Bankless - ROLLUP: Trump vs. The Fed | Staked ETH ETF | The First Stage 2 Rollup | Robinhood's Crypto Pivot
Episode Date: February 14, 2025This week’s Weekly Rollup covers Trump’s clash with the Fed over interest rates and the surprising crypto moves from Trump Media. Gauntlet’s Tarun Chitra joins us to unpack the latest developmen...ts—from OpenSea’s upcoming airdrop to Arbitrum’s permissionless fault proofs—while we debate whether airdrops are truly over. We also dig into Vitalik’s “communist” joke and Dave Portnoy’s memecoin mania. Tune in for all the drama and alpha happening in the second week of February! ------ 📣 MORPHO | GO-TO LENDING INFRASTRUCTURE https://bankless.cc/Morpho ------ 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 🎮RONIN | THE FUTURE OF WEB3 GAMING https://bankless.cc/Ronin ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/35?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 00:00:00 Start 00:03:33 Trump vs The Fed http://cnbc.com/2025/02/12/hopes-for-more-fed-rate-cuts-dim-as-powell-notes-hot-cpi-means-were-not-quite-there-yet.html http://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1889681567779283447 00:06:25 Tarun Market Takes 00:10:18 ETH Staking ETF http://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1889803399320969603 http://x.com/RasterlyRock/status/1889856397032235226 00:15:26 Robinhood Enters The Chat http://x.com/Tyler_Did_It/status/1889833087258992937 http://x.com/bridge__harris/status/1889904770485461389 http://x.com/0xjaypeg/status/1889805008318906689 00:27:13 Brian Quintenz Nominated to Lead CFTC http://warpcast.com/brianquintenz/0xbd4cc8ef http://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1889736851474333932 00:30:08 Is The Airdrop Meta Over? http://x.com/ffvv1211/status/1889333575348355152?s=46 00:34:21 MegaETH Exploring Alternatives http://x.com/megaeth_labs/status/1889733671420330150 http://x.com/barnaclebarny/status/1889936153509503193 00:40:38 OpenSea SEA Airdrop http://x.com/openseafdn/status/1890041091577057522 http://x.com/dfinzer/status/1890039791808376874 00:46:17 Ethereum Shenanigans http://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1889771554512200166 http://x.com/ameensol/status/1889774627796427235 http://x.com/TrustlessState/status/1889900532770414985 http://x.com/laurashin/status/1890044244750135695 http://x.com/ethereumfndn/status/1889978208986280031 00:52:51 Arbitrum Launched BOLD http://x.com/ArbitrumDevs/status/1889709836226416805 http://l2beat.com/scaling/projects/arbitrum 00:55:19 JailStool http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1887963615161905566 http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1887936281058947391 http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1887960660820042168 http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1889032422768918834 http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1888332104016015781 http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1888337834605420917 http://x.com/trustyournuts/status/1888336912844255436 http://x.com/CryptoKaleo/status/1888420272182604043 http://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1888598919354941897 http://dexscreener.com/solana/etcwbb9ft7yyagpkvz6ag1qzwpjxs79tg2r7tszyup72 01:04:01 Where To Find Tarun https://x.com/tarunchitra ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up where we cover the weekly news, drama, and developments in the crypto space.
This is the second week of February.
And today on the show, I have the pleasure of being joined by Tarun Chitra, the Grand Pumbaugh and Gigabrain at Gontlet.
Welcome, Turun. Happy Valentine's Day, my man.
Happy Valentine's Day. No one else I'd rather spend it with.
I'm honored. I'm honored.
We usually hear you, the Grand Pubbaa, over at Gondent, from the chopping block.
That's what Haseeb calls you.
I had Haseeb on to help me go through the news two weeks ago.
So I guess I'm just kind of like running through chopping block guests.
After you, who should I have on?
I'm between the two remaining people.
I mean, I think Tom, Tom is the silent killer.
You know, in all the statistics, he speaks the least but has the most sharp commentary.
So I think I think he's worth getting on.
I think you're the culturalist of them all, even though you are an absolute math genius, math whiz.
You're always up with the times, up with the gossip.
So I think maybe this is like a gossip heavy episode.
All right.
Let's, I'm excited.
We'll get to the gossip at the end.
First, we're going to talk about Trump versus the Fed.
Federal Reserve signals no more interest rates, which made Donald Trump a sad boy.
News that no one had on their bingo card, OpenC announces an air drop.
Arbitrum is just one step away from being a fully decentralized stage two ethereum
rollup.
And also, Vitalik is a communist.
Or Vitalik made a joke about communism.
No one on crypto Twitter can really tell, which is which.
So we're going to get to all this and more.
But first, we're going to talk to our friends and sponsors over at Morpho.
If you are a user or builder interested in lending, this message is for you.
Morpho is the first and only defy protocol integrated into Coinbase.com.
Pretty cool.
Coinbase in the front, Morpho in the back.
Morpho provides go-to lending infrastructure for on-chain loans because the unique value
proposition for Morpho just is offering builders the flexibility and users to customize products
precisely to their needs.
Gauntlet actually is one of the service providers to the Morpho stack.
Actually, since I have you, Turun, can you kind of explain how more gauntlet fits into Morpho?
Yeah, for sure.
So Morpho, I would say, is a kind of different version of how the Defi stack can look,
where there's a Dow that controls some set of the behavior of the protocol.
But then there are curators who are people who run vaults that manage what assets are being lent, what percentage of assets are allowed to be lent, and the interest rates and utilization, LTVs and stuff like that.
And the idea is that you have a market where you have competing curators who have different properties of their vaults and the market can choose.
So it's sort of different than, you know, an Aveyor compound where the Dow chooses the parameters, right?
the Dow chooses the interest rates, the Dow chooses the,
and so here instead it's like competing participants
and the market kind of joins now.
I think in general, we've seen a lot of movement overall
throughout Defi towards this vault model,
but Morpho was sort of the first to really get traction with it.
Yeah, and this kind of gives gauntlet,
which is like kind of setting the risk parameters a little bit,
it puts it in the driving seat, the driver's seat, around the vaults.
And it gives kind of like, you know,
people like gauntlet, entities like gauntlet,
a little bit more control of what they want.
their vaults to look like. There's a link in the show notes if you want to get started with Morpho.
That link is bankless.cc slash morpho. All right, let's get into macro.
I've never actually heard you comment on macro. So I'm interested to hear your takes on the
macro markets. The thing that happened this week was that hopes for more Fed rate cuts were
dashed as Powell noted that the hot CPI means were not quite there yet. So signal that we
are not going to get any more rate cuts in 2025 due to higher than expected inflation.
inflation rose 0.5% month over year, month, and we're at 3% year over year.
The forecast was 2.9%.
This similar numbers came in from the CPI.
On top of that, the Powell testified in front of Congress this week, emphasizing that the Fed is in no rush to cut interest rates because the economy is strong and inflation remains elevated.
Donald Trump did not like this on truth social.
He tweeted out, interest rates should be lowered, something which should go hand in hand with.
with upcoming tariffs. Let's rock and roll America. This happened last Trump administration
eight years ago, where Trump went head to head with Powell, really trying to get him to lower
interest rates, make a more easy monetary policy environment. And I don't really remember actually
how that turned out. But the markets did not like this. S&P 500 declined a quarter of percent.
The treasury yields jumped, which is something we know that Donald Trump does not want. He wants
Treasury yields to go down. And then also Bitcoin and Cryptom.
markets also dipped below. Bitcoin fell below $95,000 when the markets opened.
Turin. Any macro commentary? Yeah, I mean, I think the thing to realize, I guess, about Trump's
posturing is that, like, a lot of his policies are generally pro-inflation, right? Like tariffs,
it's more expensive to buy stuff from outside the U.S., even if it's cheaper to produce.
And so I think his economic policy relies on low interest rates.
And I think in general, you know, the world doesn't seem to look like that right now.
I do wonder, though, of like a lot of that overheating will calm down.
You know, I think like post-election, there was just like so much of bullions in every market that every price went up for, you know, every commodity even.
And so I kind of, my kind of belief is that this quarter in my.
be very biased by the fact that like all financial markets went up just for like unboundedly for like two months and like now we're kind of getting over the hangover and I think we'll see prices relax a bit. I think we'll also see responses to tariffs that that kind of maybe make some prices cheaper or some prices worse. But in general, I don't know. I feel like it is funny that crypto's value prop feels a little bit like 2021 or it's it's a pretty.
prediction market on the weekends for what the NASAC is going to do on Monday.
I think that probably is where we end up when we are just going flat.
Like you said, the crypto markets are the only thing that's open on the weekend.
Bitcoin pretty flat on the week, down 1.8%, which is pretty mellow.
Ether down 2.7% on the week, a little bit worse.
Continuing its slide against Bitcoin, ether's at $2,600, which is not a super high price.
overall, I wouldn't say this is really any different than price action that we've seen.
As we zoom out, Faroon, like, what are your takes about just like the market as a whole?
Obviously, we know Solana over the cycle has done very, very well.
Bitcoin, because of the Donald Trump presidency has done very, very well.
It's no surprise to anyone, no new news to anyone that Ether has lagged all these things.
Just what are your broad takes about the theme of the cycle?
I mean, I do think the new launches, like the new chain launches have been not been good.
I really feel like meme coins becoming popular really kills the kind of launches of new L1s and new L2s in terms of token value this year, like even more so than ETH, right?
Like I think ETH at least has had ETH inflows. People are trying to launch a staking ETF, you know, like there's like there's some positive news.
I feel like that the like 50 to 100 alts, that's where the bloodbath is.
maybe that's not worth talking about because their market cap percentage is shrinking.
I think Bitcoin dominance hit like 70% this week at some point.
And so, but I think the fact that like the new coin launches have been quite poor relative
to expectation has been sort of one of the more surprising things.
I think Solana seems to have reasonably kept some, you know, obviously it's down like 30% from
maybe a little more 35% from the peak.
But yeah, I'm not, I kind of feel like the real blood bath is a little bit lower if you go
lower down the list.
Yeah.
I remember I was listening to your guys' conversation about dispersion.
And I think you were on one side and Haseeb was on the other where Hasebo's like,
no, there's always been too many coins in crypto to choose from.
But nonetheless, it seems to be like you can always get more dispersed in that long tail.
below 50 is seemingly really getting stretched as far possible as we've ever seen before in crypto.
I just don't think there's that much new capital going into it versus like, you know, I think like people not making money out, like inevitably not making money off meme coins means there's not enough capital to go and rotate into those.
So it does sort of feel like a bit of a malaise, but maybe the washing out is good, right?
It generally means like projects that are not worth it won't make it or projects that kind of overpromised won't survive.
So we'll see.
I guess like to me the biggest thing is like estaking ETFs.
I think if that gets approved, that's like a big deal.
And then Solana for Sawna obviously I think there's just a ton of positive headwinds and both the ETF side.
but also just like overall usage stable coin issuance etc all of the the the institutions starting stuff like franklin templeton announced they're doing their um money market fund on salana this week so like i kind of think like salana has a bunch of tailwinds pushing it in the right direction east i think everyone is only focused on the headwinds but i think there are some tailwinds things like staking etf um and so
So, you know, it's a meme at this point to say ETH is oversold, but I think it is.
I think the ETH staking ETF, this is coming in from 21 shares, which is the organization that I think ARC partners with.
Kathy was ARC, European-based company, but also has entities in America.
21 shares proposed adding staking to its Ethereum ETF.
So this is, I think this is the first and only known proposal towards staking that has been added
to an ETF. So, of course, this is not approved, but this is, you know, putting this thing in
motion that we are going to get staking into an ETTF that is already alive. This is Ryan Rasminson
from Bitwise, who was asked his take about the impact of staking on like investor appetite
for the Ethereum ETF. He says, unless they're crypto enthusiasts, most financial advisors
don't know what staking is, and it's not the factor that's going to sway them one way or another
when it comes to investing in crypto. And so my interpretation,
of this is that if you're just kind of a
trad-fi non-crypto-native investor, the
inclusion of staking is just like kind of foreign to you.
But also that does conflict with, I think, what we know of about why
the both Bitcoin and Ether ETFs had such strong inflows in the
first few days of their being live.
It was actually crypto-natives putting crypto assets in their retirement
accounts. And so those people are informed about
what the impact of staking might do. What's your take on this?
I think my main take.
is like most ETFs have different ways of making money.
Some are creation redemption fees.
Some are just AUM fees.
Some are they lend out the assets.
I think the idea that you have a natural form of yield means that to the average investor,
they're going to have like at worst a feeless ETF, like that doesn't have any fees at all.
And I think that is a, you know, there's a world in which you can say, okay, yeah, like staking is too complicated,
to understand. But there's a world in which you can say the most popular index funds in the world
are Vanguard funds, which whose entire business model is like, we will charge you less in fees
than everyone else. And staking will allow the ETF providers to basically charge less in fees.
And I think that that meme has worked in Tradfai of like the low fee ETF. And I kind of think the
staking ETFs have that. Like, like it could be memetic. It could meme into the low fee ETF. Like the way
Vanguard has, right? So that's sort of my, maybe, maybe it's a midwit take because it's like, oh,
who cares about fees if you're buying crypto ETFs? But in normal trad index investing, people do
seem to care about a lot that a lot. So there's more news on the ETF front. The Trump group about
truthify, the truthfy like financial group, which is now a financial group now, has filed for a bunch of
ETFs. So there is the TruthFi Bitcoin Plus
ETF that has been filed. There's the TruthFi Made in America
ETF, the TruthFi U.S. Energy Independence ETF,
and then also like I just said, the Bitcoin ETF.
This is Eric Balchunis's statement inside of the Bloomberg terminal.
Trump Media applied to trademark brands for six products with America
first themes, including exchange traded funds dubbed Made in America, U.S. energy
independence, Bitcoin Plus. This is totally normal for an issuer to
ETS, there were over 700 ETS launched last year alone.
It is unorthodox for a company where the U.S. president is the majority owner to do so.
What do you think about Donald Trump launching ETFs, one being a Bitcoin ETF?
That's going to be very late to the game, but nonetheless, is in the game.
Yeah, I mean, this actually gets back to the fee thing, right?
Like, there are some ETFs where people pay a premium in fees just for the brand.
So like, for instance, like the BlackRock Bitcoin and ETF, despite it having higher fees than some of the other ETFs did a lot better, right?
Like it had way more inflows, mainly because people are just like, I don't really know these other issuers.
And there's some brand equity around them.
And so I kind of, my real question is, does Trump have enough of a brand as an.
an ETF to like charge higher fees.
If not, then I don't understand what the point is.
Like economically, I'm ignoring all the ethical, whatever issues.
But like, if we just look at it as a financial product, do we think the brand is strong
enough for that?
That's, I don't know.
Like, I, I, you know, I'm sure there's a ton of DJT's shareholders who would go
buy Trump ETFs.
Are there enough of them?
I don't know.
I think one signal for that is there is millions and millions of dollars.
is pouring into World Liberty Financial from who knows who.
So I do think there is like a mountain of capital out there in the world
who will strictly just purchase Donald Trump's financial products.
Justin Sun, he's ready to buy truth sign.
Something that's happening in the world of TradFai is that it's earnings season.
And so Coinbase earnings are actually getting reported today.
So we don't have that information in this week.
But Robin Hood reported their earnings last night.
And Robin Hood smashed earnings, according apparently.
this is from the analysis from a couple people reporting 115% year-over-year growth in Q4 to
$1 billion of revenue over the year driven largely by crypto.
So their crypto business internal to Robin Hood soared 700% to generate $358 million
of revenue for Robin Hood.
In the earnings call, Vlad put out some very bullish crypto like innovations, progress,
like frontiers that they're trying to go for.
He said, this is being paraphrased by Bridget from Founders Fund, we are going to tokenize private company shares.
We are going to help launch a stable coin to pass yield back to consumers because this is the future.
We're going to tokenize the entire stock market.
We're going to accelerate token listings and explore staking.
And oh, yeah, also prediction markets are the future.
In Q3 of 2024, Coinbase did about $34 billion of retail crypto volume.
Robin Hood did $14 billion.
So Coinbase definitely in the lead by over 2x, like 2.5x.
But in Q4, just the same one quarter later, Robin Hood did $71 billion, which is a 5x increase from their Q3 amount.
It's going to be interesting to see what Coinbase retail numbers are.
I don't think they did a 5x.
So I think Robin Hood is really catching up to Coinbase in terms of retail market share.
Coinbase is up on the news that Robin Hood reported very.
strong retail volumes, but it's going to be interesting to see. Do you care? Do you care about this world?
The Robin Hood versus Coinbase battles? What's your take? So A, 358 million revenues really great for
Robin Hood in terms of like they were like, you know, 22, 22, 23. I feel like everyone was
shitting on them being like, why did you do this crypto thing? You spent all this money. There's no
volume. Dot, dot, dot. And so like from that standpoint, the recovery, you got to give them a lot of
credit for sticking with it. Because like there were, remember when they were forced to remove all these
assets because they may have been securities, right? Like, right? They removed Solana. They removed Ripple.
And their stock got a little bit pummeled for that because it was like, oh, like, you spent all this
money on acquiring crypto users and like now you can't let, they can't trade anything. And I feel like,
you know, if I were, for Vlad, I would be laughing at, laughing to the bank at those people.
First off, the second thing was the cope from one of the funniest,
crypto haters on Twitter, which is Patrick,
is I'm saying McKenzie?
The guy who's at Stripe, Patio 11.
Oh, yeah. Patrick McHenry.
McKenry.
Yeah, yeah.
No, no, McKenry is the Congress person.
Oh, that's right.
That's right.
It's Padio 11.
I know his, yeah.
Yeah, we've had him on banklets as a guess.
Patrick McKenzie.
Yeah, you're right.
Okay, you're right.
And he's just like coping about the fact that Robin Hood made money from it.
He's like, it's them promoting gambling.
I'm like, they're in exchange.
They're supposed to make money from.
volume. Are you telling you were complaining that they like support you're you're complaining
that they're like enabling gambling and at the same time you're you're complaining about your
own employer like liking stable coins like I don't know I feel like this is a tweet that you're
talking of what's your what's your biting concern of Robbins hood then patrick asked himself
as I've advanced many times over the years they are licensed as a financial institution and they
cosplay as one but what they actually are is a casino which uses various financial assets that's a
source of random numbers.
It's just like I find his stuff like a little embarrassing for Stripe, honestly.
If I were Stripe, I'd be like, I'm buying companies doing crypto stuff for a billion dollars
and I'm like working and like, I don't know.
But you know, it's sort of like I do I do feel like he's sort of one of the worst ambassadors
for Stripe possible if they're trying to be like more crypto friendly.
other things I guess I would say
I think Robin Hood
prediction market stuff is going to be interesting
if they're going to actually lean into that
on the sports betting side
so like I think we've actually seen a lot
of the prediction market volume
increase in the sports betting side
and I'm just sort of curious
if Robin Hood will like get into that and if they do
if they'll do it on chain because I do think
between Polymark and Robin Hood
I think this is the best chance we've ever seen
for sports betting to move from Fanduel to on-chain stuff.
Interesting. You're seeing Robin Hood is the conduit for sports betting
to be just a centralized Web 2 server
to actually be growing some sort of on-chain footprint.
Yeah.
Where they're using, so another thing they announced on the earnings call
was that they're going to have yield-bearing stable coins.
I believe Paxos, USDG will be,
so you can earn interest
from either on-chain or treasuries,
that part was vague,
but as you can see from this,
the passing yield back,
the yield might come from defy,
the yield might not,
that wasn't clear,
but my point is,
like,
I think if I'm a sports better
and I can pay in yield earning stable coins,
why would I do,
why would I not do that
versus like paying in cash?
Like, it again gets back to my earlier point
about eat staking.
Like,
forget about people understanding staking yield.
It suddenly looks like
something that was a fee to them is now an earning, right?
Like, that's, that's all that matters.
And I think that's the same for the, if I, if I can gamble on sports with a yield-bearing
stable coin, it makes more sense than not, right?
Because, like, it should compensate for a lot of the, some of the spreads and some of the
tighter games.
It's interesting that Robin Hood actually, apparently, according to my chat, GPT career,
Robin Hood has 25 million funded customers, so customers with money in their accounts, whereas
Coinbase has over 105 million.
So Coinbase actually has extremely massive distribution.
Coinbase is valued maybe like $12 billion higher than Robinhood.
I think it's 72 to 60.
But Robin Hood, I've kind of figured that their ability to penetrate into the crypto markets
and maybe also via prediction markets and sports betting comes from their distribution.
Like there's such a retail-dominated app with a long tail of retail capital.
capital. What do you make about just like Robin Hood's positioning as to like why it can like how it can leverage access to some of these financial services by using a distribution?
Yeah. I mean, I think like Coinbase inevitably has like more institutional distribution, right? They have like custody. They do they have on-chain wallets, just stuff like that.
Robin Hood is like pure retail, right? There's like not there's no there's no like real institution there. So I think the interesting thing is like,
like the volume per user is actually higher in retail than it is retail plus institutional.
If depending on the coin base number, right?
Like that's the thing I would be looking at is like, are the institutional traders actually
making big block trades in Q4?
Or is it only retail trading?
And is Robin Hood getting a higher percentage of the retail trades?
Because like coin, Coinbase in theory could actually have a way higher volume number.
And now, of course, you could go compute it.
I'm not, I haven't done that, but I will find out today.
But I think, like, in theory, the institutional number could be very high because, like, post-election, I feel like that was, like, all the Bitcoin buying had to come from not just retail, right?
Like, that, that seemed like a real move from everyone at the same time.
And I think Robinson doesn't really have that.
So it's actually kind of impressive they can get to these numbers without any of that, without any, like, sort of large.
your size traders.
So I'm more interested in how they go on chain because like this kind of reminds me of like
20, right after 2017 or 2018 when like that was when Robin Hood started listing more
crypto assets.
And like everyone was competing on who would be the next big centralized exchange.
And I kind of feel like now everyone's competing on who will be the best next big like
on chain web two plus.
L2 type thing.
And so I'm kind of,
their conference call
made me think
Robin Hood really has like a
on-chain strategy
that's much more fleshed out
than they're saying.
Interesting. Yeah, this segment
and just hearing this data
makes you really want to get Vlad back on the podcast.
We've had him on before. And he's very
media trained. So I can't really
get that much out of him.
But nonetheless, I think I'm going to reach out to him and
try again. All right, Bank of the Station,
Moving on. We're going to talk about a few more subjects coming up next.
Trump nominated Brian Quinn-Tens, who is currently the policy advisor for A16Z crypto.
He's been nominated for the role of the chair of the CFTC, which is where he was before he joined A16Z crypto.
We're going to talk about airdrops, the mega-Eath NFT Mint hyperliquid.
And also OpenC announces the C token.
But that's because it is actually the year 2021.
And then Arbitrum launched their permissionist fault-proof systems.
We're going to get to all of this and more, but first, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible like Uniswap.
It's a browser wallet. It's a mobile wallet. It's now also a chain, but really it's the best place to do Defy. Let's go here from Uniswap right now.
Introducing Unichain. Built for Defy, empowered by Uniswap, Unichane is the fast, decentralized layer two, designed to tackle blockchain speed and cost challenges.
With this Mainnet Now Live, you can enjoy transactions at up to 95% cheaper than the ETH layer one, all while benefiting from an impressive one-second block time that will be getting even faster very soon.
Unichane is the first layer two to launch as a stage one roll-up on day one.
That means it comes with a fully functional permissionless proof system from the start, increasing transparency and further decentralizing the chain.
More than 80 apps are joining the Unichane community, including Coinbase, Circle, Lido, Morpho, and Uniswap.
You'll be able to bridge, swap, borrow, lend, and launch new assets, and more from day one.
Built by Uniswap Labs, the team behind the protocol that's processed over 2.75 trillion in all-time volume with zero hacks.
Unichane truly enhances DeFi experiences with faster, cheaper,
and seamless transactions even across chains.
And soon, the UniChain validation network
will allow anyone to run a node and earn by securing the network.
Visit Uniswap.org and swap on UniChane today.
Ondo Finance is leading the way in the tokenization of real-world assets,
with a mission to accelerate the transition to an open economy
by building the platforms, assets, and infrastructure
that bring financial markets on-chain.
With Ondo, institutions get seamless access to tokenize finance,
while on-chain users gain access to institutional-grade real-world assets
like never before.
bridging traditional finance and the blockchain economy,
Ondo is unlocking liquidity, efficiency, and global access,
reshaping markets for the digital age.
As the leader in institutional adoption,
Ondo finances the gateway to the trillion dollar tokenization revolution.
Institutional grade finance, on-chain for everyone.
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 LSTs.
And now, CMEEth takes the,
even further. This restaked version captures multiple yields across Kerak, eigenlayer, symbiotic,
and many more, making CMEE the most fission and most composable LRT solution on the market. Metamorphosis,
season one dropped $7.7 million in Cook rewards to M.Eath holders. Season two is currently ongoing,
allowing users to earn staking, restaking, and ABS yields, plus rewards in Cook, M-Eath Protocol's
governance token, and more. Don't miss out on the opportunity to stake, restake, and shape
the future of M-Eath Protocol with Cook. Participate today at M-Eath.
Mantle.xy.
Some pretty bullish news out of the Trump cabinet selection.
He has selected Brian Quintenz, who is, like I said, currently the head policy for crypto
out of A16Z.
And he has yet to be confirmed.
He's just a nomination, but I think he's probably going to be confirmed.
He doesn't really rub anyone the wrong way on either side of the aisle.
But I'd say it's pretty damn bullish because Quintenz is just categorically a DeFi
Ethereum crypto bull.
this is him casting out on Farcaster, Brian Quintends, the nominee for the chair of the CFTC on Farcaster is saying,
is my great honor to be nominated by President Trump as the next chairman of the CFTC, where I served as a conventioner in the last administration.
The CFTC plays a critical role for maintaining robust hedging and price discovery markets that are the envy of the globe.
The agency is well poised to ensure the U.S. leads the world in blockchain technology and innovation.
I look forward to working with President Trump's incredible financial regulatory.
team. I think it is also pretty cool that you can go and check out what Brian Quintens is doing
on chain because he owns Brian Q.Eath. He was last seen on chain minting an NFT about five months
ago. Minted a custom punk NFT. So the incoming likely incoming CFTC chair is posting on
Farcaster. He's minting NFTs on chain. I think that's pretty cool. Turin, what's your check?
I think he was appointed by Obama last time.
So I think the likelihood of him not getting confirmed is zero.
Not zero, but like barely above zero.
You know, it's like it seems I feel like yeah, he seems like a shoe in.
Also kind of, yeah, I feel like, hey, you know, people always complain that government officials have never done on-chain transactions because they're banned from doing so.
so they don't understand that it's much better than a wire transfer.
And he clearly has.
So can't use that complaint.
You know, like, I feel like there's not really any, I feel like it's a positive news all around.
It's, yeah, and I think he's actually done more, I think, than some of the other appointees in terms of like actually using crypto, actually understanding different protocols and stuff like that.
So really good to have someone that knowledgeable, honestly.
that's that that yeah there's like nothing negative possible to say about this news i i'll just kind of
position him everyone loves hester purse for her positive pro crypto pro markets pro individual
liberties uh perspective at the cfTC and brian quintens is just kind of the the equivalent
on are you mean at the cc excuse at the sEC brian quintens is the equivalent at the cfTC he's been on
bankless podcast before he's been at the permissionless conference uh he goes to crypto conference
is. And so this is basically as an aligned appointee as we could possibly ask for.
All right, moving on to Airdrops. This is the tweet that I'm showing is kind of just talking about the current AirDrop meta.
Post AirDrop Pengu down 70% anime, down 80% Barra Chain, down 60% right out of the gate.
You're missing, you're missing today's big one.
Today's big one. What's today's big one?
Story protocol. Story. Oh, that happened today?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, wow. Okay. Is it down?
You can pull up the chart.
It's IP as the ticker.
All right.
It is down 30%.
It's on 30%.
Now, okay, Turin, I think you're better at commentating on markets than I am.
But when something launches and then in the retroactive air drop fashion or just an
air drop fashion, and then it goes down within 24 hours.
Like to me, I'm just like, well, the starting price was arbitrary to begin with.
So it's like this fake benchmark that people compare against.
Like one person paints a like an X billion dollar valuation on that.
this thing and that sets the chart.
But that is not the true price and the true price is slowly discovered over time.
So I've kind of just like considered the first seven days of trading as not signal and only noise.
Check me on that take.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't disagree.
I do think there is an issue which is kind of true for a lot of infrastructure.
So like here's what I'd say.
Like I think the market had much more patience in 2021, 2022.
2020 for projects that raised privately at high valuations and then took a while to launch and then
launched. I think meme coins have inevitably lowered the time window that people are willing to wait
for valuations to correct, especially when they're like, people are like, hey, there have been
fair launches that have done really well since launch, like hyperliquid, right? Like, I think that's
the quintessential example of people will give you. And I
I, you know, as you can see, it's like the only thing that's not really crashing the way everything else is.
Hyperliquid came in at $4 at the start.
It went all the way up to $32 and it is holding its price at $25, which is pretty damn solid.
And so I think because of that, the market is like just generally bearish on last private valuations.
And so the real question is how long it takes to reset.
But this sort of reminds me more of like 2018, 2019, where there was a lot of pain before the valuations kind of reset in 2020.
Like we might have like a year where, you know, I made this joke to some of the other day.
But like there was some point in 2017 where Dentacoin had a higher market cap than like Cosmos, Pocodot and Tesos and probably Ethelins that became Ave.
like at the peak.
There was just like this like one little window.
And I kind of feel like there's going to be the same thing where like the infrastructure projects that people will use will probably just get punished for this year.
And then there's going to be something really stupid that, you know, does better than it.
But then I think eventually the ones I get used will return to real value.
Like I mean, in Hyperliquids case, because they created a product that's generating hundreds of millions and fees,
annualized right now already
before they launched the token,
it was like,
it's very hard to undervalue that.
Right.
So I do think,
I think we're just kind of having this reset.
And in the same way,
I think the ICO bubble caused infrastructure reset in 2017,
2018,
we're kind of having a meme coins causing that now.
So the value,
yeah,
I agree.
The valuations,
like,
were set at some private round,
perhaps at a time
where the last investor,
said, oh, if I make the FDV high, then it will, you know, have a successful launch.
Because there was, there was an era where, like, high FDV meant high, you know, your price
would actually go up.
Right.
And I think that that era is certainly done.
But yeah, I do think, like, yeah, a lot of the airdrops are, have been quite brutal.
So we'll see.
mega-eath is doing a or has done an nfti mint which is basically a roundabout iCO
where you are able to mint an nfti either like one or two depending on how many allocations
you had i think maybe the max per person was able to get was two um and for the 10 k nfts
there's 10,000 supply of these nfts uh these collectively represent a 5% share of the mega
ETH tokens. And with the current price of one ETH per NFT, that makes a valuation of about
$560 million for mega ETH, which I would call pretty fair, at least in comparison to like many
of these other like layer ones that are a getting airdropped or be just having private round
valuations of, you know, one to three billion dollars, a mega ETH valuation for, you know,
roughly 5,000 to 10,000 people who get access to this, having a valuation of $560 million,
I think is fairly like cheap and low.
Oh, it's not super cheap, but it's definitely an accessible price.
5,000 NFTs were sold.
There will be 5,000 sold in the future because they're going to get distributed to certain teams.
And the teams, I think, are going to be able to distribute them.
They had, Mega-Eath had this echo sale, which just immediately sold out.
There's a ton of hype around Mega-Eath.
Simply as, I think it's because it's kind of like a logical conclusion design of a layer two.
That's kind of like the design pattern that it's fulfilling.
the mega-eathe team hand drew the art
and then worked with a design studio to generate a 3D model
and let's see if I can find a bunny
here's what here's one of the bunnies
here's what it looks like
and then also if you minted one
there is an LLM behind each one
and you can go actually go talk to your bunny
and the LLM has
the mega-eith white paper as a data source
so you can actually talk to it
about the mega-eathe design
as it relates to specifically
this NFT distribution
call it a future airdrop placeholder.
What do you think about this mechanism?
Disclosure are mega-east investors, so I will add that first.
But I think they did a very good job not chasing the infrastructure valuations of that era
because everyone was trying to raise it a big – because, again, there was like this – there
was a little era where there were a bunch of L tokens that launched.
You know, I think like when did – when did –
Celestia launch and it was probably like late
2023 when
Gito and Celestia launched and like had
these crazy, they had high valuations
and the tokens did well after that
for some number of months.
It became this thing where everyone
was like, oh, okay, we just needed to raise a high
valuation that will make our launch more successful.
And they
very, you know, kind of
purposely decided not to do that
and instead focused on sort of
different distribution mechanisms.
So they had kind of been talking
about doing something like this for a while.
I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the interesting thing about, like, reading through the
Twitter lines was, like, some people thought it was controversial to do it because they kind of
did a, did a kind of hidden ICO or whatever, but honestly, I would think just-
All that hidden?
Was it hidden at all?
I don't understand why people were getting so mad.
I'm just like-
I thought we wanted ICOs back.
People just seem so mad on Twitter.
nowadays. They'd rather be mad first
check if the facts are right
later.
That's why it's painful
to read Twitter sometimes nowadays.
But I thought
I think it's a good idea.
I think like in their case
compared to some of the other recent
NFT kind of open launches,
I thought that the way they did the art
and the 3D model
made it very viral because like
a lot of people were sharing them.
and talking about them.
And I actually think that's an interesting aspect of it.
You kind of can't just do, oh, just an NFT or a meme coin.
You really do need to do some kind of like artistic thing that makes it go viral.
Right.
And then I thought that that was that was actually like a really good way of, you know,
kind of bringing that about.
In general, though, like.
If you're curious to her and here's what my fluffer looks like.
There you go.
see that's what I'm saying
it's like it's like
look at your tweet
that's a great example
the fact that like
it's like kind of this like
cute thing
it like you can like
play around with it
like it has just enough
that's like not just purely
like I spent money on this thing
waiting for an air drop right
like which I think that is
you gotta give them a lot of credit
on like spending time on that
because I think
there's obviously been a ton of things
that are just like
I'm just gonna quickly
ICO
whether
it's in Echo or whether an NFT, whatever, and like didn't really put that much thought into the
it is interesting how like really what this is is a placeholder for future tokens. These NFTs are
solebound. So there's no like liquid market for these. They're they're locked. They're there. Somehow
they're going to translate into some share of future mega-eat tokens. That part is explicit. That's not just like
through the lines that's just explicitly stated. But like there is it's also just a fun
game for people to play and talk about.
And it doesn't have to do much, but it's animated.
Like, I can go to the website.
It's my little fluffer bunny thing will dance around.
And I can also talk to it.
And it's just enough of an activity to, like, generate community excitement, even though
the art utility of this thing is, you know, barely above zero.
It's enough above zero where people are actually like, oh, I'm having fun playing with
my mega-eath NFT.
Oh, and then it also represents future tokens, too.
Yeah.
I think the return to fun is like the thing that I think is clearly missing and a lot of like the current everyone being nihilistic part of the universe is like everyone's just kind of like wants to get you know get in the fight first and I think like having things that are fun again will probably hopefully maybe calm people down a bit.
They are,
MegaEath is not the only organization that is doing a future airdrop.
C from OpenCC has been explicitly announced by a new Twitter account called OpenC Foundation.
OpenC Foundation tweeted out, C is coming.
The ticker is C.
Here are a few things to know.
Historical OpenCe usage, not just recent activity, will be an important ingredient.
Claim processes will be simple and accessible.
US users are welcome.
Wow.
We are focused on long-term sustainability and supporting a healthy and healthy and
during community. No details on timing yet, but we are learning from the space and getting it
right. And then Devin Finzer, the CEO of OpenC, tweeted out in addition to this, a lot of
changes are happening at OpenC. We are rolling out OpenC to a brand new OpenC built from the ground
up. NFT handshake emoji tokens. So something about fungible tokens is about going to be relevant
here. The C token coming from OpenC Foundation, we are changing policies that didn't make sense
for Web3, reenabling locked items and de-listing connections, collections, and removing
unnecessary bands, basically trying to be less Web 2E, more Web3E.
And that's something that he actually just makes explicit about his reflections about
the NFT mania.
He says the NFT bull market is behind us.
We got two corporate, two Web2, and let fear of risk outweigh building for users.
There's a lot more to say in this Devin Finswer tweet, but he finishes up saying, let's
fucking go. Terun, what do you think about the open C pivot or evolution into open C2 and also
them doing a token? I mean, you know, I don't know what there is to say that hasn't been said.
It does feel late, but like, you know, hey, maybe, maybe hope springs eternal and like doing it
four years later actually has some weird benefit. Like, people have some nostalgia. They're like,
God, the pumped up fun trenches are just too hard and tyrannical.
Like, I want to remember the good old days of, like, buying penguins on open sea, you know?
Like, I don't know.
I feel like they need to make the nostalgia play because, like, to me, that, I'm not sure it's like net new users are going there.
Like, something I've said on Chopin Block before, but I think is, like, kind of true is, um, salons.
is really the Gen Z chain.
Like, I really think, like, millennial and older is L2's and Eth.
But, like, every kind of young person I know is, like, to them, a blockchain is phantom.
It's not, it's not, like, a chain.
It's the wallet.
It's not even salonah.
It's just phantom.
Yeah.
It's just phantom, right?
And so I just kind of am like, OpenCy kind of already owns the millennial market from four years ago.
So maybe just, like, go for the nostalgia.
Oh my gosh. Okay. So I think we all just kind of got a little bit of a hint of what I referenced earlier with this.
Turun is actually a cultural connoisseur, which is going to be very important for what we talk about coming up next because we're going to talk about Fatalic and Communism, which is the current thing that's reverberating around crypto Twitter.
And we're also going to talk about Jail Stool and Dave Portnoy in that whole meme coin saga.
Again, Turun's favorite subject. So all of that is coming up next. But first, before we get there, a message from Fracks, the decentralized.
central bank on Ethereum and also their FRAXUSE stable coin. It's got some of the best yielding
DFI's like if Circle, Athena and MakerDA had a baby and you can go play around with that
on the FRAX still layer two, which is an OP stack choose to up for super high throughput.
Let's go hear from FRAX right now. The Arbitrum portal is your one-stop hub to entering the
Ethereum ecosystem. With over 800 apps, Arbitrum offers something for everyone.
D-Fi where advanced trading, lending, and staking platforms are redefining how we interact
with money.
Explore Arbitrum's rapidly growing gaming hub from immersed role-playing games, fast-paced fantasy
MMOs to casual luck battle mobile games.
Move assets effortlessly between chains and access the ecosystem with ease via Arbitrum's
expansive network of bridges and onrifts. Step into Arbitrum's flourishing NFT and creator space,
where artists, collectors, and social converge and support your favorite streamers all on chain.
Find new and trending apps and learn how to earn rewards across the Arbitrame ecosystem
with limited time campaigns from your favorite projects.
Empower your future with Arbitrum.
Visit portal.arbitrum.io to find out what's next on your web-free journey.
Sello is transitioning from a mobile-first, EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain
to a high-performance Ethereum Layer 2 built on OP stack with eigenDA and one-block finality.
All happening soon with a hard fork.
With over 600 million total transactions, 12 million weekly transactions,
and 750,000 daily active users,
Sellow's meteoric rise would place it among one of the top layer twos, built for the real world and optimized for fast, low-cost global payments.
As the home of the stable coins, Sellow hosts 13 native stable coins across seven different currencies, including native USDT on Opera MiniPay, and with over 4 million users in Africa alone.
In November, stablecoin dollars hit $6.8 billion, made for seamless on-chain FX trading.
Plus, users can pay gas with ERC 20 tokens like USDT and USDC and send crypto to phone numbers in seconds.
But why should you care about Sello's transition to a layer two?
Layer two's Unify Ethereum.
L1's fragmented.
By becoming a layer two,
cello leads the way for other EVM-compatible layer ones to follow.
Follow Sello on X and witness the great cello happening
where Selo cuts its inflation in half as it enters its layer two era
and continuing its environmental leadership.
Vitalik Buren tweeted out,
Make communism great again.
Now granted, this was in a reply to Kevin O'Waki
who tweeted out a screenshot of one of Vitalik's articles.
older articles from 2024 coming up on a year old titled D-Gen communism, the only correct political
ideology. Notably, this article came out on April 1st. So this was very intentional. Vidalc has known
to write April Fool's Day articles that towed the line about what really you think is reality,
whether he's actually making a farcical argument or if he's actually making very good points.
So this was on brand for a Vitalik, April Fool's joke. But when Vidalek tweeted
out make communism great again. Everyone has taking him at his word at face value thinking that
Vitalik is actually a communist, promoting communism really likes all the whole like central planning thing.
And this has kind of reverberated around crypto Twitter. What you are hearing Bankless Nation,
bankless listener, is crypto Twitter drama. So if you're not on Twitter, this segment might not be
for you. But this is kind of going around in the discussion sphere. And many people, I'm on the
camp that this is just very clearly a Vitalik shippost. This is a Vitalik flavored shippost. This is a Vitalik
flavored shipposts. And many other people are like, no, no, no, no, this is real. Even if it is a
shippost, the direction is directionally correct. Terun, what's your commentary on this?
Yeah, so I kind of, I agree. Like, I think if you go through, you might find like some messages
from Anatoli from Solana, which are like, yeah, this is a shitpost, but probably just hard to,
hard to parse if you don't already know Vitalik's writings. And everyone who's new has probably
not seen it.
I
kind of think
the interesting thing is
like, this has been more like
the splitting of camps
in response to this. There's like
the Amin, Eva, Bealin, etc.
camp and then there is the
Kevin
et cetera camp.
And I think
this just more reflects a natural
fissure in Ethereum
as a community over time that has been
growing.
There's kind of like
the older guard slash
defy
an application side of people
who feel like
people aren't being aggressive enough
and then there's the people
who are like
hoping that public goods funding
alone will like keep Ethereum
great forever.
And I think like
inevitably every society
has this type of fissure.
There's no chain.
There will be no blockchain
just like there's no society
that does not fissure
along this like
conservativeism versus liberal-ish
kind of split.
And I feel like that's basically what this is.
And Vitalik is, to his credit,
a very good emissary of trying to not pick one of the sides, right?
Like, he believes in credible neutrality.
And so I guess, like,
a joke like this is, like, hard to parse if you,
for someone who doesn't have that context,
which might be a lot of crypto-twe.
I think the interesting thing,
other interesting thing is like this all stemmed from the EF hiring someone from Gickcoin.
Like that was like that was the context that I forgot to bring up is there's this one
individual dev devansh. I'm sorry, I've just probably butcher that name. Former Gitkoin and
arbitraltarum person is now public goods and governance lead at the Ethereum Foundation.
Amin Soleimani, who is more of a like hidden in the corner's niche character in Ethereum,
but if you know, you know, kind of guy.
How do you not know this announcement?
I'm just kidding.
The only, I am proud to say that the only ICO that I ever invested in personally was the
spank chain ICU in 2017.
I was a one in dunner.
And that was made by Amin Soleimani.
The way I'll characterize Amin is that Ethereum is known to be a land of unicorn and
rainbows and like kumbaya v vibes.
And Amin is the opposite of that.
He is, hey, Ethereum community, remember to, like, grow claws and teeth and to use them.
Because there are barbarians at the gate and they will take advantage for you, if you let them.
So he retweets this announcement from this former Gitcoin person going to the Ethereum Foundation saying,
please, please, please, don't be another Gitcoin commie.
And then that spiraled into this tweet read where we saw make communism great again.
And then, like we've alluded to, this has devolved into many, many different like Spurs.
of conversations out in various different directions.
I do think it's funny.
Laura Shin put this tweet out, which was the fact that the Ethereum community is talking
more about Vitalik's bad joke about communism today rather than about an ETH ETF potentially
offering staking yield or the EF finally deploying capital into defy is a sign of how bad
sentiment is in Ethereum right now.
And that brings us to the next topic where the Ethereum Foundation has deployed about
50,000 ether into AVE, Spark, and Compound to actually use Defi with some of their
ether treasury, which like people are saying, is not really as talked about as this whole
Vital communism joke.
Yeah, I mean, exactly.
I honestly, my opinion is exactly what Laura said, which is like, the vibes could not
be good because there's so much good news that everyone is overlooking.
Like, actually, in fact, I started this episode saying, there's this positive for eth, which is
the staking ETF and, you know, like, I feel like everyone's ignoring all the good news because of like
five words tweeted that were, you know, kind of, okay, you could, you could agree that maybe it was
a poor joke, I don't know, but like, I don't know, that shouldn't be that important.
Like, I don't think it, you know, really, it really shouldn't be the thing driving the discourse.
I just think people are mad. And like, like I said, everyone wants to shoot first, ask of questions
later. And Twitter used to not be so much, like, obviously all social media has a little bit of that,
but I feel like it's like 100x in that direction. Yes. I definitely, I definitely agree with that.
I mean, people love, people, I think people want to take the vitalic communism, like, take seriously
because it's the most entertaining one for better or for worse. And people are on crypto Twitter to be
entertained. Or to, to earn the apps and for being fake entertaining. That's, that's exactly.
what I said. Just kidding, we actually do have to get all riled up for the apps. Something very real and very
fundamental and something I think everyone should take seriously is coming out of Arbitrum. So this is from
the Arbitrum developers account. After years of research and development, Bold, which is Arbitrum's
permissionless fault proofs system, is launching on Arbitrum 1. What this has earned them, and this is a
brand new Let L2B page for Arbitrum. This has earned them the green slice, security slice,
for fault-proof. So now Arbitrum has four out of five green slices, one yellow slice,
which is on the exit window, which makes them the most decentralized, the most feature
complete in terms of security layer two on Ethereum. Almost a complete set of green slices.
In this last one, the exit window is kind of the most like trivial one. Like changing the exit
window is just a single Dow governance vote away from turning green. And it's not a technical
feet. It is just a social, political, is it the right time choice? So I will say that this is this last
win, this last slice, once that turns green, Arbitrum becomes a fully decentralized stage to
roll up, which is pretty damn cool. Terun, what's your take? I mean, honestly, it's been a long
time coming. I feel like they've been the ones pushing the farthest in this direction,
you know, at the expense of other things. But like, honestly, it's, it's, it's, it's
good to finally see a green pie, especially in a world where like L2 beat is going to be
start filtering L2s based on like how far they are from being stage one or not.
I think it's, I think it's good to have a positive example as opposed to only the like negative
examples. Also the idea that a L2 with that many assets can migrate safely is, you know,
I think an accomplishment in and of itself.
Uh, yeah, you know, I, nothing more kind of, uh, good to say other, other than like the real question is, when does it happen for everyone else?
Yeah.
Specifically base, I think all lies are on base, uh, because base is, uh, not ahead of arbitram in TVL, but definitely ahead of arbitral.
I think in just like raw number of users and kind of just like focal point and, and attention.
Like base has kind of been used as the flagship layer two example for Ethereum.
and it is still at stage zero.
And it's not too far away from stage one, but nonetheless, it is still there.
All right, Trinon, are you ready to get into Dave Portnoy, who I'm sure is your favorite character
on the face of Crypto-Twter right now?
You know, I never considered him part of Crypto-Twitter, unfortunately.
But he is now.
Now we have to.
He is now.
All right.
Let me run through the history of Dave Portnoy.
This actually started maybe Thursday or Friday last week.
We didn't include it in the weekly roll-up just because it was too late.
Then this saga was ongoing.
But Dave Portnoy is now firmly in the trenches.
He posted this video of him talking to the camera with a caption,
The World of Shitcoins is insane.
And he's reacting to his first ever shit coin trade where this Montoya pour favor,
which is like, there was this reality TV show with this guy named Poantoya
who watched his girlfriend cheat on him.
It was trash TV, but whatever.
There was a meme coin that he bought.
And then he tweeted out.
That's what that was from?
I'm pretty sure.
Yeah.
Okay, yeah. No, no, I just didn't, I didn't even know. I just, thank you for the, thank you for teaching me.
I'm glad I'm giving you the right facts.
He, Dave Portnoy tweeted out, uh-oh, Davey learned how to trade shit coin and it's already up a one Brazilian percent on my first one, hashtag Montoya Porfavor.
So he tweeted out that he owns this shit coin. Dave Portnoy has 3.2, 3.5 million followers.
So it is not a trivial thing for Dave Portnoy to be tweeting out a meme coin, especially I'm sure.
is, you know, only a few million dollars of market cap.
Then after he tweeted this out, a few minutes later, he goes, holy shit, I have way too much power.
I made $25,000 by accident.
This is just straight gambling.
The tweet that I just tweeted turned it from $2 million to $10 million market cap in a blink.
He's also selling that meme coin that he just tweeted out.
So that is the first instance of Dave Portnoy learning about meme coins in the pumped-out fun trenches.
And then the power that he has when he tweets out these things.
He does it again.
He tweets out, I lost a million dollars on the Super Bowl.
I think I can make a million back on Josh Allen MVP coin.
Josh Allen is a football player.
He says, buy at your own risk.
I just bought it.
I'm going to sell it.
Don't buy what you can't lose.
A few minutes later, not too much later.
Yeah, so he tweeted that out on 315.
At 324, nine minutes later, he tweets out, I'm out.
I turned $10,000 into 75 on chick coins today.
It's like playing the rocket game on D.E.
I love it. I don't know what that is.
So he's just basically tweeting out
these shit coins that he's buying. He does it again.
Somebody
sent Dave Portnoy's
wallet a token called
Dave Fartnoy. He goes,
let's just see how this works. I bought
Dave Fartnoy. I got no clue
who made it. It was sent to me. I thought it was a
cute collectible. I may hold it for a bit.
I may sell it at any moment. Buying it is a risk.
I'm in this one to make
money. I've got no clue who owns it. They could
rug you at any moment. No babies.
no crying. Don't put in more what you can laugh off losing. No crypto bros crying when the music stops.
He once again sells this token very quickly after tweeting about it and is then kind of like shown to be like made up to be this this pump and dump it up there, this celebrity pump and dumper dumper who like thinks he's trading against like a bookie but rather than he's trading against like actual other DGens in the trenches and just dumping on them.
And so this, as a result of that, of the DGens being very offended by Dave Portnoy, dumping on them three times in a row, multiple times in a row.
Somebody makes this meme coin called Jail Stool, as in Stool, Barzol Sports, that's Dave Portnoy's company, Jail Stuel.
Dave Portnoy, this is the first tweet that he made about this.
He goes, hey, crypto bros, I think whoever made this coin is funny, and I want to collect it as a memory of you, bitch, it's crying like Lily.
babies. I might dump it eventually, but I'll let all you righteous losers dump on each other first.
So don't put me, don't put it in more than you can lose. These hobby games is a hobby game.
Don't cry like a little bitch when you lose. Buy Felicia. This causes the jail stool token to
absolutely pump. He accidentally, he says he accidentally sells it, but then he buys back a double.
He just sells something and he buys back twice what he sold. And then he says that he's just not going to
sell until it hits a billion dollars. So he starts to seriously pump the hell out of this meme
coin that he both bought and was sent to him. And then it rockets up to like almost $300 million market
cap. He has four, he tweets out a screenshot of a $4 million phantom wallet. And he still hasn't
sold to his day. This token jail stool, so it was listed by cracking, listed by a few centralized
exchanges. It almost hit $300 million, like I said, is now down to $70 million. But I think it has really
kind of like allowed the meme coin trenches to jump the shark.
I think a lot of people are just fed up with meme coins as a category as a result of this
shenanigans by Dave Portnoy.
He's still doing it.
He's still in the trenches.
He's still like playing little games.
But I think there's been some mixed reactions about like whether or not this is even
good for crypto.
Turin.
That was a huge monologue.
What's your take?
Probably not great for crypto from a PR standpoint.
Let's start with that.
But the second thing that is worth saying.
is I feel like this is like
financial performance art of like
Findom or like BDSM
like the people who are watching
who are like his fans who are listening to him
say I am going to dump on you disclosure
but do whatever you want
buy my token if you want and then he does dump on them
you know it's like they did
they did if they had some like personal
responsibility it was their fault
They could have read the fucking tweet, right?
Like, uh, and so I, I feel like this, this is like a financial nihilism is now into like financial domination.
Um, this feels a little bit like, that's like, you know, I just dump on me, daddy.
Yeah, it's like, exactly.
That's like the vibe, which is just very weird.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I mean, I guess people who are spending like money on, on, on, on, you know, AI girlfriends.
this is like maybe an equivalent kind of way of losing money.
But like, I don't know.
The whole thing is very weird to me.
I like, I find this, this idea that like, see,
the other celebrity coins don't disclaim anything, right?
You like, look at Scotty Pippin's Twitter and you're like,
okay, well, this guy's not trying to tell his fans he's going to dump him.
But Portnoy is telling you and like almost disgustingly telling you that he's going to lose you money.
Like it's like it's like it's like it's even weirder like that's what I mean there's like the celebrity coins where they like pretend that it's a real thing and then there's the portnoy thing where he's like telling you he's going to dump on you which is this a better meta or worse meta than celebrities who are faking promotion of their coin everything is bad some are worse I don't know I don't know which one is the worst do you think meme coins are as a category bad or is it just like I I I don't know
not a fruitless argument.
I kind of think like everything, there's a, there's always like, for everything, there's always
some good in it.
Like, you know, if you think about the ICU boom, like, yeah, sure, 90% reduction didn't
work.
But the ones that did survived and created new stuff, right?
I'm sort of of the mindset that there will be something interesting that comes out of
meme coins.
If only that it's the infrastructure.
sure it's the ux it's getting people used to them whatever i'm the celebrity coin thing though
feels like cash grab not like i think it's really hard for a celebrity coin to be
redeemable in any particular yeah the celebrity coin ones are but then the celebrity coins that
tell you they are going to rug you are even weirder right it's like it's like that's like
that's why i'm saying it's like some type it feels like it's like fin dom it's like fin dom for genzy
You know, there was Findom for millennials.
Now there's Fendom for this.
Is this the beginning and the end of Fendom?
Or do you think that this is actually the front of the door for future Fendom activities on chain?
I think like in the past people's Fendom predilections were private.
Now they're very public.
That's that.
You know, it's like I can see your entire on-chain history of getting domed by Portnoy.
Oh my God.
Okay, Turin, this is an hour.
and I don't know if I want to talk about Dave Portnoy anymore.
I agree. I agree.
Fine, moving on.
Trune, thank you so much for helping me walk through the news today.
If people appreciated your takes or just like the sound of your voice,
they can follow you on Twitter, but they can also listen to you on the chopping block.
Tell them a little bit more just about you, who you are,
and what they can hear from you by following you on Twitter and other takes that you give out.
You write very intellectual papers, which is maybe not what people expect after this episode.
Tell me a little bit more about where they can find you.
Yeah, Twitter is just my name, Tarun, C-H-I-T-R-A.
And I think a lot of why write on is, you know,
D-F-I-Investing and risk stuff within D-F-I.
I think the one thing I will say is being an investor in the space for a while
has made me have to always question
what I've believed over time, which is why, even though David likes saying it's because
I know something about culture. It's more that I just try to follow what people are doing
online. And I've just gotten kind of this, I've been trying to understand like what, why people
want to trade meme coins. I still don't have a good answer. But if I do, I'll make a 10-part
podcast series for you.
If anyone can figure that out, I would appreciate that.
Turin, thank you so much for joining me this week on the weekly roll-up.
Thanks.
Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal.
Crypto is risky.
Dave Portnoy could dump on you.
You could lose what you put in.
But nonetheless, we are headed west.
This is the frontier.
It's not for everyone.
We are glad you are with us on the bankless journey.
Thanks a lot.
