up. From like Coinbase proper. I think it was just like the people pounding their chest saying like a base is good for Eith. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think there was any material association between Coinbase and ETH there.

They had, they had, they have more Bitcoin and Ether on their balance sheet in Bitcoin and Ether terms than they had last quarter. So they are buying crypto, which is good, great. I was supportive of that. They should buy more crypto, specifically my best. My guess is for the ETH in particular that they're probably just keeping base sequencing process. Right.

They're earning revenue in ETH. They're holding ETH. They're just not dumping it, which is great. Yeah, also good. Yeah. Have you ever imagined Bitcoin and Ethereum truly? working as one, unlocking the full potential of Bitcoin Defi and more, meet Hemmy, a groundbreaking modular network designed precisely for that vision, co-founded by

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I'll go pull it up right now. It's up something like 30% over the last two days. And so my equity's bags are doing pretty good. Yeah, look at that green. That's just nuts. Yeah. So going from, yeah, 25% over the last two days, which is pretty damn crazy. As someone with options expiring at the end of this year, I am euphoric.

Yeah. Yeah. Coin has been a kind of flat performer on a yearly basis, but it's nice to recoup some losses. Andy, what's your take? I think it's cool. I don't really buy stocks. It's not what I do. You're zero stocks. I have a very small 401k. Okay, sure, sure, sure. My retirement portfolio is Bitcoin.

The simplest answer of why it's good is because do you own index funds, though? Yes. Yeah. So that is part of why it goes up is just the it's auto bid now for, yeah, I previously didn't own coin. either because I don't do single name stocks, but I have index funds. So we are now coin holders. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a sick, like, it's just cool for the industry in general. You know, when I got into crypto in like early 2017, it just like feels like it was such a different world to that. And so like, whether or not I own it, I think like, you know, whatever, whatever people's feelings are about Coinbase, like, it has to be a cool thing for you if you're

spending a lot of time in this space that this is what's happening. Yeah, I mean, it's legitimizing it, right? That, like, one, we're thankful for that. But for me, I'm happy because Coinbase has kind of been getting rocked a little bit and like some of the bulk case you could have for it. Robin Hood's starting to step in and they're starting to take over some of the retail, like U.S. flow. Like, they did just buy Deribit, which is awesome. So they're trying to create a complete like trading package, which is, I enjoy.

And you know that Coinbase is the custodian for basically all of the ETFs. So that's good if you think, you know, just that bid is going to go to the ETFs that some of that splashes on to Coinbase. Obviously, they have Circle, big, big, I think 40, something percent ownership there. So if you think stable coins are going to be the thing that grows, like awesome exposure. But it's been a little shaky. As David said, I was expecting a lot more when they had that regulatory moat over the last, like, year and a half. It's just never really materialized into anything.

And then, yeah, the base stuff, like when you do it relative to all of its other earnings, it's not really that high. So base is revenues, even though they are big for our space, is not really. relatively big for the rest of its business. So it's like, that's just a nice cherry on top. The last thing I want to talk about on these podcasts is politics, but it is worth noting that the entire Trump tariff dump has almost completely gone from the market. Depending on where you measure it, we are actually green. The S&P 500 is actually green on the year. There's still, like, some, like, we need four more percent in the S&P to actually turn to all-time highs,

but like we are within all-time highs on the S&P 500, which is pretty crazy. I also I will say I saw something on the timeline. I think it was yesterday from like the Coinbase VIP account that they're going to be like totally reworking their whole like VIP setup and like all of that. And I think that that's interesting as well is seeing them potentially trying to lean more into like how do we attract, you know, potentially like crypto Twitter influencer people or like this is the whole world of like how do you make this a really just like enticing full. sweet product where we're building community and doing these other things, which I feel like Coinbase has generally struggled with, other than with base, I would say, over the time that I've been around in the crypto space. This kind of just feels like a American Express, like you get all these perks for having the

card. It feels like a very similar product line to that, where if you're part of this advanced VIP program, you get a bunch of extra stuff, including NBA games and exclusive dinners. Give me a lounge in an airport. and we'll talk. Yeah. Yeah. Do you guys see Coinbase announced or launched their new wallet, which includes what basically

looks like a Twitter clone? And I think everyone's kind of confused about that because, you know, it's one thing to have a more, you know, I have a better relationship with Coinbase than I have with my bank. It doesn't mean that I want to go to Coinbase for my like my social media needs. And yeah, what I looked at it is like if there's likes, there's retweets and there's embedded text and pictures, this is Twitter. This is a Twitter clone. And I'm not sure what Coinbase is trying to do, just copying and pacing Twitter and

like establishing a social network. I don't know, which guys is takes. I thought it was like a warpcast embed or something or something from Farcaster. I didn't realize it was like a totally separate product because even the comment in there is like, see you at Farcon, which is obviously the Farcaster thing. It is using Farcaster. It's built on Farcaster. But it's basically, it's essentially another Farcaster client that they're integrating

more socials and stuff with like Zora and things like that. It's a warpcast competitor if you want to call it that or whatever. That's what it pays me. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I don't care about. I guess that makes sense. They don't have to bootstrap. Yeah. And I think it's more bullish for Farcaster than it is for Coinbase wallet. So I think that's kind of Farcaster's whole sales pitches that you're building the social graph where you can build a social app, without having to bootstrap the network effects of that social app.

Mm-hmm. It shows make a little bit more sense, understanding Jesse's push for, like, on-chain social and coined content, because you can imagine coined content being embedded right inside of the Coinbase app. TBD on whether that's consumer behavior that consumers will ever engage in. But you can see, like, why there was a concerted push by Jesse and the base team here. Yeah. Yeah, I'm generally skeptical on anyone going after incumbents,

whether it's Pompon or Twitter or whatever, like, especially with this stuff, whenever you're trying to change, use your behavior to try to, uh, find PMF. It's just like, it's,

it's so, so, so, so tough. Um, so, so, so,

it feels a little bit on them. Yeah. It feels a little bit like when Coinbase rolled out, what was it, their NFT platform three, four years ago, something like that,

like basically, basically an open-te competitor and that's just very quietly, completely disappeared. Everyone had one of those. Crackin had one of those. Yeah. Coinbase had one of those. of those.

Wow. FTX had one of those. FtX had an NFT pletful? Yeah, they had an FBF minted his, like, he was the very first mint on or whatever, right? It was like a handwritten note was the first one. Nick bought a bunch of board apes on auction from like Sotheby's or something, so they could list them for sale on the FTX place. It didn't go well.

I could imagine, no, I mean, of course that was customer funds. I could only imagine you were using. All right. Any other topics before we round this thing out? Do we talk about, oh, so we're talking about Coinbase, Robin Hood is a thing. Do we mention the Robin Hood L2, Mr. Wonderful? Oh, yeah, the Robin Hood layer two. You're the one who, I saw this on your feed, Brad. Maybe walk us to do this.

Yeah, so there were murmurs, you know, about a week ago of, like, Robin Hood wants to explore blockchain. Are they going to launch on Solana or they're in conversations with Arborchum? So, like, everyone was speculated on where that was actually going to come from or where they're going to land. And today, or I guess it was actually yesterday, it was when it released, they announced that they had acquired a company called WonderFi, which has an L2 associated to them already. Apparently, it is a TestNet, L2 on, in the ZK Sync bubble stack. Again, test net, nothing really there. They talk about gas abstraction and trying to do, like, a freemium model to try to get some consumer stuff there. So then the speculation becomes one, is this the L2 that they were looking to acquire,

meaning they did not do anything with Arbitrum and they're not going to go do anything with Solana? And if so, whether it's Arbitrum or this, is that going to be value of creative to Ethereum the token? Like, how does that play out? What does that look like? But it's interesting being inspected it on. I would assume that they would just pick all this stuff up and keep it there. I wouldn't imagine they would try to migrate or anything. But there's also no switching costs because it's a dead L2.

I looked at it. There's nothing being done. there. It's just like infrastructure. So like losing it is not a big thing. And it was a part of the overall package of WonderFi, which has a bunch of other financial services. It's not just the L2. You see there's a wallet there. There's a few other things. Yeah. Yeah. Wonderfy chain, Wonderfy wallet. On the website, it says a global leader in centralized anti-centralized crypto projects, products with a ticker for their Canadian Stock Exchange listing, which apparently is now being acquired by Robin Hood.

So do we know how much they bought them for? I think we did. Yeah, I think it just said in the, what was it, bread? It's 250 Canadian, but that's 178 million U.S. I checked. So like, I never understand this. I've never heard of Wonderfi, no disrespect to their team, whatever. Robin Hood couldn't take $180 million and build a better version of Wonderfi without having to, like, go through all of this.

I know that there's more business things at hand that I don't care about. Like they're a Canadian company. They have other financial services. I'm sure they're acquiring whatever, whatever backend stuff and or processes and or customer lists and or whatever on the back end. And then they get a few things, like a few products that they just spin up faster, right? Instead of having to go from day zero, scope it out, build the thing, do the investigations, whatever over the next six to 12 months.

They're like, all right, well, they've done a lot of the DD, hopefully. now does us go to market over the next three months instead of having to wait too, too long. I know very little about this deal. There's got to be a team behind this, too, that they are acquiring the team too. Correct. I know very little about this deal, but another common reason to acquire various platforms, particularly in crypto, is just for regulatory and licensing reasons. If they already have the applicable licenses in different jurisdictions that you want,

and that will take you a multi-year process to get, just going and buying someone, and then folding them in is often a cleaner way to do it. It's like buying a bar for the liquor license. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're basically just buying the license. I mean, that does happen sometimes. I don't know the details of this deal, but that is another common reason to go buy someone. Thinking about this stuff, like MMA, M&A has been crazy the last two, three weeks, right?

We're seeing all kinds of acquisitions. I was listening to a favorite podcast. It was on one of the Belker ones, our Blockworks ones. And you think about how this actually. works out with inflow and capital into the space, right? Like this is an instance where now we have Robin, Robin Hood money in bulk coming into a bunch of people who are presumably crypto-native.

Like I would say these guys are less crypto-native than some of the other businesses that are inside of the industry. But if you have outside Web 2 capital at this level coming in and buying out all of this stuff, you have to imagine a lot of these people that are being acquired are going to take a lot of the money that they made from this stuff and probably inject it into our ecosystem in some capacity because, well, It worked out for the first time, double down and make some more money in the thing that you're familiar with. So even if it isn't like something that's great for us, we don't really care about, but like I think long term, it is kind of a liquidity injection into the industry, which is good.

The founders are going to go market by youth. Yeah, that's right. Well, with a Deripid acquisition, it was like something like $700 million in cash, but then the rest of like $2.3 billion in Coinbase stock. And so that not necessarily, not necessarily will be going back. into the crypto ecosystem because they have to first dump coin first, and that will come out of coin stock, which is, you know, that's one of us. That's bad for us. That's bad for us.

You specifically. Yes. Yes. Yeah. I mean, the other big acquisition, too, was, I mean, ahead of them rolling out new products this week, but also from Web 2 was Stripe acquiring Bridge a few months ago for that was 1.1 bill, which they immediately took advantage of in the past week launching stable point financial accounts.

But, yeah. The bigger impact of it to me is less about rolling that money directly in from founders. It's also just helpful for the funding market. I mean, just from a VC perspective, but for anyone investing in these markets, this makes it much easier to underwrite equities to the extent that you have a healthy M&A market. I mean, this has been a big problem in traditional tech VC as well over the past few years, is that so many acquisitions, we're just getting shot down, and it makes it really hard to underwrite opportunities if you think that, you know,

anything successful, well, we can't be acquired and people don't want to go public. So it's harder to get an outcome. Showing here that you can get multi-billion dollar equity outcomes and having real big buyers here is very valuable for being able to underwrite equity investments. And also just making teams probably feel a little less pressured on the margin of, well, we need to go launch a token because there's this big token premium and there's no value in the equity and no one's going to buy it because there's no big buyers of this. Just showing a really healthy, large funding market is super, super healthy, which is great for crypto. Gentlemen, it's been another week.

Andy, Brett John, I really appreciate you guys coming on and doing this roundtable with me. Thanks for honest, buddy. Yeah, it was fun. It was nice to have more things to talk about. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure the token launch pad saga will just be continued next week. We'll talk about whatever the next launch pad is for the next meta that happens in seven days. And I'll see you guys then.

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're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.