Unchained - Pump.fun Just Raised $600M. What Does This Mean for DeFi, Solana & Social Media? - Ep. 868

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

The weeks leading up to Pump.fun’s ICO were contentious: accusations that it was extractive, debates over decentralization, and outrage over allocations.  In the end, the company pulled off the third-largest ICO in crypto history, raising $600 million in 12 minutes. The day of, Solana barely flinched under the load, and onchain platforms like Hyperliquid and Raydium left CEXes looking outdated. In this episode of Unchained, Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly and Joe McCann of Asymmetric join Laura to break down: Whether this marks the return of ICOs The objections to the small ($10 million) airdrop to creators How Pump.fun’s ambitions could reshape memecoins, and maybe Solana itself And why TikTok might not need to worry just yet Visit our website for breaking news, analysis, op-eds, articles to learn about crypto, and much more: unchainedcrypto.com Xapo Bank Ledn Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner of Dragonfly Joe McCann, Founder, CEO & CIO of Asymmetric Previous coverage on the ICO: Pump.fun’s $1 Billion ICO Has Caused Controversy. Can It Succeed? Unchained: Pump.fun Becomes Third Largest ICO, Raises $600M in 12 Minutes  PUMP Traders Make Big Options Bets on the Token Surging Past Its ICO Price Pump.fun Draws Backlash After Confirming PUMP ICO SolanaFloor’s tweet on LetsBonk’s stats The Block: Pump.fun makes first acquisition, purchases Solana-based copy-trading wallet tracker Kolscan Dune Analytics Twitter thread on the PUMP ICO stats Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🚀 3:43 Why Joe says Pump.fun is one of the best crypto businesses he’s seen 📈 6:04 Whether this heralds the return of ICO mania 😤 7:11 Why the raise triggered backlash from parts of the crypto community 💸 8:32 Whether PUMP’s valuation can really be justified ⚙️ 12:10 How the exchange-first design created issues—and why others may copy it 📊 16:15 Whether PUMP’s distribution model helped or hurt its credibility ⏳ 21:43 Why the decision to have no token lockups sparked debate 👾 24:40 What kind of traders actually bought into the ICO ⚡ 32:56 Whether Solana’s performance makes it the new home for ICOs 🏦 37:50 Why Coinbase sat this one out 🔮 44:07 Where PUMP’s price might be headed in the medium term 📉 48:37 How Pump.fun lost some momentum—and what that says about the space 🧠 55:14 How Pump.fun plans to spend its $600 million war chest 📵 57:21 Whether Pump.fun can really take on Facebook 🔥 1:01:46 Why Joe still believes memecoins are just getting started Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What I think of pomp is is that they're pursuing financial entertainment. And financial entertainment is fundamentally very different than what most people are doing on TikTok or on Facebook. I do think it's something that Gen Z is much more tuned into than previous generations. And so I can see that this thing could become really big. But the idea that it would kill TikTok, not really, but could it become as big or comparable to something like TikTok? I can see that's right. Hi, everyone. Looking to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. We love featuring quotes from listeners on the show. Today we have some comments

responding to my recent episode with Brandon Millman, CEO and co-founder of Phantom, on my Phantom chose to launch perps on Hyperliquid instead of Solana. On X, Kefa said, fascinating pivot by Phantom and a bold statement on where CryptoUX is heading. Choosing Hyperliquid over Salonan Native Dex says a lot about current infrastructure tradeoffs. And on YouTube, wants to comment 7092 wrote, Hyperliquid has the liquidity, Ethereum has the institutional credibility, Solana has the meme coins. To have your comment featured, write a review of the podcast overall,

or leave a comment on our video on YouTube, Prodcaster, or X. This is a July 15th, 2024 episode of Unchained. Crypto moves fast. It's why Bitwise launched the weekly CIO memo, a jargon-free summary of what's moving crypto markets, written by one of the best in the business, CIO Matt Hogan. Get up to speed in five minutes or less. Check it out at bitwiseinvestments.com slash CIO memo.

Carefully consider the extreme risks associated with crypto before investing. Lutton is a leading platform for Bitcoin-backed loans, offering a secure and transparent way to unlock liquidity without selling your Bitcoin. Issuing loans since 2018 and earning over 1,000 trust-pilot reviews. Learn more at leaden.io. And today's topic is the Pump Fund ICO. Here to discuss our Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of Dragonfly,

and Joe McCann, founder, CEO and CIO of Asymmetric. Welcome to Steve and Joe. Hey. Thanks for having us. So everybody knows what happened this past weekend. There had been news that leaked earlier, you know, like a month ago. But last Wednesday, Pump Fund finally officially announced its ICO. And the trail in front was pretty slick.

It was very pump funny, very on brand, very zoomer-ish. And they tweeted, our plan is to kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch on Salada. And then they said Pump will grow the Pump.com fund ecosystem by delivering value to its community and incentivizing the ecosystem that continues helping the platform succeed. So they said the token would offer things like fee rebates, token buybacks, other incentives. And, you know, famously people probably know, it is most likely the fastest company to reach $750 million in revenue. So it was interesting as kind of like early on, there was like a negative reaction, like criticism that this was extractive, that it wasn't anirdrop, complains about the high valuation. So it's just kind of funny to see how sentiment shifted.

But I'd be curious, Joe and Haseeb, like, what did you think about the numbers around the ICU? And we, you know, I mean, it's, we can talk about anything in the $500 million raise, especially given the hefty amount they'd already made, the $4 billion valuation, the price, even like the allocation, 18% to institutional, 15% to the public, et cetera. So you can really pick whatever stuck out at you. I talked about this. I think on bits and bits a while ago or some other podcasts where it's like, leave it up to the crypto industry to completely reinvent the word revenue into extraction.

Like, Pump. Fun is a company that's meant to make money, and they built a killer app where they were generating revenue. Now, people use that to potentially do nefarious things, and people use all kinds of stuff to do nefarious things, and thus the extraction. And so the extractive narrative really picked up when meme coin started to go to zero. When they were ripping, no one talked about extraction, right? And so for me, like, I think Pump. That Fund is an example of a great company that built an amazing business. The timing was impeccable. And there's nothing to, you know, from my perspective as like a DC or an investor or just even a founder, former founder, like I'm like, hats off to them. Do I think that the lack of an air drop or the lack of allocation or the price or this and that? Yes, because it's the internet. Everyone's going to be upset. Like as an example, hear me out on this thought exercise. Imagine if Pump. Fund just to get a 100% of their tokens as an air drop. Somebody would complain about that, that they didn't get enough or whatever. It's impossible to place the internet.

And so, you know, I think, I mean, clearly things could have been done better in various ways, you know, internet capital markets and capital formation on chain dominating in the current kind of environment and landscape, right? Like we had the ICO craze. I know Haseeb was around back then when the ICAWCRAs was happening with Ethereum, you too, Laura. this is a pretty meaningful seminal event for true capital formation at global scale and the Salon Network just kind of hummed right along.

So there are three big things that jump out at me about this story that I think are worth going into. The first is the fact that, like you said, Joe, the sentiment online was so negative about the pumped-out fun raise. And there was a sense that like you said, it's very extracted, which I think itself is interesting. The second thing was the fact that there was such a dead. delta between the sentiment and the demand, right? If you read the Twitter replies, you would think, oh, this thing is going to be sitting out there, no one's going to buy it. And in fact, it was massively oversubscribed, sold out in minutes, crazy amounts of capital.

And the third thing, Laura, you mentioned this earlier, is the return of ICOs, right? So this is the first really massive ICO that we have seen in a long time. And it probably pretends that this is coming back. People have kind of whispered a little bit about this, of that, oh, hey, maybe under Trump, under these new, more permissive SEC, there's gonna be more openness to these kinds of, this approach to capital formation. It is true also that the UK and US were restricted,

and everything in the pump ICO had K. So this is not an old school ICO, it's not the kind of, okay, here's a wallet, send your money in, you know, it's not that kind of an ICO, but it is really like what we were seeing on coinless and these other platforms, massively on steroids, the kind of scale, really only the EOS has surpassed in,

in previous eras. Yeah, yeah. It was interesting, too, because I was thinking that, like, there were some ICOs in the 2017 era that were KYC. Like, I remember Civic was the first one. And there was kind of a gimmick. It was a little bit. It's true.

Yeah. Going back to the first point, which is like, why are people so upset about this, right? I think it's really fascinating to me because it speaks to. the fundamental tension that's at the core of crypto culture and crypto spirit, which is that crypto is in part maximally capitalist, right? In a sense, Pump. Dot Fund itself is maximally capitalist. It's like, hey, let's create coins for everything. Yeah, people are going to feed on each other. They're going to, they're going to extract from each other. Just let it happen. You know, it's all, the war of all against all. We literally call them the trenches because it's sort of calling for violence,

right? And then at the same time, there's a sense of like, oh, wait, wait, wait, why is Pumped. Fund extracting from the community, which is almost a sense of like, okay, actually, we should be engaged in this kind of socialist project that you're supposed to be giving back, just be running this almost like a charity, right, which is a very, very actually Ethereum-coded complaint, right? This is like the whole Ethereum ethos is that you're supposed to be giving back to the community and sharing with everybody and like air-dropping everything completely and being totally decentralized. But that front is not decentralized. It's never claimed to be decentralized. It's never used any of that language. He's never told people like, hey, we're all building

this thing together. It's like, no, no, no, we're the team. you guys are in the trenches and we are giving you guns, right? That's like they're basically arms dealers, right? And that it's funny that this is the thing that everybody simultaneously went to, which I think, again, is like this contradiction at the heart of crypto. But I do want to ask just about the fact that they had, you know, this $750 million in revenue. So I am just curious, like, you know, I can think of reasons to justify like why they would need more money. but I was curious just like for you as a VC,

like I'm sure there was an opportunity for Dragonfly to invest. And I already heard Rob Paddock say like it's just not like you don't normally invest in companies at that stage. But, you know, putting your VC cap on like do you feel it's justified? Do you feel like the valuation was justified? Like what do you think of the numbers? Well, look, the token is out trading now. And it's trading at $5.20, something like that. I'm sure it's going to move around a lot as people continue to get their tokens.

And as listings come in. So clearly the price was correct. Actually, I think they did a great job in pricing this thing because, like, okay, that's a good IPO pop is, you know, you're up 25%. You didn't leave too much money on the table, but everybody feels good for having participated. They're up a little bit. Wait, I'm sorry. Did you say $5? I'm sorry.

Okay. Five cents or fractions of a cent or whatever. Yeah, half a cent. Right. Okay. Right, right, exactly. So basically everyone's up about 25% if you participated in the, in the ICO. So I think that's good prices.

That's what you want to see, is that like everyone makes money, there's a cushion, and there's room for upside. You know, I think it's hard to imagine pomp trading like significantly below where they priced it, so I think they were pricing it in a retail-friendly way. But also, the market environment changed a lot from when they originally announced that price and where the market's sitting today, now we see your coins rallying, Bitcoin at all-time highs, whereas when they originally were floating this price, things were kind of in the doldrums. But if you look at the pre-launch markets on Avo and then hyperliquids, started listening yesterday, everything was around $5 to $6, basically the entire period.

And so markets already were pretty uniform in their perspective that this thing should trade around $5 to $6 billion. Yeah, there's two key things to kind of draft off of Haseeb's point here. One is what's fascinating about this ICO is you had the majority of the capital formation on chain. 75% of the allocation went to wallets that were buying basically a million. So, you know, that's typically not your retail investor. That's some level of smart money and smart money that's really good at using on-chain infrastructure.

This is not your trad-fi, you know, way of raising money, right? The other thing is, so you have the capital formation with Solana on-chain, and then you had price discovery in hyper-liquid, right? And this was, this is a very fascinating concept because, you know, if you look at like, I'm an investor in Circle, full disclosure, like we bought private shares years ago, like look at that IPO and the way that that came to market is a lot of chatter about oh they left so much money on the table or like you know they kind of increased the the price to go public at a couple of times and then when they actually went public like they were forever trying to match the orders and this

and that it just feels like a very archaic way of doing things especially for us crypto native people and so hyperliquid is actually like you know the price I think they they flipped the amount of trading volume on there was like half a billion dollars or something. It was an incredible amount of volume for a token that had not launched. And then it turned out the price was pretty consistent with where the token started trading earlier today on Monday, July 14th. And so to me, there's something really compelling about the approach to capital formation on chain and then the approach to, you know, call it an on-chain way of doing price discovery that just doesn't exist today in Tradfide. So the other interesting thing about this ICO was

also the mechanics, which I think were pretty novel. So usually when we see an ICO, like in the olden days, or even, you know, you go in something like, you know, one of Kobe's platforms, whether it's Echo or Sonar, usually these ICOs are all in one venue. So you go to one place, you go to one contract, and you send in your money, and you get your tokens. This ICO was very interesting because they used these distribution partners of basically six exchanges. So it was like buy-bit, bit, bitget, gate, they had a few others.

and you could go in and put your order, whether it's on ByBid or Cracken or whatever. And apparently the way that it worked was that each of the exchanges had some inventory that they were able to sell. They had a limit on how much they could sell. And each of the exchanges got a cut. So they sort of had, you know,

they were kind of these intermediaries that were able to sell more to their own customers. And Pump had an API on the back end that basically, you know, when somebody says, hey, I got an order, I want to confirm this from my customer. You have to hit their API, and the API tells you, yeah, you, yes, you're good. And apparently what I'm hearing from some of these exchanges is that

that API did not work very well. And that's a big part of the reason why, like, it just got overloaded with the huge amounts of volume that were just slamming that thing. And of course, you know, they built this themselves. So this was like a one-time thing that nobody really had the ability to test at the scale that they ended up experiencing. Because everything about this design, and I got the sense from this when I was chatting with the pump team because they were talking to a lot of VCs beforehand getting advice about how, you know, how to come out with this raise. And they were very concerned that maybe they weren't going to sell out. And so this whole structure was designed for what if it takes like three days? Like the whole ICA was supposed to

take three days. Everything about this ICA was designed for like, oh, what if the demand isn't there? And of course, in reality, the demand was massively oversubscribed because so many bids were hitting on chain that it basically flooded all of the partners. So the partners couldn't actually know whether or not they could fill their demand. And so you saw the Cracken accidentally overfilled. You had other exchanges that accidentally overfilled because they're just like, look, the API is not responding. We have to, if we give our customer zero, they're going to fucking kill us. So we have to get something and just like make it up on the back end. So anyway, it was kind of a mess.

But this structure, my guess is that we are going to see now that these exchanges have built out this apparatus, they are going to use it again. And so my guess is that this is not the last time we're going to see the structure play out. Wait, I'm so confused when you say that. You mean the Dex is. No, I mean the centralized exchanges. The centralized exchanges have all built this infrastructure now to be able to do these like coordinated ICO things at the same time. Like as far as I know, By better crack and never built this before. Okay.

But if the, if, you know, the fact that the API failed, like what it means is that, you know, whoever is having the ICU like the quality of a high. Yeah, they need to clean it up. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It needs to be designed for this kind of load, which, you know, this was the first run. And obviously, you know, Pump was not prepared for the amount of bids that they'd be hitting in the first few seconds. And the irony being, all you had to do was go on chain with Solana and it was totally fine, right?

Yeah, yeah, which is just crazy. What was funny to me is so Bybit, it gave their, so obviously it refunded people whose orders were not filled. but then they also gave like a $20 trading credit or something. But Cracken said that they would actually air drop pump to affected users. So that that was really interesting. That's really, really good leadership by Arjun in my opinion to do something like that. Because the dollar amount versus the public backlash, I mean, it's skewed such that like, if you spend a million dollars hypothetically, I don't know what they're spending,

but like, it's totally worth it because the people are like, oh, Cracken is a good. actor and when you look at by bit and i mean i've nothing against by bit but like twenty dollar trading credit because i know some people that were trying to buy on say by bit were shorting the perp on hyperliquid to be delta neutral and then they didn't get filled and so now they're like upside down on their short you know yeah there's some you know but wouldn't they wouldn't they be up on the short because uh it's trading at five something now and it was like six yesterday i think like the day that it actually happened like they were anticipating getting filled at some price and then shorting it and just capturing the spread. But they just had a

naked short, unfortunately. Yeah, I saw some tweets. There was this one from Fubar who said the biggest takeaway from the pump launch is that hyperliquid has officially overtaken, taken sexes in relevance, 600 million pre-market ball on hyperliquid 600K on Coinbase. Slauna traders got pre-sell aloe. Bindbet traders got wrecked. On chain has finally flipped off chain for good. That was interesting. I did want to ask that one other thing about just like the math behind all this. I was curious what you thought of the token distribution. I mean, some of this was like not crazy, you know, 20% to the token team, 13% to existing investors, 33% of the ICO, 24% of community ecosystem. But yeah, you know, throw in there, you might have seen there

were some people protesting the fact that there will be an air drop, but it's only 10 million to the creators. So, so another. comment on this was from Star Platinum Soul who tweeted, Pup Fund is allocated a total of 10 million for its air drop in an industry that is seen uniswap as 6.4 billion, 8.0.3.5 billion, Arbitrum, 2 billion, Bonk, 1.3 billion, Celestia, you know, 700 million, et cetera, et cetera. So I don't know what you thought about some of those decisions there.

Yeah, look, I mean, people are going to be unhappy. It's just the way it is, right? Like, you're, you know, as the CEO, I don't, I would not want to be alone at Pump That Fund trying to figure this stuff out because you have investors, you have your employees, you have yourself, you have the community, you have the creators, and somebody's going to get upset, right? And so I don't think there's a perfect science to this. You know, Hyper Liquid did an amazing air drop. Gito did an amazing air drop. I'm sure Haseeb knows of the folks in the Ethereum community that have done amazing air drops. There are successful ways of doing this.

And I do think that one of the key things for a token to be valuable is distribution. And this is what happened with Bonk, right? They have like a million wallets now that's holding Bonk. They focused on distribution and then building utility into what they're doing with Bonk. And now you see the result of that, right? It's a multi-billion dollar market cap meme coin, but they have all these products. They have a bunch of, you know, diehard users because they distributed the token.

If you restrict that distribution, then you have to find other ways of getting your in the hands of other people. And so that's the thing I always talk to founders about is like, optimize for distribution of the token to get it to as many hands as possible. And then you do your best from there. Did they do that with pumped out funds allocation? I don't know. We will see.

But, you know, it's still trading, you know, above ICO price, which suggests that there's still reasonable demand and people aren't just flipping out of this thing. Yeah. So I take a slightly different tack is that the difference with Pump. pumped up fund and most of those other platforms that pumped up fun already has extremely large revenues high user retention they never told people they were going to do an air drop they never even implied it so there's not this like implied social contract that pump has that many of these platforms did have

right like people who are on hyperliquid they knew they were playing for points yeah uniswap is kind of that immaculate conception where it was genuinely a surprise and this meta had not really been invented Unswap kind of was the one to do it. But with Hyperliquid, they were from the very beginning, incentivizing people with points. And the game theory was there that, okay, the people had to be satisfied with theirdrop. With pump, like nobody was ever entreated. Hey, go on Pump.com, because there's going to be a massiveirdrop if you trade. People are just there because they love the product.

They just love the experience. They love the community. And so anything that they do from here is kind of gravy. Like, they don't need it. And they never promised it. Now, that being said, like, you said yourself that there's 17% of the, the token that's set aside for community and whatever, I assume that's what that implies, is it basically it's incentives to get people to do stuff.

An AirDrop is almost by definition, it's like a, it's like charity, right? It's like, hey, thanks for, thanks for all the help. And that, like how much of that they should do? I don't know. It may 10 million sounds low given the value of this token, but my guess is that they're kind of just winging it. Knowing this team and knowing the way that they make product decisions, I think that's the answer is that.

They're winging it. They'll probably change in response. We've seen already a few things about the ICO change, even from where it was previously announced. So I would expect to see that, too, on anirdrop. But that being said, the other thing that we've learned about airdrops is that it's actually very hard to tell what your users actually think from just reading community sentiment. Because community sentiment overwhelmingly weighs toward complainers because they've learned through experience that, like, complaining works. It's actually very profitable to complain. because if like you know the cost of complaining is basically zero and now we have all these bots and LMs that can you know just do this at scale and the upside is significant because if you can bully a team

into air dropping more of their token like damn that's all gravy and like you can sort of take the take the brand hostage and say oh isn't it you know it's a nice little sentiment you have over there on your air drop or on your on your token launch wouldn't be a shame if something happens to it and like you know everybody just starts shooting on you yeah yeah it's Totally. I did also want to ask one thing, though. The fact that there was no lockup for investors, I thought that was interesting. I heard Rob Haddock even saying on Empire that he heard exactly what market cap it is that some of the VCs were planning to dump that. Which, like, already, I was just like, okay, just hearing it made my heart flutter a little bit. I was like, oh, people are getting erect. But I don't know. What do you think of that? Is that maybe it, maybe it's not weird. I don't know. I mean, VCs is a strong word for investing into an unlocked ICO. Like, the reality was that I think originally from chatting with the team, the plan was to raise a much smaller amount from institutions.

And again, like a lot of this, again, the entire design of this raise was worst case scenario planning because they just didn't know if the retail appetite was going to be there. And so originally they were planning to raise much more from retail and less than institutions. And then when the institutional bid started getting really crazy and they got all this money that was like, hey, We want to buy direct. And also, they realize a lot of this money could not buy in an ICO, right? They can't go on buy bid on shit or go on chain and Yolo and stuff. So the only way that a lot of this capital could buy is buying directly from the team. But they got the same terms as retail.

So everybody was on the same terms. It's just they were like, hey, if this demand is here, I don't know if it's going to come. You know, everyone's saying, oh, crypto winter, meme coins are dead. Trenches are bearish, right? And this is what the sounds were a month and a half ago. So that was very much how they optimized this raise, and that's why there's so much, quote, unquote, institutions. But yeah, it's obviously if you're buying an ICA with no lockup, like, there's no expectation that you're going to hold. That's right.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, like, getting back to his point earlier about like hyper capitalism versus like, wait a second, Kumbaya Community Socialism. It's like, look, if somebody puts money at risk and they have the opportunity to take profits or cut their losses, that's on them to do that. Right. And so I don't think there should be any shaming of somebody who bought into this thing and they're up 25%. Because look, if you're a hedge fund who's managing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and you put X amount of dollars into something and it's up 25%. That's a lot for a hedge fund that's operating at that size or scale, especially in TradFi. I don't think Tradfai participated in this deal. But like conceptually, if you have that type of opportunity, you will flip out of it. And you're seeing a lot of this in the digital asset treasury vehicles today where the pipe investors, you know, get in a really cheap price, the stock rips, and then all of a sudden,

it kind of the shelf offering gets registered for the ones that are RTOs, and boom, the stock price dumps. Why? Because people made a bunch of money. And it's like, this is the nature of the game. So it's not specific to crypto in this context of the pump raise from institutions. It's just the nature of people investing. And if you give people the escape hatch and they're up a lot of money, they're probably going to take it. Okay. So now let's also talk about like even who bought? Because there are some interesting stats here. So first of all, it does look like, so the largest number of buyers, sorry, the largest tranche was people who bought less than 1,000 worth. That was 8,200 people. And less than 200 bought more than $1 million worth.

It does look like there was at least one account that was almost like Sibble buying, which is strange, but you don't need to go into that. It might be like an airdrop technique, like a Sibble farming type of thing. It actually looks like the overall number of people that participated was around, I think it's 13,000. So what did you make of all those points? And then even the fact, you know, just going back to how we started this conversation about the fact that in order to participate, you know, 24,000 people did KYC on Solana. So I saw Dune tweeted, this shifts pump from Wild West to structured entry, potentially attracting institutional interest in Salinas ecosystem. Not sure about that, But yeah, just for your take on the, you know, yeah, the who question.

Well, those are the ones that we see on chain. Obviously, the vast majority of the capital was funded on chain because, you know, everything just sold out really quickly. So the other thing to remember is that probably a lot of people were thinking, oh, you know, I've got three days. This is a three-day-long ICU. That's what it said. And so, yeah, I can like, you know, maybe after the first half hour, I'll go,

maybe in a couple hours later, you know, I'll take some time on my, what was it, Saturday, I think when it happened. Saturday. Yeah, yeah, exactly. People are, you know, they're like, oh, I'll get breakfast, you know, and I'll come back and I'll do the pump ICU. And 12 minutes, everything was gone. So those are all the people who got in in 12 minutes. I imagine if you include the sexes of all the people who didn't get filled on sexes, and you include anybody who was just planning to, you know, enjoy their breakfast, or who was in Asia, for that matter.

Because, of course, yeah, exactly. The U.S. and U.K. were excluded. So if you're an American, you couldn't do this deal. So it's all non-Americans. Yeah, but the time, however, seems like especially conducive to Americans. But anyway, not trying to take any... You're to KIC. So this is not like a, you know, VPN-in kind of thing.

You know, this is, you have to pass KYC. That's true. That's true. But, yeah, Joe, do you have anything to add? I mean, for the people that invested, I mean, look, the fascinating part to me is that, I mean, and this was kind of like my white bowl moment during the original. ICO boom was like, holy shit, we can actually do global capital formation in matter of seconds.

Like, that's just, it's such a huge change to the way that companies and businesses and people can be funded. And we had it happen again, right? With an arguably controversial, you know, company slash token launch. I just, I don't think this is going to slow down. I don't fully agree with like the kind of hyperbolic statement that you show. earlier from somebody tweeting saying like sexes are dead and this and that. And it's like if you unpack that a little bit, Coinbase has like what 50 plus

million KYC accounts. Robinhood has how many? Revolut has how many? Like that's a network, right? So you can light up your network with things and services and products and whatever. That's pretty material. So I don't think that it's going away per se. I think to Haseeb's point earlier is like it sounded like some infrastructure, API,

issues that were going on. But I just get back to what happened on chain, right? Like the activity on chain as the canonical Salonah Bull here, I was like median fees were like two pennies, you know. And that a year ago wouldn't have been the case on Salana, let alone two years ago. So I think this is going to continue, but I think it will be augmented with using sexes as distribution outlets,

as opposed to being like the primary venue for raising money because it's very clear that pump probably could have done all of this on chain and had no real issue with it. I think it's important to acknowledge the fact that these distribution networks of potential KYCed users exist in these exchanges and that's not changing anytime soon. Well, the other thing I would add to that is that a pump is also pretty unique, right? I mean, one is probably the most well-known application in crypto period. Second, it is a very, very, very highly monetary in nature, right? So, like, the people who have a lot of money all know Pump, they use Pump. And this, you know, this ICO took place on Solana, which is like the primary application

on Solana right now is Pump. So their ability to raise all this capital themselves and have this direct distribution is pretty unique. I don't think if we're going to see a wave of these ICOs coming back, my guess is that probably the next person who does it is going to rely more on the exchange distribution partners than Pump had to, right? Pump was worried that they would have to, which is why they had this structure. But then they realized on game day that like, oh, wait, never mind. We can fill the whole thing ourselves, not pay any middleman, any fees. And, you know, it makes sense. That's absolutely what they

should do. But, you know, if you're the next person that's a, hey, I want to do an ICO2, you don't have that kind of reach, you know, people who have this kind of money are not, you know, jamming their finger at 10 a.m. on a Sunday or Saturday to try to get your token. That's right. And look, the interesting thing also that was kind of happening behind the scenes. There's a competitive launchpad called Let's Bonk from the Bonk team that leading up to the ICO, they just completely took over Pump.comfund's market share of newly issued tokens and graduated tokens and fees, et cetera. And so even in the face of like the fundamentals falling apart for Pump into their ICO, they were still able to fill it in 12 minutes.

Like that's pretty powerful. Yeah. So we'll talk more about, um, all of that, including the effects on Salado. But first, we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors to make this ship possible. Hi, I'm Matt Hogan, CIO of Crypto Asset Manager Bitwise. Look, crypto can be confusing. There's so much noise and the space changes so quickly. That's why, every week, I write a five-minute memo on the biggest stories impacting crypto. In plain English. Why is Bitcoin up or down? What are people missing? Where should investors look next? Get the lowdown every week. Sign up to get the weekly CIO memo delivered straight to your inbox.

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to unlock liquidity without selling. Learn more at leaden.io. That's L-E-D-N dot I.O. Here are more listener comments. On Friday, we released my interview with Sam Tabar, CEO of Bit Digital, and why the company is going all in on Ethereum, not Bitcoin, and why he believes Ethereum is the real digital gold.

Here's what Otis Vineyard said on X. Digital lumber, building material for the future of business on chain. Also on X, R. Kaplan 1, wrote, Digital Gold, it keeps changing its narrative, losing fees to L2s, and shifting from inflationary to deflationary depending on gas fees. No, it's far from it, but it is still obviously a great asset. Again, if you want to hear a comment featured on the show, please write a review or leave a comment on an episode on YouTube, Farcaster, or X. Back to my conversation with Haseeb and Joe. So I want to go back to that point that Joe made about how Salana fees only

spiked up to two cents, which is incredible. I was just curious, like, how you thought this ICA would change the competition amongst the various chains? Well, you know my answer. I mean, I actually see it more as, like, testament to the engineers that have been relentlessly building on Solana and making Solana a better L1. You know, the hats off to them because clearly, you know, there have been reliability issues in the past, even though it's been well over a year since we've had an issue with the network. And it goes to show that like the continued perseverance of the devs building Salana Corps are bearing fruit.

And, you know, I mean, when the Trump meme coin happened, you know, fees with bananas because no one knew about it. I think people were somewhat prepared for pump because they had announced it. But again, the stability of the network, I think this was another test and it passed with flying colors. So I actually, I don't know because I haven't followed any of the Solana technicals here, but my impression is that like this is just a very different kind of event than the Trump meme coin. Like again, there was like 25,000 people who KYC, who even like had KYC ready to go. And so it's not like you have thousands of people, you know, slamming buttons or bots going everywhere. There's nothing to bot, right?

Like you got KYC and then you put in your bid. And of course, because it's a blockchain, bidding a million dollars or 20 million dollars, or, you know, it takes no more transaction fees than bidding for, you know, $100. So because everyone expected that the pumped-out fund ICO would be for three days, people were talking about, oh, is it going to sell out or not, you know, is there the demand? Oh, these guys are getting desperate. That's why they're, like, trying to raise all this money and, you know, they're trying to cash out at the end. Like, the sentiment was so negative.

I think people thought that it wouldn't be that big of a deal. So it's selling out in 12 minutes was really a surprise, but it didn't comprise that much on-chain volume, right? It's just like 25,000 people is nothing for Solana. You know, that's just like, that would just disappear in the metrics of who's actually trading on chain. So I think it's sort of deceptively, it's sort of deceptively a non-event from a technical perspective, even though in terms of capital, it was absolutely enormous. Yeah. Do you think, and maybe because you're probably closer to this than I am, but do you think Jesse and the team over at base are looking at this going like, hey, how can we enable folks to do these types of ICOs using base?

I mean, it's notable that Coinbase did not offer this. They didn't do this. Cracken did. And the fact that Cracken did it was notable, surprising, because Cracken is very highly regulated. They can sort of play by the rules. They're not one of these international kind of overseas exchanges. So the fact that Coinbase didn't do this, to me, implies that, like, look, they're still a little wary of being too close to something like this. Cracken, you know, they don't have as much U.S. market share.

They're mostly European. And so they're kind of like, yeah, you know, fuck it. Let's, I don't know. I'm kind of imputing motives that I don't know that were really there or not. And maybe they're slightly regretting it. Now they had to, you know, basically go short, pump because they weren't able to get their stuff filled. But I think the answer to me is that like the quantum of capital that any of the exchanges got, right? Because they each probably sold in the order of like 20, 30 million at the most.

And then some of them had to like backfill some that they didn't get, like, you know, crack and doing thisirdrop or buy it, giving out credit. So like probably like they might even be losing money net net on this whole deal. because of course they're only going to keep a small portion, right? They're not keeping like 20% of the proceeds or something. So this tells me, because of the fact that they weren't able to sell out, that this is not yet a big business line for exchanges. I don't think they're looking at this as saying, oh, my goodness, I can't wait for the next ICO.

They may be saying, wow, this was a huge moment that our customers really demanded, right? Our customers are really mad about this, that they didn't get access to pump or that they didn't get their thing filled. And so maybe this is more like, you know, when you, when you, A big part of the reason why you do new listings as an exchange is not because new listings generate a bunch of volume. Oftentimes they don't. It's more that they generate a lot of attention. And everyone wants to be on the exchange where they get access to the new listing.

But most of your fees come from trading, you know, the regular old stuff from Bitcoin and Doge and, you know, XRP and all this other stuff. That's where most of the money gets made. I think this might be something like that, which is that doesn't make a lot of money, but it's a very important headline. In the same way, FTX used to do all this stuff where they'd list all this random crap. just to get a headline. And it would bring people through the front door to get them to trade, you know, the real moneymakers. Yeah.

My thought is about like why Cracken did it is I, you know, I think Coinbase, their like customer base is very, very retail and very U.S. And I think Crackens is like probably more whales. So, you know, those are the people who are going to be more interested. You think whales are more interested than retail? I mean, like if you just look at the distribution, like, yeah, there were a number of, of like, you know, small accounts, but like, I don't know, there were, yeah, there were a lot of people that wanted more than one million. So like, I guess what I'm trying to say is like it just,

even from from the research I did on like the earlier ICO era, we also have a lot of influence. So even if like there's just a small number, but they bring in like a huge amount of business for your exchange, you're going to like do their bidding. You know, and like I would say that I think Cracken's business is probably more dependent on them. So it's not about like the numbers even. It's more about like just influence. Yeah. I don't know that that's true.

I mean, Cracken is dominant in Europe. And so I don't think Europe is like more whale heavy than the US is. I think it's much more that if the US and UK are excluded from this sale, then, you know, those are those are. Those are coin base. I mean, that's the strongholds of coin base. So on some level, it's kind of like, okay, maybe it's even just confusing. for Coinbase customers. If Coinbase announces that we are supporting the pump

ICO, but guess what? If you're American, you can't do this. That probably would make people even more mad than even the people who got in to say nothing of people who couldn't get in who actually were eligible. So that may have been the calculus, maybe not even the regulatory risk. But I would guess that the regulatory risk, as well as the fact that Coinbase is public, right?

So maybe it's just like, look, I don't want Wall Street analysts talking about me offering pump token or even bring it into the conversation, because it's only going to hurt me to be associated with meme coins more than I need to be. But Cracken is saying it wants to go public. So you feel like. Well, it's not public yet.

So, you know, like there's a big difference between wants to be public and it's public. Right. Yeah. One thing to note, Coinbase did launch a perp for their off, I say off offshore venue. But it had, yeah, there was a pump. A prelisting pump perp for Coinbase, but it's their offshore venue. you still can't access if you're in the US, right? And it did very little volume relative to hyper liquid, but they did try to get involved with, you know, for price discovery, but not so much the ICO itself.

But I think Haseeb's point is correct. Like, Cracken, uh, dominant in Europe, still private company. And I mean, even what they did with tokenized stocks instead of going their route of like, you know, an L2, like Robin Hood's doing, they're just like, it's an SPL token, like let it rip. So I would not be surprised if they were like, yeah, of course we're going to do the pump ICO. Okay. Yeah, all of that makes sense. But it's interesting because like their strategy is confusing with the ink blockchain being on. It's an OP stack chain.

So yeah, if anybody from Preckins listening, maybe you want to reach out and explain like. We are completely speculating. I have no idea what they're what these people are thinking. It could be they never even approach Coinbase, right? Who knows? Yeah. But, but this question of will ICOs take off? on base is actually interesting. I don't know. I mean, Haseep, you literally just talked to Paul

Graywall and I got the vibe listening. I wasn't watching the videos. I couldn't see his face, but I thought the vibe like they don't see meme coins as like a big thing. And I don't know, or not that it's not a big thing, but they themselves would be worried to do it. I don't know they'd be worried to do it. I think it's very clear that Coinbase is in a unique position because they are the representative of crypto to Wall Street. And Wall Street doesn't want to hear anything about meme coins. You know, they want to hear about institutionalization. They want to hear about, you know, Bitcoin as a macro asset. They want to hear about ETFs. They want to hear, you know, they want to hear about tokenization of real world assets. That's what they want to hear

about. And Coinbase understands. They are listening. They see what happened to circle. And they're like, okay, cool. We will march to that, to the drum of that beat. Well, at the same time, we are going to, you know, basically take our retail customers and have a very, very profitable retail-facing business. Right? They make almost all of their money from retail. And they know that. They understand that, like, look, the custody business is not what's bringing in all the revenue today. So that, all being said, it's a fine line that they have to walk. Getting involved in pumped out fund does not help them walk that tightrope in any way. And, you know, again, the revenue is probably de minimis for, you know, something on the scale of Coinbase.

Yeah, but I do think that this knows. Like, they're doing all these campaigns constantly to get more people on chain. You know, they're having this big announcement. Yes. Well, you see what Jesse saying on chain. He's like, yeah, I just coin it, like, let it rip. internet capital markets. So they're, they're embracing this. But Coinbase itself never talks about this, right? And again, this is strategic. This is strategic is that that's what you want.

What you want is for one side of the business to be able to be presentable. You know, it's like, you know, we used to talk about the D5 mullet. This is like the C5 bullet. You know, it's like, on the one hand, you are talking a big story about tokenization and how institutional crypto is and, you know, lobbying for, you know, bills and so on. And then the other side, you're just, you know, and treating people to like buy random shit coins on base. And that's great. I'm glad they can do both. It would be a worst world if they had to choose one side or the other.

That's right. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I am stoked that Coinbase is, you know, that Brian puts on the suit and tie and goes to DC, right? Like, we need that as an industry and it's clearly working. Yes, you're still going to have the experimentation, innovation that's happening on chain that isn't, you know, tailored towards the kind of suit and tie Wall Street. DC policymakers and investors. But great. Focus on that. The folks at A16Z do a great job of this as well, being in D.C. and helping drive change there. But there's going to be a lot of other folks

that aren't going to be carrying that torch. They're going to be more like in the trenches, so to speak. And I think having both is valuable. And to his point, Coinbase has that with base and also what they do with just Coinbase, the company. Yeah. So we'll see what happens on base. But I personally could see the pump ICU inspiring a new wave of ICOs on Solana. So Joe, I know you, you retweeted and said that. You thought that was likely. So we'll see what happens. I don't know if anybody's. It's really good engagement farming. So thank you for letting. Yeah. Nice. All right. So let's see. So, okay, so we did talk a little bit about the trading that's already happened today. But I'd be curious, like, do you have any projection

for what would happen to the market cap kind of over the next, you know, whatever, like, I don't know, a few months. Well, not financial advice. I'm not an investor. Don't hold any pump. But I think right now

there's still a lot of price discovery happening because my understanding is that not all the tokens have been delivered yet. And so, and the other thing is that the listings are pretty scarce right now. So it's on, I saw it early today, it's on buy bid, it's on Ku-coin, and then it's trading on pump swap.

And right now, pump swap has the most volume and the most price discovery, because, of course, most people got filled on chain. At equilibrium, usually the answer is that these tokens get most of their price discovery on Binance. So, Binance hasn't listed yet. And when they do, probably there's a lot of people who, you know, they maybe did the pump ICO and they don't even know how to trade on a Dex. So, and of course, there's a lot of institutional capital that invested in this thing that is still,

you know, might not even have their tokens delivered. And if they did, if they did it not on chain, probably is because they can't trade on Pump swap. So that price discovery is going to happen soon. And when that price discovery happens, one, it may mean that retail gets access to Pump.com. Where right now, like, again, if you're a finance user, never gone on chain, don't know what Phantom is, you can't buy this thing right now. Once you can buy it, okay, that's something. Second, the institutional investors who may want to sell and they say, hey, I'm going to lock in that 25%. Those people haven't gotten a chance to sell yet.

So there's two sides of this market. My guess is we're going to see a good amount of volatility until call it a week or two. once all the listings are in and everybody can kind of get their initial positions move to where they want it to be. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think I have always been anti-priced targets because I think they're just a product that Wall Street created to sell shit. And so I just like, yeah, like pick a number. It doesn't really matter. I do think there's a couple things to, I don't know, underscore here.

One is a lot of folks will try to back into a price based on fundamental. And this is kind of like the running joke in crypto is that they tend to not really matter, especially if you're using TradFi models to apply to, say, a network or protocol or something that effect, right? There are plenty of protocols and tokens associated with them that from a fundamental basis are like dirt cheap. But the price doesn't really move. Why?

Because this gets to my second point, which is all about the attention and the engagement associated with said token. Because the token, love it or hated, is the product, right, for the most part, once the token is out there. And so how does Pump That Fund continue to garner attention and thus want people to hold their token? Well, they have a plan, it sounds like, very ambitious, to take on Twitch and, you know, TikTok and whatever, which is great. Like I spoke with this guy. He's a, you know, creator in the Slan ecosystem named Soljakey. And he was asking me about like creator coins and the whole concept of this. And right now, you know, the stream.

world is the people that are like the top streamers are making fortunes. It's unbelievable how much money they're making as top streamers on Twitch or wherever, but there's no kind of, you know, there's no token, right? So maybe the plan is that Pump. That Fund wants to create this kind of new streaming platform that enables creators to create their own tokens. And then there's a market immediately that can trade it and, you know, it's more and more and more engagement, right?

And if that happens, then you'll have a lot of, lot more engagement, I think, on the pump underlying token. The key thing that I kind of look at as well is what would be the comp for pumps valuation? And there really isn't one. As a big fan of Bonk, I'm stoked that the higher that FDV goes, that means Bonk is likely underpriced because Bonk is actually doing from a fundamentals basis more of the token launches, more of the volume, more of the graduated tokens on their platform. And those fees go back to the Bonk ecosystem which burns half a bonk and puts another 15% in a validator, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm curious to see where that equilibrium is that seems describing.

Because if it's, if it's $5 billion, if it's $10 billion, then I would look at comps like Bonk and go, this thing is radically undervalued relative to where they're pricing something like pumped up fund. Okay. So yeah, let's talk about that because you mentioned this earlier. So, you know, the let's bonk competitor to pump fun had. surpassed Pumps 24-hour revenue. I think it was like a couple of days last week.

As of last night, it was still ahead. And this, actually, also this morning, Salina Ford. Oh, it is. Yeah, but they're pretty close to each other. Okay. Well, but actually this morning, kind of early, Salana Flora tweeted,

Bonfund has surpassed all other Salana launch pads combined, including Pump. Fund and weekly revenue for the first time. And listed some stats. Tokens graduated on Bonk Fund was like 1,243, Pump Fund a little over 600. And tokens launched on Bonk. Dot fund was 130,000 on Pump. Pump.57,000. So I was curious, like, so Joe maybe is like most familiar about what's going on here. Like, is it that, like, is it just like some kind of incentive thing?

Like people are just switching due to, you know, I don't know if like, like, what's going on, but like, why do you think this shift has happened? Yeah, so, you know, this is just my own opinion on this, but, you know, we've been talking about it that folks like pumped up fun, but the sentiment around it is pretty negative. You know, people see it as extractive and you've got all these, you know, crazy scammers and rug pulls and like whatever. And that is associated, unfortunately, with pump. not fun, even though they're just facilitating stuff to happen.

Bonk is kind of less Solana. And you're rare to find someone who isn't a fan of Bonk if you're in the Salana ecosystem. And it's a team of really cracked developers, right? They have myriad products that generate real protocol revenue in Seoul. And a lot of that goes back to buying Bonk and burning it. And so my kind of intuition here is that folks are more a lot. at least currently with something like the balk community and their launch pad versus pump.fun,

which appears to not be aligned with the community. Now, next week, the data could flip, right? But that's at least what we're seeing today is a lot of the folks, you know, the majority of the tokens created on pump.commoner, it's not like tens of thousands of people. Those wallets are now deploying over on let's bonk, the bong platform. And so what will drive them back? Maybe Pump.com fund creates an incentive program or who knows. But I think you're going to see this battle between the mascot of Solana, the community-backed, like, people love Bonk versus Pump.

That fund that's like flooded with cash and has made tons of money and has these big ambitions, which is great. I think that that competition is super healthy. I have no idea who's going to end up winning, but it's probably a winner takes most. Okay, I'm going to make like a slightly weird comment, see what you think. Maybe it's not weird. But I went on let's balk because I was kind of like, what is this? And I have to say like, somehow the memes on it or whatever, or the meme points, they were less appealing to me than the ones on Pump Fun, which I know like 99% of all of this is trash, but like somehow, I know this is like such a weird thing, But I feel like the higher quality meme coins that are all chick coins that are mostly going to go to zero were like better quality on on pump fun.

I don't know. Is that like like somehow the culture around the bonk launch pad felt frankly, I'm just going to say it felt like more Asia coded. But also it's so like not culturally US coded to me as like a potential consumer of these coins. Is that like an actual thing? Because I don't know the demographics. Yeah, I mean, it's tough to identify, you know, geo based on wallets. But Bonk has been investing for years in Southeast Asia in terms of just raising awareness around Bonk in general. So that may be part of it.

I think the other thing, though, is like, you know, Pump. Pump. Dot fun got to like a 4chan meets meme coins for a while there. And you still have this type of stuff no matter what. It's a permissionless network. can't control it. I don't think people actually care, right? The traders in the trenches are just looking for the next 100x runner, as they call it.

They're not like, what is the image or what is like, for the most part, they really don't give a shit. It's just they're all competing in this PVP game to see what is going to be the next, you know, 100,000 X runner and 99.9% of them are zeros. So I don't, I don't know if it's, I mean, it's clearly subjective from your own experience. but I think for the most part, they really don't give a shit. In a lot of cases, most people aren't even on the actual website. They're just, you know, if they're running sophisticated bots,

that's where they're making a lot of their money. Yeah, I don't trade meme coins, so I can't really speak to the vibe difference between the two. But I'll say from my experiences of VC, it doesn't surprise me to have seen a competitor emerge, especially now when the sentiment around pompous are negative. And there's a sense of like, oh, meme coins are over-extracted. and blah, blah, blah, the trenches are done.

Very often what you see is that when a particular social scene or like a social network gets kind of tired, it's been around for a while, like it's sort of gotten entrenched, it's become very well understood. It's very hard for new creators to emerge and to get mindshare. That very often creates the circumstances for us a new network to emerge and to define itself as being younger, having a different vibe, a different aesthetic,

allowing different voices to be successful. So this might be part of it. There's also a little bit of cross-subsidization happening on LetzBonk that's coming from Radium. So I don't think that has that much explanatory power, but there is something there. That being said, I would not bet against Pompeer. Now that they have a billion dollars in cash

that they have raised, in addition to all the soul that they own, and in addition to now having this giant token treasury that they can shoot out like a T-shirt cannon at anybody they want to, So if they want to reclaim the market and say, fuck you, Bonk, like it's over, they have the ability to do that in a way that very few other projects do. So judging from the way they behaved in the past, I'd be very surprised if you do not see Pump.combe fun come out of your swinging to try to crush Bonk from here. Okay. So I did want to talk about their plans, the plans to kill Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch. So in light of that, what do you make of the first acquisition, this Cole scan or KOL scan, which is basically a tracker for,

Solana Wales on chain has a leaderboard. It has real-time data and analytics. Pumps said that they plan to add copy trading features, which gave me like James Wynn, LA Babe Cabal times. But I wondered what your thoughts were about that acquisition and just generally their prospects for their overall strategy or plans. It makes a lot of sense.

Like they know that platforms like Axiom and Photon, have owned a lot of the stack. Like there's a lot of people who are trading things on pump that are not going direct. And they understand like, hey, that's a lot of the revenue stream

is actually getting captured by intermediaries. We should verticalize. Same thing that OpenC figured out with blur is that you do not want to get disintermediated. If you do a lot of the revenue stream,

especially from sophisticated traders, is going to go to somebody else. So I think their answer is very straightforward. It's an old playbook that we've seen for many, many players, is that if you see these intermediaries,

grab them and verticalize. Yep, I completely agree. I mean, it's consistent with like any company that raises a shit ton of money. And they're like, all right, we have our organic growth prospects. But what about our inorganic growth prospects through M&A? And to Steve's point, they should vertically integrate and create like the ultimate platform. Because remember, if they're going to be creating this, you know, super high powered streaming capability, well, then they're going to need trading and swapping and analytics and portfolio management,

like all these other things so that they control the experience end to end. because the problem with partnering in general, has nothing to do with pump. In general, when a company partners with another company, they don't control that UX. And so I think if pump is focused on controlling the U.S. and providing a seamless experience, it makes total sense to acquire something like this,

amongst other things that they will likely acquire in the future. And what do you think about? So apparently I think they're planning to have a buyback tied to some of the pump revenue that's generated. And I guess already actually pump swap their decks is already sharing 50% of its trading revenue with token creators. So yeah, what do you think of those plans or just like, you know, generally, like what do you think is their prospect for taking down Facebook, TikTok and switch, Twitch? Or if they were going to try to do that, like how would you, you know, what do you think would be a good plan for them? Hmm.

Maybe on Facebook or TikTok? Yeah. A lot of luck. Yeah, I mean, look, I obviously had some bullish shit to say, and it's great. You should say bullish shit. Right now, they need to take down let's balk. You know, like, obviously, there's a much smaller competitor right in front of them. And I think the idea of like, hey, let's also own the entire meme coin value chain of, you know, like,

in a way, I can imagine them starting with, okay, we're going to build our own pro interface that is for, you know, everybody who's got a second screen. that they're you know they've got pump over here and they've got axiom or they've got whatever or they've got like five of the thing they got bubble maps here they got this thing there what what pump really wants is that it's one screen it's all my platform you're not going anywhere else you're not looking anywhere else and you can imagine maybe even at some point they start cutting off or even like trying to actively interfere with other people's ability to like use pump effectively from a from a third-party platform

and at that point then you can start thinking about these bigger ambitions of hey you know how do we start getting more versions of content and start creating more of a social network type thing. I don't really understand the path from here to there. I think what they're building is just so fundamentally different from a TikTok or a Facebook that maybe I'm just insufficiently imaginative. What I think of a pump is is that they're pursuing financial entertainment. And financial entertainment is fundamentally very different than what most people are doing on TikTok or on Facebook.

I do think it's much more, it's something that Gen Z, is much more tuned into than previous generations. And so I can see that this thing could become really big. But the idea that it would kill TikTok, not really, but could it become as big or comparable to something like TikTok? I can see that story. Yeah, I mean, I think I was looking back to this many years ago because I was like, how does anybody usurp Facebook at this point?

And Facebook, you know, sucked at an amazing job of creating a huge social network, and then buying another network, Instagram, and then buying another network, WhatsApp, and now you've just compounded all of these networks, right? That's very, very difficult to just intermediateate. However, you have something like TikTok show up, and it's a fundamentally different user experience, right? The experience of TikTok is just, it's nothing like Instagram.

It's nothing like Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever. And so when you have this kind of 10x improvement in you, user experience that's innovative that captures people's attention, you can end up with the explosive network that TikTok has created. With Pump, they're going to have to do something that is a 10x better user experience than people that are streaming on Twitch that also enables, you know, these kind of capital markets or trading around the streamers themselves, right? Because if you're Kaysenat right now, you're getting paid millions of dollars by anybody because you're all. audience is enormous, he's not leaving that platform. He has no reason to. So then the question is,

I don't, how do you get creators that aren't Kaysana, that are huge, to use pump streaming platform and then have a breakout success so that the new generation of, you know, call it teenagers, people in their early 20s are migrating towards this new platform and away from things like TikTok and Instagram. I think the success is going to be highly tied towards kind of a younger audience that's coming into this space via the streaming component, but now they're exposed to crypto. That's a really, really aggressive and ambitious bet to make, but that's kind of how I see this playing out if they're going to be successful. I don't think it's like, we're just going to get all these people from TikTok to leave their experience at TikTok to come to pump. I don't

think that's the case. I think it's something else. Yeah, no, exactly. It feels like it's going to be a generational play. And then the money component is going to attract these young people. and frankly even like just yeah kind of creating a more gamified experience which is I think like what we've been seeing with Pump and then there was one other thing I was going to say there. Anyway, I just I just forgot it. But I know I know we have to run. But is there any last comment that either of you want to make? I'll just say like I think meme coins, you know, people have for a long time talked about like the death of meme coins or meme coins are over. And I've always said, I think about it like software.

There's like a 1.0, a 2.0, a 3.0. And I think that this is just like the next kind of release, if you will, for the meme coin software craze that's happening. And with the capital that they have raised, like this stuff's definitely not going away anytime soon. So I'm actually excited to see what happens just in the kind of experimentation innovation front from Pump and others, particularly the Bonk team, as to how this space continues to emerge. because clearly the fact that, you know, tens of thousands of tokens are still being created every day, there is something there. I don't know. You're not going to explain this to Tradify Wall Street Bros.

But the folks in the trenches and in crypto certainly love it. And I think it's just going to continue to accelerate. I guess the closing note I would give is that I think it's quite likely when we look back, you know, a year later on this cycle. We are going to remember the pump ICO as being the marker. of a new phase shift in alts. Right? So we've already had Bitcoin and Hyperliquid basically being the only two tokens that have made all time highs this year.

I think by the end of the year, there are going to be other tokens, a lot more tokens that are going to make all time highs. Maybe not all time highs, but let's call it yearly highs, pretty significant highs from this cycle. So if you just look at like the markers of what's been going on in alts, where I think it was last week that Snoop Dogg sold $12 million of NFTs. We just saw a billion dollar raise for pump and the biggest ICO that we've seen in years since the ICO bubble sell out in 12 minutes. Like to me, it is a sign that there is more coming.

There's going to be more crazy, frothy stuff that's happening. And so far it's only been Bitcoin, treasury companies and, you know, hyperliquid. I think there's a lot more to come from here. And to me, this portends like, hey, all cycle has arrived. Yeah, I remember the comment that I was going to make, which is the Coinbase. wallet event is on Wednesday. And they have kind of hinted that there's like a social network element to it. And if we even think about like the lead up to this, which was Robinhood, it's all this like, you know, let's target younger people. Let's have this live streaming

component. Like it feels like the the mashing up of crypto and social are really coming together. All right. Well, um, this has been awesome. Where can people learn about each of you? Uh, you can find me on Twitter. I'm Haseeb. Just Google me or Yeah, you can find me. I'm easy to find. Well, it's been a pleasure having you both on Unchained. Thanks for having us, Laura. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Joe Haseeb and the Pope ICO, check out the showness for this episode.

Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Iranovich, Pamajumdar, and Mark Akuria. Thanks for listening.