The Wolf Of All Streets - Memecoins Memecoins Memecoins | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

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I don't know why I'm always having issues connecting, but I almost said 50% of the time, your thoughts on this brutal Bay market score. It's just, uh, when are we going to finally get the pump? And it's just such a tough game market. The bloodbath is crazy. Yeah. God, I can't believe it's over. So sad. Uh, I don't think we should call it a consolidation and not correction. That's what I think. i know it's yeah god i can't believe it's over so sad uh i don't think we should call it uh consolidation and not correction that's what i think normal no i call it i call it not a

bull market it's a bloodbath crypto's dead i haven't looked at the markets i think that's fair we would get more people watching i think we that in the title though. If we put crypto blood bath, we would get a lot more people listening. Oh, so that's 66.6 K. Um, and I was looking at the notes where the 33rd day about 60 K would you even call that a correction? Like it just doesn't. No, I call it consolidation. Yeah. I call it consolidation. You know, like you go up, then you chill for a while, then you go up, then you chill for a while. I don't know how that's a correction. It's only a correction if your expectation is a new high every day

or every week. Otherwise, consolidation. And you think, how are alts doing during this consolidation? So you analysts keep saying that whenever Bitcoin is consolidating, alts rally. are we seeing that? They dropped with Bitcoin kind of on the way down and I think we're seeing certain sort of sectors and areas rally. Ran takes a much closer look at that so you know he could probably answer that question even better than me because I really kind of only follow a select few

coins and I don't really you know there's there's such an easy trick and i don't i don't want to show the trick but i mean it is our piece of software you just go to banter bubbles and mario you got a hot mic um you you go to banter bubbles and you mario your mic's killing my ear bro so you go to banter bubbles and you can just see which tokens are recovering the quickest, and that shows you what the narratives that are running. So today, if I look at what's recovering the quickest, so there's BitGet token, but that's because they've got an IDO on the IDO platform.

You've got Solana. Obviously, Solana is recovering very well because of the wormhole airdrop and the meme coin mania, which is far from dead in fact it's exploding still um you've got athena which is the new stable coin i don't know if you'd like to call this table synthetic dollar synthetic dollar synthetic dollar that's it uh that that one is is up um it launched yesterday so too soon to to understand it you got a token called flare which is a layer one blockchain which is actually up uh and then mainly mainly mainly it's the solana coins that

are up and the base meme coins so like the base meme coin called brett uh that one's also up so that's kind of like that's kind of like the narratives that are that are actually running so like brett um uh you know so it's a solana meme coins the base meme coins i think what i can what i can surmise here is that again this is not a correction because the fear and greed hasn't dropped and people just want to ape into meme coins and they don't give a shit about this like they're just carrying on trading into meme coins and the amount of of i'm going to use a bad word because Twitter can't censor your stream, but the amount of fuckery that's going on

in this meme coin market is absolutely ridiculous. I'm seeing people trying to ape into and trying to close deals with meme coins. It's like, it's the craziest thing. It's like people are fighting. Actually, I heard Mario's team is actually fighting to get into some meme coins. I'm like, whoa, Mario, is this true?

Now he doesn't have a hot mic. Yeah, now he has no mic at all now. I noticed actually ran some, I think some RWA coins are also moving today. There seems to be like a 10% there like 10 ish so i i x swap uh mantra well i guess that's more ai but yeah let me go and get so i'm going to quickly again i'm going into banter bubbles and i'm filtering and i'm going to filter by rwa just one second filter real world assets and you can actually see how the rwa sector yeah i mean rwa sector's doing not not amazing it's i mean it's there but it's not amazing uh yeah not amazing the the big

movers hey where do you where do you sort by sector and bubbles i use it all the time okay you can go to filter so go if you click on the filter so you see this there's a button that says filter and you can filter by category so you you see this, there's a button that says filter, and you can filter by category. So you can see this memes, gangfire, metaverse, privacy tokens. So you can just go look at, you can, and you can click just say view all, and you can see which ones are the ones that pop up. This is on the app or specifically on the desktop or both?

You can do it on both. You can do it on the app and the desktop. Okay. Cool. Also listen, if you want to, if you do use banter bubbles, you can get it. it we're creating a meme coin i think i told you that yesterday or the day before gummy gummy gummy is out is a weed gummy and we're creating a meme coin the reason why we're just doing it we're going to drop 100 percent of the coins to the to the community we just want to show them how to create a meme coin to show them how simple it is because people say uh oh the dev of the meme coin the dev it's not a dev there's no dev oh it's just so simple to create this and we're going to just show our community how to create a meme coin we're going to create a meme called gun memory just going to send the

tokens all to the community that sounds fun see we lost mario when we started talking about memes i don't know if he uh disappeared you brought up a ethina synthetic dollar actually we happen to have uh matthew siegel here from vaneck i saw matt yesterday that you guys have launched a stable coin is that correct that's right yes so this is uh pretty big news um nick vanak who is jan's eldest son and who has helped Orange Pill him over the years, is launching a stablecoin called Agora to explicitly compete with Tether and USDC. So they raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by Dragonfly, also included investments from General Catalyst. The way this is going to work is the parent company is incorporated in Delaware, but the VanEck will be managing a private fund that will serve as the deposit vehicle for Agora Finance, which

will be issuing a stable coin domiciled in the British Virgin Islands and targeted to global businesses. So VanEck will earn a small fee to manage the fund, which will be similar to what Circle pays BlackRock for USDC. And then we think that Agora Finance can gain market share by sharing some economics with market makers and other partners. So if you look at stablecoin transfer market share, it's been basically a two-horse race, Tether and USDC. Tether market share peaked on October 7th of last year. October 7th is kind of a big date in global geopolitics. And we think that there's room for a well-regulated new entrant into this space that can compete on fees. So look out for this.

Big news for us. MARK BLYTH, JR.: Zach? ZACHARY TILLERY, JR.: I'm just curious about the, except you can speak about it, what you see as the future of not so much the is it backed regulatory side of things. I think we're likely to get clarity on that. But on the KYC AML front, I think

a lot of the criticism of Tether, which is a very popular product around the world, is it is used a lot for money laundering, right? It's a very convenient tool for criminals. But almost anything you would want to do to stop that is going to make it a less useful product and less permissionless and less peer-to-peer. And so from an institutional perspective, from VanEck, how do you think about those questions going forward? Yeah, I think you're going to want to wait and see how we how we roll it out. But the the opportunity is to start something from scratch and build the proper relationships from first principles thinking and then share that information with the regulators as appropriate. But I think it's important to note that until there is federal legislation for stable coins in the US, Agora is not going to go after the US market. They're going to focus primarily on customers outside the US. For sure. I'm just thinking long term, do you foresee the future of stable coins being that

you have to have a whitelisted wallet or something so it can track where the funds are going from or to? Or do you see stable coins acting more like digital cash that can be sort of more anonymous? I think the way our current banking system kind of works where, uh, if you are a size buyer, then you have to KYC, but there are limits below which it's essentially cash. I think that's more or less the structure. I think we, I don't know if Matthew was done or if we lost him. But William, you have your hand up. Go ahead.

Yeah, sorry. I wasn't supposed to be here, but then I heard Rand talk about meme coins and I wanted to say something. Can we talk about meme coins for a bit? I wanted to react. I mean, what else would we ever possibly talk about at 10.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on a weekday? Well, I am still very bullish on the meme coins phenomena in terms of what's going on right now. And don't be fooled by the silliness that they have. That being said, I was thinking we need like a new name. We used to have shit coins when the ICOs came out in 17. And there will be some very bad meme coins, obviously. And I saw a stat this

morning talking about the lotto. Americans in the US at least spent $113 billion on lotto tickets per year. So that could be one analogy. But the thing that's interesting is that it's being done in reverse. Some meme coins will have products. It's being done in reverse, meaning that the brand comes first, then the community, then the market fit.

And they have things that other products would dream of. So I wouldn't discount what's going on in the meme phenomena right now. Yeah, I literally tweeted this this morning, which the tweet is pinned above from Charlie Palelo. Americans spent over $113 billion on lottery tickets last year, more than they spent on movies, books, concerts, and sports tickets combined. I tweeted, this explains meme coins. And this is totally reframed, not the specific tweet, but gives a perfect framing for meme coins. And I'm sorry, I disagree that it's about utility or building anything.

These meme coins are digital lottery tickets. And that's it. This is people who... There are some people who are actually making money and flipping around. But just like with lottery tickets, we know that obviously people with less money, less income spend more on lottery tickets because they're looking for their one shot to get exceptionally rich. And that's exactly what's happening by and large in the meme coin market. And that is it. People gamble and they're looking for an easy way to get out of their current situation? If you want to see a really good exception, look at what DGEN is doing

in the Warpcast community. They are being integrated into all kinds of things and really becoming a product of its own. Is that even a meme coin? Really? Well, it started as a meme coin. It still has components of a meme coin, but the way it's evolving is to be embedded into use cases as a result of the community's support. So it's not just one central team doing all of that. It's all kinds of small teams all together doing small things that add up

because they want utility. So we will see some of these kind of break from the mold. And that's going to be what's interesting is to be able to differentiate, if you can, between the ones that will make it and become something that's more than a meme coin or not. Max? Max? Yeah, hey guys. Thanks for having me. I think this is the first time that we've all spoken.

Appreciate the invite. I'm excited on the direction that this conversation is going. Obviously, I think it's pertinent to discuss what's happening with this meme economy right now. And there's a lot of things so far that I've heard that I partially agree with. I think, Scott, you had mentioned people looking to get out of their current situation. Certainly, I think that's relatable on all fronts for everybody, right? The reason I'm in crypto, the reason people flock to Bitcoin is for hopes of something better, something more, a more fair system, potential gains, and not even just protecting themselves from the predatory debasement of their fiat currency and viewing cash actually as a liability, but the hope that they can actually get a leg up by being smart and opting out of the fiat system into a concrete store of value being Bitcoin. Now, I spend a lot of my time focusing on the meme world and the meme economy.

And I can tell you that, yes, there is certainly gambling, you know, specifically a lot of, you know, a lot of random contracts, they pop up on is certainly gambling, you know, specifically a lot of, you know, a lot of random contracts. They pop up on Sol and they, you know, are sometimes offensive names, you know, whatever, whatever. to be vulnerable and gullible people that just buy into it under the guise or the promise that this is the next Doge or Pepe or something like that. But if you spend enough time digging in the weeds and understanding the intricacies of this web, you can actually map it out. And let me start with this. I'll preface with this. For one, you need to know where to look, right? That's the first most difficult part. But you need to view we constantly hyper-focus on the ETH BTC valuation or the sole BTC valuation to determine whether our altcoins

are worth the inherent risk of holding. Because if your altcoin is bleeding against Bitcoin, why not just hold Bitcoin? It's first mover advantage. It's a decentralized proof-of-work network. You have institutional adoption, global adoption, countries purchasing it. If you can't outperform Bitcoin, you shouldn't hold an altcoin. View Doge similarly to how I just explained Bitcoin, right? You should not hold a meme coin if one, you can't chart it against Doge and set up a pair trade similarly to ETHBTC. Additionally, that inherent risk of buying any new young meme coin, if it's not going to outperform Doge over at least a multi-week or multi-month period, and there's not a technical setup there, is not worth it. One of the reasons that people have

started to take a liking to my work is because I was very early to the Pepe trade. The Pepe USD chart looked great. Obviously, we all know Pepe. It's now a multi-billion dollar meme asset. And of course, Pepe is sort of the de facto mascot of the internet. But the reason I was interested in Pepe was not because of the meme, right?

The meme is great, right? It's funny, we all like it, we all adore Pepe. But the reason that I was interested in Pepe at the lows was because when you chart Pepe denominated in Doge, similarly to ETH denominated in Bitcoin, you set up a pair trade, you can see crystal clear that this is not random. This is not gambling. This is not a lottery ticket. These are multi-hundred, if not sometimes multi-billion dollar assets that can be pair traded against each other, right? What is the value in it? Maybe it's a fraternal thing. It's like however much you appreciate the meme and the culture and the community you buy in, and that's sort of your vote of confidence in it. Whatever. People are here for different reasons. For me personally, you denominate every single meme coin in Doge and you see how it looks. Then you can go further down the risk curve and

you denominate newer memes against Pepe because if Pepe is going to be the one outperforming Doge and a new meme coin pops up, denominate that new meme coin in Pepe because why would you hold something if it's bleeding against Doge? Furthermore, why would you hold something if it's bleeding against Pepe? Now, there's some people out there, no one here, right? But there's some people out there that they don't understand the intricacy of this web, you know, of the meme economy. And they look at these memes and they brush it off and they feel as though they are above it.

You know, I would never get down into these childish games to play with meme coins. You know, I'm above that. Well, you look, not you guys, right? But in a general sense, you look down on us for playing meme coins. I look down upon you for thinking that you're better than the market and you know what's best. When the market is clearly telling you these are multi-deca-billion-dollar assets that can be pair-traded against each other, not only against each other, but against soul, you know, chart whiff against soul chart Pepe against ETH chart, these memes against their mothership against their L ones, see what the chart looks like. It'll be crystal clear. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Dave, I'm going to Joe, Joe, I saw you disagree with what Max just said.

So I think it's perfect way to place a segue to you before going to dave thanks mate uh no i'm just laughing i uh i think that yeah you can draw lines on screens and try to make sense of meme coin and try to be like oh yeah this is fascinating this is going places but it's a meme coin it's literally made for fun like don't get ahead of yourself. You're going to hit me with the whole, oh, but you're arrogant. You're looking down on this space. You're not getting into the weeds and having fun with it. It's like, no, I'm choosing not to, but I'm also very aware that all of these things will trend to zero eventually. You gave this great big Bitcoin maxi preamble to what you were just saying there, and then undermined it all by shilling Pepe and other community tokens. And I know that it's all about community,

and I totally get that part of it as well. People are lonely. People are looking for mates in the crypto space. But a lot of these communities are incredibly toxic, like to the point of getting death threats in your DMs and all sorts of horrible i'd like to respond to some of those points so quickly please oh god no sorry your space i don't want to hijack it go ahead i just want to go ahead max you can respond no no go ahead max joe i i don't i don't care about the memes, right?

But I would, at least at a minimum, if you haven't yet, I would encourage you to set up something like a Pepe-Doge pair and just look at how the – I don't know if you're a technician. I'm not familiar with your work or your area of expertise. But to discount it and say, for example, let's talk about Doge just real quick. Doge has been around longer than Ethereum. Okay, Doge is a decentralized proof of work network. It may have a funny name, but you know, now there's, you know, chain functionality like Doge and Nulls. It's also an L1. It's also an L1. Oh yeah. I don't know if that particularly matters to me necessarily. There's plenty of L2s that can find success and even L3s.

I'm just saying it's not the same as like cat with fresh boxers, even, you know, I'm not advocating that cat with fresh boxers is going to be anybody's meme coin of choice, right? I think a lot of that is silly, but I would say before you write it off and say that, you know, do not let the names and the memes get in your way of a multi-billion dollar liquidity pool that has, you know, 20 times more volatility, intraday volatility and volume than that of potentially on any given day, even Bitcoin or ETH or Sol or some of these majors that you probably wouldn't write off. Just ignore the names and understand the liquidity and the volatility and from a trader's perspective it is to their own detriment to discount to discount and write off these memes just because the names are silly or quote-unquote childish want me to get back on that

go ahead joe and then joe joe you can respond and then to dave yeah thanks mate uh no i'm just gonna say no thank you uh the the investigations i've done into the communities has always ended up horrifically toxic and nasty and just type in into google or whatever coin telegraph pepper community um i wrote a couple of articles about pepper hosted some spaces with that community done lots of deep dives into other meme coin communities people get married to their bags and people try to throw meaning onto their bags and it's all bullshit. Yeah, you mentioned that Dogecoin is an L1.

Yeah, it's a fork of Bitcoin. Do you know anyone that's actually running a Dogecoin node? Is it actually decentralized? Yeah, maybe on your spectrum of decentralization, it's better than whatever token you just mentioned there. But get real, man. It's a whole silly game. Joe, I explained it to you and you just continue to discount it. You actually have not taken

a deep dive into it because you're not listening to what I'm saying. So just at least consider it and look into it. My work will speak for itself on this. Yeah. Yeah, Max, I think the issue here is that you're telling investors to set up a pair trade on Pepe versus Doge that like any sophisticated investor needs fundamental reasons to either be long or short that pair trade. And when the entire effort behind a meme coin has only gone into picking a funny ticker and a funny image and not into

a product roadmap, there's no fundamental underpinning to pair trade any of these assets. So I don't see any value in that. I will grant that Dogecoin has now outperformed Bitcoin since 2015. And that is a tremendous track record. But for the long tail of meme assets, unless there is a roadmap, we consider them to be uninvestable lottery tickets the way that Scott is approaching it. I hear you. Look, humans have always had an innate fascination with scarcity and culture and collectibles. Why does a Tom Brady rookie card sell for $4 million? It's a piece of

paper, right? If we want to go down that rabbit hole of what is value, we certainly can, right? We certainly can. And I'm not arguing that meme coins are superior to Bitcoin or Ethereum or Solana, right? But what I am saying is that if you ignore the funny names and you study the liquidity and the flow of capital into multi-billion dollar liquidity pools that may have funny names and you move past the, you know, the quote unquote childish communal aspect of it and you're a trader and an investor. anybody that's active as an active participant in these markets is to have a highly liquid ticker that has 20 to 30 times beta to that of something like Bitcoin and can actually be pair traded against it. That's fine, but just be clear. All you're doing is chasing momentum. That's all you're doing is chasing momentum. I'm not advocating for people. Not a sustainable investment threat. That's right. Max, you lost me where you said for traders and investors. If you had just said for traders, I totally agree that meme coins, for those who understand it, is a dream asset class for traders.

But the minute you call any of them an investor, you lose me. Yeah, okay. No, I understand. I mean, I think you could make a case for potentially doge just given it's it's a decade long it's not a meme point anymore that's the point but yes i agree right so doge is the only one but you know at this point it's too early to to advocate on any of the other ones joining the ranks or the likes of doge right you know i think but yeah but yeah but Yeah, but Doge was laughed at as a meme. Hold on, Max. Yeah, and then the richest man and then the richest. Yeah, and if Elon Musk had not attached himself to Doge,

we would be still having that conversation. That is a black swan event for a single token, but you can't ascribe any future potential to any other meme coin unless you think that Jeff Bezos is going to randomly start tweeting about Dog with dirty underwear. It's not. So look, Elon may have started it and set the wheel in motion, but he did play a huge role in legitimizing this meme economy for better or for worse. Whether it would have happened without him or not, nobody can say for sure. You're probably right. It wouldn't have. But he set something in motion and it can't be undone now, you know, and I've told the story many times, Max, but to be fair, as much as I came in

and got orange filled and love Bitcoin, my first love in crypto was when I found Doge in 2016 and traded the Doge cycles to make Bitcoin, right. Because it only traded on a sat pair. So I understand the compulsion to do it. But I also know that I was gambling trying to make money and it was fun. And when we try to make it a lot more serious than that, and pretend that this is like a legitimate asset class that's investable, that's where we becomes very dangerous. It's like, for people who go to Las Vegas, to gamble and know that they're in a casino and understand the risks of being there and are doing it for entertainment, or because they believe there's upside, perfectly great. The problem is that 90% of the people somehow don't know they're in the

casino who are doing this. I agree with that. And here's the thing. I will just add an asterisk to that because I agree with a lot of what you said, but there's one thing I disagree with. It is too early to make that distinction that it is not a long-term investable asset class. We don't know yet. It's simply too young. They would have to cease to be memes to be investable. They would have to cross the creek. And just to be clear on my philosophy because I'm new here, I just want to give a tiny bit of context. My philosophy, my company is called Because Bitcoin.

I'm an active trader. My team is traders. But however, we trade actively and we recognize that Bitcoin is the only true store of value that we would be willing to make multi-decade or millennium long bets on and we have confidence in appreciating over time as a salient sound concrete investment so we may trade i may talk about meme coins again you can set up a lot of these pair trades and these multi-billion dollar liquidity pools called doge and pepe with funny names but all capital all trading profits flow back into bitcoin okay Okay. I just wanted to provide that.

Joe, let me ask you a question. Do you think the experiment of a decentralized community, because I know we've had meme coin spaces before, do you think that experiment at least has the potential to become something more than a toxic community, a toxic group? Yeah, people can get hella rich off that. A lot of these, not only hella rich,

so a lot of these meme companies are more decentralized than the projects, the startups that we, you know, some of us here invest in. The fact that there is no group of people, there's no party that can ruffle the project or that can abandon the project and the project dies, do you think that has potential to eventually become a use case within itself? And then what that community does could be nothing,

could be something stupid, could be something a bit more interesting? I mean, I guess you've kind of summarized what Doge was from, you know, from its starting point, because it started off as a joke and a meme and just a fork of Bitcoin, and it's become this global movement spearheaded by Elon. I think my opinion on this sort of reflects what Scott was saying, that while some people might be acting with good faith in this space and just for the pure entertainment value and the meme value, a lot of people are bad actors in this space. And crypto and meme coins in particular is a playground for bad actors

where they can spin up these projects and then dump on people and make a lot of money in the process. So as long as people are aware of the risks and aren't trying to create an era like this, this atmosphere of legitimacy and this atmosphere of, oh my God, because it's got trading pairs, it's now legitimate. Oh my God, because Elon Musk said it's, you know, this payment of the people or whatever he said, the money of the people, then suddenly it's got legitimacy like elon does not think about cryptocurrencies um he certainly hasn't studied bitcoin or anything else and his forays into the space have always just been all doge is funny i will support that um you know i'm reading his autobiography at the moment it's really interesting because i wanted to get more sense of what he thought and if he actually thought about

bitcoin and it barely touches that um subject But yeah, to your original point, Bitcoin has become something more. I really don't see it. I don't see it as getting past the point of degeneracy. Like we've seen how many cycles of this? You know, Scott, if you've been in this space since 2015, you've seen three rounds of meme coin mania now. And have you seen anything come of it

other than just, you know, money and, you know, funny, funny trades? Largely, no. seen anything come of it other than just you know money and you know funny funny trades largely no i mean i'll give some i'll give some credit that some may be trying i mean mario to your point about decentralization i think that there is potential there but most times when we've seen the community take over there's two things a community is only as good as price right remember all these nft communities where people like I am my turnt up turtle, like I deeply associate with my languishing lion or whatever the fuck stupid PFPs people were associating their entire lives with. When the price goes down, those people are no longer their lions and turtles, right? It's all about price. It's all about making money. And that's when they turn toxic, as he said. And most of these quote unquote decentralized communities that have lost a leader or whatever, some of them can succeed, but the bulk of them become Lord of the Flies.

Right. And they like Constitution Dow, how much money did they raise to attempt to buy the Constitution? And when they failed, all of a sudden, it was a bunch of idiots with tens of millions of dollars sitting in a fund trying to figure out what to do with it. That's what you're largely gonna get with most of these things. I'm not saying some can't succeed, but to pretend that like the interest here is to build some sort of genuine decentralized community that will have some future use is complete bullshit. These are lottery tickets, these are lottery tickets,

and people are gambling on which one will be the hot potato next. And that's 99%. Exactly. I don't disagree with you. I don't disagree with Joe. And I think the last comment, that's 99% of it.

I agree. But then again, that's 99% of startups that people are trying to get, make a quick buck. And that's it. 99% of investors are trying to make a quick flip and that's it. They don't believe in it. They're not trying to be out.

They're not trying to be out, but they're not trying to be out. They're not trying to be out, but they're not trying to be out tomorrow is the difference. But you know, but Dave, go ahead. It depends. If they could be out tomorrow, they would be out tomorrow.

Yeah. I'm trying to be patient. I've heard more dumb things on this conversation than I've heard in a while on this thing. People have completely lost perspective. We have in literally the biggest meme right now, the most ridiculous meme right now, isn't in crypto. It's Donald Trump's So Truth Social. We've had GameStop, AMC, which has zero hope of ever getting close to it, or legal securities that trade in a casino

called the stock market. The fact of the matter is, this is a pervasive, the person who, I'm going to defend Max here, or I think it was Max, who was going on about the meme economy. It matters. I mean, we have memefied our whole freaking asset casino. And to basically just dismiss that as a social construct is just crazy. I mean, the fact of the matter is memes are here to stay. I mean, if you talk about toxic, go on Reddit and look at Wall Street bets and see what's going on there. I mean, come on. I mean, it is literally the same thing. Now, do I disagree with Scott? And do I disagree with the notion these are trading vehicles and not investing vehicles? Of course not.

It's exactly what they are. But the reality is that the biggest single problem in all of meme tokens, the one that bothers me the most, is that if you build a community, and William has talked about this a lot, if you build a community that could become monetizable, it actually makes a lot more sense than a lot of these zombie stocks that people bid up because they're going for mother of all short squeezes and nonsenses. But then you're an unregistered security. But fuck that shit. The fact of the matter is, that's the problem. The problem is we have securities laws that allow you to do the exact worst stuff than what's going on in crypto, if only there was a way to actually allow disclosures and allow people to do what they want. The problem is, if you're a meme coin, the way to stay away from being unregistered security is to make it less

investable by not allowing participation, which is completely insane. It makes no sense. Look, there's a couple of simple facts here. And I'm also going to plug something. Fact number one, Max, I think it was Max who was right, in terms of pairs trading and other stuff like that. Look, my company does this. There's at least a dozen meme coins that our clients have done double digit millions using algorithmic pairs trading and spread trading on our platform. And they're able to do it substantively better than, you know, kind of some of the swap methodologies that are out there.

So obviously I care about this. So yes, if someone wants to accuse me of being rent-seeking, I suppose that, you know, our getting our very small, low single-digit basis point fee to help people save double-digit basis points when implementing these trades. If that's rent-seeking, so be it. But it is a vibrant trading market, and it is no different in the essence to what's going on in the stock market. So that's point number one. Point number two, our legal framework is literally exactly flipped. It does exactly the opposite of what it should do. In other words, if you can build a

community of people who can actually make something that's monetizable, I mean, I love the comment about Pepe is, you know, has made itself into, you know, an avatar for the Internet. That's very important. Whether it's true or not, I don't know. You know, Elon Musk's stuff with Doge, it's true. I mean, I thought it was forked off of Litecoin, by the way, not Bitcoin. But, you know, what do I know? I'm the oldest person in the call, probably. The fact is, meme economies is literally, I mean, it's almost inherent in our social media culture. And I don't care whether it's crypto or stocks. And so the real question is, you know, how do you do it? How do you clean up the complete crap? Because Scott, you and I have talked about this. I mean, you know, launching a coin, rug pulling it three days later, you know, it look, you can only do that in a world

because there are no regulations and there's nobody, there's no consequences for doing it, trying it and failing. Yeah. Can I just jump in there and say about the forks? Sure. Because Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin and Dogecoin is a fork of Litecoin. So yeah, they're both forks of Bitcoin. So you are right with that, Dave. Just what about Dave's point that the whole meme economy that we're living in is here to stay.

And while there's an ugly side to it, whether it's a toxic community or dump groups or lack of regulation, reading, leading to, to meme coins, pumping, dumping left, right, and center.

But a meme coin launched the right way to a fair launch without centralized part. The founders could drop or could sell their tokens. The community could, could continue existing. The meme token could continue. I used one example. I was, I remember I had a project on one of our shows and I talked to them. Okay guys, look,

I like what you're doing because I think the YouTube co-founder was talking about them. And my team started speaking to them to do some sort of deal, you know, we'll start up, we partner with them. We might invest OTC with a lockup period and then work with them over a period of time. So we wanted to do a similar deal with them. They're like, Mario, there's no founder. There's no one. There's a bunch of large investors.

There's no founder that you can do a deal with and do an OTC deal with with a SaaS and everything else. So this is exactly what decentralization looks like. That's going to make it hard for us to do a deal. And then you've got the co-founder of one of the largest companies in the world looking at that project and potentially wanting to publicly talk about it. Is that a positive start of the decentralized meme communities that we've created over the last few years? Joe, that's for you.

Oh, thanks, mate. Sorry. I was just going to make some comments about the... Dave compared meme trading to the stock market. And I just think that's just wild and a little bit outrageous. And to your point about whether or not this is going to stick around, it comes in waves, doesn't it? We've seen this happen since, what, 2014? Every couple of years, people find out new ways to make money in crypto by dumping on newbies. And then people that out new ways to make money in crypto by dumping on

newbies and then people that make a little bit of money believe their bags and start start to throw more meaning onto it um you talk about these decentralized communities but it's it's basically just an internet community you know like all these people all around the world that waking up to make memes about pepe or doge or whoever it is on a daily basis it's just people on the internet doing internet stuff but this time they're doing it with some money about it. And the final thing was about whether or not the Twitter community and the meme coin community is more toxic than other ones.

Of course, this is really subjective, but, you know, getting death... I've never had death threats, and I have a public profile on Reddit and Twitter and YouTube and TikTok and other social media sites. The stuff you receive on Twitter... You should try a political space. You should join me on one of the Republican versus Democrat spaces about the Gaza war or what's happening in Ukraine. And then you can compare the ratio of death threats to that compared to when I talk anything negative about a meme

point is incomparable. So I think the toxicity is just adding the internet. In which way is it worse? I've had my life's way. Joe, it doesn't make sense to point to all of the bad things that have happened with meme coins and launches and paint the entire meme economy with a broad stroke. It'd be like saying, well, Luna collapsed. I'll never buy another proof of stake l1 or anything like that there's always going to be bad actors

and in any industry whether it is legacy or whether it's crypto but i think max well i think this point i think let me let you some more joseph i understand you can make you can say what you've said about pretty much anything but joseph is like at least um with some of these projects they're trying to build something that these projects they're trying to build something that has utility they're trying to solve a problem in the ecosystem where meme coins are not really solving any problem i'm speaking on your behalf i don't i don't know if a lot of these i don't know if a lot of these these new projects these vc back projects are actually sincere with the language they use i think that they sell a big promise with a lot of

buzzwords and they raise a lot of money from Silicon Valley investors. And I think that their objective is primarily to use retail as exit liquidity in a more predatory fashion than the meme coin communities. I agree with you. Joe, one more question before going to the rest of the panel. One more question. If hypothetically there's a project that launched launched a meme coin that launched in a decentralized way, the founders of drug pool, they just walked away, or they, they, there was a fair launch and they don't have any tokens.

And then that community is now incentivized to create something of value because they all benefit. So they don't need a central entity to say, all right, we need to build this. We solve that problem. They're like, all right, cool. We're all token holders. Let's talk together and let's see what we can do. So our token goes up. Now their incentive is their token goes up, but that's not necessarily a bad thing because that aligns incentives for them to create value. Because the only reason a token could go up is either the community becomes

final. They launch a really cool game. Now there isn't many good examples of that. There's some, but not too good. It's theoretically with that, could that use case make sense? It's essentially a meme coin eventually becomes a decentralized community incentivized to create value without an essential party being there leading the way. I mean, I would bounce back saying the question you just asked, which is what problem is it solving? And the second thing I'd say is that you made a few assumptions there with the launch of this project. You said,

if it were to launch in a decentralized way, I don't know how any crypto project realistically can launch in a decentralized way. You could make the argument that Bitcoin didn't launch in a decentralized way because for the first day there was one person mining it. So I think that there's a lot of creative and imaginary beliefs that we throw onto a lot of these systems in order to justify our bags later on down the line, when realistically, these meme coins are companies. You're creating a company in the hope of making some profit from this company, which you're going to sell for dollars or maybe for Bitcoin, as Scott did with Dogecoin later on at a later stage.

So I don't really know how to answer the question, given that there's so many assumptions made along the way. So I put it back to you. What problem? Yeah, I would just say this path is well defined, guys. You start as a trader and then you get a little more interested. You see that you're about to lose money. You move your stock loss. Then you convince yourself that you're an investor and you're in it for the tech and for the long haul and for the community.

And then you become a passionate community member when your investment continues to go down. Then you become a toxic maximalist for whatever that thing is. And you start sending Joe death threats. Tale as old as time. And that's where 99% of people who are buying these things are headed. Joe, Joe, you asked about what problem they, Joe, you asked about what problem they're solving. So startup determines that problem prior to launch and their local,

a lot of their tokens for marketing purposes to a team for future raises. And could a meme coin, and remember I'm a person, I get attacked a lot by the mean coin community for being critical in many aspects, just the heads up. So I'm playing a bit of devil's advocate, but couldn't mean coin create that value over time. So essentially they launched a token. They're like, Hey, we're a decentralized community. We've got funny pictures.

Um, we're going to have fun. And then the community later determines what utility they want to create. So I'll use that example that I talked about earlier, and I'm not, I'm naming it. I'm not naming it. cause I don't want to sit in shilling. Cause I'm going to use it generally as an example. So what they've done is they've created like a charity now to help an animal, certain animal, um, in opening a shelter. That's one of the use case. And that's a very basic use case,

not enough to warrant a 20, $30 million market cap, but that was achieved without a founder being there, without a founding team, without an office. That says something. We're extremely early. Like right now, you can point out so many flaws, but just the fact that a community came together where financially incentivized without any central party

to create a charity for cats is, it cannot be ignored. It can and it should that is the biggest BS man come on like remember the 2021 cycle remember feed every gorilla token remember there was a whole swathe of tokens

about saving animals around the world and for every zero they lost off their market they fed 100 gorillas or whatever it is yeah but yeah Jojo I agree with you, but that's the same with startups as well. Like that's the ecosystem we're in. There's no regulation with regulation. Maybe it'd be very different, but without regulation,

a lot of these token launches that we're trying to solve a problem. They're sitting with a debt token now still down 99%, even on the market is pumping just because they've collapsed in the last bull market. No one's paying attention to them. I know some of these, I've invested in them. We lost a lot of money investing in these projects. They're actually still creating value. They're still building out platforms, but no one's buying their token.

No one's paying attention to them. So there's still 99% of tokens that promised the world that didn't deliver the value they promised. I'd like to actually do something that I didn't think I would do this space and agree with Joe. The utility or, I mean, charity is great, right? I'm not talking about charity. But that shit is absolute nonsense. And the reason for it is, it is extremely difficult to attach a multi hundred, if not multi billion dollar valuation to any form of utility. So if we're

talking about meme coin investing, the strongest thing, the most subjective thing that you can attach a value to is culture and community. When you start getting into, we're going to build this and we're going to do that and raise money. How can you possibly attach a billion dollar valuation to something that is not fucking needed at all? It's literally, it's garbage. That's a death sentence for anything that is sort of a decentralized community. So you think building utility on top of meme coins should not, you don't advocate for that? He's literally also saying that they can justify multi-billion dollar valuations by doing nothing,

but the minute they try to do something, they're worth nothing. Well, it depends. It's all case by case. So largely, yes yes scott but it depends who it is right most developers or or you know token launchers uh that put out meme coins that that gain traction are not qualified to you know to build out anything uh any real ecosystem that's not all of them i'm not going to paint with a broad brush so what is it what What is it? So what is the maximum? So move away from utility, sorry. What is the value of that community? So let's say the Pepe,

or let's look at a more OG, give me another OG moon coin other than those that we could use as an example. And I'm not going to ask for what you should. She be in you and float me. I know nothing about these really, but I know that they had since they made a shit ton of money, they've tried at shiparium and Shivalium. I don't know what they're building, but they're trying to build things. Both, you know, they seem to have relatively qualified, intelligent teams.

Most meme coins do not share that. And I think it's important to understand and be acutely aware of you as a founder, right? Like what are your capabilities and limitations? It's about staying in your lane. If you are a developer, if you are a founder, a company builder, and you are equipped to tackle something like that and make sure that, hey, I've got a $5 billion valuation attached to this token. If I flop on this project, my community is done. You got to make sure that, hey, I've got a $5 billion valuation attached to this token. If I flop on this project, my community is done. You got to make sure that you understand. You need to be acutely aware of your skill set and where you fall.

I think as soon as you start talking about team and founder, it moves away from the whole concept of a mean point. What I like about mean points, obviously, a lot of things I dislike. What I like about the decentralized nature of it is, hey, it's a bunch of people that are financially incentivized to do whatever the fuck they want, whatever they're interested in doing. Great. Go ahead. So I thought you were finished. I was going to say, why can't we, why can't we just accept the casinos are fucking awesome. If you know that you're in a casino and that's all these are and not try to

assign value to them. Like why does it need to, why? I'm perfectly fine. Like, like everybody thinks I'm not an advocate or that I'm, I have such pushback against meme coins. I fucking love casinos, dude. I love playing craps with a bunch of people and we're all winning and having a good time. But everything I've walked into the casino with, I've already marked to zero. If that's your mentality when you walk into the meme coin casino and you're having fun and it's entertainment, then Godspeed, man,

have a great time. But trying to assign meaningful narrative to this beyond useful assets for potentially gambling on and making a bunch of money. And by the way, everyone who makes a bunch of money on these loses it within 6 months anyways, just like lottery winners. I just don't understand why we have to try to attempt to even assign any utility or value to these. They are what they are. I, I, yeah, I just, I just don't find it interesting enough find the whole concept of a decentralized casino, which you can also say applies to all the token motions in any bull

market. And, but the whole concept of a decentralized casino is just not that interesting, but I'm more fascinated by what a decentralized community rallying around a frog could do. Maybe it's nothing. No, this could all end up failing and the whole concept of a decentralized community creating value starting as a joke could end up remaining as a joke. Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I'll let me go to William.

I don't know the answer to this because I haven't tracked it outside of maybe pudgy penguins. Like, cause this was, this is like a carbon copy of the NFT conversation last cycle. Right. They were going to build a community and you're a, you're a, you're an ape or whatever the hell you guys are and it's going to value and blah, blah, blah. Like how many, maybe pudgy penguins are in Walmart. We had a conversation with Luca here is pretty interesting, but how many of those have delivered on exactly what you're talking about here? Yeah. Yeah. Um, exactly as many, as many as you'd expect, um, you know,

board apes and pudgy penguins and a half, what I've only listened, I think like, I don't know. I'm not trying to, expect um you know board apes and pudgy penguins and a handful of other dates what i mean i've only listen i think like i don't know i'm not trying to i don't want that they've only they've only had one cycle man how many how many cycles did it take for outcomes to start creating value i mean they still haven't largely but yeah i think and we would probably invest in those projects because Yes, because I love money. And I think that some of them will, but I'm not being disingenuous about my intention. I invest in things that I think have a fighting chance,

but we know that you and I, we talked about that. I mean, we know that one in a hundred will have meaningful, like adoption or value. That's fine. That's how, that's how people invest in VCs. But like you also know that maybe 50 of them could make you money, even if they don't. One in a hundred, one in a hundred achieving something is worth, 1% is worth pursuing.

I agree. That's what I just said. I agree. Not from a monetary perspective. That means, hold on Max, if 1% of NFT projects end up getting value, whether you're talking about Pudgy Penguins or Bored Apes or any of the others, that's a good number. And if 1% of meme coins end up becoming a really vibrant community similar to Doge,

then I think it's worth pursuing. Especially when you consider the fact that if you were in 100 of them, there was probably an opportunity as a trader at some point to have actually made money on them, even if they do go to zero. That being my point, that's different in the crypto model because people are

liquid with tokens, whether that project works or not. It's a broken model, but it benefits people. If I may, I think the appropriate way to view these altcoins and meme coins and even NFTs is it's similarly to maybe buying a 90 to 180 days till expiration option for some legacy index. OK, so at the appropriate time, you know, people can boost their returns by buying, you know, out of the money calls. You're not going to buy a six month call option on Tesla and try to hold it for nine months. It's probably going to go to zero. OK, these meme coins, some go to zero, some don't. But I think viewing them in another light is almost an inappropriate evaluation of the real utility is that they actually can be paired against Bitcoin. WIF can be paired against Sol. It's L1. Pepe can be paired against ETH. It's L1. And at the appropriate time, you can chase some serious beta against

their mothership, against their L1. So again, if you're a trader and you're savvy and you actually look at this stuff, you will see what I'm talking about, that these are incredibly liquid and volatile instruments that are correlated to large L1s. It's not random. It's not gambling. I'm not talking about- What percentage of traders are successful? Yeah, I don't really know that, Scott. I mean, I don't really concern myself with that, right? I mean, I... The answer is, depending on the survey, it's 1% to 5%. And that's with assets that are highly liquid, lasting in the stock market, companies that have P&L and such. Listen, I'm not even

arguing with you because you just said the correct thing. They're highly liquid for people who understand the market and are talented traders to make money. That describes sub 1% of the people who are participating in that market. And my main... They're going to get rinsed. And listen, to be fair, they're going to get rinsed here or somewhere else. And my main objective is to help educate and to teach, as I'm sure you share similar values. Of course, if you're going to do it, do it right. And without us discussing these topics, somebody won't know that something like this exists and what to actually look for. So I don't

think just saying, well, people are going to get rinsed, we shouldn't even talk about it, is the appropriate way to highlight what's actually happening, because it is a bit of an anomaly and a revolution, dare I say. So again, my approach here is not to shill Pepe or shill meme coins. It's, hey, here's what Max is doing. He's successfully doing it. Let's talk about it. Maybe somebody will feel inspired to try to take a step further and look into what we're talking about, because there is real utility in understanding how to appropriately use these products at the right time in a safe manner. Yeah. I mean, okay. Not in a safe manner. That's nonsense. No offense. To be fair, we're not trying to avoid having the conversation. We literally beat this to death like a horse that's died 15 times every single day on this space. it's seemingly the only thing that we we talk about but listen

i hope that if somebody is going to do it and we can't and they you know that they're going to do that all all these people to be fair who are losing money in meme coins would find another place to lose it right because it's just the nature of humanity and what they're doing it's the casino as i said so if the goal is to maybe save a few of them by teaching them how to do it successfully, I understand that argument. But it should not be the main focus of every crypto conversation when there's so many important things happening with Bitcoin and beyond in this market. And the fact that we can have literally Bitcoin spot ETFs and Larry Fink on TV. And I told

this story, maybe I said it yesterday, so I don't want to be too redundant, but I was on Yahoo Finance for an interview. They had Cynthia Lummis on, a senator from Wyoming in front of me. They were having a very serious conversation about ETFs and regulation. And they asked her about fucking meme coins. And like it was the most embarrassing, one of these most cringe like embarrassing moments that I've had as somebody

who had to go on and speak positively about our space to listen to a U S Senator have to answer for dog with hat or whatever they are. And it just shows you when you really zoom out, like I think mean coins can be exceptionally fun. And I know some people like 12 will make money on them in the end, but it's a distraction, you know, it's a distraction and to prevent, and maybe they're here to stay, but like, yeah, I think it's most, I should just say it's mostly avoidable for most people. Jason.

I want to react to something I said earlier. Yeah. You're right. That there were some NFTs that did not do what they promised. But I believe in the power of iteration. And the first version of the ICOs were not all good, but then they got better. Everything is going to get better. Entrepreneurs will learn and will get to do things better. So I believe that some of the meme coins that we are seeing today are going to are doing things better. So I believe that some of the meme coins that we are seeing today are going to are doing things better. And we'll talk about it. Yeah, just really quickly, just really quickly, the argument I've heard is that meme coin, we had it on this very show, that meme coins are the are the positive evolution of those NFT communities. Well, no, it's one of them. It's one of them. It's not. I mean, they have elements of NFTs. They have elements of tokens used to earn and to spend. It's one of them. So, again, it's all about iterations and trying to find a fit and demand. There was also talk about decentralization.

I want to point to something that not everybody talked about today. Did you know that Ethereum first quarter report was out today? And what's interesting about that, it was not, obviously, it was not published by the Ethereum Foundation. It was published by Cone98. And I tweeted about it this morning. It's like, this is what's going on right now with these decentralized projects. All the data is out there on chain, it's public. And Coin98 has done a very good job. They give you things like it's

1.8 time quarter to quarter. They tell you what the transaction's growth was quarter to quarter. It's kind of, it looks like, it sounds like a traditional quality report, but it's not. And it wasn't published by Ethereum themselves. So that's what we're going to see. We're going to see these decentralized projects, their performance is public and everybody can see that. Jason? Thanks, Scott. So I want to support a lot of what you're saying but just add to the conversation a little bit of what I think are some of the serious policy risks. Like you're calling it distraction. I think it might even be a dangerous distraction.

When you look in combination at the fact that there's been these racist meme coins, you know, members of Congress, senators, they don't see like the distinction between Bitcoin and a meme coin and blockchain. It all gets very muddled very quickly. So to, to assign the, the, you know, the racist concept in, in what could live forever on a blockchain is, is, is, is a huge problem from a policy perspective for the overall space I'm talking about for crypto space. Number two, the fact that Solana last week came out to try to stop some of these racist meme coins and talked about, I think, in an Asia summit that the nodes should start filtering out in different ways because Solana obviously wants to wash itself of this. That's a huge liability from a policy perspective, and it's almost collateral damage of mean coins because now you're talking about what the nodes of a blockchain can do or cannot. We just talked about decentralization, right?

When you look at Senator Elizabeth Warren's bill that's very bad about BSA and AML, it assigns the responsibility of nodes on a blockchain to do BSA. So if you're now going to say as Solana, hey, we're going to have our nodes stop this one thing, it makes it very easy for Warren and her policy people to say, well, if you can stop these racist meme coins, then you can do BSA on all the transactions in Solana. So there has to be KYC. And a lot of people have said Warren's bill could really damage the overall crypto market in the US. And the third part is, again, just to kind of follow on what Scott was saying, which is the fleecing of people. You know, I still remember talking on the Hill about Bitcoin in 2016, 17 and 18. And when, you know, the price went up and then it went down, the big concern a lot of people had were, well, this is bad for investors or bad for people because they're losing all this money on Bitcoin.

So, I mean, and that was an easily explainable thing, right? The overall trend of the price of Bitcoin. And I'm not an investor on meme coins. I don't put myself as an expert. But I can tell you all the losses that the other 99% that Scott's talking about that don't make money on meme coins will probably call their congressmen and senators. So I just think that it's important to realize, like, it's a distraction. Meme coins are also funny.

But from a policy perspective, there's some, because mean coins are also funny but from a policy perspective there's some because mean coins are getting all this attention because senator lumbas is being asked about it on now who finance it's becoming like a major liability for the overall crypto space from a policy perspective at least from from my point of view yeah i i agree with that and i think as long once again as long as people know what they're doing and what they are, and accept that risk, I think it's totally fine and reasonable. I just think it's damaging for it to going to do it, I would assume that we would want them to do it better. I think it's just regrettable that that's what, you know, we become at certain points in this cycle. Guys, I think we're going to probably wrap it up here. We will be back.

Of course, tomorrow morning, 10, 15 AM Eastern standard time. I appreciate all of the guests. It was a lively conversation. Yeah. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow's show is going to be called Meme Coins Again, so make sure you don't miss out tomorrow's Meme Coin discussion. We're going to have some of the best PFPs on stage to have a discussion with Scott about the future of Meme Coins, the past, the future, and the present.

I'm here for it. So fun. Alright guys, see you tomorrow. Bye. Cheers, thank you very much.