Bankless - ROLLUP: Ethereum L1 Comeback | MegaETH Testnet | Base Token Chaos | OHM Crash | WalletConnect Token

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

This week, Bread joins David to unpack Ethereum’s surprising pivot back to Layer 1, as insiders push for a more pragmatic roadmap and faster block times. MegaETH’s 10ms testnet drops jaws and breaks dApps, while WalletConnect shocks the industry with a late-stage token launch. Meanwhile, Base stirs chaos with its “content coins,” OHM crashes $6B in hours, and Solana’s token wars heat up. Is Ethereum finally finding its focus — or just reacting to the noise? It’s a jam-packed Weekly Rollup you don’t want to miss. Bread: https://x.com/0xBreadguy MegaETH: https://x.com/megaeth_labs Modern Market: https://x.com/modernmarket_ ------ 📣 WALLET CONNECT | ONCHAIN UX ECOSYSTEM https://bankless.cc/WalletConnect ------ 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 🏦INFINEX | THE CRYPTO-EVERYTHING APP https://bankless.cc/Infinex ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:20 Bread’s Arc 3:17 MegaETH & Testnet 8:46 Noise 13:31 Wen MegaETH Mainnet? 16:59 Ethereum Strategic Pivot? 39:25 Base Tokenized Content Drama 49:59 $OM Mantra Token Dump 59:28 Raydium’s LaunchLab 1:03:38 Bread’s Upcoming Excitement 1:04:31 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up each week. I'm bringing on a different co-host to help me go through the news. And this week is the last time that I do that, bringing up the rear, bringing up in the caboose. I have the pleasure of being joined by Brett. Bread is a crypto-twitter educator who's also working on Mega-Eath. Brett, happy Friday. Happy to have you. It's kind of appropriate that you introduced me as the caboose, given some of my pictures on the timeline.

For those who know. Yeah, if you don't know, sometimes I post pictures of my ass online. And everyone likes it. We were going to have you on last week, Brad, but the tariff news just continued to rock the world. And we swapped in Haseeb to talk about tariffs. But Hizib also, I think, underhanded us with a lot of what we're going to talk about today, which is the Mega ETH test net came out last week. It's been one of the most anticipated main net relaunches that's coming.

Still may not here yet. But with a test net, people can start to play around. And then the Mega-Eath project has really just done a very good job attracting unique apps. Like not Crypto's 200th PEP Exchange, but some unique applications that are being found and being built on Mega-Eath. So you grew up your branding, educating on crypto-Twitter, and then decided to land a position at Mega-Eath. Maybe you can talk about just your arc for people that don't know you and then talk about the decision to join Mega-Eath. Yeah, sure. That's actually a little bit of lore for everyone else listening is like, you know, you and I even talked about like potentially working together trying to do something because you're right.

I cut my teeth over the last like year and a half as like educators is how you introduced me. Like I come from a history of and Web 2 where I worked in actually the medical industry on the IT side. So like I traveled the world basically talking about complex technical stuff to clinical people. So like no one knew any of the underlying stuff. So I got pretty good at just talking about complex topics in normal ways. And I enjoy it, frankly. I like educating. And it teaches me some of these deeper concepts.

So yeah, over the last like year, trying to like really take this place on full time. I was spending a lot of time on the timeline talking about things that I was interested in, which was the technical stuff and doing it in in relatable terms, trying to look for just basically the opportunity to contribute to the industry. And whenever I saw Meg Heath come along back in, I think it was July, I just reached out and I was like, hey, I got time. I'm looking for a team that actually resonates with me because I didn't want to try to sell something I didn't believe in. I saw that, saw them, reached out, tried to contribute more heavily. Bing actually took the actual co-founder. She actually turned me down. She was like, oh, yeah, join our Discord. Like, we're not opening

roles, but you can like hang out on our Discord. I was like, no chance. I'm not going back to the Discord dog days. And I just kept doing my education stuff on the timeline. And eventually, actually November of last year, they came back and like, yeah, we actually need someone that's forward on crypto Twitter that can represent us and actually talk about our technical concepts. And at that point, I joined the team. And it's been fun ever since.

I think we are still in the hype phase of many of these blockchains, mega-eth included, Monad. But there's a bunch of not-life chains that everyone is very stoked about. And so people's imaginations are allowed to, you know, go pretty wild. The line that Haseeb gave us last week that I really liked was that this isn't just like a blockchain with very fast block times. This is so incredibly fast that it starts to really change the form factor for what even a blockchain looks like because the block times are so fast, 10 millisecond block times that it's a streaming blockchain. And so the chain of like, you know, discrete blocks doesn't, it's not really the same because of how fast it goes. And maybe I can emphasize that for the listeners with one of your guys is Oracle's Redstone,

which is updating the price on chain on MegaEath every 2.4 milliseconds. And so that's 416 transactions per second of just Oracle pricing updates. And so things are just going so fast in the Mega Eath world. The hype that everyone's getting excited about is that this actually doesn't really fit the same form factor as a blockchain. Maybe you can share a little like behind the scenes peak of what that looks like on the team side of things. Because I know you guys have had some additional challenges because, you know, Megheath is just building a blockchain that doesn't look like any other blockchain. Yeah. I mean, you alluded to it last week whenever you were talking for anyone that saw that. And it's just like, yeah, a lot of the things that we built into or have is like just standard stuff in our ecosystem just isn't ready to handle it.

One is just like the literal like logic and like low latency updates you have to do to your systems to make stuff work. but other stuff is like something is nuanced as we're used to a confirmation spinning wheel coming up, right? So like if you think about your user flow in our space, someone comes, they click swap, a modal pops up. It gives you a message to read. It's got a little spinning dial. And then after, you know, half a second, a second, multiple seconds, if you're on Ethereum, it goes away. You can move on with your life. And with us, we're finding that the applications are building stuff out.

And a lot of these flows just straight up don't, they don't work. Like it's just like you have no time to read a message in between your click and it being confirmed on chain. And we're only able to do that because we're. obviously we're an L2 so we can offload consensus down to Ethereum and we're just really really really leaning into this right we're trying to shrink this this what would be time filled with consensus which was a block time to basically zero it's at 10 milliseconds now we're aiming for one millisecond and you're right like yeah like visualizing stuff just is very very hard when you're at you're operating at that level so like you know we use demon it as like the streaming blockchain

we're calling it the real time blockchain because it feels real time it feels instantaneous um and it is just yeah it's a world that is yeah you're showing there some comparisons with like Discord messages, you know, stripe payments. And like Netflix, yeah, Netflix Seek. Like I, we talk about a lot of this stuff in like really esoteric terms within the blockchain world. So, you know, I made a point to if you write an article,

like, okay, let's talk about it something that you actually can relate to. An Instagram story, right? Like the time it takes for the stuff to swipe and show up on your screen. And whenever you start visualizing, like, the time it takes for us to process with things that you use day to day, as opposed to like some random swap on another exchange that you've never actually used. more relatable and you kind of like understand contextually like what level we're operating on. And yeah, a lot of stuff breaks down at this level.

The news last week was that the mega-Eath test net was out. What has that looks like? Maybe you can again show us a little bit behind the curtain. What's going on now that the test net has been out for like 10 days or so? How has the community received it? What are they doing? What's happening? Yeah, we're, I mean, we're just scaling it up, right?

We're good like, we're pointing out to a lot of stuff that's breaking down, a lot of infrastructure stuff that we realize is just not. ready day one. So things like you mentioned the Oracle, we had the Oracle drop out the other day. And so now people can actually build games. Like one of the reasons this actually even came up is like we have, we have people are trying to build games on chain.

And they're like, oh, I can't even track the person because we need to, we need updates within these 10 minutes like an interval. And it's just you need to get stuff on par with your actual block so that we can do like, you know, motion tracking, all this kind of stuff. But yeah, we have a bunch of apps launching. A lot of them are novel because they are consumer forward because they are operating at the speeds that you're used to with your mobile phone.

Like you're just like a normal phone, our app you download from the app store. So a few that I'll call out is like, that I'm really excited about is noise is one that popped up. That's when we trade mind share, right? So it's just, yeah, this one is all over the timeline. And this is the only place you can get it because it's a consumer forward app.

I like it's instantaneous. They're replicating the EIP 7702. So it's like there's no approved swap flow, which is all right there inside the app, one click that everyone loves. Everyone thought brought down. on Ethereum. But it's really exciting.

People are coming to it and playing. Another one that, like, there's more consumer forward. If you go down, you can actually even see, like, yeah, it's like this is GTE. That is our normal text. You can see a little bit higher. You can see like the speed at which the approvals are actually happening right there. Yeah, you see, like, he's clicking right there on that screen. You can see the swaps are instantaneously.

Each click is just, it's swapped. It swapped. It's swapped. Right. So like, for them, the button coming up and showing like, are the modal coming up and showing approved and then swap confirming and then swap doesn't make sense. Like maybe you just change it to the button is just a color change because that's all the time you have to process anything.

And then we have some other stuff like Guess Best and Euphoria is coming, which is a tap trading tool. But people are just like starting to ramp up, starting to find the cracks in what was like a traditional app inside of Web3 and seeing how they need to modify that to work with a real-time blockchain. Really all of these questions are getting the background of Meghaeth, I think, was to really get to what is actually like the news of the week, which. which like you alluded to, noise,

is just on the timeline. Not everyone, not everyone, but like a good number of people are talking about noise, which is, again, a app, a mega-eath app that's on test net. I think the construction of noise is pretty interesting.

It ingests a Kydo Oracle about mind share of a particular subject or a project or, you know, something category. And then it creates a perpetuals exchange around that Oracle. And so the Oracle is a single source of truth. And then people can go long or short

on the movement of the growth or decline of mindchair. And so people are just like being able to bet on the mind chair of particular projects. And so if they think this one thing is going to have more attention in the future, they can go long. They think it's going to have less attention in the future. They can go short. And this is inside of the same category we're going to talk about later the base creator coin debacle. But this is actually in that same category of people are very interested in trading mine share. And this is what Alon from Pump Fun likes to say is what Pump Fun is doing is actually

Culture Coins, meme coins, they're actually like mine share markets. And people are trying to find more ways just beyond Pump Fun, like, you know, static meme coins to trade mind share. And that's what I'm seeing happen with noise. And I think why a lot of people are making noise about noise. Yeah. So like you're correct. And I'm personally not someone that gets in the trenches deeply.

I'm not in there playing a bunch of meme coins because I understand the probabilities of of like being directionally correct but picking the wrong coin right like AI agents came along you would be like AI agents is it is going to be a thing like you can clearly tell everyone wants it but there's a gazillion guillian coins and just like I don't know which one to pick was it AXBT is it you know I don't know there's like a thousand of them right for fart coin like they're all like they're all have their own cut up stuff and it's like I would like to say that I believe this thing is going to be a trend which is their tagline it's trade trade trend which is their tagline it's trade trade. friends. I wouldn't believe that this is going to be a trend and it will be something that people will be talking about, but I don't want to pick, I don't want to pick a specific coin. There was actually a tweet that we fired off around Ethereum. And it was like, if you're in ETH, Howard, if you're in hashtag ETH, pivot to hashtag ETH, because ETH has been like the conversation for very, very long time. And like, Mindshare for ETH is trending up, whereas like the price, unfortunately, has been trending down a little bit. So it's like that, that specific outcome kind of shows you what they're trying to go for.

And to be honest, I was a little worried that this would be too easy, right? Like in something like this, you need people to lose, frankly. Like you need people on the other side of a bet to make sure that you're actually like being able to fill up the order books. And I was like, it's too easy. You just pick trends and you're doing stuff. But I'm losing my ass on test. So I am now happy to say that there might be a product here because like, yeah, it's not

as easy as I thought. I'm getting blown out on a few trades. But it's like test debt money, right? It's not real money? Yeah, of course. Of course. Okay. Okay.

Okay. I'm just like, you know, I picked the wrong trend. I thought it was going down for sure and it did not. At least according to Kaido. Right. Yeah. There are a bunch of different constructions about these like mind share trading applications that are cropping up. And even Zora is trying to position itself.

Again, like I said, we're going to talk about the base token debacle. Anything else going on on MegaEath that we should know about before we move Yeah, so like a lot of the apps that I would call it in that that article, which is like about Omega is only on mega apps. A lot of those teams are born out of our incubator, our Excel, I won't say incubator, accelerator, right? So we have a mega mafia program where it's like we've co-lived with, you know, upwards of 15 teams, 18 teams for 30 days at a time. We did Berlin and Chung Mai before DevCon last time. And we literally helped them like do everything they need. They go through raising.

they go through finding co-founders. They go through like PMF, like working on their product, you know, go to market, all this shit. And a lot of these applications were actually all of these applications were born out of that outside of Guess Best. And we're going to do another round of that. I think you should see an announcement here soon. And I think it's a very exciting opportunity for people to really come to us,

understand our technology, work closely with our technical team, our engineers actually like dictate some of the outcomes of the chain. like the current mafia team because we meet weekly to go over stuff, help them do things. Like we've specifically implemented things on Mega-Eath because they've been requested by the teams that are building on Mega-Eath because we want to be the best place for that. And we're going to open up another cohort here soon. And it's an exciting opportunity.

So I would say look out for that. I know you guys are just getting the preliminary data from the TestNet, right? The TestNet win live like 10-ish days ago. So you still have a lot of TestNet left. But if you had to give a best guess about when Mainnet, would come. Are we talking like, you know, this year, Q3, Q4, are we waiting to next year? What do we think? Yeah, I think Q3 is a, it's probably comfy. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, we're trying to be aggressive with it, like on balance. Like, I think the, um, one of the, the mindsets we have, obviously, we don't want

to jeopardize anything. Like, but some of the, some of the things that have been, uh, seen as a downside in the past, right? Solana's going down because they're being too aggressive. They're scaling too fast. Like, some of the stigma associated with being just like hyper fixated on performance. and moving fast, breaking things, a little bit of that fafo energy. Like, we're not afraid to maybe step into that realm. Obviously, we won't avoid it if we can. But, like, you know, we're trying to be aggressive. All right.

Let's pivot into, let's go back down to just Eith, not mega-eath. We're going to talk about the strategic pivot going around in Ethereum. The slow strategic pivot is kind of what I'm calling it. Yeah. There's going to be an episode that comes out with Dunk Rod. I saw that. I'm so hyped for it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's going to be good. And that's where the words, I don't know how the words, strategic pivot is going to land with the Ethereum community, but that's what I'm like kind of like branding it as. It's a slow strategic pivot. We're going to get a lot of this conversation before we get into that conversation about all the tweets that went out about Ethereum slowly pivoting. First, a message from our friends and sponsors over at wallet connect. Wallet Connect. If you don't know what it is, it's a bridge for signing transactions and messages between apps and wallets used by over 255 million connections, 40 million unique users. They are recently introduced their last building block of the Wallet Connect stack. Of course, the Wallet Connect token. After Wallet Connect has eight years of development, they're doing their token at the very last stage of the development. I think it was pretty admirable that they waited until the very, very end.

I recently had a conversation with Pedro Gomez on Twitter about this, doing the token last, not first. It was pretty cool. If you are familiar with the Visa model or even the Swift model of messaging and ownership, this is starting to follow something similar. that where ownership over Wallet Connect is being passed around to people sending the messages, and Wallet Connect is finally ready to embed itself deeper into the internet, and it needs to launch a token to do that to make their notice permissionless. So that just peaked you. Follow at Wall Connect

on Twitter. There's also Bankless.c.c.c. slash Wallet Connect to stay ahead of what's next. All right, let's go ahead and get into it. That one actually surprised me, by the way. Yeah. While there's specific token, I saw it and I was like, that doesn't make any sense. What's going on? But then I read it into the documentation. I'm like, oh, okay, there's actually full infrastructure that's going up behind the scenes and it's like, okay, like they're actually trying to spin up some of this stuff like, it's like this surprisingly like I see this. Okay, cool.

I think there was a lot of people's first reaction. I was my first reaction to the Wall Connect token is like this is a piece of very thin middleware. Why does this need a token? And then you, and then you, Pedro, again, like, watch that, watch that video, gave a very coherent, very like, rational pitch as to like this is going to be a like commonly owned share

like infrastructure shared by wallets and everyone and and and and now we get to actually embed it deeper into the internet by decentralizing it allowing people to permission seamlessly run nodes and be like stakeholders of the network which is exactly how Visa and Swift bootstrapped at their network. It's actually kind of brilliant. Yeah. Kudos to them. Yeah, big kudos to them. Yeah.

Okay. So there is a bunch of tweets that went out outside of the Ethereum community. One from Tamash, who is the incoming executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, which he had a delayed start. He agreed to sign the job, but then he has a bunch of, um, uh, just he has his role at Nethermind, which he, I think he needed to appropriately sunset or at least just, you know, put on the back burner. Justin Drake put out a tweet that, uh, we talked about scaling the Ethereum Layer 1 by 1000X, a very classic Justin Drake tweet, followed up by a tweet saying that, uh, the Ethereum Layer 1 will be for the top 0.1%,

which did not sit well with people. The context matters. We'll talk about that. Uh, and, Overall, there's just been a growing rabbling of interest around the Ethereum project. So we'll start with this Tamash tweet. He tweeted out, this week I officially signed the contract with the Ethereum Foundation. I have been waiting with some of the communication until this happened. Then he talked about a delay on his side, but I'll skip through that. He says, since the beginning of March, I have had around 150 calls and in-person meetings, listen to feedback, and constructed a very broad strategy document.

I think that particular thing, the idea of a broad strategy document for the Ethereum ecosystem, it's something that has been missing. And I think this is being represented, the shift in strategy, the pivot and strategy from the Ethereum project, the Ethereum ecosystem, is like being, is symbolically represented here by this new executive director coming in, creating a strategy document. And he takes here, Brad. Yeah, it's just good to see some opinion coming out of them, right? Like, that's kind of what a lot of people have had against the ecosystem broadly.

It's kind of like, how do you define yourselves? What are your goals, right? Like you've been clobbed over the head with the IBRL of the Solana roadmap versus like the picture of the 10-year, 35,000 item, whatever slurge, merge, dirge, like stuff. Right. So like that doesn't resonate as quickly with people. So it's good to see like, you know, there is some top down. And remember, it's a decentralized protocol. So, like, he can say all this shit.

And it means nothing. I actually think I quote you to this one specifically and not just like, it's kind of wild that he's coming forward with a lot of these posts because it's almost like you're in an all hands meeting back in. Like if you're in the corporate world, right, like it's, you would have these meetings where the boss comes down and says, this is what we're aiming for. This is direction of what we're doing. These are some of our steps.

These are the people we're meeting all this stuff. And what's going on with that is like it's wild. He just shoots that off into the ether here with crypto Twitter because like we're the that he cares to like rah-rah, right? Yeah, I got a lot of tweets going out these days. They do. So we're the people he's trying to rah-rah. And with that, like, and he still doesn't have the power to actually change anything, right?

Because you need to convince all the client teams. You need to get social consensus. You need to do all this stuff. So it's just interesting to see someone that is serving as almost a CEO role within a decentralized ecosystem, doing his best to build up conviction and the direction that he, in the vision that he sees. So it's needed for sure. the episode that I did with Ansgar and Dunkrad did illustrate that there is this coherent, again, strategic pivot in, like I'll kind of identify. So I'm writing an article that'll come out on Monday.

And so I'll identify like the five, maybe there were six articles, six points that I collapsed into five. But these, where this strategic pivot is being manifested. So doing after this podcast with Ansgar and Dangrad, they just helped identify that something that I think the community has broadly known, which at the core of Ethereum's issues, is a strategic misalignment between long-term ideals and short-term execution. I think everyone kind of generally understands that. But that problem has manifested in its own way in different parts of the Ethereum like eco-social techno stack, right? So there's the layer one under investment because the Ethereum project zoomed forward 30 years to do the Ethereum. this like roll up centric roadmap thing. Same thing.

There's a product mindset deficiency. There's a leadership vacuum with organizational ambiguity. There's ivory tower culture and then layer two fragmentation. And I think all of these are kind of downstream of this same exact issue, which is a strategic misalignment between long term ideals and short term execution. And I'm seeing, again, heavily informed by this podcast with Ansgar and Dankrad, that these five things are being addressed one by. one because again it's the same problem manifesting in five or six different arenas but it's

they're being addressed one by one and this one what we're seeing from tamash is the leadership vacuum and organizational ambiguity and this broad broad strategic like what did he call this he called it say a very broad strategy document I think is helping align all these stakeholders to first off he's being a much more stronger executional force than I think I was but then he's also creating this document for reference across the ecosystem that I think can remove some of that organizational ambiguity and kind of get everyone onto the same page. That's at least what I'm seeing. Yeah, I'm super excited to hear those two talk. It's like Dunkrod's been one that's been very vocal.

Like he's been the counterweight to Justin Drake, I would say, on the timeline for the last year, maybe a little longer. Like he's been very vocal that like he does not believe in this, the virtuous, you know, 10 year vision. He's like, we need to deliver value to the main net. We need to make sure the value of cruel is something that we're discussing. He's been very forward with that. He's been open about it too, which is, you know, refreshing. I followed him and put him on alerts a long time ago. And Ansgar is in that same boat.

I remember in like a lot of the blob discussions because that's actually where I earned a lot of attention within the Ethereum ecosystem. When I saw the blob stuff come to market, it's like, guys, this doesn't seem to make sense. Like broadly like how all these things will be, hey, the miscelline incentives, all this shit. And Anskar was someone from within the Ethereum Foundation that was just like, yeah, I actually see this too. I think we can deliver in X, Y, and Z ways. It's very pragmatic, very like direct and but very like not head in the sand with how we viewed everything.

And then we talked on the stage with Sausal and Onscar and DevCon, which is awesome just to have that counterpoint. But yeah, I'm excited hearing the talk about stuff. And I think the directional stuff, again, it doesn't have to be very super specific. I'm glad he's saying broad. Like, as long as you have some directional stuff for the ecosystem of the line around, I think it's a good news for everyone. Do you remember what the thing was that what didn't make sense with the blobs? It was just simply that there's just not enough of them?

For me? Yeah, the thing that when you were saying, the thing that you cut your teeth on with getting attention from the Ethereum community when you're identifying the lack of like pragmatism. Was it just the lack of total supply of blob space? Or do you remember what that was? Yeah. For me, it was just like a lot of the misaligned incentives that injected into the model. Like I know, I come from the school bank list. Like, I've been listening to you guys for years, right?

So it was like I was so fixated on ultrasound money and this stuff. And I was like, guys, this narrative is going to blow up with this. Like, it's going to die because of like the, you know, a lot of it being non-obligatory posting to the L1, not even utilizing blobs. Like a lot of the incentives to like just kind of shift away from them entirely to all DA. Like Meggie, we're using all-DA because Ethereum just is not big enough to handle the stuff that we're trying to do. Yeah, it's a pragmatic decision. And now on the performance competitive vertical, right, you have chains like us that come forward. And everyone that's in the middle of the path, that's a true roll-up is going to see us and go, well, the users don't give a shit, right?

The users are going over here because it's a better experience. They don't care about the underlying. They don't do whatever. It's like now they're forced to compete. And like they have to make a decision between like, do I post down to Ethereum, pay a little bit more, cost my users more stuff? I'm slower. I literally can't be as performance as I want to be. That's what base is fighting with now.

and like now I'm in a position where I have to choose between like quote unquote alignment, maybe some underlying technical properties or being the best chain I want to be to compete with people that are like already made that decision. And like I just saw a lot of that and I was like with all this stuff in line. Like we're still not even we're still not over 50% capacity with Blas or actually even going down a little bit these last few weeks after a year. It's been a year since they've been released. Saturation isn't here and we're trying to blow it up even more.

So it's just like I don't I didn't see it as something that would be a long term value accretive thing for the token. So this has resulted in a reconsideration of what the Ethereum layer one is doing inside of the Ethereum ecosystem, like broadly. And previously there has been communications from the EF. And then therefore, us at Bankless, because we saw the vision and we parroted it. But the idea of like getting off the layer one, like Justin Drake said this at least a couple times on Bankless podcast that we had it, man.

It's like the layer one is not for users. Get off the layer one. The floor is lava. These are lines that we used to say. And now everyone is starting to like, okay, well, maybe actually the layer one is the place to be. And Justin Drake, after I asked, does anyone remember which episode, Justin Drake said this? Because we've had so many Justin Drake episodes, I couldn't remember. It turns out there's two of them.

He said, here's my updated stance. We can scale the canonical layer one EVM by 1,000 X from 10,000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second using ZKEVMs. This is something that a lot of the Ethereum researchers are pretty stoked about is the idea of ZKVMs. While this seems like moon math and it kind of is, they're all, everyone is pretty excited about this not being a long-term thing and instead being a medium-term thing on the one to two-year time horizons.

And he just does some basic explanation and talk about how like you can get to up to 10,000 transactions per second on the theorem layer one in like a two year-ish time horizon. And then Storm from Paradigm says, ZKVMs are very exciting. However, I still think you should explicitly disavow the stance that the layer one is not for users, even if you still believe that most activity will happen on the layer two's. Layer one quality is critical,

messaging the issue shift from a layer two-centric roadmap to a layer one and layer two roadmap, which I love that idea, a layer one and layer two roadmap. And then Justin Drake follows up and says on Twitter, again, I hear by disavow the stance that the layer one is not for users. And I read that. I'm like, that is great.

And then he follows up with, he says, it's for the top 0.1%. Early adopters, roll-ups, wills, arbitraudges, institutions, enterprises, nation states. Now, I get what he's saying here. There's going to be infinity transactions across all types of blockchains.

Eventually, there will be infinite transactions. There will be more transactions that anyone can count. And so what he is saying here is that Ethereum, the layer one, will represent the top 1% of the most valuable transactions, like, defy, anything that has any meaningful amount of gas fees, like just the most valuable one percent, top 1.1. That does not read well to anyone.

And it is what I will call extremely high dunkable surface area, and that's exactly what happened on crypto Twitter. Yeah, man. Like this is so bad, because you're right. Like, you'd shown my picture before, right, you know, the current overlap is 100% within L1L2s and like this is what needs to be right. And Vitalik put it in his blog is like one of the directional things you can do. And like he's saying the exact same thing, right?

Like he's saying the exact same thing. It's just whenever you're never going to find it. Maybe you might. No, you're recent. Here it is. I got it. Yeah. Yeah.

There you go. So like, so he's saying the exact same thing is this except whenever you see this, everyone can insert themselves into this, the bottom picture of like I'm the one that can say on Ethereum Main and I'm the one that can do whatever. But whenever you say 0.1%, you immediately turn on this, especially in like this new, like, new political landscape where like everyone's against the riches and everything. Everyone is like, oh, the 0.1% the elitist, like the, oh, you want to do it. So like it invokes something that is deeper and rooted in with everyone.

But he's saying the same thing, which I totally agree with. I think it sounds like you do too. It's just like, yeah, man, like you need users because users are, are, this all boils down to value accrual, right? That's all this is. because like there's a future where Ethereum is Ethereum, I'm going to say with quotes, because this encompasses all the L2s and whatever rolls up in there, like addresses the capacity of the world and can handle infinity transactions and everything's great and everyone's on chain,

everything's cool. But if that doesn't result in Ethereum, the token price going up, like I don't know that everyone's going to be happy, right? Because everyone has an underlying, like, I want to have a piece of this because I was here early. I want my thing to go up because I got in early. I want ETH to be valuable, ETH the asset to be valuable. and this is a step towards like trying to get that, right? You need users on the L1 because that is the one-to-one

CYOP correlation with fees accrued, right? You need usage, you need that dollar, 100% of that dollar to go to Ethereum as fees or whatever so that people can do their discounted cash flows. Even if you don't believe in that, you need people to like be able to put that in their mental model as like a conviction for the asset. Like you need some of that element there.

And by offloading 100% to the L2s, right, the actual fee accrual, you like, I saw some rollups today, like 95% of every dollar, or 95 cents of every dollar was going to the L2 team. Like that's just, it's just not a sexy picture and it gets fuzzy for people. So, yeah. Yeah, downstream of this,

you're seeing people like Kane, and Kane is just one of many people who are tweeting out the same sentiment where he says, literally spent the last six years of my life, helping to meme layer twos into existence, only to land back on Mainnet. Cannot make this out.

PURPS v4 make Mainnet D-Vy defy grading. He's talking about synthetics. But there's just been this general shift towards the Ethereum community. They're like, oh, the layer one is actually a fantastic place to be. Despite its flaws, despite its 12 second block times, it's actually got the richest defy ecosystem.

It's got the most volume. It's got the most users. Or maybe not the most users, but just the most activity, the most broad strokes activity. And so there's been this general shift of like, oh, let's actually go back to the layer one. It was nice there. The campfire was warm. Let's go back.

It feels great again with the gas. I'm like under one way. Like you're shooting, you're shooting transactions off. Like, yeah, the wait time is not awesome. But like that, like, it doesn't have to be a salina. Like, that's the thing. Like, it doesn't have to be the most performant.

It just has to be a little more inhabitable for apps. It has to be somewhat practical for a lot of this stuff. And so shorten the block times, includes the, or shorten the finality window, you know, increase. So you can have a little more capacity. So gas isn't going crazy with a lower amount. And yeah, man, like that's all that has to do. As long as it preserves the properties that that Ethereum is clearly number one at, right?

It is the most, it's never gone down, right? Most I've had a finality issue before, but never gone down. It's censorship resistant. It survived a literal attack from the U.S. government. Like no other chains can claim that right now with the tornado cash stuff, right? It's got all of these properties that it needs to maintain as being the number one thing. As long as it can maintain those things and then like be as performant as possible while maintaining those things, it's undoubtedly going to be a top chain.

In response to Justin Drake's tweet where he talked about scaling the layer one from 10 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second, you put out this tweet, which is like this, you say this is how these posts always feel to me, and then you give the draw the rest of the owl meme. So in step one, we have like two circles, which slowly will represent an owl. And then in step two, there's a whole beautiful, like, a well-drawn owl. So the idea is like we're missing the middle stages. Can you elaborate on that? Because I actually wasn't totally sure what you mean. Yeah, you actually talked about it a little bit with the Tomas stuff, which is just like, you know, Ethereum is at a little bit of an inflection point right now.

And there's some people will be getting genuinely like disenfranchised or disillusioned with Ethereum, the asset, Ethereum, the ecosystem. Ethereum, even the broad strategy. So they're like, I don't see a vision in this stuff I'm leaving. So for me, and this is builders too, right, people that are building apps on the chain. people that already have been building apps on the chain chains if you include L2s and what's happening for me is it like okay like he's he's talking about this future we're like don't worry guys like eventually we'll be able to handle 10 million TPS because he literally called out 10 million across

all the L2s and like it's like who like you the numbers don't go from 10 to 10 million right the numbers go from 10 to a thousand to 10 000 to 100,000 and so you need to have people who have conviction and want to build and want to contribute and want to grow for the duration of that because if I build a chain today that does 10 million TPS but no one gives a shit about it, I'm going to do 10 TPS. Right. So I was just saying, which reiterates your Tomash stuff, which is like, we need someone to carry that middle ground to make people care about the today and improve the tomorrow

so that they build for the next year. Right. So like you need the full journey. You can't just be like, don't worry, guys, it's coming 10 years from now. I actually think you and I had this exchange. a long time ago too with the economics of roll-ups where it's just like I was like guys this is improfable we're losing like losing up the blobs like ultrasounds going away

and then it's you're like well don't worry we'll have 10,000 L2s eventually I'm like yeah but like think about the journey going from five L2s where it's like a dominant dominant two of the five or we have a hundred now so dominant five of the hundred to like 10,000 L2s like if no one cares to like participate in the Ethereum ecosystem from that 100 to that 200 to that 800 to the thousand like we'll never get to the 10,000 so like you need to have the full life cycle. Yeah, there's a line from John Charbonneau that has stuck with me, maybe a couple lines, which was path dependency matters and all timeframes are important.

It's great to have this ivory tower like long-term roadmap. Like if the Ethereum community has a very strong conviction that it has cracked the nut of the idealized blockchain architecture that is like 100 years in the few. future and it's trying to zoom straight forward for it, but path dependency matters and all timeframes also matter. And so ignoring the middle timeframe, ignoring the short term and the medium term, in order to just zoom towards the long term, we'll create a certain path for getting there that will result in, I think, what we've seen in the last two years of crypto history, which has ignored all timeframes and just only focus on the longest of

timeframes and has allowed people to take advantage of the fact that Ethereum is not looking for the at the near term or even the medium term. And it's only blindly looking at the long term. Yeah, it's the expectation versus reality bicycle map, right? Like you have the expectation is like, oh, straight line, we'll just keep growing. We'll just keep growing and we'll get to 10,000. But then in that reality is like, oh, you rode a bike through like a crevasse and then you go on a tight rope and then you have to dive down into a canyon.

And then so like it's the journey is much, much, much harder than you would like to think whenever you're talking to time horizons that are, yeah, from one to 10,000. We got a couple tokens we're going to talk about. There's a base has started coining some tokens on Zora. And then also there's the collapse of the mantra token. And so this has implications. It's not just about price action, but I think this has like community cultural implications about what we do about these things.

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this is 18 hours from the time of recording. A tweet, BAS is for everyone, which is just a screenshot. of one of their marketing videos that came out. And then they followed up with that tweet, just saying, coined it, and then linked to a Zora link. And Zora, if you're not familiar with Zora, Zora is a place to tokenize files, JPEG files, MP4 files, GIF files,

or any kind of file. And so they just released a coin of their marketing video, a screenshot of their marketing video, and just yeated it out there. Not really any context or any sort of plan, just said, coined it and then released it. And then they, and then so that, people started trading it.

And it instantly went up to something like a $15 million market cap. And everyone's like, did base really just release a coin? And this is an NFT that actually gets fractionalized into an ERC 20 token. So it being an ERC20 token, you know, fits the form factor of a meme coin. It's a meme coin. It's a token with a picture. And so, you know, the DGEN started going after it and it pumped to $15 or $18 million. dollars. They followed up an hour later with another one saying we coined our FARCON poster,

far that's a FARCAS convention poster on Zora. So they followed up with a second tokenized picture on Zora, which immediately caused the market cap of the first one to go to from, let's see, where was it, 18 million down to 2 million in a blink of a eye. So like erasing 15 million of gains. The gains, the $50 million did not exist. Then it did exist. And then it went away again. And then everyone was like, did base just rug their community? And that was the line that got like chanted around crypto-twitters. Like, base just rugged their community.

I don't agree with that line, but that is the line that got like chanted around crypto-twitter. Brett, what was your thoughts when you watch this happen? Man, this chart pattern is something that was not in the wilderness very often, but has been, and they're deeply, because you talk about the mantra one too. Very similar candle there. So I think this is a example of a horrible Execution for something that maybe isn't as malicious

as people are trying to interpret it as And Jesse has talked about it a lot Right he's he's talking about he's trying to define now culture coin Or no no content coins instead of yeah content coins instead of meme coins And like do this whole thing which is like you can't force this stuff to happen man Like you just can't you just kind of do your thing and I think where they fucked up is they should have Forecasted their plan ahead of time before we're doing it. And I think what he's trying to get to here, right, is like the, this chart pattern

is a byproduct of this ecosystem not being saturated, saturated, this stuff not being normalized, these things not being just like a, you know, something that everyone does and you can use them as collectibles. Because like as a collectible, yeah, sure, it makes sense. If I want to buy this thing, ERC 20 is probably a little easier to buy it than an NFT, like at an open edition. So, you know, sure, I get it. But what they should have done is come to the table and said like, guys, we're going to post a bunch of this stuff. And we're going to tokenize on. all of them. Be ready, right? Because then people aren't going to ape into the first one and do the second thing. I think what he's trying to get to on the other side of this is like if you were to launch

an NFT collection today in 2025, right? Like if you would have done it back whenever they came out, because it wasn't like a normalized, just like saturated thing, like every chart was going crazy. You buy and you buy whatever's happening because it's the first one, second one, whatever. You can you sell it like five minutes later for X amount of dollars. He's trying to get to the 2025 version of NFTs where it's just like, oh, it's an NFT. I'm like, I don't care. I don't went into it. The speculators aren't speculating. It's just people buying it because they think it's kind of a cute picture and like they

don't find it as much. Execution to get there is not been the best, I think. I agree with, I agree with you. I think there are two mistakes. One, you just identified, which is, I'll actually kind of contest that content coins and meme coins are not different things. They are actually the same thing. And it's more aspirational to think that content coins are.

are different from meme coins because they are, it's just a fungible token with a picture, man. And like all of the, that you said is it, a specialized NFTs, right? Like, we've had these forever. Mm-hmm.

And so Jesse has this like picture of like, comparing a content coin to a meme coin, right? Like a content coin has no expectations versus a meme coin has high expectations, right? Content coin, you can create many content coins with meme coins. You should only create one coin. These are all opinions.

about how the market should behave, and that is not how the market works. And so I think that that was an error. And then I agree with you as well. Like they should have like allude, informed the market that there will be many of these things. You could have actually, if you were paying attention to Base and Jesse's messaging,

they said we are going to make tokenized content on Zora. We are going to do that. And so there was an attempt out there. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't clear. It should have been tagged along. with that first initial coin. So I think there was a couple mistakes here.

I will also say people took the opportunity to just twist the absolute F on the knife that the rabblers on crypto Twitter were trying to stab into Jesse. And so the rabbling, in my opinion, did not match the event. People were like, oh, Jesse made a mistake. Let's take this opportunity to really just dogpile

the absolute F out of Jesse and base. I'm sure that that was very frustrating for Jesse. He didn't. I don't think he deserved it. He did make some mistakes. They did make some mistakes. I see what they're trying to do. They tested in prod.

But I do not think that the rabbling match, the actual event. I think the worst part about all this stuff is because I think everyone, like, almost universally thinks Jesse's a good person. Like I think he's a good guy just trying to help. One of the most beloved people. He believes in all this stuff. He's trying to do good. But like, yeah, this tweet reads like, bro, you can't make fetch happen situation. right like you're trying to make just don't force it and then you know after the fact again with all the

good intentions he's trying to go on spaces to talk about stuff and he hops into a space that's run by scammers because scammers run their base their spaces up and that's like but he was unaware right he's just an innocent dude walking into innocent sheep walking into a wolf's den because like that's just what these people do and it's just like yeah i get it that's unfortunate but like you know the you can't dictate the market like you said yeah yeah i think i think i listen to that same space that that you're alluding to. I listened to a clip of it. And there was this one guy who talked about how he was,

he is and was building on base. And he, because of the complete stupidity of the base team, he now is not going to build on base anymore because of how dumb and stupid and bad Jesse was. And I was listening to this guy, like, just like, again, dog pile on Jesse.

And I just felt like this was cringe virtue signaling to base haters. It was like base hating virtue signaling, which is how, crypto Twitter works, which is so frustrating. Because, like, he's just trying to do something good. The DGens and traders and speculators turned the meme, turned the token into a meme coin chart, and then the chart did meme coin things.

And then everyone is, like, surprised. And, like, yes, like, like, we said, there were some mistakes made with the launch. But nonetheless, like, no crying in the casino. Yeah, man. Yeah, it's ruthless out there. And, like, like, you were pointing out to the way in which they addressed it, there's a ton of spaces that they could have gone on that are run daily by good people doing whatever. And they would have actually talk about it.

And they maybe just gave them like straight up like bro advice, which is like, guy, you're like, dude, you're fucked up. Whereas, yeah, the one that he targeted because it was run by people who sensationalize everything and they know sensationalizing stuff is going to get even more people into their space and build their cloud and do their stuff so they can sell a coin, you know, three weeks from now. Like that's what they optimized for. And yeah, they did it. Yep. Yeah, yeah. I did really appreciate this taxonomy. from Eddie Lazarin, who works at A16Z, chief CTO of A16Z, really smart guy.

We've had a monobankless before. He treats out, it's true that not all tokens are created equal, but the right way to classify tokens is according to their technical, legal, and economic properties. And then he gives out this taxonomy, which, like, is a pretty, like, defines the different form factors for tokens out there. So there are security tokens, company backed tokens, arcade tokens, network tokens, collectible tokens, asset backed tokens. and the process that they came to for how they defined these six types of tokens is like a pretty

it's pretty like intellectually rigorous like they have really worked through the idea of like is one of those like yes no charts right so does the token have inherent value if no then it's a meme coin if yes then there's another question is the token's primary value primary derived from a country company controlled system if no then it goes in in one way if yes in in this way so he defined this token from base as a collectible token. And so I think this taxonomy helps define the structure. And that is, so rather than like saying like, no, this is a content coin, not a meme coin, I think the correct thing is actually look at the token taxonomy, the form factor for the token

and judge it based off of that. I enjoyed this take from Eddie. And this goes right back to your initial like deduction that this is like, this is just an NFT like collectible, fractionalized. of T. That's all this is. But yeah, trying to recategorize or come up with a new category entirely is probably not the move.

Had people just said like it's an open edition, open edition ERC 20 or I don't know how hell you were going to try to say it, but like, yeah, it was just framed and properly. The funny thing is after the token dumped from 15 million down to $2 million, it's back, baby. It reached all time highs. So all the people that were like harping about how a base rugged their community. is objectively wrong because I don't know where it is right now. I tweeted this out a few moments ago. I mean, I can go look at it.

Unreal. It dumped starting at like $17 million and now it's at like $18 or $19 million market cap. Yeah. My brain is so messed up that I saw this coin and my brain immediately went to like, ooh, I bet activities up. I want to look what the blobs did. So like I started looking at the blobs right down to see what the burn was and like who's dodging, posting blobs and all this shit. Yeah. All right. Well, the chart, the charts had $13 million, which I think is pretty funny.

All right, let's get into the next chart that went down 90% in a very short amount of time. And this was a bit much, much bigger of a token. So by comparison, the token they were just talking about, the base token, that was a $15 million market cap token. The mantra token was something like $6 billion. No, excuse me, it was like a $25 billion market cap dropped 90% down to something like $5. $6 billion. The details behind this, like how this happened, I think it took a while for people to figure out because people initially thought it was crime, which I think is a pretty like normal

reflexive response by crypto-twriters. That looks like a crime candle. It does look like a crime candle. Yeah. Let's see if I can pull up the candle. I'll pull it up in a second. The OM token crashed 92% in six hours from $6.40 down to 57 cents, $6 billion of market cap, white.

out. There were reports of investors in the token sending tens to maybe $30 million of tokens to the exchange days prior, but nothing at all close to the actual drop of the token. What I think people have collapsed on in the theory of how this happened was it was a perpetuals exchange cascading liquidation. So it wasn't defy cascading liquidations. It was very poor liquidity in perps, which triggered just a cascading liquidation of just like one or two million dollars getting liquidated that translated into like seven or eight more million dollars getting liquidated, which took the price down from $6 down to $2.8, which the big takeaway here is that OM had not enough liquidity to manage these cascading liquidations and maybe shouldn't have ever been as high

as it was priced. That was my big takeaway. What were you thinking when you saw all this? So like I was just watching in real time and trying to see everyone work through the actual crisis of it. Everyone being the team, right? Because like the founder Mullins, I forget JP Mullins, I think it is. He tweeted like three hours before, okay, I'm going on a plane, like don't have Wi-Fi. That's my biggest nightmare, L.O.L. And then he's, you know, away from Wi-Fi for 12 hours, going to Seal. And then this happens.

And so everyone's like, what, like, did he rug? Did he do whatever? And then he gets there and immediately goes on a campaign tour of like trying to like address what's going on with the worst, like, handling of the situation, I guess I could say. He's going on coffee, coffee zilla, right? And, like, incriminating himself as, like, someone would, like, just like, yeah, you have this little clip here. It's just, like, talking about, like, pumping the price and, like, getting into

definitions around that stuff. He went on a few podcasts and did the stuff. And he just, he looks horrible. So in... He did the Hayden Adam, oh, not Hayden Adams. So, yo, sorry, yeah. He did the Hayden Davis strategy? Same thing.

And, but, like, which is funny because this is shortly after the by bit stuff, right, where the crisis management was like impeccable right like it was a masterclass and then now we have a you know six in a row of these events of people just like going on and saying the dumbest thing so it was just fun to see in real time frankly as someone that's not impacted at all yeah yeah so what was your what's your takeaway that's your learning lesson i like oh m is i don't even know if too many people are like familiar with om it's a layer one that is meant for real world assets and so this is kind of just like like kind of away from people's general focus of attention.

I learned there's some lore to this, right? Because I'm not deep in the Pocodot in our ecosystem. But my friends, my friends who are said like, okay, mantra is actually something that was launched back in the day. You may remember Poka Starter, which was like a launch pad way back in the day. They launched a bunch of things that were kind of used the branding, like the brand name of PocaDot, even though they weren't affiliated at all. And a lot of those projects were just like not well received and or long for this world.

A lot of them went down to zero. So this was a project that was launched through that and stayed in the PocaDot ecosystem. But even people within Pocod, I have friends of that again, they're trench warriors inside of Pocateod. They're like, no one's heard of this thing. No one uses this thing. Like it's just like it's got like $4 million in total TVL on the chain. Like it was just not a very aware. They were not aware of the ecosystem.

And then so to see this, they were not surprised. And they're just like, yeah, it has a pretty illustrious. history inside of this chart looks like crime man yeah look at this thing so the token chart goes all the way back to september of 2020 where the price was that candle is so that kind that candle is so so stark it looks like just the end of the graph it looks like it's like oh it didn't like register today like so that's all that is but no it's that's the price it's crazy that the token has five years of lindy like it's existed for five years and for the vast majority of its time It spent its lifespan between six cents, six cents and 20 cents.

And then, you know, in January of 2024, it starts to actually break through. It goes from six cents to 75 cents in May to a dollar and a half in October. And then, you know, in January of this year, up to $4. And then it gets up to $7 at the peak, $7.8 at the peak. And then it goes to zero. And like just the shape of that graph to me is highly suspect. Yeah, there was a lot of commentary around the market makers assigned to and you saw some of that on the other side

of the actual fallout of this chart where like, okay, like if, I don't know if they're actually a U.S. entity, but like the SEC is coming forward some guidelines on how these projects need to what they need to disclose and like saying the market makers, saying like the agreements they have in place,

all this shit so that us as ecosystem participants can see like who's behind potentially creating this chart. Like if we do see some suspected, suspect repeat patterns like this and like we believe there is some manipulation, Maybe if this is repeated across multiple projects, we can like find patterns of like maybe not the most genuine price action across projects. I just see a tweet maybe yesterday and it had six or seven or eight different tokens. And all the tokens had that same.

I mean, the market has done very similar things to tokens between 20 and 200. But like it's kind of unfortunate for us, all of us in the industry that if you can go and you can pick out, you know, throw a dart and you'll pick out a chart that looks like it has been going down for two years in a row. And even worse with like doesn't even have a main net. I guess I don't really have a comment there. But a lot of token charts look exactly the same right now. There was some news on that one though too, right? I thought Rishi was at.

Yeah, I don't know what's going on with that news. Blockworks reported that Rushi has taken a leave of absence. Rushi, again, Rishi is the founder of move. Rushi denied it saying he's totally with. team. There's like mixed reporting here. I don't really know what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. Likewise. I had seen people saying rumors of like, oh, I had heard this before this actually happened. They were claiming they got internal messages from Slack. So it was like almost a coup of sorts. But he's like, I'm literally on a stage in APEC talking about AI and movement. So like, I don't know what

you guys are talking about and showing pictures of his still having an active email. So who knows, but it's never a dull day in crypto. That's right. Yeah, the Rushi is definitely one of the subjects of crypto Twitter, ire, I will say. He's polarizing. He's very polarizing, yes. Very aggressive founder, very polarizing. We will wait to see what happens with all of that.

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It only generates cryptographic proofs. Here's how it works in three steps. First, register and verify. Use the self app to scan your biometric passports RFID chip. Self verifies authenticity with zero knowledge proofs. Each passport creates one unique identity. Second, you can share proofs privately. Third party apps request identity proofs,

like confirming you're over 18. You can also link proofs securely to public wallets for airdrops or governance participation. And then last secure verification. Apps validate your proofs instantly on chain, like on cello or off chain. Audited by ZK security, the self app is live on iOS and PlayStore. Visit self.xy-Z and follow self-proticle on X. One last big news of the week is Radium has launched Launch Lab, which is a token launch pad.

So a couple weeks ago, maybe a month ago, Pump Fun launched PumpSwap, which is their AMM. Their Uniswap equivalent. It's a radium competitor because it's all on Solana. And so Pump Fun, the token launch pad is moving up the stack to create a decks. And they are decoupling their need of Radium. So rather than graduating their tokens to Radium, they are graduating their tokens to their own decks to get their own liquidity on their own protocols. Radium responds by creating LaunchLab, which is their own unit swap, pump fund competitor. And so now they are going down the stack to create a token launch pad that would, of course, graduate tokens back to Radium.

This is a natural response that we're seeing. So we're seeing this Pump Fun versus Radium War arms race continue. I think general sentiment is that this token launch pad is not going to have nearly the same amount of traction that Pump Fun has just because Pump Fund's brand is so big. That's where you go to launch tokens. That's where the liquidity is. Any thoughts on this, Brad? I totally agree. So you're right in the directional moves of both teams.

Pump Fun is going up to stack. Radium's going down. And one of those owns the, those two things owns the user, right? Pump Fun is the one you mentioned. You've used the branding, right? But it's the same thing, right? They've always maintained the relationship with the user.

It goes, like if you go and you launch a token, you're sitting on the Pump Fund website. And then once it goes to Radium or previously when it went to Radium, you would go to Jupiter. Right? Like you never really interacted with Radium. It's just kind of this infrastructure in the back end. And so there's no like brand Lindy there,

no loyalty, no whatever. And we've actually, this isn't the first iteration. of Pump Fun having to stand up against someone who conceivably could be a good competitor, right? Deck Screener launched their own version of this. Actually, it's probably a year ago at this point, six months ago. Same thing, right? Deck Screener is somewhere where everyone goes to sit there and monitor tokens even after they've existed beyond Pump Fun. They launched their own launch pad, all this stuff.

And it's just no one left Pump Fun because Pump Fun owned the user. They're the ones that sat there and now they have the capital to even build better products because they've earned what six hundred million dollars in fees over the last year like just truly astounding so now they have the brand and the funds to be able to basically clobber anyone over the head so cool novel but i don't somewhat novel i don't see it being something long for this world when it comes to just like trying to stand up to pump yeah at least you you are seeing fees drop uh across the sacks so when um pump fund launched pump swap they reduced a lot of the fees and I think this is the same thing happening with radium

and their launch pad, their fees are going down. There was this early, early crypto thought in crypto design where if you have a fee, if you establish a fee inside of your permissions protocol, people are just going to fork it and then remove the fee. That's not exactly how it played out because things have still maintained some amount of fees, but the fees do have very strong competitive pressures

and the moats around those fees are something like, you know, users and liquidity. And so we are still saying that fee pressure still drop to zero, but it's being maintained by the strength of, like, user and liquidity moats is what I'm seeing here. Yeah, and that's something that's been around for a long time, right? Uniswap Labs just runs a front end and charges a fee on top of it whenever you have stuff like Defi Lama doing Lama swap, which is aggregates for free, right?

Like we've always had access to these tools that allow us to, and that's the benefit of public protocols, right? Permission with blockchains, all this shit is people can actually launch this stuff and be competitive and squeeze these things to zero and actually functionally turn them into just infrastructure, public infrastructure, to a degree. But having that stuff open and copyable, forcible, whatever allows us to do that. And yeah, so Uniswops Labs said, I don't, I think it'll be the same for pump where it's just like there's going to be a little bit of stickiness to brand and stickiness to the utilization

and comfort. Like, just people use metamask today, even though I would say it's objectively not that great of a wallet. But so, yeah, there's just comments on that. Brad, that wraps up all the news that I have for us to talk about. Anything top of mind for you that you're looking forward to in the short term, the weeks, the months coming up? Like, what's living rent-free in your head these days?

It's just shipping the chain, right? So we're trying to iterate through TestNet, trying to now we're going to get ready to kick off this next cohort of people with our Mega Mafia 2.0, right? So we're going to find another group of founders that want to come and build on on mega-eath and and again we do the co-living thing so we're going to go to a couple remote places for 30 to 30 days at a time just to co-build build camaraderie like try to really find PMF help them go through raising all that kind of stuff so focusing on make sure we deliver the best

product for that as we go towards main net and then if you want to hear me talk more you see to contribute to the modern market I do daily shows Monday Wednesday Friday in the morning feel free to stop in 7 p.m. Eastern or 7 a.m. Eastern I should say. All right we will get all of those links in the show notes. You can follow a bread at zero X bread guy. He is the profile picture that looks like a slice of bread with sunglasses. Bread, thank you so much for helping me go through the news this week, my man. Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Bankless Nation, this will be the last time we have a guest on the weekly roll-up. I won't say anything more because you can put two and two

together if you're paying attention. So we will see you guys all in a week. Bankless nation, you guys know how it goes. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but nonetheless, we are headed west. This is frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you're with us on the Bankless Journey. Thanks a lot.