Bankless - ROLLUP: Milei’s Memecoin Scandal | KAITO Airdrop | The Fed’s QT Pivot? | Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

This week’s Weekly Rollup, David and Kain Warwick dive into Argentine President Milei’s LIBRA fiasco and Strategy’s bold $2B Bitcoin play, while we check out the new Kaito airdrop making waves. We also explore Ethereum’s biggest upgrade yet—Pectra—plus Monad’s high‐speed L1 testnet launch. Finally, we dig into the SEC’s fresh “CETU” cyber unit and what the brand‐new Infinex platform means for DeFi. Tune in for all the drama and alpha happening in the third week of February! ------ 📣RESERVE | INVEST IN CRYPTO NARRATIVES  https://bankless.cc/reserve ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax  🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain  ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle  🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo  🦋MORPHO | CRYPTO-BACKED LOANS  https://bankless.cc/Morpho  🏦ONDO | INSTITUTIONAL GRADE FINANCE https://bankless.cc/Ondo   ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/38  ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro, Libra, Memecoins, & ICOs https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1890611964994363769  https://dexscreener.com/solana/bzzmnvfm7t6zsgfelxzermrxfkanldo4fszvsisxcszz  https://x.com/bubblemaps/status/1890531084221182326  https://x.com/JMilei/status/1890606683291779195  https://x.com/KelsierVentures/status/1890914579493863532  https://x.com/MemeCoin_Track/status/1892324967196569675  https://x.com/JupiterExchange/status/1891181433588470052  https://x.com/hellochow/status/1891341548115149190  https://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1891285564713836830  https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1890611982320971992  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-18/argentina-scandal-fuels-selloff-on-favorite-memecoin-platform  https://x.com/RunnerXBT/status/1891400277535703389  https://polymarket.com/event/milei-out-as-president-of-argentina-in-2025?tid=1740070784399  29:59 Markets https://www.strategy.com/press/strategy-announces-proposed-private-offering-of-2b-of-convertible-senior-notes_02-18-2025  38:51 Kaito Airdrop https://yaps.kaito.ai/  https://x.com/KaitoAI/status/1890379872280682548  https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/kaito  https://x.com/divine_economy/status/1892597817434145113  https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1892585101873033380  53:16 Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1890534315148132521  1:00:21 Monad launched a public testnet https://x.com/monad_xyz/status/1892227817149997212  1:00:47 SEC Launches New Cyber Unit ‘CETU’ Aims to Protect From Bad Actors https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-42  1:06:52 Infinex https://x.com/infinex_app/status/1887028112099283198  1:11:29 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 where we cover the weekly news, drama, and developments in the crypto space. This is the third week of February today on the show. I have the pleasure of being joined by Kane Warwick. Kane, how you doing, my man? Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Just got off a flight from Hong Kong,

so it would be fun. It was a messy week. Are you sure you are ready to go through the messy-ass week of news that I have for you? Always ready. Okay, Kane, where were you when Javier Malay dropped the Libra meme coin? It was just before I headed off to Hong Kong. Did you buy?

I didn't buy it. It's funny. I had that whole thread about Trump and just being like washed on the trenches and not not having like enough energy to deal with it. And I saw it and I was just like, I'm too tired. I can't handle this. We're too many loops down the roller coaster. Okay. So I'm going to go through.

there is a ton of things that happened as a result of the fallout of Javier Malay. I have like 20 links in front of me to go through it all. And so, can maybe just like sit back and relax while I like run through some of the facts? And then we'll kind of debrief about all of it at the very end. So on Valentine's Day at 5.01 p.m. Eastern Time, Javier Malay tweets out this tweet saying Argentina grows, this project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups drops a Salana contract address. The name of this project, in quotes, is called Viva Libradad Project.com, ticker Libra,

and then a Solana contract address. And so if you bought this on Valentine's Day, congratulations, you are a true crypto bro. The Libra token immediately launched at something like a $2.5 billion valuation, and then it jumped up to $5 billion within 30 minutes. And then about from 90 minutes from launch, it was down to $30 million. So inside of 90 minutes from launch, it went up to $5.5 billion and then down to less than half a billion dollars. Already people's just like warning signs were triggered with this Libra launch. 82% of the Libra token were held in one cluster of wallets that all spawned the Libra token.

Also, no tokenomics were shared. Unlike the Trump token, no tokenomics were shared. just the president of Argentina tweeting out this Salana contract address. And so people's warning signs are all ready firing. But then I guess it doesn't really matter because the thing had already dumped inside of 90 minutes. There was another tweet from Javier Malade saying a few hours ago I posted a tweet like I have so many countless times supporting a supposed private projects, which I obviously have no connection to. He has since deleted the tweet and finishes the tweet with to the filthy rats of the political. castle who want to take advantage of this situation to do harm.

I want to say that every day they confirm how lowly politicians are. They increase our conviction to kick them out in the arse. This is just day one. There is this individual that arises on this scene named Hayden Davis from something called Kelseyor Ventures, who I don't think anyone had ever heard of before. Kane, before this, have you heard of Kelseyor Ventures? No, it's weird. Like, I'm in a lot of chats and, you know, there's different cabals that have been mentioned,

but these guys never came up to the best my knowledge. Yeah, yeah. And this individual Hayden Adams, not Hayden Adams, very strictly not Hayden Adams. I was about to say, you're using its full name. How much did Hayden Adams pay you to make sure to use it full name? This is the second Hayden that I've ever come across in crypto. First one, Hayden Adams of Uniswap. A great guy, Hayden Davies, who is supposedly behind this Trump meme coin, along with Kelsey

Aventures, puts out this statement about trying to explain what just happened. And it's kind of a mess of an explanation. He puts a lot of blame upon snipers, sniper bots that were going to come and snipe the supply. And then later, also, Hayden went on a CoffeeZilla interview. If you do not who know who CoffeeZilla is, he is this YouTuber who kind of just exposes scams across the world and very frequently comes into the crypto space because we tend to produce a lot of scams. And so we invoked CoffeeZilla. CoffeeZilla posted an hour and a half long interview with this Hayden individual where Hayden admitted that he sniped, Kelsey Aventures,

sniped the Libra supply ahead of two front run actual snipers. Maybe not the best tactical decision in this whole mess to go on CoffeeZilla. Maybe not as well thought out as, you know, this criminal mastermind. We thought he was, but here we are. It does seem very much like an SBF post-F-F-F-TX list like publicity tour. Just meltdown. The man does not comprehend at all that he just might be in at least a little bit of legal trouble. Yeah.

He thinks he's good. Just crashing out. Completely crashing out. Completely crashing out. Yeah. It doesn't stop with Hayden, though, who, somehow, we will reveal shortly here, got Javier Malay to tweet out this tweet. So we'll talk about how he actually got that to happen. But there's also something that's worth talking about in this whole

complex is Jupiter and Meteora. The Meow, who is the founder of Jupiter, is not his actual name, had to put out the statement saying, hey, their early employees of Jupiter were seen trading the Libra token, but Jupiter had nothing to do with the launch of this. And this token. We had no employees that had any insider information. So he had to put out the statement that Jupiter and nobody in the Jupiter orbit really had any sort of insider knowledge. Miao, again, founder of Jupiter, had founded this thing called Meteora, which is kind of like a more sophisticated AMM with a bunch of levers and gadgets and dials to really kind of be able to tweak a Dexon Solana. And Meteora does not have the same level of deniability.

So there's Ben Chow from Meteora who has since stepped it down, who also tried to distance himself from this Libra launch. But as it turns out, there is this association between Meteora and Hayden Davies, Davis, that has been ongoing. So not just the Libra token, but also the M3M3 token, which I think stands for a meme, which is related to the Meteora token, is the meme coin that was launched on Meteora, as well as, as we find out, the Melania token. So the Melania token, Hayden admits to once again on the coffeezilla interview,

that he was also a part of the Melania token launch. And so we have this one individual who is finding ways to reach out to people of influence and convince them that it's a great idea to launch a token. And then they get referred to Meteora as kind of this technical service provider. there's the idea out there that it's actually Meteora who's trying to snipe the supply ahead of Hayden Davies. And so it's actually Ben Chow

or somebody in the Meteor orbit who's actually doing the sniping and it's actually Hayden Davies and Meteora that's going head to head to try and snipe the supply of this meme coin that is being tweeted out by Javier Malay. Now it's worth noting how

this individual Hayden Davies who is a United States citizen lives in L.A. got access to Javier Malay. And it's reported that Hayden Davies found a way to reach out to Javier Malay's sister and wrote messages that have been turned into screenshots on Twitter that say that to the effect that he sends her money and that she is in her total control. And through Javier's sister, he is able to gain access to Javier,

which is how a tweet coming out of the president of Argentina had a salon a contract address. in it. This, I think, Kane, I have a take for you. This is not nearly as bad as FTX, but this is the worst thing in the crypto industry since FTX. How do you like that take? It's the worst thing

this year so far, I would say. It's February, bro. I know, right? I know. It's dark times. So I think the interesting thing about this is this is not a singular event or news story, right? Like this is

This is something like FTX that was bubbling under the surface for a long time, right? Maybe not as long as FTX, but I think the thing about FTCS was it really undermined your view of reality, right? Like, I had conversations with SPF where I was like, where's, you know, on Twitter? Like, where are you pulling this yield farming money from? And it was like, oh, it's Alamed. And so, you know, all of a sudden you had to question your perception of like all the things that had happened, right? And I think this is one of those things where a lot of people in space have been like, okay, it's a, you know, there's obviously these different cabals doing crimes and, you know,

they're manipulating launches and they're bribing people to do, you know, token launches. But the idea that there was, you know, one puppet master in the background controlling this whole thing that no one had ever heard of is like so wild. It's really, you know, and then all of a sudden you go, okay, well, who, if they're able to compromise this person, who else did they compromise? And so there's this kind of unwinding of a lot of stuff that's happened. And now you've got a singular thread that runs through it all. And I think that's been kind of the wildest part of the story is that there's just this

crackhead guy running around, you know, bribing and manipulating people and taking advantage of different platforms and teams. And, you know, it's insane that someone was able to get that much control and influence without anyone really knowing that this was going on. Yeah, I would be curious to know, and I think we're going to find out, because I'm going to go ahead and guess that there's already active investigations going on to be. The man is it, is it lives in, he resides in L.A. He resides in Los Angeles. He's, he's onshore. And people lost a lot of money with this. Dave Portnoy was paid tokens ahead of

launch, was paid tokens, Libra tokens by Hayden Davis to promote the Libra. the Libra coin when it came out. Dave Portnoy returned those tokens saying that he, because Hayden requested Dave to not tell anyone that he was going to promote the Libra coin. And so Dave returned those 6 million coins, which I don't know what

the total value was, but millions of dollars. But Dave had insider information, and so therefore he bought the token thinking that he was going to buy early. And I think many people bought the token five, 10, 15 minutes into the launch, and they all ended up down because there are these very early snipers that were trying to snipe the supply.

And when the initial valuation of the thing comes out at $2.5 billion, then everyone's going to lose. Dave Portnoy was refunded his money that he lost by Hayden Davis, the tune of $5 million. And now everyone is very upset that Dave Portnoy is getting a freebie return on his capital that he risked after calling like the crypto trader bros like a bunch of crybabies, which I think is quite ironic. And I do agree with you, Kane, that, like, I think this was, what we are really seeing here is the exposing of the industrialization of the meme coin launch. And it was absolutely going to get worse every single time Hayden Davis and this structure

of incentives between Meteora and other morally compromised individuals. If that was allowed to grow, it would have just gotten worse and worse and worse. It was just so happened that when the president of Argentina launched a coin and the incentives collapsed between Meteora and Hayden Davis that everyone realizes the gig was up. And so what started off as like a relatively fair, fun casino of meme coin launches that was a reaction to the high FDV low float meta actually turned into having something with like no rules, no regulations, no guardrails. And once again, the grifters come in, figure out how to game the system and blow it up for the rest of us. And this is a pattern that we've seen in crypto time and time again.

Yeah, I mean, the most interesting thing to me, even, you know, being on this show today and seeing the process of kind of unwinding this and how many people are looking into it is like, if this had been going on and we had the level of, you know, kind of vetting of people and an investigative, you know, process that's going on now, 2018 would have been a very different place, right? You know, 2018 ICOs, it was quite. Prime Central. You had these guys in Singapore running ICO Mills. You know, I met some of them. Like when I was in Singapore, so I was like, oh, you got to meet these guys. And I turned up to this office. And I was like, you know, what are you guys doing? And they're like, oh, we've got a bunch of projects.

And, you know, they basically would just find a team of like 20 year old kids and write a white paper for them, do their tokenomics, go and, you know, find a couple of syndicates to like start, you know, basically buying up the tokens in pre-sales, then they would just flip them. They would get a bunch of the supply, 5, 10, 15, 20% of the supply, and just flip it and just dump it straight into the market after they got listed on, you know, whatever exchange, right? So as you say, this is the story that's very, you know, very old in crypto, right? You know, grifters will turn up and exploit the permissionless and, you know, low barriers to entry that we have in crypto to just extract value.

This, what is interesting to me is just how quickly it all happened. You know, you go from meme coins like 2023, you know, through like this is basically a thing that happened in the space of a year, you know, that this all became industrialized and, and, you know, a few players gained enough market share in, in, in, grift launches, right, to basically become monopolist. What do you think about just like the level of inherent griftiness in the meme coin vertical as a whole? Because the ICOs, I was very pilled by ICOs because I was young and naive and that's

what happens when you come into crypto. And now I look back and like, okay, that was actually just a bunch of just grift happening. Same thing concluded with even with defy summer where we end up with 10,000% APY pool two's. Same thing with NFTs. Like the Azuki like Elementals Mint, I think everyone kind of felt like jumped the shark. This is how all of these metas end. And then

there was like this interest of conversations of people talking on crypto Twitter about like, well, you know, let's rank all of these metas in terms of griftiness and talk about which ones were better. And I think this was a tweet that really rocketed around the Twitter sphere from Anatoli from Solana

who said, DFI summer was way worse. Leverage Loops that created Nasty House of Cards. there's virtually no contagion in meme coins. The Ethereum community, and I think the broader crypto community did not like this take. But what's your take on how grifty meme coins are and how you think about these things? So it's funny. I mean, like that tweet is one of the most retarded things I've ever seen, right? Like it just is, right?

And, you know, like I love Tolly. He's a very smart guy. But the interesting thing about that tweet, and you know, this is from a person who's tweeted some retarded stuff themselves, right? Like I'm not immune to this, right? that was coming from a place and you know totally said this later he was triggered by the fact that you had a bunch of defy people and eat the maxis pointing figures at uh at you know salana saying it's a crime chain and he's like guys like no this is not fair like you've just whitewashed history and pretended like this is all flowers and rainbows and defy summer and you know he didn't even go back to icos right like ignore defy for a second the icos were were you know just as bad if not worse than than meme coin Because the interesting thing about meme coins is, okay, you know, these guys pulled out 100 mil, right? You know, this Hayden, Hayden Davis guy pulled out 100 mil. You know, then you look at like Meteora and, you know, people added it up.

Let's say it was like $3 billion. Like the ELS ICO was $4 billion. Right? Like, you know, there were there were so many 50, 100, $150 million dollar ICOs in 2018 that just like evaporated. Right? So, you know, in terms of the scale of money at that time in the industry as well, $150 million ICO was like, you know, 1% of the market cap of Ethereum or something like that, right? Like, it's, you know, we're talking an insane amount of money relative to everything else. And I think one of the reasons why meme coins were not as bad as they could have been is most of the rugs happened pre-exchange listing, right?

The exchange actually did a pretty good job of vetting coins and, you know, as this accelerated and it was like 90 minutes between launch and rug, right? You know, the liquidity that was actually in these pools was far lower, right? Like if you start an ICO, people put $150 million worth of ETH into the ICO and you walk away. That's $150 million gone, right? You can have a meme coin that has like $2 million worth of liquidity. in a $2 billion market cap and, you know, you rug it, you only get $2 million. So there was a bit more of a constraint on the amount of money that could be extracted, but they were getting better.

They were improving their techniques, right? And that's why I think it all kind of unwound. So, you know, at the end of the day, I get why Salana people are frustrated by the finger pointing from the ETH crowd of like, you know, you guys are running a crime chain. The fact is that Solana is the chain where there's the most activity. There's the most stuff going on. And grifters are going to go to where the liquidity is, right? They're going to go where the money is.

And so it's not surprising that there's crime happening on Salana because that's where meme coins are happening. The same thing happened with NFTments. Same thing that would happen with ICOs. Same thing would happen, you know, in Defy summer to an extent. It's just this whole defy contagion thing is nonsense, unfortunately, for Tolly. What do you think about just like the meme coin? sector as a whole. I think if you look at the Salana

meme coin market and just generally meme coins post this Liberty token launch, things are like down in the red pretty damn bad. Like meme coins have all retraced. The meme coin sector is like very, very burned. Somebody, one of these tweets is putting the, putting a measure of $6 billion of market cap has been erased from the meme coin market. Salana, the meme coins are dominally on Salana. This even makes it way into Bloomberg, a Bloomberg, headline says Argentina scandal fuels sell off on favorite meme coin platform, which is,

of course, talking about Solana. I think, of course, I don't really think anyone thinks meme coins are going to go anywhere. Memcoins are just kind of a primitive, primitive that we have in this industry. But what do you think about like the health or longevity or vitality of the meme coin, like vertical going forward? I think, you know, the decoupling of crypto, right? Like the, you know, the correlation decoupling that happened in Defy Summer has just continued, right? We've seen cycles within cycles. So, you know, you had Defi Summary, you had this

defy cycle. Then you had an Altil 1 cycle that followed it plus NFTs. You know, this is all following the ICO cycle. Then it transitioned into the low float cycle, you know, low float high FDV cycle. That was a whole thing for a while. A lot of people lost a lot of money on that, you know, and it's probably not even quantified. If you went and looked at all of the tokens and, and let's not forget SBF was the one that created that meta, right? The Samcoins, right? You know, 1% float, 200 bill FDB and then down only. A lot of people lost a lot of money on that, but it's harder to quantify, right?

Because it's not a direct rug where you can look at the chart and go, okay, well, these people extracted that, right? And then meme coins. So, you know, we've had cycles within cycles, but meme coins have been around for a long time. Same thing as NFTs. It's just that, you know, they went parabolic. So I think that there is a chance that this is the moment, the top for the attention of meme coins and the market pivots to something else, especially because we have seen kind of the reemergence of ICOs. Like this is maybe the opportunity for ICOs to make a comeback.

And, you know, the interesting thing about ICOs is they have more utility in theory, right? you know, ICOs gave us Ethereum. They gave us AVE. They gave us a bunch of cool stuff last cycle. Even if 99% of it was dumb, the 1% that wasn't is amazing and it's a good trade. So maybe ICOs come back. Maybe something else new and weird emerges. It'll be interesting to see what happens for the rest of this cycle because I think we're

still in a macro bull market. So something will emerge. Something will capture attention. Yeah. because there's always a demand to speculate. Meme coins, meme coins do feel like a logical conclusion of sorts of the token speculation game. And a lot of this like token speculation game has really had to route around like regulation.

Regulation has been very constraining around like what kind of ways the crypto industry can play with tokens. And meme coins seem to be some sort of like logical conclusion of just like it's a pumped off fun interface. You can spit out a token. All you need to do is upload a JPEG and you're done. That's it. To me, if we go back to ICOs, it actually kind of feels like we're going full circle. Like we've reached the end of the road. And now we have to hop back to the very beginning where there is a formal sale.

You put up capital at risk on the same terms as everyone else. And then we just kind of do this whole system all over again. I would like ICOs to return. I think ICOs are a superior distribution mechanism. I don't know if you have to take on that. The interesting thing about meme coins is it's the platonic ideal of speculation, right? You know, to just pop into existence, you know, it's a very PVP game, right? There's low liquidity versus, you know, they're low float high FDB tokens.

Interestingly, right? Not in the sense of, you know, low token float, right? But like the actual liquidity that's available is very small, right? So it's a game of musical chairs where whoever gets out first, you know, wins, right? And so that, I think, is fine, except when someone is able to exploit information asymmetry, right? Or technical asymmetry to, you know, max extract. And the problem is the people who, you know, same thing with ICOs, right? A lot of teams raised money and just disappeared. And that money got pulled out of the ecosystem, right? They dumped their eth, crush the price of

converted into Fiat and then drove off into sunset in the Lambo. And so, you know, you see that same thing happen. It's one of the reasons why we, as the crypto community, I think are getting better at having an immune system that protects against these things. But, you know, to go back to the Tolly tweet, I think one of the challenges for Solana is they need to work out how to self-police, right?

They need to work out how to identify bad actors in the system and not have, you know, platforms like Meteora get co-opted for extraction, right? And that's hard because as the underdog, there has been this mindset of like, if anyone says anything about it about Salana, kill them. Right. And so, you know, if someone says something about someone doing something in Salana, there's this immediate reaction of like, you know, circle the wagons, defend, defend, protect the queen, right?

And that's great when you're the underdog, but when you are the dominant platform that has the most activity, then that doesn't work because the grifters have shown up. They're in your house. Right. You're circling the wagons around the grifters. Exactly. The grifters are like, great.

It's amazing. They're just filling their pockets and then, you know, they escape. And so, you know, you have to have the ability to discern a good actor, versus a bad actor. And I think Salana is discovering that capability in real time. Ken, I'm about to pull up in the polymarket, which is going to show you the odds, polymarket odds, of Javier Malay being impeached

by the end of 2025. I thought it was going to be the odds of us having a rematch in Singapore. There is no market for that. I'm going to get that market. I'm going to get that market off. What do you think the odds are that Javier Malay is impeached by the end of this year. I think it's probably like 20% or something, 15, 20%.

Wow, well done. 16%. Okay. 16%. That's not bad. I did do a stream with six Argentines, just to hear their reaction about what's going on in the streets. None of them really think Javier Malay is going anywhere.

They think this is kind of like a news cycle event that will move on. There is a hearing and there will be an impeachment trial, but this is, according to just the people that I know in Argentina, this is more opportunistic by Javier Millet's opposition and there doesn't really seem to be much weight, mainly because what is Argentina's version of a Congress would actually have to vote Javier Malay out and the current Congress. Yeah, like, Javier is Javier's party.

Yeah, my heuristic on these things is like, you know, it's a lot of noise. They don't usually go anywhere. If you're going to depose someone, you know, usually they get their head cut off or something, right? So, yeah. Okay, Kane, that was all that we're going to talk about about Libra. Unless there's anything else that I haven't brought up about the whole Libra debacle or any last, like, comments you have before we move on?

No, I think we're covered it. All right, Bankless Station, we're going to hear Keynes takes about the Bitcoin price, the ETH price. We're going to talk about just the markets that whole. Michael Saylor is once again buying Bitcoin. So that's good news, which is why Bitcoin's back up to $98,000. But before we get there, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Starting with Uniswap, it's a browser wallet. It's a mobile wallet.

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But I think the biggest thing of note is it was interesting that Michael Saylor last week put out a tweet saying, Micro Strategy has purchased no new Bitcoins this week. We have purchased no Bitcoins. They put out an announcement of a non-purchase. This week, they are putting out a stress release announcing the private offering of $2 billion of convertible senior notes. So Micro Strategy announcing that they're going to be buying two. billion dollars of Bitcoin coming in hot.

And then the current, also the total crypto market cap is at $3.3 trillion. Can just broad sentiment, broad strokes, state of the market. How do we feel about where we are right now? You said we're in a larger, more macro bull market. I think this cycle has been confusing to many. How are you feeling? Bill of bull market, relax, my favorite tagline. It, you know, again, the end of Deepi summer,

Right. When defy started falling off cliff in May, if you were in the defy trenches, it felt real bad. But, you know, Alt-L-Wans, Bitcoin, everything kept ripping, right? You know, and so we had another six months of basically up only, right? And I think this is one of those things where cycles within cycles. We had this meme coin cycle. You know, it may it may kind of deflate now, but something will replace it and we'll see, we'll see a kind of continued strength

with Bitcoin leading. And then eventually, you know, and this is, this has happened in every single market, people get to a point where euphoria kicks in and they're looking to outperform Bitcoin. A simple 3x is not enough, right? And they're looking for a 10x, 20x, whatever.

And so that's when that rotation out of Bitcoin, you know, looking for for the next 10x, really starts to accelerate, you know, the things that are in the top 50, top 100, you know, really ripping. And so I think we will see that again probably towards the end of the year. You are calling for business as usual. Even though up to this point, I would say everyone is talking about how different and odd and weird this cycle is. Do you agree that it's weird? Or are you just saying that this is just what it looks like when you're inside of the inside of the cycle? cycle. This is what it looks like if you're not in the right thing at the right moment in cycle,

right? If you were in meme coins over the last six months, you've been having a good time, right? But remember, there are a lot of people that are sidelined for DFi summer. They're like, this is dumb, you know, we don't like it, you know, especially Bitcoin maxis, right? And so I just think those people who are sidelined, if you go back and read the timeline in late 2020, there are a lot, there's a lot of cope. There's a lot of cope. There's a lot of tears. There's a lot of people that are like, this is dumb. It's going to end badly or whatever. And so I think that I think it's not surprising. It's not surprising. And let's not forget, a lot of the people who were the dominant voices, influencers, KOLs or whatever from last cycle were kind of sideline in meme coins.

You know, a lot of the groups I'm in, they didn't fomo into meme coins until like the last couple of months, maybe even post-Trump, right? So they bolt the top, they're now wrecked. Of course there's like, you know, turning into Bitcoiners. Yeah, exactly. So I think it's unsurprising, but, you know, the macro setup is still there. There's a, also one of the big themes of this market is call it the VC chains,

but I don't know if that's totally fair. Things like Bear chain, story protocol is on here because it's up 220% on the week. Bear chain just launched. We have Monad incoming. I'm definitely forgetting a month. Say, Aptos, Sui. What do you think about the new cohort of chains? Is this same pattern that we've always seen before?

Is there anything that kind of stands out to you as an investing thing? I mean, again, like, let's go back to last cycle, right? Defy Summer leads into NFT mania plus Altel one season, right? You know, like, I think we're too stupid to not have an Altel one season. I think it's just going to happen again. But the All-Tel one season last cycle, happened because DeFi Summer blew out and overflowed

Ethereum's demand for block space and Ethereum is like I'm going to be decentralized and my block space is going to be really expensive and that created the Alt Layer 1 like mania because everyone realized Ethereum couldn't scale I don't see the same catalyst for like an Alt Layer 1 speculation game because we don't have... It's already starting my friend.

Is it? Is it? Interop, the Interop Wars, fragmentation you know, L2, like the the FUD against L2s, okay fine you've scaled, but, you know, you've broken the thing, right? Like the in-biting has even started, right? Like, a mean losing his mind on the timeline. You've got Martin, you know, you got Martin calling for canonical L-2s.

I've been saying we need to shut down the L2 tokens. It's creating, you know, confusion amongst, you know, new entrants. Like, do I buy E? Do I buy Arb? Do I buy the base token? Oh, there's no base token. Now what do I do? you know, so this setup, this narrative of like, ETH is broken from an investment standpoint

because of the fragmentation of L2 tokens, it's already there. The setup's there. It's ready. I agree that the pattern is there of crypto Twitter discussing many of the things that we discussed during a bull market, but what is missing to me is the new capital and the actual bull market side of these things.

I think we're all doing this like mock bull markets where the bull market is missing, except for in Bitcoin, soul, dogecoin, and ripple. The bull market is but narrowly impacting those things but not the crypto industry as a whole, I would say. Except meme coins.

We had a... Meme coins didn't drive adoption, did they? I don't think the stats back up meme coins actually bringing in new people. I don't think Dify Summer drove adoption. Defy summer was so PVP. Yeah. Like, no new people turned up to yams.

Like, it was onboarding existing crypto natives who were like, I guess I'm doing pool 200 billion percent APY farming now. I'm a farmer. Like, it was all the same people. Of course, it brought some new people in, but the new people don't come until euphoria kicks in. We haven't had euphoria. Okay, but then it was NFTs that did bring people in.

I'm just looking for the internal catalyst. Sure. And I don't think that that was meme coins, and I don't know what that is. And of course, we won't really know what that is until after we're experiencing it. But I'm like always kind of dubious that because I'm not really seeing some sort of like internal catalyst phenomenon mechanism that we're building inside of crypto that outside world really, really thinks is cool. I mean, there's, you know, Trump coin. We saw it with Moonshot, right? They onboarded, you know, to 300,000 people in space of a week, right?

So it wasn't nothing. Right. So there was a study on all of those addresses that got onboarded with Moonshot, and less than 1% did anything else on chain after buying the Trump coin. I mean, let's go and have a conversation about Coinbase Earn Maker deal, where they gave Coinbase like $200 million for people to make $5 CDPs, and people literally just like dump the thing and never went on chain. Like many such cases.

Like there's just a lot of examples of like, okay, fine, only 1% of people are out. activated, but that's still 4,000 new trench warriors that we got in the space of the week. You can do a lot of damage with 4,000 trenches. That's actually, that's not nothing. We're going to talk about the Kaido AirDrop, which I think is definitely the talk of the town, at least today. Thankfully, there's something else to talk about post-Libra drama. But before we talk about the Kaido AirDrop, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Reserve. Reserve is a permissionless platform that allows anyone to cruise.

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Reserve. Something that happened in the markets this week was the Qaeda AirDrop, which was a very high AirDrop and I saw many, many threads about the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars that people are going to get from their yaps. Turns out the like $100 per yap estimation came down to something like 13 cents per yap. So crypto Twitter kind of really overextended how much pay a payday they were going to get. Did you farm any gaps, Kane, were you a yapper? I was a yapper. I am a yapper. We also have our own YAP leaderboard for internet. And so I think, I think,

There was a little bit of opium post, you know, hyperliquid where people saw a bunch of perps traders, you know, get eight figure airdrops. And they're like, what about me? I'm, you know, I'm a good guy. I talk on Twitter too. And so I think that there was a little bit of opium there that that was going to play out. I haven't done the math on it to figure out, you know, the 13 cent, 17 cent thing. But yeah, I mean, it's a couple of one orders of magnitude off from expectations.

So that's going to have some sad people running around today. So if you're just listening to this on podcast and you're not on Twitter, Kydo is this crypto analytics platform that uses AI to kind of like aggregate, analyze and like surface data for both like on-chain data and off-chain data. Like a lot of Twitter data and social media data goes into just like pointers. towards where investors are allocating their attention. Like what narrative themes are capturing a lot of attention right now? And what we're looking at right now is the Infinex yap board.

So who is yapping and who's like tweeting or talking about Infinex? And there's like whole entire sectors. It's like who's talking about defy, who's talking about AI, how sentiment. So it's kind of just like an aggregation, a data platform using sentiment analysis and some AI tools as well. And they release their token, Kido, and they distributed it to people who were, yapping, as in people who were talking about different sectors of the crypto market, you would have to, of course, go to Kyto, sign up, and then you could start to accrue some yaps

based off of how well your tweets performed. Bigger, banger tweets got you more yaps. Kane, how does it feel to be fourth place on your own yapper leaderboard? It's pretty dark, actually. Like, you know, I said this a few times during the, I was active in the bearer chain leaderboard as well. right and I would like have these tweets talking about bearer and then it would start to pump it would have like you know two three 400 likes and then I'll be like oh you idiot you didn't even say bearer chain in there right like because you have to you have to put you have to say it yeah like the AI is not smart enough to know you're talking about bearer chain if you make some dumb joke about it right um and so uh so you know I had a couple of good tweets that went um that that pumped a little bit but didn't actually have the hook um so yeah I'm not a great yapper, it turns out. I think the interesting thing about YAPS, right? Let's talk about market

dynamics for a second. There were people who sort of predicted this, and I was talking to a few people in Hong Kong, the difference or the delta between expectations of YAPs and the reality on the ground, right, in terms of like people are being, uh, people are talking their book,

even before they have a book, right? They're talking. They knew they were getting a book. So, so it's like you've given the most skillful people at pumping bags, a free bag, and they're going to pump it to the moon.

So of course they're talking, you know, the delta between that and reality is probably as, as skewed as any other project in history. Right. Because you, you weaponized the biggest, you know,

people to talk their book. There was, you know, like it's organic in one sense, but it's also like these people are, it's like you got a bunch of actors, right? To like go and sit around at a party, pretending to have fun, right? And it's like, oh, that looks like the most fun party ever.

And then 20 minutes later, they're like, where's my cash? And you're like, oh, it wasn't a party at all. It was just people were pretending to have fun. Once it was announced that Kydo had done the snapshot, so no more Yap's recruiting to anyone, I did notice just a complete hollowing out of reply guys in my DL, like in my replies and everything.

And this Twitter just got like reshifted and everything that's got a lot more normal very, very quickly. Yeah, I mean, the actors were, you know, we stopped paying the actors. The actors went home, yeah. Yeah, the fact of like, all right, job done, see you later. There's one billion tokens that came in at a $1.30 valuation. As people were claiming and selling them, it fell down to about 90 cents. is currently resurging back up to $1.80, which gives Kido a $1.8 billion valuation.

Something that's different about Kido, it's not a defy app, it is not a protocol. I don't think they have any plans on decentralizing their system. I don't think decentralization really makes sense in the Kido stack. So the unique thing here is this is a centralized company incorporated in Seattle, Washington, so inside the United States, issuing a token, there was no there's no sale or anything. So I believe they're claiming that it doesn't pass the Howie test. But this is not a common activity by centralized companies to issue tokens. It does feel bullish.

It feels like this is something that could not have happened in anything outside of the Trump era. Something that also I thought was pretty cool. This is a tweet from David Phelps who just basically tweeted out that Kyto use its own AI analytics to determine who is actually values aligned with Qaeda. And so I think Kydo as a function of the algorithm to determine who gets how many tokens, try to like map out who is bullish or bearish on Kaido. And if you are a Kaido bear, then you got D, you got Nerfed. Your token supplies got nerfed, which makes so much sense. So like all of your bull posters receive more Qaeda tokens.

And anyone who's like talking negatively about Kyto is like receiving less tokens. And the way that they did that was they used AI to actually kind of evaluate. you which yappers are more kido aligned i thought that was pretty clever we need this system for ethereum we need to we need to scale this out to the social layer of ethereum right um look i'm i'm all for uh bear tears right like you know the more punishment bears take the better so um i think this is a really cool uh cool approach um you know we're going to see uh more uh more kind of innovation in the AirDrop meta, I think. Air drops aren't going away.

But, you know, trying to get alignment. It was interesting. We did our portion of the Pengu AirDrop at Infinex last week. And it was about a month later because we had to, you know, so we got to carve out of Pengu from the original AirDrop for InfiniteX users. And so we had to distribute that. But it took a little while. We had some issues.

And so eventually we got the platform ready to go. We did the AirDrop. and, you know, a lot of times people who jeed an airdrop, they're like, well, it was going to be down only. I had to, you know, rush out the door or whatever. I mean, look at Kaido, right? You know, $1.40 to $0.90. All these people or whatever it was, dollar, yeah, $1.40 down to 90 cents. You know, people rushing out the door, right, that first wave of people.

And then, you know, they starts to grind up, right? And so what was interesting to me, though, is a month later, Pengu is at one cent. it's not volatile, it's sitting there. There's no rush out the door. There's plenty of time, right? And yet we saw this activity where people just instantly cheated this air drop when they got it. And I was kind of shocked by that. I was like, you know, the excuse of like, oh, you know, it was a race condition and you needed to get out was gone.

And yet they still dumped. So what's interesting about that is we know who that was. And, you know, we've got a whole bunch of other people turning up saying, we also want to do an airdrop. And I'm like, well, you know what? If you instigated it, we're probably going to nerve you. Like, you don't deserve an air drop. Like, if some other project turns up and says, hey, we want an air drop to you,

maybe it would give you 10% on the dollar of what you would have gotten. Because the whole point of anirdrop is to buy attention. And if you were just like, I'm out of here instantly, right? Also, I hold on a Pudgy Penguin, so I took it personally as well. also. So, you know, I think that we will see an evolution in this process because air drops, as much as I think air drops are a very inefficient way of getting attention. They're not going anywhere.

People like them too much. We also saw on Infinex, a 10x uplift and activity during this paint share drop. So, you know, it's just a hard thing to wean ourselves off of. You know, the world loves air drops, but we need to find better ways of distributing them. Do you think future airdrops will take in data from past air drops as relates to wallets or Twitter accounts? Because if you wanted to collect your CIDO AirDrop, you needed to connect your Twitter account. So now selling or holding behavior is linked to people's Twitter accounts. Do you think in the future or future air drops will like try and

ingest this information to like kind of inform their distribution? I think we've seen it before. People have tried to do like multi, you know, optimism did this, right? They did the, you know, three waves of airdrops and, you know, if you weren't aligned, which I guess is like communist speak for Eugidid. But, you know, if you're not aligned with the project, then you didn't get the next air drop or you got a much lower number, right? Which I think is really good, right? And so I think we will see more innovation when it comes to air drop distribution to figure out who's aligned. Because if I give you Pengu, you're supposed to hold it and you're supposed to, you know, then become aligned with the project. If you just instantly dump it for

USDC, you're not even like, you'd like get, get out of here. You're doing the opposite of what you're doing the opposite of what, you know, there's no advantage there. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly right. The Qaeda air drop was dropped on base. And this is a tweet from Dan Smith from Blockworks research who says base has been humming along nicely since the Qaeda air drop topping out at 160 transactions per second for a median fee of two cents. Scaling efforts clearly paying off. With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the M.Eath protocol is home to M.Eath, the fourth largest ETH liquid staking token, offering one of the highest APRs among the top 10 LFTs. And now, CMEEth takes things even further. This restaked version captures multiple yields across Kerak, Eagan-Layer, symbiotic, and many more, making CMEEth the most

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Early April is the estimation. So we have a couple test net forks. Holski and Sepolia test test nets will fork on the 24th and then the 5th of March. And so we'll have two test net forks before we're ready for the Ethereum-Maneat fork only under the conditions that the test net fork. only under the conditions that the test net forks go well, probably sometime in early April. Petra is not the biggest upgrade, but there is,

it is the biggest in terms of like the sheer number of EIPs, but it's nothing in comparison to like the merge of Dinkoon. We have, for the Ethereum nerds that are out there, we have a max effective balance that is incoming, and then also we have a blob limit increase. And so we get into more blobs and we're getting some max effective balance and then a few other tweaks as well.

Unless you have any take specifically, Kane, about Pectra, what's your kind of take about the Ethereum broader discussions around, like, pace of development, is it communist? Your Ethereum's broad positioning inside of like the chain wars. I was just thinking I missed the Rinkeby test net as you're listing out those test nets. Like all my OG test nets are gone now. It's a bit sad. But in terms of pace of development, like, you know,

it's not an issue of fundamentals, right? It's not an issue of like delivery. Ethereum, you know, from a research and delivery perspective, I think is better than it's ever been. You know, the core devs understand what they're doing. The prioritization is good. Yes, of course, these roadmaps are longer than we all like because we're impatient, you know,

people sitting on the sideline, you know, shouting, come on like you know let's go faster but um but i think it's still an issue of the overall calms like the the the the comms and marketing side is what's missing right really you think it's all boils down to comms and marketing i think it's just not communicating what the benefits of these things are right and you know sasano does a great job he does a great job you know he walks through everything on a daily basis and you know why it's important whatever um but uh like the the the narrative alignment, right, in the Ethereum community in terms of like constructing the right narratives to make sense.

You know, I think it's good. It's good that it's decentralized, right? But it is a bit uncoordinated. That I think it's just too uncoordinated. So having some more coordination there would be, I think, beneficial. but, you know, we're not really seeing it. And, and, you know, I said the other day, like three weeks ago, four weeks ago now, you know,

that Fetalic cook. And we haven't seen much cooking, you know, from that perspective, right, from the columns and marketing perspective. So, so yeah, here we are. Let's, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic, but I do think it would be good to see a little bit more, traction there. I did see a tweet.

I don't know if it came out of Ethereum.org specifically, but there is a job posting for a social media manager for the Ethereum account, which has 3.4, 3.7 million followers. So after all of this angst, we were getting potentially a new social media manager of the Ethereum account. Maybe we can get narrative. My genuine question is, did we have a social media manager of the account? I don't. I think the answer is firmly, no, we did not.

So, like, that in and of itself is just, like, gigar-retarded. Like, I'm sorry. Like, what are we doing? Like, it's all like we're replacing the underperforming social media manager or intern that we had, right? We're like, oh, this is a good idea. Like, we figured, like, the rest of crypto figured this out, like, five years ago that you need someone running your social media account, right? So, you know, baby steps, like us. broadly the Ethereum community is asking like, hey, maybe we have put too many, too much emphasis on credible neutrality.

Maybe we should try and coordinate some sort of like centralized leadership team to point the ecosystem in a coherent direction. And we can like shed some credible neutrality points in order to meet those ends. And that has been that decision is like very contentious. I don't think Vatelic likes that at all. No, no, I don't think so. But, you know, the interesting thing is that Ethereum on some levels of victim of its own success, right? But it still has the underdog mentality, you know, that I was talking about with Solana, right? Where, you know, Bitcoin Maxis would be like, there's a pre-mine scam.

It's all going to end poorly. Every time anything bad happens in Ethereum, you know, from the Dow hack to, you know, bridge hack, like, just any, any bad. thing, there's a bunch of people who are, at least historically, we're ready to just jump on Ethereum and be like, see, we told you, right? And run Victory Labs. And so, you know, the approach to that, I think, was just to not engage, right? Continue to deliver, deliver the roadmap, deliver the tech, deliver the research, do all that stuff, right? And, you know, that kind of worked against the Bitcoin Maxis because there weren't many of them and they're fucking idiots. And, but like, you know, it doesn't work when you're competing against a project like a team.

You know, a team like sweet or, you know, like even, and ignore Solana for a second here, right? But, you know, if this Alt-L-1 thing pops up, right? Like, even Monad, you know, like they do a really good job. They've created a cult, bearer chain. They've created a cult. They've created this cult following that feels like the early days of Ethereum in a lot of ways. Right. And so I just think that there's a level of competition now that especially Ethereum

main net, because you also have arbitram and optimism and base competing for mindshare against Ethereum mainnet. And if Ethereum main net doesn't maintain mind share, that's net negative for all of the Ethereum ecosystem. And so, you know, having this, you know, credibly neutral, you know, above the fray approach, it served us for a while. But, you know, one of the things about being a founder is you need to be able to adapt to the reality on the ground, right? And I do think that Vitalik needs to adapt to the reality on the ground. We are in a different environment in 2025 to what we were in 2015 or even 2020. Yeah, speaking of Monad, the Monad test net is one of the things that was launched this week. It's kind of crazy how much there has been discussion around Monad,

and yet their test net has just now gotten out the door, which I think it gives a huge just like plus one to the size of the cult, because if there's no test net, not even a chain, there's no test net, then what's left, the answer is, well, there's the cult. That's the cult that's there. One thing I thought that was worth bringing up this week was the SEC has announced a cyber and emerging technologies unit to protect retail investors. I'm calling this the SEC's cyber police. And so there's an organization being made spearheaded by the SEC,

but does different things, mainly going after fraud across the internet. So they are focusing on transactions in the following areas. Fraud committed using emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning, fraud on social media, the dark web, or false websites to perpetrate fraud, hacking to obtain material non-public information, takeovers of retail brokerages accounts, fraud involving blockchain technology and crypto assets, which relates to much of the things that we discuss on the weekly roll-up. That is all of the fraud that we talked about at the beginning of this episode and many other scams and scandals. And then a few other ways that the SEC's new organization, again, the cyber and emerging technologies unit to protect retail investors. So I think we're getting some cyber police to come and actually crack down on, even though it's not securities transactions, fraud, which I think is just totally fine. What's your take?

Look, I'm not, you know, the unintended consequences of regulation are so powerful that I'm never a cheerleader for this, right? Yeah. You know, it's great now, go off to some AI guys and make them feel some pain, right? It sounds good. You know, go kill that guy. Don't bother me. And of course, we've been saying there's so much fraud.

Go after the fraud and not uniswap, right? They went after the wrong hate and it turns out. And, you know, so of course, like we want efficient markets and, you know, we want fraud to be weeded out. I just think that there is, there's a danger to, you know, being too reliant on regulatory agencies to fix the problems in any industry, right? You know. So, so, Kane, we identified things like the ICO mania started fairly, started with things like Ethereum, started things like, like Avey.

Mastercoin. Ended with fraud. Ended with fraud. Defy summer started with compound, started with uniswap, ended with fraud. Ended with fraud. NFTs started legit, ended with fraud. memes like bonk started totally fine community bottom up ecosystem ended with fraud and so yet when we weigh all of that on one side you're still saying that the potential risk of overregulation is

higher than the potential costs of having these metas that always end in fraud on the crypto side is that what you're saying 100%. Wow. And my view is this that like you know I think Matt Levine has a very good take on this right you know, if you're the compliance officer and a bank, one of the most regulated industries in the world, right? You've got to dial. You've got a fraud dial, right?

Now, if you ask someone, where should they dial the fraud between zero and a hundred, right? A lot of people, the naive take is zero, right? But at zero, there's no bank. You don't get to have a bank. You can't have zero. Zero's not an option. Zero is

the brainlet take, right? Of, well, obviously no fraud. Like, why would we want fraud? And it's like, if you have an organization of 50,000 people running around doing stuff, humans are dumb and bad and they do bad things, right? If you want zero fraud, shut the whole place down. And that's the alternative, right? So, you know, should we have good fraud enforcement?

Yes. Can we hope for a world of no fraud in a permissionless environment? No, we can't. It's not realistic, right? So it's about finding the right balance. And so if we throw our hands up and say, let's hope that this regulatory agency he solves these problems for us, you know, it can go badly. And, you know, those kinds of agencies can get co-opted so easily.

Look at SBF. He co-opted so many different, you know, people in positions of power to facilitate that. So the unintended consequences of giving regulators too much power is very dangerous. It doesn't necessarily even stop the fraud. And it can create far, far wider unintended consequences. So the creation of this, call it a task force, is being complimented by the work of Hesterperson acting chair, Mark Ueda, who are both very crypto-positive Hester Perser, we just had her on the podcast. So maybe what you're saying is like, just because we have these two crypto-positive SEC chair and commissioners, David, don't be naive because once these two individuals are gone, we're going to be left with Gary Gensler 2.0, Gary Gensler's cousin, Gary Gensler's son. and now this tool is in the hands of them

and now it's going to come and choke us out. Is that kind of what you're saying? That's the risk, right? That's the risk. And so that's why my view is always that we should look to market dynamics to solve these things, right? And when it comes to ICOs,

we were starting to figure this out, but then regulation killed it, right? When it comes to, you know, meme coins, we've sort of figured this out as an industry a little bit, right? Like there's been this expose that's come internally, right? No one, you know, to the best of my knowledge, the police didn't go and kick that guy's door down and arrest him, right? I mean, they did kick Shane Copland's door down, right?

Which is fucking ridiculous, right? You know, so like this is my point, right? Like, we need to be able to self-police, right? We need to be able to have the right structures and incentives to weed these things out. We can't rely on some external body. It's not to say that an external. body is bad or good or whatever, let's say it's neutral. It's not sufficient. We have a direct responsibility as an industry to sort our own shit out. And I think maybe one of the things

that we're building in this industry is structures that can't do fraud, can't be evil. And I would say that's something that you are building here at Infinex cane. Infinex is call it a neobank on the internet that can't do evil because it's all governed by smart contracts and code. Talk to me a little about what's going on at Infinex. There's this new term that you guys are inventing called Swidge. Maybe download us on Swidge and everything else

that's going on under the sun at Infinex. Yeah, so, you know, we've talked about fragmentation and chains and, you know, all of the stuff that, you know, comes from that, right? Like, people needed to get Keitel on base, but there are Salon Maxis.

They got to set up, you know, Mert was talking about this, right? He didn't have, you know, he'd set up a base wallet, but, you know, a lot of people who are on Salana haven't got a base wallet. or vice versa.

People don't have a Solana wallet. So we are trying to build a platform that basically allows anyone to interact on any chain by having this universal swapping and bridge functionality called Switch, which means that if you get an AirDrop on Solana, you can bridge it to base or optimism or Arbitrum or Barrow chain. And you can deposit the airdrop onto some boycot. yield farming scheme in bearer chain and start owning yield

without needing to go and understand how to, you know, what's the bearer chain canonical bridge or, you know, how do I secure my seed phrase in a new phantom wallet for this, you know, this new chain. You know, Monad, for example, right? So the idea is to make it easy

to do things on chain again. You know, we got to a point where there was so much fragmentation that it was hard to do things on chain. When I was watching this demo of you, Swidging, I was interested in the choice to actually show users like this swap and bridge interface, where you can actually kind of go through the steps in the process, not unlike Uniswap.

But there's also a choice where you would just abstract that completely in the background, and you don't even show users their chains at all whatsoever. How does Infinex fit inside of the choice to actually, like, show chains and tell users what chains they're on versus abstracting all chains totally. Yeah. So there's a there's a very long running debate internally in the design and product team about this. And we've got versions of this interface that are purely chainless, right? And I think that that is directionally where things will go. But at the moment, people still have a need. Because we're still talking about people that learned a bunch of dumb things, right? We told

them a bunch of dumb things and they're like, but I need to know that, right? And so if you take it away, they feel like, oh, I'm missing something, right? So it's going to be a slow reeducation process of like, it doesn't matter what USC, you know, is sitting, what chain of USC is sitting on. It just doesn't matter, right? If you want USDC and Echo, okay, just tell us that. You want to deposit in your Echo account? Okay, press the button. Press the USC to Echo button, right? And what if you don't have USDC, then push the dollars into Echo button. We know that Echo wants USC. You have some yield-bearing stable coin that you're sitting in.

You shouldn't need to know that. I want the stable coin that makes me money, and then I want to buy the Echo thing. Just click the button. We'll do the rest, right? So it will eventually get there, but there's a slow re-education process where if you take too much away, people start getting worried.

They're like, what's happening? I don't, you know, I need to know the chain that I'm on. Like crypto natives have just tooled up and become so educated about how to use these things that we actually have to dumb ourselves down to use like more normie friendly apps. That's pretty funny. That's not a problem that I've ever been faced with yet in my crypto career until you're building Infinex. If somebody's curious, is Infinex open? Can they just go and make an account? Yep.

What's their roadmap with Infinex? Make an account. You know, we are doing a bunch of work withirdrops, a bunch of work with new chains. We just added you new chain. as you mentioned, we just added uniswap as well. So you can swap on uniswap directly on unichain, go and buy some uni on unichane. And yeah, it's a game at the moment of rolling out more integrations,

more chains, you know, more functionality so that people can feel comfortable putting their assets into Infinex instead of into Binance or bybit or upbit. Kane, it was certainly a doozy of a week. Thanks a lot, my man, for helping me go through all this news. I really appreciate it. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky.

You can lose what you put in. 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.