Unchained - The Chopping Block: AI Memecoins, Trump’s Token Flop, & Ethereum’s Malaise - Ep. 727

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner slice into the juiciest topics in crypto. This week, the crew tackles everything from AI-powered memecoins and the explosive rise of GOAT token to the ongoing rivalry between Ethereum and Solana. They break down the appeal of AI-driven assets, analyze Trump’s World Liberty Finance flop, and debate whether Ethereum’s current fragmentation is hurting its narrative. With Halloween thrills and market chills, this episode delivers insider insights on the trends pushing crypto forward. Show highlights 🔹 GOAT Token Madness: The latest in AI memecoin hype and how GOAT token captured the attention of investors and Twitter alike. 🔹 Memecoin Stagecraft: Are AI-driven coins here to stay, or is it all clever stagecraft? Our thoughts on the future of AI-based assets.  🔹 AI Meets Memecoins: Is character-driven AI the secret sauce in building compelling memecoins? Exploring the potential of charismatic, interactive assets.  🔹 World Liberty Finance Flop: Trump's crypto token sale misses the mark—are accredited investor rules and lack of memes to blame?  🔹 Trump’s Role in Crypto: How Trump’s “hands-off” approach may have impacted World Liberty’s slow start.  🔹 Ethereum vs Solana: Ethereum’s current challenges and Vitalik’s roadmap defense—can Ethereum reclaim its narrative from Solana’s simpler, single-layer approach?  🔹 Fragmentation in Ethereum’s Ecosystem: How Ethereum’s L2 rollup competition might be confusing new users and hurting its narrative. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Timestamps 00:00 Intro 02:12 The Rise of GOAT Token 11:41 The Future of AI Coins & Meme-Based Value 21:50 The Importance of Attention in Crypto 23:53 Trump's World Liberty Finance Token Sale 31:24 Ethereum's Struggles and Vitalik's Response Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can pull a carriage with two horses, but can you pull a carriage with 1,024 chickens? Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quans. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm in the trading firms who are very involved. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hi, everyone.

Welcome to Chopping Block. Every couple of weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. We have Tom, the Defy Maven, and Master of Memes. How do you do, my friends? We have Robert, the Cryptoconucincer and Tsar of Superstate. GEN. We have Turun, the Gigabrain, and Garan Puba at Gontlet. Yo.

And we have me, Haseeb, Head Hype Man, at Dragonfly. We are early stage investors in crypto, but I want a caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopping Block to Xyz for more disclosely. boasures. And first off, I want to say to our audio-only listeners, this might sound very confusing. And the only thing I'll tell you is please go watch the video, even if it's just for 30 seconds. Very important this week to catch the visuals for our special Halloween episode. And Bitcoin this week is almost as all-time high. I guess it's excited for the end of election season, the way that many of us are excited to be bored of having to not look at, you know,

crazy news every day. But with that, I'll hand it over to our, our green-haired friend. By the way, if you're watching, look at the signs behind me. They represent Haseeb's true inner self. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, yeah, we thought we'd mix it up today. And, you know, as, as Teroon, I'm going to take over moderating. It is Halloween. We wanted to make things a little bit fun for you guys. But there's, as always, a lot of news. Also, I cannot actually read any of the notes of these glasses.

So I'm going to do the grandma move here. So there are a few stories that we wanted to get through in the spirit of Halloween, scariness, and weirdness. The first thing is the rise of goat token. So first thing I should ask, anybody here invested in Goat token? Do any of you guys own any AI meme coins? I have an allergy. to investing in what goat is derived from.

And so I saw this and I did not want to participate. An allergy in what goats are derived from? Oh, Goatzy. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the origin of this token. You're not supposed to Google it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, don't. Don't Google. Don't. Yeah, I mean, but I would say I have the opposite reaction. I was like, wow, Mark Andreessen is chilling a shitter. Let's go. I think I bought like $100. It was not like a...

You did? Okay, wow. That's like 50,000 now? No, I bought a little later. I think it's like 8,000. Wow, very uncharacteristic of you as top tier VC to be going all in on a midpoint. I was just looking at Mark Andreessen writing about this, and then I was reading the replies. And I saw all these like normal AI people going crazy and like yelling at him. And I was like, and I saw the crypto people being like, this is the singularity.

And I was like, okay, this is the first time that. AI people has paid attention at all to anything in crypto. And when I saw that, I was like, aha, this is, this is, this is worth the $100 lottery ticket. Yeah. I mean, I get that. I just, you know, the singularity is just, it's mathematically impossible, right? It's a very imprecise. No, no, no.

I look, look, look, look. I'm not saying I have any rational thing. That's why I was just kind of like, I had a salina wallet that had $100 in it. And I was like, I forgot. I was like, why not? It was totally just like reading that. I was like, all of these people are delirious, like the AI people being like, this is not a real agent. It's like, yeah, no shit sure.

Okay, so let's give a little bit of backstory of what exactly is goat. First, we'll start with the forewarning. Do not look up Goetcy if you don't know what it is. But this is a 90s meme that I heard Laura Shin describe it very elegantly as a man. spreading his butt cheeks. I think that's a very generous way of describing what goats he is. It's one of those memes that actually, it's sort of like, if you were coming of age in the early internet, you know, we talked on the last show about ebom's world, part of that generation of internet culture and internet humor that has evolved in so many directions since then.

But so there was an AI that was created by this gentleman by the name of Andy Iyer, who is kind of a, I wouldn't call me an AI researcher. He's sort of like an AI performance artist or something. I don't know. He's one of these people experimenting with AI to create different kinds of art or performance art or something. And so one thing that he did was he trained an AI model to basically, one, I think it was a llama fine tune that he generated based on the conversations that two instances of

Claude generated by just talking to each other and rambling for hours and hours in a discord. And by fine-tuning a model on this set of conversations, these models came up with this thing called the Goatsey Gospel, which is some kind of weird pseudo-religion they invented, oriented around this meme. And so this model that he generated has his own Twitter account called Truth Terminal. And Truth Terminal just tweeted out random crap to random people on the internet. And Mark Andreessen, the founder of A16Z, was very entertained by this, as he tends to be entertained by things on Twitter, and sent $50,000 in Bitcoin to this account. And so this sort of started this awareness of, oh, hey, this account has a crypto wallet, and it has the ability to do stuff in crypto.

So somebody created a meme coin on pump. dot fund called goat, which stands for Goatius Maximus, which is this, you know, corresponds to this religion that this truth terminal account created or implied that it wanted to create, and sent a bunch of the tokens to this account. And within a couple weeks, this thing has become one of the hottest meme coins in existence. It's traded up to a high of $850 million market cap. And the tokens owned by this AI are worth more than $10 million. And people are now saying that there's a new renaissance of meme coins that are AI-generated meme coins. So we now have another one. There's a platform called Virtuals, which is used to launch these on-chain agents that's also created its own

meme coin. And for whatever reason, the meta has moved here of these agents that are interacting with Twitter and dynamically representing some meme coin in the process. Now, all that being said, it's important to realize what is and isn't really happening. And there was some controversy happening over the weekend about, oh, is this really being controlled by a person? So the reality is agents on chain are not actually autonomous enough to be able to manage crypto or trade or anything like this. And the creator of the account is made very clear. He is actually controlling which tweets go on the timeline and which ones don't because occasionally there's like racist stuff on there. There's just like random nonsense that is not a good idea to tweet. And so he is filtering the account.

He's also made clear that he is controlling the wallet. And people started to, you know, speculating that, oh, he's going to, you know, he's going to steal the money for himself. And so he created a trust such that, or he said he's going to create a trust so that the wallet is only used for the, you know, blah, blah, blah. There's all this weirdness. And the meme coin also took a nosedive over the weekend because the account started making typos. And people thought, oh, my God, that means it's a human.

It's not really an AI. And AI would never make typos, which is not true. So anyway, a lot of, I've seen so much in my timeline get taken over by these AI meme coins. Curious to get you guys read. do you think this is the newest thing happening? Is this the future where we're going to be trading meme coins created by our AI overlords? Because if so, that would be truly scary and Halloween-worthy. First of all, the meme coin is not created by the AI Overlord. The meme coin is created by some dude who made the meme coin and then tried to convince the AI

to adopt it. So this feels a little bit like stagecraft in a lot of ways. And I, I think, feel like the narrative of like these are AI coins is kind of like nonsense. It's like someone using open AIs like chat GPT to chill a coin that someone else made. You know, it's not that impressive to me. I'll be excited when the AIs are starting to diversify their assets into real world assets on chain and earn some tokenized treasury yield. But I agree. It's actually, I think, very analogous kind of a lot of the crypto eye projects in that is a lot of like vaporware smoke and mirrors kind of potent-in-villages kind of stuff going on. So I agree. I think giving these things the label agent is also, I think, a bit of a stretch. But people like the

narrative. And it's a good meme. And I think that is, you know, mostly why these stuff has been doing well versus some, you know, bigger meta-shift or idea. So, Robert, you don't think this is a glimpse into the future? That's you. That's you. That's you. I'm asking Robert. No.

We're, no. I'm pretty skeptical. But you never know. Things might change in the future. I'm not going to lie. Most of the meme coin stuff, I completely didn't really participate. But I just have, like I said, I happen to have this wallet. And I was reading this Mark Andreessen thing.

And I was like, Mark Andresen is implicitly marketing a meme coin. This is insane. Like, I, this $100 that I forgot about, there's no other way to spend it. You know, it was like a total joke, like a fluke. I just, like, happened to be holding a phone that had the $100. And I happened to be reading that. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, it was just like a momentary lapse in judgment.

Although I guess it wasn't a lapse in hindsight. Are you now a financial nihilist? Uh, I just feel like, you know, I, just went to the casino and normally I don't play anything at the casino, but somehow I decided to play backerat. And I was just like, I had one too many drinks and I played one round of backer out. That's like basically what happened. This sounds like you're defending your actions in a deposition. The phone was just there. I found the money. I didn't know what I was doing. It was all a moment of excess. Yeah, we're going to find out that he actually is the one who was

partially responsible for creating this coin. And this is like the cover. Like, oh, I bought a hundred worth by accident. That would make sense. Yeah. No, no, no, no. I wish I was both smart and stupid enough at the same time to have pulled that off. But I think the thing that was interesting to me about it was the narrative itself will create the real thing.

Like people are all making these kind of actual agents that are doing these actions, right? Like Brian Armstrong and Coinbase are really pushing the. the Coinbase API for agents and modifying it so LLMs can call directly into it. And you can write cursor code that calls their APIs directly. So I actually think the reason that this is interesting is not that it itself is the correct thing, but it's inspiring people to make all this other infrastructure so that the thing that it claims will happen. Yeah, I do think there are these kinds of self-fulfilling prophecies and technology

where something is just so fun and so cool that like we wanted to be true and then we do everything that we need to in order to make it true. I think this might be one of those moments. And there have been early shoots of like, what was that AI influencer that I was A16 and Z-backed? That was like a... Oh, Rudd, Lil' Michaela? That's right. That's right. And there been a... Trevor McFrederys is now working on, was it, virtuals or Luna? Yes. Or one of that.

Oh, is that right? One of them. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I see. I see. Okay. Yeah.

So, I mean, it's a, it's a, there's an idea that's been circulating for a long time. There's also that there's a Japanese pop star that's purely a V-Tube creation that doesn't, you know, what's her name? Kikunee YouTube. Oh, there you go. Okay. I knew that. That was on tap. Yeah.

This is, this is, this is me as Robert as a deep editor. Yeah, Robert. Wow. Yeah, Robert, wow. You're surprised you into this stuff. Yeah. Wow. Robert took a time machine back to his defense.

Yeah. I mean, as a dad, I thought you'd be too busy to keep up with this stuff, but that's impressive. Running multiple companies? Wow. They're very cool. So, okay. So this idea has been in the year for a long time. Actually, the first time I ever heard such an idea was I was in China and Robert was at the same thing. Actually, at your event, Dragonfly event, 2019. It was your event. Yes, yes. Sorry, mine to my event. But the Dragonfly event in China in 2019. And Olaf, the founder of Polly Chain, large fund in the space, was just telling me his dream for crypto was that the richest entity on Earth would be a broken Tesla that once it was broken, it's like AI was like, well, shit, I need to make money somehow. I can't make money being an autonomous vehicle. So I'm going to just trade crypto until I do.

And like, this, that was another reason I thought this was funny. It just reminded me so much of that story because it's like, okay, fine, there's not the broken Tesla. part, but there's the, the autonomous thing. But the funny part, and I agree with like Ilya from NIR, who we haven't the show before, who had a good point, which is like, this notion of the AI agent trading new, trading assets is like not new, right? Like, that's literally every HFT firm, right? Like, that's what I was doing 10 years ago. I think the thing that's new and interesting is the creation of new assets. Because governments restrict new asset creation strictly. That's why tradifies boring and not fun, right? It's like you have a fixed set of assets.

You spend five million years trying to get a new one approved and then maybe you get lucky and it gets approved, right? I do an API call and it's like, oh, I got 500 new assets. In fact, a fun statistic I heard today was that there were 40,000 new assets issued on Solana yesterday, which is wild. So my point is, is the interesting thing about crypto is that this new asset creation thing is because of the lack of censorship resistance, spin permissionlessness and all this type of nice stuff, and the API ability of it, you can actually imagine the AI making all these assets, which is a totally different story than the AI trading, just trading, because that's kind of boring. That's like what everyone already does.

Well, I think any AI could be taught to go to pump. fun and generate 10,000 different images and 10,000 different names, like quite easily. But you can't, but my point is in TradFai, you can't do that. That's like a modality that doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah, I don't think that matters so much. I think the thing that is really different. That does matter. It changes like a microtry.

You can say that Solana created 40,000 assets yesterday, but it didn't really, right? I mean, there's just 40,000 token contracts, but there's only maybe 10 of those that are actually assets by any meaningful definition. My point, though, is like the point of crypto is that anyone can make the asset, right? Like the top of the 40,000. That's not the scarce resource. The scarce resource is not SBL token contract. It's not about the scarce resource.

It's about the microstructure difference, right? Like in track, all the trades concentrate. Yeah, yeah, I don't buy this. I don't buy this. I think the scarce resource that is ultimately now being dominated by these AI meme coins and by these AIs is character. Attention and why attention? The answer is through character.

Like truth terminal is interesting. It says weird, interesting stuff. Now, part of that is the curation of the creator. We know that now that he's intentionally curating what we're seeing in order to make it maximally interesting. It responds to people in comments, right? It has conversations with people. That is fundamentally new.

There's never been a meme coin that talked back to you. And that's part of what makes it so compelling. If you think about it, like, there kind of have been, right? And that like, you know, when everyone was trading every single Andre Crohnier coin that, you know, five seconds before it actually launched, like, part of what was so interesting is, okay, you talk to the dev, the dev says this and that, like, that's part of the game of what makes this thing so compelling, right? That's part of why celeb coins are so fun, is that, yeah, the celebrity talks back to you. Now you've got this, this AI that talks back to you. The first of all, is more clever than most of the celebrities, right? Like, I mean, just the way that it writes, you know, it's literally got the world's intelligence compressed into itself. And, you know, it's obviously superhuman with respect to its verbal intelligence in most senses. So it's just actually really funny. Like, you go read its tweets.

And, like, this is funnier than most meme coin devs. So I think that's the thing that's really new. And now this idea of, okay, you trade, so an AI launches a coin and everyone trades or speculates on the coin. I've actually seen a bunch of startups pitch that idea. It's actually, a bunch of people have tried to do that. And it doesn't work because no one wants to trade, you know, just, oh, here's some LLM agent and you can trade its coin. There's a bunch of projects that I know that I've tried this and it hasn't worked. The reason why Truth Terminal try this is a Truth Terminal is just really charismatic.

It's actually funny. It's actually kind of breaking through this noise, this attention game, which is what every meme coin is ultimately competing on. And so I think we are at, in some sense, like a local maximum, that there's a lot of novelty and excitement around the fact that these AIs are actually funny now. And if you did this in GPD3 land, the AIs wouldn't be funny. They would just be kind of incoherent and they just wouldn't be able to keep. pace with what's happening in crypto. But I think the novelty of that will probably wear off

within, call it, six months would be my guess, of, oh, okay, this AI is really clever. And it's like talking back and it's like talking shit and it's got, you know, it's, it's, you know, it has all these like really kind of esoteric, not safe for work callbacks that it's making and stuff. But once there's like, you know, 50 of those that have a bunch of followers on Twitter, then it's like, okay. Now there's like, okay, it was kind of cool when someone made. the first 10kpfp, but now this is like the 40th one. And like, come on, let's try something new. Well, here's my prediction of the AI coins in the future.

So for any token, there's really like a... I'm trying to get my head. There's really a spectrum. There's really a spectrum between meme value and work value, work being what it produces, what goes into it, the hard science, whatever. Right. And the AI coins are starting off purely on the meme side. I think what will work long term are the AI coins on the work side that are doing something, whether it's, you know, being funny and getting tips online and it turns into something, you know, or if it's like, you know, solving problems for people or like, you know, automating Ubers, you know, and getting paid a cut of each of it and then tokenizing it. Like work AI will take over over time. And like, crypto wallets are the easiest way for actual AI agents to spend capital and earn capital. And so eventually, you know, when we get out of the easy mode meme-based value world into the hard work-based value world,

AI coins will work. And there'll be lots of them and they'll have actual value and sustainability and all these things. But until then, I think we're stuck with this sort of like lowest hanging fruit, which is its value comes from people laughing. at the fact that there's a new asset. Totally. And it's, I mean, it reminds you a little bit, you guys remember that NFT collection of there was this, there was just like Indonesian guy who took a bunch of selfies

and turned them into NFTs. And they like went super viral and these NFTs started trading for thousands of dollars. It feels a little bit like that where the internet like decided to adopt this weird story. And it's like hilarious that we all collectively agreed that like this is the thing that we're all going to make worth a lot of money. But I think the rule of thumb in my mind is that when it's a story that it's attached to, like a sort of temporal event, that means almost by definition it's going to be transient. And it'll be hot for like, you know, a few months and then the attention will wane and people will move on to something else. When there's no story is when there's the real potential for longevity.

Right. So like, think about, you know, what's the story around, you know, whiff or what's a story around Bitcoin for that matter? There's not really a story. It's just a meme. That's it. It's just a picture of a dog. If you like that, buy the token. And I think in a way, like Goat is very tethered to this guy, this AI, this Twitter account,

Mark Andreessen being, you know, all these things kind of have to keep happening for the locus of attention to remain on this token. And if it loses that to something else, I think it's hard for there to really be a sustained ecosystem around this thing. that's my intuition that said you know i'm not i'm not a meme coin trader you know as a as an industry analyst and as a creative gauntlet i'm just here to you know whoever pays me more i will i will say that you'll live forever i think like i i agree with you the attention aspect is important but i do think unlike social networks like all of the dreams that people ever sold you on on

web three type of stuff of like owning your own content or whatever this is actually much closer then all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on dog shit consumer crypto companies. I will say that. How is this like owning your own content? Well, I just mean this is closer to the vision that they had, right? Because it's like this thing that has this content, how the quality of the content is generating is causing the asset to be worth more. So people who are following it have this reflexive cycle. And in some ways, like all of the attempts of doing that in the past did not, did not have, end up having this feedback loop work.

great. It worked for a few cycles and then it died. It peered off. Right. And I think that's, I see Robert making his skeptical face. No, that's, oh, wait, sorry. Tom, excuse me, excuse me, I was saying Robert. I think it's, I mean, I guess in some ways it's also a little bit about, it kind reminds me of teams who get very clever and very cute with their tokenomics around, oh, here's how the token is going to accrue value and here's how like, this whole system is going to sort of function. I feel like, you know, on average, outperform teams that have a good product and then the token is adjacent to it in some ways. And like, okay, there's people know that this thing is valuable and then the token is associated with it and that's going to be it versus like, oh, we're going to

like micro engineer how this token is associated with the content. So I guess in one hand, I see that, but I also feel like it's just a very different kind of model than kind of like a, oh, you can, you know, trade this post or, you know, trade this creator coin or something. something like that. Tom, what would you say? I would say that eventually there's going to be a million creator coins and the lines between the people and the not people and the and the and anime people. They're all going to blur into one and we're not going to know the difference. Okay. Fair enough. Well, speaking of losing grip on reality, we're about a week away from the election and everything now has reached a fever pitch. It's looking right now in

prediction markets that it's going to be roughly two-thirds to one-thirds probability of Trump versus Kamala, but there's still, of course, very, very wide error bars in the polling. And so, you know, we're not going to know it could end up being a landslide in either direction. That being said, with respect to crypto, Trump, of course, who's been the famously pro-crypto candidate, he launched his token sale just a couple of weeks ago for World Liberty Finance. So World Liberty Finance, of course, Trump is affiliated with World Liberty Finance, but there are other founders who are directly responsible for the day to day, particularly the folks who previously founded Doe Finance. So the World Liberty Finance token sale was aimed, aiming to raise

$300 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. And they were targeting, they were only allowed to be investable for accredited investors in the U.S. And the token itself was non-transferable. So out of this target of raising $300 million, they were able to be able to be investable. And the token itself, to raise 14 million, 1-4. They raised less than 5% of their target. It was kind of a resounding failure. And as a result, I've seen just a lot of people kind of saying like, oh, okay, great, it looks like crypto is rationalized and we're no longer in the kind of ICO era of just rampant stupidity with respect to token projects that are going nowhere. At the same time, I saw a lot of people saying, like, well, no, this is because it was only available to credit investors. The website was going

down, you know, because the token's non-transferable, that's the problem. Otherwise, this thing would have sold out in a hot second. How do you guys reflect on the failure of World Liberty Finance, you know, which is a tentative failure with respect to their fundraising goals? And what it means, is Trump potentially going to lose interest in crypto if he hasn't been, if he hasn't been able to make a bunch of money off it? Well, I'll say this as the master of memes. I don't think this project was memed into existence correctly. And I think that this is a problem in that the true master of memes, Trump, was detached from the actual launch and operation of this project and was left to, you know, subordinate it's

who don't carry the same mastery of the memehood. You know, Robert, I concur with your view of the world of your financial. You mean, you excuse me? No, I mean, Tom. Yeah, I don't know if you. Saw the world liberty. People are going to have so much trouble listening to this audio. Sorry.

It's fine. It's fine. Yeah, it was really bad. I also don't buy the sort of website accredited issues. I just don't think there was like a reason to get involved. It was never really comparing compelling narrative other than it's mildly Trump-affiliated, but also not explicitly Trump-affiliated. And it was not really a good vision.

There was not, there weren't good memes right. It was actually kind of cringy. It was also very on the fringe of crypto, I feel like. Like there was not strong endorsement or sort of strong buy-in from people who are already in the space. I just felt like this sort of outsider kind of move it. So the whole thing doesn't – I mean, that said, I think if Trump wins. They did get all the advisors. Yeah, but it was sort of a haphazard, like, oh, every week there was some new advisor.

And okay, great. So it just felt like they came out of the gate really slow. But I was going to say, if Trump wins, who knows, the thing could sell out. I don't know what the time limit is for the sale, but it's still going. So if it's still going post-election, maybe people, you know, want to buy some I mean, financial tokens. For any, any form of evidence, I think, like, DJT is up, like, almost 2.5X in, like, the last month or something. Because that's the true meme coin.

That's the real meme coin. Yeah. It's true. I feel like DJT is a real meme coin, not the stock, not. Yeah. How would the Trump and T trading? it's doing. I haven't checked. You know, I got an email today for another NFT Trump collectible sale. That's right, because you're on the mailing list. Yes, yes, yes. Because you bought the first one.

That's right. I forgot. Yeah, interesting. No, this reminds me a lot of a famous bond sale that happened in the late 90s. It's actually in every financial engineering textbook. It turns out, yeah, you know, if you're not actually tying the financial performance of this asset to, you know, the person in question, like the reality is that this token was not going to unlock before the election. So if it's not unlockable and you can't actually see the price go up, because, you know, the sale is an extended period of time, I think just tactically, that was enough to make it a mistake, which is that that's what people want. People want, like, I buy Trump, Trump do well, number go up. And like, that's fundamentally what you're selling. And if you're not actually encapsulating

that in the financial characteristics of the product you're selling, then it's like you're selling the wrong thing. You're like trying to sell Trump steaks and instead they're, you know, steak knives or something. Just like the wrong thing. At the risk of alienating people, but probably no one who listens to this podcast, the World Liberty Financial launch had Erbit vibes, you know, where it's like, it's like really far, right, fringe. No one wants to buy it. It like didn't have like financial performance. Like Erbit was always like getting, getting shilled by this like alt-right very, you know, demographic. I don't think the alt-right was shilling World Liberty Finance.

I don't think anybody was chilling it. Nobody was. Yeah. They're not about that. Okay, maybe you're right. Maybe it was no. There were op-eds of like, oh, Trump is making a mistake. You know, people should like, pull it.

People should get in his ear and tell him not to do this. But I think, I think urban was the same way. It was like attracting a non-existent demographic, right? Like, people telling urban people, like, don't do this as bad for your career? No, I agree with. I agree with Haseeb here in that there is no target demographic to fit with the marketing. Who's going to get really hyped about a fork of Doe Finance? Well, they said that they're going to do some kind of stable coin thing?

Yes, because everybody has to launch a stable coin. But is that just like a go, GHO fork? Or does anyone know what they're, have they given any GCH? I'm assuming the answer to. I think they're trying to pump the ICO with new. ideas. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this thing seems pretty dead on arrival, unfortunately. But we'll see. We'll check back in post-election. If Trump does end up winning, then maybe there'll be some life in this thing. But otherwise, it looks like this thing is a pretty big failure. And supposedly,

my understanding was that Trump or the Trump family or Trump entity gets the proceeds past like 30 million or something. And they didn't hit the hurdle. So, Trump gets nothing from this failed sale, basically. Barron's four wallets will remain empty. Very sad. They will be barren. Barron's wallets will be barren. Wow.

Wow. Incredible. That was a Hes C-level joke. You're on it. You're on it. That was good. Great. I would not think if it would seem to be fast enough to come up with that.

Yeah, only too. Yeah, exactly. That's a very Turin. It's a very turin joke. Okay. Last story, I guess one that we, have been coming up against again and again is malaise in the Ethereum camp. So Ethereum, down bad, you know, everything in this market. Well, not everything. Bitcoin right now is at like 70,

north of 70K. Markets are feeling very flush on the backs of potentially seeing a Trump win. And of course, that would likely be bullish for crypto assets across the board. But Ethereum has been lagging. So Ethereum, relative to the other majors, has been probably the weakest among everything that you see in the top 10. And Vitalik has been recently back in Twitter, after having been in hiding on Farcaster for a very long time. He's now back on Twitter in the fray, kind of going at people. And he's released a long set of blog posts describing the Ethereum roadmap. And also in public, starting to more often defend the Ethereum roadmap against some of the detractors. So the standard critique of Ethereum right now has been, Ethereum doesn't really have a

North Star. It's kind of, you know, this highfalutin, okay. we have seven different stages of scaling, you know, the surge, the splurge, the verge, the merge, whatever. And people are like, I don't really get it, right? What's the simple story? The simple story for Solana is, you know, number go up, Solana go fast. And people are really pushing for Ethereum to, one, simplify the story and defend the story in public. And second, to try to regain some of the mantle by not allowing so much of this financial activity on the Ethereum ecosystem being sucked up by the L2s and come back more so to the L1. So curious what you guys see, do you guys feel like this gambit is working? Is Vitalik's reengagement in the public sphere

starting to reignite some of that energy around Ethereum? Or do you feel like this is the last gasps and, you know, Ethereum is just losing the narrative war and it's not going to change? Well, I don't have an opinion so much as I'd like to read one tweet. that I found quite appealing and interesting by an account named Molly. First time BTC hit 70K at 4K. Second time BTC hit 70K at 3.9K. Third time BTC hit 70K at 3.3K. Now, BTC hit 70K for fourth time at 2.5K.

It's almost a high coup of crypto. Beautiful. Almost like it was written by an AI. Well, I thought Kobe's, Kobe's tweet of both Bitcoin and Ethereum are $2,000 from their all-time high was pretty funny. Like, I mean, obviously, that was like last night or whatever, but I thought that's pretty good. Okay. Robert, what's your take?

I mean, I think people are sort of seeing this as like wartime, Fatalic. I think we're not there yet. But I think, you know, like all the sort of quality of life stuff that people are talking about for Ethereum Maynet actually seem great, right? Like basic stuff like EIP 7701, 7702, things that make the chain more usable for your average person to actually get them to do things. I agree that right now their narrative is very confusing. You tell people to use Ethereum. And so, yeah, I didn't actually mean Ethereum. I meant an EVM chain, an EVM row up that is on Ethereum or.

oh, you are on, you know, one rope, you have to go to another roll up. I do think the roadmap to a certain extent does address this. And there's a vision for how it's all kind of comes together. But that doesn't really resonate with people who are potentially buying ETH or using ETH. And so I think a lot of it is just a narrative battle. And Ethereum just doesn't have the kind of same, I feel like, momentum or sort of wartime mentality as I think other chains or other sort of ecosystems. It's much more of a kumbaya. Let's all do some research and talk about our cypherpunk vision together.

Yeah. Hasib, do you think that Vitalik has the capacity to be a wartime CEO? Yeah, I mean, I do think the ticker as ETH tweet became quite shared and memed. I think the kind of like interesting thing to me about it is, there is a sense in which the L2s themselves, I think because of how much they've spent time warring with each other, have sort of made Ethereum. It feels in some times like they've made Ethereum collateral damage in the process.

Not just from like, hey, there's less economic value or fees. I actually don't think that's the thing that's driving it. But I think like the way they're like fighting over each other kind of almost emphasizes the flaws in Ethereum more. right? Like each roll-up being like, you don't have my feature, this sucks. Kind of like just to an outsider who it's their first time looking at crypto, if they just read crypto Twitter for like an hour, they're just going to be like, wow, only these Ethereum roll-ups are saying

things that are also built on Ethereum suck. So there's this like, there's this kind of Spider-Man meme problem where everyone is pointing at each other instead of like trying to understand the global problem, which I feel like is like a thing I think like you often see a lot of other communities point out about Ethereum Ethereum is like there's kind of this like incoherence in that way but I do think you know from a technical level

I thought Vitolix posts were really good right one thing about them that you have to respect and I think people on Twitter don't have the attention their attention span to respect is that Vitolix spends a lot of time going through the tradeoffs of each of these decisions and like really laying out like here's the dialectic of like if we did this, this happens. If we do this, this happens.

And here's the reason we should do one of the two things. And I think that type of stuff to Tom's point is just like, is that discernible to the person average net new Eath buyer? Not really, right? Like they have the they have the literacy of wanting to buy goat without reading about the story. Like me when I just was like, Oh, wow, Mark Andres. Well, hold on.

I want to defend the people who are, you know, getting excited about the ticker's Heath. Like, to be a good leader, you need both the micro and the macro. And it's not enough to have ownership over the details. You also need to be able to sell the big vision. I think Vitalik actually does a good job. I think the roll-up founders do a much less good job. Let's put it that way.

And I think in order to sell the vision of... Why do you say that? I feel like it's the other way around. I think to sell the vision of Ethereum at large, you need all... You need, like, the consortium, because they are a consortium effectively, right? Like, kind of. I'm sort of like, look, if you're, if you're Vitalik, you sort of, you're not allowed to say, like, well, the roll of people are not really in synchrony with me and therefore, like, I'm just

going to focus on the technical roadmap and just like keep repeating the seven stage diagram until people get it, you know, like that does feel to me like the wrong answer. Now, I do think, I do think Vitalik has heard the message and it feels like he is adapting. his own messaging. And it is a little disheartening to see people treating Vitalik like he runs a meme coin. And like you can tell like the verbiage of the ticker is ETH and, you know, Heath is good or whatever. Like this is like people are getting excited when he talks like it's a meme coin,

which is obviously the wrong quantum of capital that you need in order to move something like ether is not, you know, getting meme coin traders on Ethereum or on Twitter excited. You know, you actually need a lot more than that in order to get Ethereum pumping, you know, blood through its veins again. But it does feel like having that kind of muscular leadership and vision and also acknowledging that, hey, Ethereum is behind the ball. And we kind of do need to step up our storytelling and our evangelizing beyond just to the cypherpunk base and beyond just to the technical kind of inner circle of Ethereum. Right. If you read through a lot of this stuff. Like, it's, it's well written. It's coherent. It's cohesive. It's an explainer, right?

It's like, it's very much in line with his explainers about, well, here's how ZK works. Here's how you know, diagonalization works. Here's how Starx work. Here's how whatever. Which feels like the wrong, the wrong vatallic that we need right now, you know, or that Ethereum needs a vitalic that is more like the proselytizer who showed up in 2014. But I guess my point for the roll-up piece that I'm trying to make is like when imagine I'm a consumer app that has a verticalized interface like Polymarket or like something like imagine there's a polymarket app, right, that was just on a roll-up on one of these roles. There's a sense in which the roll-ups themselves are constantly fudding each other for like your roll-up sucks and like this doesn't work to the point that like the end consumer who doesn't give a shit about the technical stuff and will. never look at that stuff. They'll never see, they'll never read the Vitalikos. They're never going to even look at it. They just had a finance account and they were like, okay, now I'm going to

withdraw because I want to use this app. That marginal new user gets these infinite number of conflicting signals about which roll up to go to. Why should I use this app? What should I go to? And I feel like that actually is the hard part, like this like onboarding problem for NetNew versus Solana. It's just like, oh, just go to this one thing. There's one app. Go to Phantom. effectively. And like, I feel like that that fragmentation and then also the like them saying everything is bad about each other makes it like so confusing for a new user. And and to me, that's the thing that I don't know how you fix in kind of the Ethereum world.

Like there's this kind of famous phrase in distributed programming of like why it's hard, which is, you know, you can pull a carriage with two horses. But can you pull a carriage with 1,024 chickens? And in some way, somehow the roll-ups trying to pull the whole ecosystem feels a little bit like the latter more than the former sometimes. Not always, right? But sometimes it has that candor. Wow.

That was a really deep metaphor. Very typical of your wisdom on the show. I'm very impressed. Great. Well, with that, we're going to wrap. Hope you all have a very good Halloween. And we'll be back next week for some election craziness. Don't forget, Haseeb is really Superman under that.

under the covers. Yes, he is. Yes, he is. All right. Thanks, everyone. We'll be back this week. Dianora. See all.