The Wolf Of All Streets - SOL Revenue Now 10x ETH, Gas Fees On ETH Hit 5y Low | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

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Good morning, everybody. Sorry for the delay. As usual, we're having a major glitch here on X. Hopefully you guys can year low. But first, I actually want to talk about Powell right now. I'm trying to get Mike McGlone up on stage. So I wanted to ask him specifically about this. Dwayne here as well. Dwayne, are you watching Powell at the moment? I haven't looked at Powell that closely. It's just, you know, it's a lot of volatility, you know, within that, you know, within that particular equity. So it's kind of, you know, I don't really have a lot of comments right now for that. But yeah, I have seen that it's, you know, it's doing a lot in regards to the price. Yeah, which I think anyone would expect. Mike, got you up here. Perfect timing considering Powell is currently testifying. Maybe give us, and at this moment he was testifying right before with Elizabeth Warren, which always is entertaining.

Her first comment was about President Trump and co-president Elon Musk. Of course, she had to get her shot in there. But, Mike, what do you what are people looking for right now, do you think, in this testimony? Well, that's a good question to start. What's been impressive lately is what he said and what he did at the last meeting, Trump actually said he agreed with it, which and him and Besson have doubled down on the desire not for much lower rates, but lower yields, which means bond yields. And that might imply Powell staying the course a little while and cutting rates later. Meaning if he cuts too early, like we learned last year, cut too early, you pump up risk assets, which included cryptos, and it just creates more inflation, more wealth effect, which hurts things in the long term.

So I think they're playing a little bit of a long game. We'll see how Powell works on that. But the way I see it right now, he's going to stay very much stable, no higher rates until markets tell him to. And this is why I really appreciate Scott Bessett as a treasury sector. He's a trader, ex-hedge fund guy, you know, he's kind of our space. And we haven't had that in a while. I mean, we've had like Janet Yellen, you know, economists and stuff, but traders get it. They know what it's going to take for bond yields to go down. And when bond yields go up and the Fed cuts, that's a sign they're not going to go down until the Fed hangs out and lets other risk assets go

down. So what Powell's going to say, we'll see. But I think he's going to do very much in the middle and total line, but not be hinting at anything unless the date he suggests. And that's the key question I like to ask. And even I'm sure Besset asks, what's it going to take for the next rate cut for rates to go lower? We both know what that means. Either unemployment going up, it's unlikely inflation can go down. We have such a massive wealth effect and so much wealth creation. And so the other key thing is the stock market, which means where I think the leading indicator on the planet, Bitcoin, might be hinting at.

Dwayne yeah pardon me for some reason i was thinking about palins here we're talking we're talking about the comments here so jerome palantir he's the new uh rock rock star and yeah yeah yeah i heard i heard pow instead of pow okay, yeah, like when we take a look at this here, you know, we have some CPI data coming out, which might give us some sort of guidance here. But I do agree with the previous speaker that we're not going to see rates really move anywhere for the next, you know, for the next few sessions here. I don't think there's any really need to, you know, to see rates, you know, basically sessions here. I don't think there's any really need to see rates basically decrease here. I think later on in the year, Trump will push for some sort of rate cut, and there'll be a lot of friction in that regard. But I think for now, things will pretty much stay the way they are, unless something really changes dynamically in the market or in employment as well. There's a lot

of pressure right now on federal employees. And that was some of the comments that he said previously that, you know, they're going to push to, you know, basically raise the unemployment rate, at least as it comes to federal employees. So I think that could possibly put pressure on a rate cutting cycle, but we'll have to basically see what happens from here. Yeah, it seems like the Fed is in a pretty rough spot here, right? I mean, when you take a look at it from the outside looking in, we're still pricing in rate cuts at the end of the year. But if inflation doesn't cool further, we should see higher for longer. They effectively seem they just cut too early, right?

I mean, they're caught between keeping rates high to control inflation and the risk of slowing down the economy too much. It's the recession that never comes, but it's a tough needle to thread. Go ahead, Andrei. Yeah, I just want to ask have you seen that chart i i think was shared by uh andrea steno larson from steno research he shared that interesting chart uh by true inflation they have this high frequency um inflation indicator and it suggests that inflation is cooling like headline inflation is cooling

over the coming months which would suggest a decline in long-term bond yields i don't know where they've seen that but it's it has huge implication at the same time i also agree that like the the labor market in the u.s is quite um yeah at risk because you have this decline in construction employment right i mean we've seen these construction job openings, which usually lead the whole employment growth, right? I think that's also definitely a risk. But I think the inflation numbers, the forward-looking inflation numbers, they look quite promising in my view.

Mike, what do you think? Yeah, well, the issue I like to point out is we we talk about this yesterday on macro mondays as you look at u.s money supply it's up 40 since the end of 2019 and we're all looking for that inflation and it's not going down and inflation is not going down it's still tickling higher now we had it up for 10 11 12 percent for a while still running three percent which means everybody's costs are still increasing and i think that was really important was previous said is what's happening with doge is almost unprecedented on a global economic sovereign bias meaning this kind of cuts are just delightful to see from someone who's you know watches forever is if you really want to cut excess spending and cut out waste just across the top just start cutting

everything and make people beg for more they're doing that it's impressive and also what they're doing with you know and obviously it's going to be court pushback they got they're going to absolutely push the limits but it's very impressive but what it means is it's very negative for economic growth i mean we are spending 7% of our GDP on economic growth. And this is also a sign when you have a risk or you lose your job, you ain't going to go be buying a new car or washing machine. You wait until you have solid employment inklings and cover your dependents. So to me, this is pretty significant that the Trump administration gets it. They're thinking midterms and he's already

talking about the next four years or the next president. I was kind of shocked by that. It's a little bit early. Did not enforce J.D. Vance. But they're thinking, well, hey, you got to get the pain over early, especially when you have advisors who are traders who get it like Besant. He's a trader, a hedge fund guy. He knows about cycles of markets. So I think they're going to continue to focus on don't underestimate the tariffs. They learned the last time of not doing it, of trusting China. And they're just kind of walking you through. He doesn't even have his team in place yet. So I think this to me is the elusive 10% correction.

We've been looking for that stock in the S&P 500 for a while. Last year, we only got 8% kicking in at some point. And then we're going to have some very good opportunities for tactical moves and decision making particularly and maybe risk assets in the meantime i think the risk is um i point out in a one two and three year basis gold the rock is beating stocks s&p 500 as of yesterday and that's not a good sign you don't i have right in front of me i've seen bc bloomberg and cnn up and i haven't seen gold listed on the top of those screens for weeks, even though it keeps making record highs. But you see stocks every day. And right now, I see our famous Elizabeth Warren.

I've never seen her smile, by the way. To me, so that's the key thing is gold's telling us there's something wrong with this narrative. A little bit of a reset's overdue. Bitcoin's peaked at $100,000 for now. The charts look great. I get it. But then here's the question I want to ask the chat is, I don't see what stops Ethereum from going back to two grand, just a normal rotation. It peaked in their four. It's been hovering between two and four forever. It's got 11,000 other cryptocurrencies it has to deal with. There's a lot of-

I think you mean 11 million. Sorry. Yeah. I missed the zero there. It used to be 11 be 11 000 that was just a couple years ago yeah thank you for correcting my uh my not on that but to me this is a key thing is um and so i published today as something i published last year we're seeing decade almost multi-year lows in u.s stock market well so just starting the bottom looking at like 50 week 200 day moving average yes that was early but the key thing I'm really noting is, if it's like a 200-week moving average of the S&P 500, gold, and Bitcoin, they're the same chart. They're all heading to new highs. But if volatility is bottoming, which I think it is, particularly with our new president, who does have to be in the tape every single day, and he's quite mercurial, what wins when volatility continues to revert higher? And this is one

of my key signals in 2006 that helped me make a lot of money in 2008 unfortunately i was a bit early andre yeah i totally agree i mean i think there's some mixed signals between inflation expectations which are forward-looking especially market-based or consumer survey-based inflation expectations, right? If you saw the University of Michigan survey, I mean, like, the mean, medium-term inflation expectations, they increased to a 40-year high, right? And I think also the short-term inflation expectation, the one-year head inflation expectations in the University of Michigan survey is totally consistent with what you're seeing in the gold year had inflation expectations of in the university of michigan survey is totally

consistent with what you're seeing in the gold price right and the call makes gold inventories and all these indicators so i think inflation expectations um in the medium long term are moving higher right but at the same time you still have this drag, especially in core inflation, by the decline in rents, right? And they make up a huge part of shelter inflation, as we know, right? So we have this kind of mixed signal between increasing inflation expectations, also market-based inflation expectations, like CPI swaps, break-even rates. I just saw two CPI swaps increasing to the highest level i think since 2023 so this that's also consistent with forward-looking market prices right gold bitcoin and so on but at the same time

i think like the realized inflation is still coming down because of these tracks right can i piggyback on that one real quick scott i'm i'm right i'm writing about copper for tomorrow because copper sets a major shenanigans so so far this year you've got some of the blame i think crude oil's peaked at 80 so let's talk about commodity stuff i know i think natural gas has peaked at four we have corn probably peaking around five and it looks like copper might just peak just below five dollars a pound in u.s and there's some major technical signals that show that a lot of it's because there's nuances in um in in future stuff that you know i used to do in trading pits the key thing is you look at bond yields in the rest of

including china they're all almost collapsing i mean this is not sign of global inflationary forces yet commodities at peak what is that in the back of speculators man i used to be one of them i know how to make a lot and lose a lot of money speculating in the future so to me these are part of the all the trickle downs and so i need something to show me otherwise and that's why i look at is this inordinate burden if you just get a little bit of a backup in the stock market say five ten percent those are severe deflationary forces kicking in i just have to point out that u.s 10 to 10 yield in china at 1.63 percent is severe deflation the u.s might be heading that way the key thing is what prevents that

and that's why i look at cryptos as a leading indicator but from a commodities guy i'll just point out i'm putting my head out in the line i think these markets have peaked for the year it's early in the year and it needs something shocking to make it go higher and what's all these countries who have been exporting a lot to the u.s forever the joke we used to use in the trading pitch was everybody in the world wants free trade as long as they can export to the U.S. It's now facing a hammer that they have not seen in their lifetimes, really not since the 30s. This is seriously coming. And our administration is willing to take the pain until something forces them to stop.

We all know. Mike, couldn't that hammer cause inflation, not deflation? Oh, it's the opposite. Well, that's the key thing. What we generally expect doesn't occur. It's 10% of the U.S. economy is import exports. In China, it's closer to 25%. In Germany, it's 50% is exports. In Europe, it's 25%.

Who's going to be the least pain? It's Canada and Mexico, much more dependent on exports. So in the short term, yes. But I like to hear, let's put the facts to it. So I say, no, it's the opposite. If one key thing happens, everything about the U.S. offshoring and all the imports we've been doing forever is about corporate profits. The number one reason. I mean, Jack Welch even said he would not invest in any companies that were not offshoring and trying to minimize costs by exporting, importing for outside so that is about if you put 20 on our total 1 trillion of deficits that's 200 billion dollars let's fix the zeros here if the stock market traps is just 10 you

know stuff to be most being used to be normal that's six trillion dollars remember it's bounced last year it bounced 12 trillion dollars that was 40 of of GDP. That's my point is that's your deflationary cliff's edge just waiting to happen. It has to stay up. The stock market has to stay up or we're going to get that severe deflation. That's why I look over it. What are my leading indicators? Gold, bond yields, cryptos. Dwayne, you had your hand up.

I'll give you a chance here. And then I want to pivot to the comment Mike made about Ethereum and dig more deeply into that with the panel. But go ahead, Dwayne. Yeah, sure. Thanks. Actually, I had a quick question for Mike since you're up here. How much weight do you put into, say, geopolitical uncertainty when it comes to gold and other commodities here? Because we have the demand drivers that have been in many aspects driving the you know driving the price of gold here um you know um central banks buying gold um the the jewelry market some of the um you know the release of uh some of the tax um that we've seen in emerging markets like india so on the top level there with geopolitical uncertainty how much would you say that's priced into the rising price of

gold here. Dwayne, I'm glad you went there. It's the number one thing. So I want to measure gold. You start with February 4th, 2022. That's the date that President Xi announced the unlimited friendship with President Putin. Now, I'm not an expert on history, but I just am complete addicted to it. That shifted the world order.

Gold's up 60% since that date. S&P 500 is closer, total returns closer to 40%. Crude oil is down 20%. That shifted the world's order, shifted the world's axis. So I'll start with that. To me, it's number one, makes the number one risk for gold, I think, is Zeke wakes up in the morning, picks up the phone, calls Donald Trump and says, hey, I want to be your best friend, this guy Putin. I'm done with him. No more limited friendship. That's the risk i think to go because all about geopolitics the number one buyers of gold on the planet are central banks china's leading and according to the latest world gold council report the last three years they bought more more gold than ever the question is will that stop we have a d people are talking about dollarization there's

no other currency in the planet it's even close to the dollar. It's gold. So that keeps me bullish gold. And the Gishin, so that's part of the macro. It's the underlying support for gold. Now let's look at key things also. In the last four years, we've had net outflows from ETFs. People are not buying gold ETFs. We know anybody in 30 doesn't touch a boomer rock.

They go to cryptos. And if you're an equity investor, why touch the rock when the stock market's on a tear and you get high bond yields? I think that's going to shift this year towards people buying gold ETFs. So that's part of the big upside. And the number one thing, I think, the goal to really have it take off, now it's going to bump into good resistance, about three grand, just like Bitcoin did around 100 grand. It's the number one thing I think to really accelerate is when we have that next, God help us, what we would call bear market equities. I mean, it doesn't make a record high for a couple of years. I'm not saying it has to go down. When people start giving up a little, and I'm only 60, I've seen a few cycles like this, they always come. But to me, that's the next key thing for gold. So I'm sticking with the rock

until proven wrong. And a good thing would be global, seriously global detente or some kind of something that shifts the regime in china which are very unlikely at the moment okay i want to talk about uh what mike said what stops ethereum from going to 2000 since we have you know robbie and gorov and gareth all these people here i mean robbie my feeling is that we're at peak ethereum bearishness personally yeah no i would i would tend to agree with that um and i think that, you know, obviously, we've had some huge liquidity draining in the market recently with the Trump coin launch. So alts have just, you know, suffered across the board. But, you know, I tend to be

erring on the bearish side. I think if anything, the outlook for the next, if you measure it in weeks or a month too, might be a little bit slow given that so much liquidity has been wiped out of the markets. But I do think looking at this year as a whole, definitely, I think I'm happy to call we're at the bottom-ish on ETH because I just, you know, this happens time and again and it always recovers because ETH is where all the developers are. Yeah, that was exactly the next point I was going to make. When you look at the developer activity, TVL, it's still disproportionately massively on Ethereum, right? It's not even close. I mean, even Solana is not even close.

And we know where most of the action on Solana is coming from. Absolutely. And I always think that one of the things that's a common mistake in summing up the Ethereum universe is people look at the price of ETH, and the price of ETH does not necessarily bake in the price of every L2 or L3. And really, the ETH community should be the aggregate of all the L2s and L3s because that's the world of Ethereum. It's just not necessarily reflected in the price of that single token. Yeah. So just quickly, since you're seeing this on the ground, obviously, at Animoca, are you still being pitched as many things on ETH or ETH L2s as you were in the past?

And what's, you know, versus other chains at this point? Are you seeing it disproportionately in either direction, more or less on ETH? So I think we're being pitched, I would say, just as much stuff on ETH, although obviously, you know, Solana has been having a tear for a long time now. So we see, although I think on Solana, it's interesting because we're starting to see more stuff that's not just meme-ish, like you're seeing people pitching DeFi and other things on Solana, which is nice. And then some of the upcoming, you know, upcoming things like Barachain and MegaEth and stuff like that as well. That makes perfect sense. Matthew? I think one of the other things that folks haven't necessarily priced in or, you know, as we've seen through the wave of either liquidations or capital coming in is just this note that things like Chainlink and Ondo, for example, are interesting applications that

are based on the Ethereum blockchain that could be used by institutions or larger financial conglomerates, most notably something like a World Liberty Financial. So I think that there's a lot of money that will come back into that ecosystem. And one thing that Ethereum certainly has over its younger cousin Solana is that it hasn't gone down nearly as enough time. So when you think about the ability for a blockchain to stay up and running, working with institutional players, it's just kind of the bulletproof option that I think we're going to see. And also a note and a nod to the, it's not reflected in the price because you've got so many other L2s that are taking some of that liquidity out and it's just not going to be reflective so it's it's kind of an interesting

juxtaposition yeah agreed gareth hey guys uh good to be back um yeah my quick thoughts on this i actually had a very interesting conversation with someone at the ethereum foundation today and they made some like very interesting comments to me, obviously, all off the record, but stuff that I can at least offer as some perspective here. If you look at the entire Ethereum ecosystem, it's a mix of various L2s and obviously some different infrastructure providers and all have a load of TVL locked in them, but all very decentralized. And I think that that's always a good place to look. A lot of these newer age protocols that have come up have a lot of questions around the decentralized nature of

them, the mix of liquidity and holdings of tokens, and also just the amount of nodes that are part of these ecosystems. Ethereum is a very big beast. I think the shift to an L2 focus means that it has been fragmented in some sense. that they need to bring it all back together in a way that allows for the Ethereum layer one to function as it needs to, but allow the scalability and use cases that everyone imagined. And I also had a conversation with my brother, interestingly, who's a developer last night, and he's been diving into a lot of the Ethereum documentation and starting to play around developing in the ecosystem. And he was like, this thing goes deep, you know, it'll take time for people to learn how to do this. And there's complexity in that,

but there's also a first mover advantage here, you know, like, um, uh, Ethereum really pioneered smart contracts and a lot of smart people have built a lot of great things that have led to a lot of the old ones and other protocols that we have today, you know, the suites and salons of the world. So at the very end of all of it, I still remain pretty optimistic about the Ethereum ecosystem. It's number two by a long way. There's a lot of development that's gone into it,

and it's not just going to all crumble down and fall. And I think, yes, you're right, Scott, like we're at the bottom in terms of token price. But I do think from the conversations that I've had in recent weeks, there's a very big push to get things going in the right direction again, just as much as there was before the merge and everything, right? You know, the move to proof of stake. There were a lot of questions about what's going to happen. And a lot has happened since. And I mean, they pulled off the merge, you know, a shift from proof of work to proof of stake without the blockchain stopping.

And, you know, some of the major protocols have had various outages over the years. So like hats off to the Ethereum movement, community, ecosystem in general. It's still very much alive. Whether or not people are happy about the token price is another question altogether. Yeah, I mean, the actual activity on the chain at the moment is obviously relatively low i think the title we had at the beginning was that solana had 10x it temporarily or something like that gas fees are low so it gives people the impression that the base chain is not being used but it's i think that's misdirection for all this development andre i just want to say it's funny that we're talking about eth btc or soul versus

eth because we just published one piece about eth btc today and what we looked at in this piece is we looked at fundamental indicators relative fundamental indicators ethereum versus bitcoin things like relative realized cap right how much capital is flowing in on chain, relative ETP flows, transaction count, and so on. And what we realized is since Q4, the fundamentals of Ethereum relative to Bitcoin have been improving, right? Especially if things like transaction count, right? On L1 only, I'm not talking about L2s, right?

L1 only. So it has been outperformed bitcoin and now this there's a huge divergence between what's happening on chain uh on ethereum relative to bitcoin and the price action right it's almost two standard deviations right and i think we're we're getting to a zone where it becomes increasingly attractive and the reversal becomes increasingly likely. I mean, probably we've been saying this for one and a half years, right, or two years already. Same. If you look at the fundamentals, right, I think there's such a huge divergence already.

And I think what corporate adoption and sovereign adoption is for Bitcoin, stablecoin and RWA tokenization is for Ethereum. And I think we're in for a very big surprise, I think, especially towards the end of the year, because if you look at the fine print of central banks, they tend to say like, oh, we're probably going to use an enterprise blockchain, right? But many of these major central banks, they're testing on public blockchains, mostly on Ethereum, right? And I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, I'm personally not a big fan of CBDCs, right? But I wouldn't be surprised if CBDCs end up being tokenized, right,

on Ethereum. Yeah. We had Dan and then Gaurav. Yeah. So if you want to talk about chains that are, or networks that are derivatives of other networks, Ethereum is essentially a derivative

of Bitcoin. It only exists because Bitcoin first existed. If you want to talk about chains that had outages, Solana has outages all the time. XRP had an outage for its first 13,000 blocks or something like that, whatever it was. We can say that Ethereum had its outage during the Ethereum Classic fork, right? Let's be clear about that. That was a failure of the network.

But if you want to go even further, you can say that even Vitalik himself said something like, along the lines of, if transactions cost more than, I think it was 50 cents per transaction, that would count as a de facto outage of the network, right? So there's a few things. Look, I'm not totally against Ethereum. outage of the network. Right. So there's a few things that

I'm not I'm not totally against Ethereum. I am a maxi. Clearly, you know, I spent a lot of time in Bitcoin and Bitcoin is my back. But I think there's a few reasons why Ethereum is facing headwinds.

The EVM model of Ethereum is easily forkable. We've seen that with Binance Smart Chain and Polygon and others. It's very easy to spin up. So I think the fact that BSC and Polygon exist as chains shows that it's failed to capture the public sentiment in the way that Bitcoin has you know it's not technology led so people can work on things on a theorem change sure but they're totally immediately portable to BSC or polygon or any of the other EVM chains and the fact that you don't have a one single kind of place where the layer zero is what we call it right layer zero is the human layer that are not

coalescing around a single layer is one thing and i think the main difference between bitcoin and other chains is that um you know bitcoin has captured the store of value of chains and ethereum was the place back in 1617 where you would have the ICO and the new token stuff. And that has totally now been eclipsed by Solana. Clearly it's been eclipsed by Solana. You have all these tokens launching on Solana. So it's hard to find a way, in my opinion, that Ethereum finds its place again, because it has the highest level of usage and that kind of stuff,

but it's not the fastest, not the cheapest. And it's no longer captured that layer zero level of where everyone does it on this layer, on this network, rather than others. So just to throw a little bit of a counterpoint in there. dorav i'd um build on what dan said and then of course agree to the fact um of general consensus there i mean agree to the general consensus there it is indeed all-time low i think um it's a good time to bag up more if um anyone was planning around it of course there are so many other better investments you can make. So, you know, depends on what's your investment thesis. Now, how many startups are building on Ethereum?

I only see the opposite. I see everybody who built on Ethereum now getting ready to launch, thinking about other EVMs because Ethereum clearly has lost that charm. So that's about the Ethereum startup ecosystem. EVM indeed was the core innovation, the point about developers and we operate some of the largest hackathons through one of our companies. EVM indeed was the biggest driver of developers and development, but that is a broken code. That was already broken three years ago or four years ago.

I mean, of course, many, many years ago. But now everybody has an EVM. Polka is launching their native EVM. HBAR has, I was talking to them at the foundation yesterday, they have almost EVM and EVM-like implementations. So basically, everybody has their EVM. So the biggest developer point and the ecosystem of developers is no longer limited to Ethereum.

They would actually choose a better technology with the same access of EVM if they can. And that's how convenience around development and business works. So I think I touched pricing. I touched ecosystem and development. Another last segment that Dan talked about, indeed, as a layer zero, it has a certain value of a financial layer zero. So the largest amount of smartest crypto money still sits on the largest amount of smartest crypto

money still sits on on ethereum right let's not forget that so the the moment we are done with this uh meme stupidity we will we will see an alt rally and alt rally means more prosperity on the native eth tokens as every large enterprise and a large product evolves, it started from something, Bitcoin started as whatever game currency, transfer of value now sits as a store of value and so much more. Ethereum started with smarter money,

moved to the startup ecosystem and so on. And now can find its utility as this native finance hub. But will it actually account for most of the transfers? I don't think so. I think all the older Ethereum tokens, larger Ethereum tokens have found their bridges and have bridged to more efficient, technologically advanced and cheaper chains so 99 of the transactions around those tokens you know native eth tokens happen through the bridge on these new new chains uh while it still holds you know the bridged assets and the value hence

attached to it so i think that would be my sum up around it, which is not a small utility, which still accounts for a massive, massive run. But not the least, let's not forget that there's a huge world of value being unlocked as we talk, which is the Bitcoin native Bitcoin on chain, as they call it, and the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem, which is what they don't like calling it. Essentially, all of that is, you know, Bitcoin layer two. But I mean, I'm just respecting their nomenclature. And if we think this particular value proposition of Ethereum, which is the asset value sitting on, financial asset value sitting on Ethereum matters, then there's so much more on Bitcoin.

So there's like good sides to review. And I think the bets have to be placed accordingly. I think it's hard to fade Larry Fink. He keeps talking about tokenizing. Yes. To me, it still seems like maybe Ethereum has lost its luster with the crypto degens and natives, but I think that the future of real growth is going to come from institutions. And I think that they're still very focused on Ethereum. Yes, it's still the host of security.

It's still the host of value. And I don't think anyone would mind building on OP stack. And that's the biggest value proposition of optimism. It's being pitched to the largest institutions as Ethereum. It is Ethereum tech, right? That's how they ship it. So if you look at it, I mean, if you look at their pitch, it definitely promotes Ethereum on the top, right?

And I don't think anyone would build directly on Ethereum. I don't think Larry Fink being Larry Fink, or I don't know, whoever, would ever put their assets, if they're looking for liquidity on Ethereum, where it would cost $350 to move a fractional property from one point to another. Makes sense. Gareth, you had your hand up.

Yeah, I was just going to say, I think it's important for everyone to remember why L2 strung up and actually why they settled to the Ethereum blockchain blockchain it's because it's got security you know it's it's decentralized um there's a lot of different nodes and that is why those layers all settle to ethereum so i mean if you look at some of these other protocols uh they have it's the blockchain trilemma you know you're balancing different things and um bitcoin uh i mean i'm also a closet bitcoin maximalist for people that don't know that so i'm a big believer in bitcoin but um

i've written about all these different protocols for years now so i have a generally good understanding and an appreciation for different things doing different things right and this is one of the the core reasons why ethereum still remains, you know, the second in charge and the home of smart contracts and the father of smart contracts on blockchains. It's an important thing to remember. I mean, there's a great book that was written by Paul Brody, the head of Ernst & Young, about why enterprises use Ethereum. And this is a key reason why it's got privacy. Yeah, quickly, Robbie, you and Gaurav kind of had different takes on what you're seeing

from pitching, certainly, and what's being built. I do still see quite a few things coming around on Ethereum, or at least that are EVM compatible. So how does that square with what Gaurav was saying? So I think, from our perspective, we see a lot of stuff that's EVM compatible, I think, because, I mean, you know, if we went back two years, everybody was grant shopping, you know, with all the new L1s and L2s coming out. Whereas now, I think a lot of it,

especially when you come into consumer applications, like things like gaming, for example, or GameFi, a lot of people are pitching within the EVM ecosystem because all the tooling is largely built out now. So, you know, plugging in custodial services or plugging in marketplaces or other things or doing cross-chain compatibility is just much easier in the EVM ecosystem just because of its maturity and the availability of tools that you can plug and play. Matthew? I just think it's interesting that when we talk about Ethereum being the father of smart contracts and all these kinds of

things, I think it's interesting just because it's not, there's nothing that's better. So this is what we're using. And that's the frame of reference that we people have right now is like, because there's nothing better, this is what we have to use. And it's certainly proving the use case so far. I think, you know, kind of a hot take perspective, I think alt season, this quote unquote, alt season is kind of a garbage nomenclature and a nothing burger this cycle around. There's way too many tokens and not nearly enough liquidity for people to actually believe that tokens in the 300 500 700, like levels down in the market cap are going to be, you know, crazily in demand, when institutions come flocking to these tokens, because banks are not going to go flock to the 500th token, they're going to flock to a thing like Chainlink, or the indexes that are getting

created by ETFs that are only going to be really around like the top 50 or top 30 tokens. So if you're if you're really plunging down, like we have to just reevaluate what we call an altcoin, a quote unquote altcoin. In 2017 and 2020, you could get away with calling these like the first 500 tokens but now i think that you have the designation of altcoin is maybe the top 50 or top 70 and the rest are just kind of like a gambo garbage kind of situation like nobody really knows what what is going to be popping up from those tokens and so i just i think people should be wary of what quote unquote alt season is going to happen because I don't see it coming. We do have a sponsor today, which is MeMarket.

MeMarket Fund, the account is up here as well. And just before we get started, I just want to note of a disclaimer. So Mario's company, IBC, does marketing, incubation, and investing. And sponsors on this show are working with IBC and not necessarily Crypto Town Hall, Scott, or even myself specifically. So with that, me, Market, I'd love for you to just open the floor and just explain what the product is, like an elevator pitch. Hey, everyone. Nice to meet all of you. Some of you I know on Mario, etc. Scott. for meme coins. And we provide a seamless gateway for not only DGENs but Web2 users into the meme market as a whole

by providing a safe and seamless access. We leverage a prediction market game to hedge RIFs, also with some novel tokenomics and normal solutions to some of the high barrier entry to normal prediction markets and then secondary and third products are mini games and we have in-app swaps and wallets etc we're trying to provide a seamless experience. Basically, you have to jump into the trenches, whether you're a DGN pro trader, forget about Web2 users.

And we aggregate the entire market on Solana under one roof. So liquidity, meme coins, and with the gaming aspect, as we mentioned, you have direct access to communities of all the hottest coins, branded IP, prediction games, and ways to leverage risk as opposed to, you know, chomping in the hole, as you could say. And JD, I assume it's you talking. I'm getting a bug with Twitter spaces right now. It doesn't show you as actually talking, but I was able to deduce it. It's JD, right? It's my ghost. Yep. Yeah, I've been getting dropped audio audio this whole time it's pretty weird yeah another day with x spaces but i just wanted to yeah to make sure that the one with biggie smalls

on on the front that is yeah got it got it so i think what might be helpful for the audience is maybe running through an example of what somebody can do with the product. So let's say, I mean, Jailstool is really hot right now in the market. A lot of people talking about it. How could a user use MeMarket to kind of like hedge their risk or get more deeper involved? What can they do on MeMarket? So there's numerous ways. I mean, first, you can join the app,

you know, your profile set up, you can go into. So what we do specifically with prediction markets is try to provide a low barrier to entry, right? That's one of the biggest problems with prediction markets, high barrier to entry. Most 87% of people on Polygon lost money. Usually whales are the only ones who could really do anything. And it's extremely low engagement and low liquidity after, right? They're long-paced markets. You can look at our prediction market game in a few different ways, but it's very much a binary option or an extremely fast-paced futures market, right, for memes. With a novel token design, you can deposit stables. By becoming a liquidity provider, not so much like a liquidity provisioning on an AAM, but by depositing into each event,

you become a liquidity provider. That is tied to a bonding curve, which then rewards each member of each event with a second prize pool for providing liquidity. And then aside from that, if you hold tokens or part of governance, you earn revenue, right? And then the next best thing is that we are an only prediction market where you actually always win because technically if you lose and you're a holder, there's a portion of that second liquidity incentive prize pool, right, for all losers.

So we created this very kind of hyper, fast-paced, addictive, where you could still get the dopamine boost of speculating on meme coins but you could do it in a more safe way right and still earn a lot of money which is why we did that double prize pool and those tokenomics and stuff um i know that was a little long-winded uh it's you know coming up on midnight where i'm based in asia so a long day uh but there's a lot more because behind that scenes, we got mini games where you have normal gamification of simple telegram mini games, et cetera. And where you can earn points, you can earn more rewards. We have branded IP with other big meme coin partnerships. Within that, you can go into what we call the pump zone. And then you

have all the partner ecosystems or the partners within the ecosystem on Solana, where you can access directly to their communities, to their socials, and you can earn points and rewards. So we have some pretty major partnerships coming up. And you launched in January, is that correct? Yeah, we've been basically less than two and a half months. We've launched and we're only, man, we're on an angel round budget, which we're about to announce, which you guys already kind of dropped it already on this space is one of them. But we're about to announce all our tier one Vcs in our angel round and angels from other leading companies that we uh raised and in less than two and a half months we're at uh oh i think 100 almost 160,000 users and 430,000 communities and socials in two and a half months and that's on basically

bare minimum budget wow that's that's impressive. I know that I think even PumpFun has about 220,000 users per day and you guys are what, 160k lifetime already? Yeah, two and a half months.

They're incredible what PumpFun has done and we're working on actually, we're partnered already with almost every major meme launchpad except for them. So we're working on that next because we add value. We have a very symbiotic ecosystem model and a portion of our community tokens are for all our ecosystem partner communities. But we're all OGs behind the team. We've been in the game. Oh, man, I've been in 10 plus years.

Our other core advisors, 12 plus years. So we've launched some of the biggest projects in crypto before this. Well, that's a really good segue about the MFUN token, because in your Git book, it's talking about MFUN, which is an upcoming token for me market how is it going to be used and then i assume there was an angel round that's specific to this like maybe give some some context into that and how the token works sure well we don't want to announce all all the investors get an angel round that's coming out any moment right now uh we're actually

just still waiting on on the quotes from mario and ibc so whenever you guys finish that send it please but um yeah as far as the token so it it spans across multiple uh i would say facets right but first and foremost the prediction market game uh can't live without the token meaning that a lot of solutions that we added to that to try to create a more low-friction, high-engagement, low-barrier of entry into the prediction market, which is creating double prize pools, et cetera, et cetera, was tied in. So by propriety and liquidity, you earn rewards. By staking, based upon your weight of staking or locking, you can actually earn higher percentages of revenue off of the protocol, i.e. from all the revenue within the platform. The same thing applies to based on staking weight or locking weight and lifetime

up to that moment of providing liquidity, get multipl, etc. It's extremely gamified, the whole thing. Aside from that, you obviously win rewards for participating and contributing to the ecosystems. That means contributing to other partners' ecosystems through the form of quests. We have in-app payments for in-game items. We got governance, and I could continue going through, but they were designed by a really, really well-known team and with us as well. And they took quite a long time to design. So we're quite excited about launching MFUN. Do you have any sort of approximate date to share

in terms of when MFUN might go live? Oh, man. You got to ask that question live on a space. I can move on to the next one, man. I don't want to put you on the spot. When moon and when soon, right? We're shooting sometime soon. Let's just say that. Could be in March, could be in April, but we don't want to throw out a date.

You know how retail is, right? I know how it goes, man. I just asked some questions that I know people are going to get excited about. but you should definitely join our community it's it's extremely exciting you just go into our chat right now it's it's absolutely mayhem i mean you go in our chat we got like 130 000 members in there there's probably like 40 000 live right now you can just go in there it's pretty may. We have contests running weekly. The prediction market game is not live yet,

but a lot of the other features and games are. And we got what we call prediction market training. So each week, either with a partner that we're doing, last week, next week, we have another big meme coin partner. We're doing basically online prediction market training leading up to the games. We got meme contests, tons of exciting things happening basically every single week. Awesome. And obviously, people who are tuning in probably know that meme coins has been the narrative of this cycle,

but the other has been AI agents. And I know that you guys have a AI meme advisor. So how does this product work? How are you blending that in? Yeah, so we were actually, that was part of the whole goal prior to it being as hot as it is. So I'm very grateful it's so hot right now. But we use it basically, the vision of this super app is that the fragmentation within crypto and then add meme coins to it is absolutely a nightmare, right? So we use this as a way, let's give you a simple example. You go to, let's say, even Bunk or any of the meme coins, right? There's like a thousand decimal points. They do it on

purpose, obviously, right? It's a psychological thing. As a regular user, let's say even me, I don't know how many tokens I can buy with 100 bucks, let alone a million, right? So the easy thing by using the AI agent is you can ask about fundamentals, you can get direct data at your fingertips that's intelligent, whether it's how much you can purchase, what are the tokenomics about, you know, what's the different price movements, you can even have it analyze your wallet and your holdings. And then within that, once you can get a direct, basically either allow the agent to process an order, whether it's just buying it for your favorite meme coin or making a trade, or you can have it actually an actionable suggestion, meaning like, I want to buy a hundred bucks, tell me that blah, blah, blah, and it'll

load it right into the wallet directly in the app. And then you have the option to push execute or not. Is this an agent that you guys have been working on and building from scratch? Or are you partnering with any that are existing? We are partnering with one of the biggest ones in the industry right now, which we don't want to make public just yet. It's not our core product, which is why we're not building it. We're not one of those projects who try to build everything under the rainbow to add more value to their token. Yeah, it's the best way to scale too, right? Partner with the best and integrate.

Even our swaps and everything with the wallets, those are all major, major partnerships too that we'll be announcing soon. So we leave that stuff for really strong partnerships so do you guys have any i mean just since january there's you've noted a lot of different features within the app that are that are already live and are even coming soon is there any other upcoming sneak peeks releases new features new features, things like that, that you can kind of share with the audience today? Oh yeah, we have an incredible, what we call squads. That's about to launch any moment right now. So stay posted for that. And that features 12, at least right now, we have some new partnerships that work, 12 of the biggest exchanges and the biggest, let's say, DEXs and a couple other not public ones we're going to announce on Solana as well. And those will be partnerships with all of them.

And squads allows users to rally around their favorite exchanges and compete for points. By joining a squad, you get extra points just by joining it across the board within the app. That means when the prediction market's live with all the games that are happening right now within your quest, you earn 10% more. And then we provide a weekly bonus, millions of points to the winners as well based on tier positions within the squad rank. So it's another exciting way to basically provide value to our users, give them something to do, which is one of the biggest things in crypto with a lot of projects is the retention level, right?

So you could really look at our app as very much gaming. And if Robbie is still on here, I totally should have dropped this. He might've left already. It's so funny. We use his quote all the time. And I just used it with another VC that's coming in our next round,

is that he basically calls meme coins as very much hyper-casual gaming. I should have dropped that when he was on the call. So you can really look at us as very much gaming underneath all of this, right? And that's the beautiful thing about meme coins, is that meme coins are very much social underneath all of this right and that's the beautiful thing about meme coins is that they meme coins are meme coins are very much social financing gaming intertwined right yeah no i i agree and that's that's why i've been so interested in how dave portnoy is talking about meme coins in the last week or so because it's almost like a case study and like okay how is somebody digesting this who's

not from our industry and somebody who is great at marketing how are they explaining it and he's using a lot of the same verbiage that you just highlighted it very much is man and it's you know what what we always we don't say this kind of publicly this is more kind of like partner B2B investor, right? And VC is that, you know, the meme market is very much like 2019 DeFi 0.5 or one, right? Is where we are. And we really need to get to a place where this market can mature. And what that needs is actually products, right? And infrastructure around it versus just exchanges

to trade at the top, which disconnect you from all the community and culture, or the launchpads, and nothing against them, by the way, they're incredible, which give you direct access to the early stage ones. And yes, a part of their community, though, it's very centralized around just that meme podcast community, but there needs to be more products there, right? Different ways to experience meme coins, different ways to engage with them, and different ways to access them. Better ways, which is what we are working on now. Do you guys envision solely focusing on Solana? Or are you kind of exploring other ecosystems

where meme coins are flourishing? I know BNB chain has been hot lately, but are you focused on finding product market fit within Solana? Yes, yes, 100%. First and foremost on Solana as a base chain because of the liquidity,

because of the engagement and the seriousness of that community, right? And then obviously the technical aspects of it. But we do plan and have already started, you know, working with, you can see a lot of big partnerships we've done. You can go on our Twitter, see partnerships we've done with some of the top meme pads on TAN, one of the top two L chains. Sorry, the top L2 chains on TAN, one of the top two L chains, sorry, the top L2 chains on TAN. So we have a lot of stuff focused early on with bringing in the TAN ecosystem within to Solana. And then we do have a bunch more, I don't want to drop names yet because we actually haven't activated them,

but all the discussions are there since early days with a lot of the other big meme chains. You know, we just got to go in steps and actually get the prediction market live before we start integrating all the other smart contracts and stuff across chains. But that is the goal. Awesome. I do want to call to action for people who are tuning in. So the meme market account, even though JD is speaking on behalf of the project, is up in a speaker spot. So if you click on that green M in a speaker spot right now and you go to the mean market profile, you can get all of their official links in their bio there.

Make sure that you're giving them a follow as well and following JD. But JD, I also wanted to ask as we're wrapping up, what was the original thesis for launching the project? Like I assume as an entrepreneur, you kind of identified a problem or a niche that could be tackled here what was the motivation behind starting the project um this was to to provide a gateway that is seamless fun safe and rewarding into meme coins and crypto as a whole really truly that's it you, the 10-year plan is that meme coins,

you look at the data, you know, on how many Gen Z own meme coins and how much percentage of them got into crypto because of meme coins. It's because it's fun. It's entertaining, right? It's culture. And there is literally barely any way

to access it safely right now. And that is really our motto. So that's a great segue into what you think the future of this market sector is going to be. I know there's some retractors who say, OK, meme coins are a fad. They're a fad of the cycle. They're the NFTs of the cycle. But where do you personally see meme coins going? Where do you see it in not only 10 years, but even a year or three years from now?

Well, first, anyone who's saying that they're just a fad is completely wrong because they've been around now three and a half years through both cycles of the last two, at least. Right. And they're only getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So and the velocity, right, the velocity at which they they're launching like if it's a volume play that's where the volume is right dude i mean our our front well i don't know what you know there's a bunch of different nationalities on here but i'm you know i'm american are the you you know now you have africa but the u.s president lost for better or worse what everyone wants to say it's still incredible that the president lost a meme coin. Right. So 10 years, I don't know, five years.

You know, Murad has a really great chart that talks about all the different types of meme coins from the ones with utilities, the ones that are more entertainment, the ones that are more gaming, the ones that are more culture based, blah, blah, blah. What I believe is that they will segment out into kind of what he's saying, right? We do have a lot of strong meme coins with strong IP and brands. Just look at Bonk and look at Floki. Both of them, incredible. Vertically integrated corporate structures, extremely smart teams of what they built those meme coins into, right? So anyone who wants to crap on meme coins, yes, there's some, let's just say, less savory ones can look at some of the great ones and see what they've done, right? So I think they all will hold their own special place. But what I do see is

that the ones with utility are going to keep growing and there'll be more meme coins with utility. You'll have the ones that are very much brand and ip focus which probably lean more on gaming entertainment anime etc etc that i believe is probably going to take a lot more precedence because it's such a normal human thing and the basis of you know life for the past what 500 000 years since there was like you know on stage acting right with shakespeare and and you know and all that stuff you know so um i believe that those will take precedence because it's very much like gaming and a cult and association uh just like any kind of celebrity brand esports brand lifestyle brand like hip-hop how hip-hop literally changed

the entire world and what is that that's actually just culture right yep and i and i noticed one of the coins you didn't list was uh i gotta give a shout out to where i come from is the development representative over there but shiba inu and i see a lot of the shiba inu community follows me to a lot of these spaces and they're they're tuning in so i want to give a shout out to them i see calvin jay in the audience he's one of the the biggest creators in that community too. So I think Calvin will really like this product as well. But JD, as we're wrapping up here,

what's maybe one call to action? If people are tuning in, they're hearing about MeMarket for the first time, what's the best thing that they can do to get involved? Join our community either by joining our chat on Telegram or loading our app, which you'll find everything right there. We are the most fun, exciting, and rewarding community, providing extremely fresh experiences, right?

So that's probably the best call to action I could do at almost midnight right now. I love it. Well, I know you're in Asia, so I'll let you go to bed. Don't go to bed as long as Hayley Welch. But I appreciate you joining today, JD, and of course, me, Mark, as well. And just an advertisement here for IBC. IBC is also hiring for writers, journalists, and moderators. So if you're looking to join a great team, make sure that you DM Mario's account there at the top. Or if you're a project who's tuning in, I see there are a couple projects here in the audience as well. If anyone wants to do an AMA just like this one, just like MeMarket and what JD just did, make sure you DM the Mario account up there. He's got a ton of people that

are working around the clock to answer all those DMs. So JD, I appreciate you joining and me market as well. Didn't get to talk to who's behind the mic at me market, but appreciate you joining as well and looking good up here in a speaker spot. Sounds good. Thanks for having us. Thanks for coming. And thanks for all the listeners for tuning in. Everyone have a great day.