Unchained - The Chopping Block: Crypto’s Worst Week? Bybit Hack, Libra Scandal, & The Memecoin Reckoning - Ep. 788

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner break down the biggest stories in crypto. This week: Bybit’s $1.5B hack, likely by North Korea’s Lazarus Group, and the Libra scandal, where Hayden Davis exposes the memecoin playbook. Meanwhile, Dave Portnoy rugs Greed and Greed 2, Kanye’s YZY token leaks, and the LA Vape Cabal collapses. But crypto markets hold strong, and the SEC just dropped its lawsuit against Coinbase. Is this the end of the memecoin era? We break it all down. Show highlights 🔹 Bybit’s $1.5B Hack – Largest crypto hack in history, linked to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. CEO Ben Zhou handled it masterfully, securing a bridge loan to cover outflows. 🔹 Hayden Davis & the Memecoin Playbook – Argentina’s Libra token scandal exposed the insider trading behind celeb-backed coins. Hayden Davis spills the playbook on Coffeezilla. 🔹 Portnoy’s Pump & Dump – Barstool’s Dave Portnoy rugs his own followers with Greed and Greed 2, then mocks them. 🔹 The Memecoin Bubble is Popping – Sentiment shift: retail realizes the game is rigged. Memecoins may finally be out of steam. 🔹 Kanye’s YZY Coin? – West’s team accidentally leaks a memecoin plan. Will it even launch, or is it DOA after the Libra scandal? 🔹 The LA Vape Cabal Collapses – Once a driving force in memecoins, this underground group falls apart after links to Kelsier Ventures are exposed. 🔹 Regulatory Winds Shift – SEC drops its lawsuit against Coinbase. Crypto enforcement pivots from good actors to actual fraud. 🔹 Crypto Holds Up – Despite chaos, the market remains resilient. Infrastructure tokens are seeing renewed interest. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Disclosures Timestamps  00:00 Intro 01:41 The Largest Crypto Hack in History 03:03 Bybit's Response and Industry Reactions 04:51 North Korea's Involvement and the Aftermath 18:06 Hayden Davis & LIBRA 30:50 Meteora & the Solana Universe 33:34 Downfall of Memecoins 39:58 Hypocrisy of Celeb Coins 47:00 Regulatory Changes and the Future of Crypto Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I feel like, you know, I don't believe in astrology or luck or circumstance, but like, but like, I think crypto got like too high on this own supply post-election, and then now we're having this like tragedy of calamities. It's like, it's like, it's like, you know what I mean? It's just like, we've just, it's just feel like we've been rolling downhill nonstop for three weeks. Like, as soon as Melania, the second meme coin hit the Solana blockchain, it was like all downhill. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two pawn. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

I'm into trading firms who are very involved. Delic.eat is the ultimate problem. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hey, everybody, welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone.

Next to you got Robert, the Cryptoenoconisurer and Tsar of Superstate. Let's get ready to crypto. Wow. Next we've got to Rune, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Guntlet. Yo. And I'm a C. The Head Hype Man to Drive and Fly. So we're early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice.

Please see Chopin Block. That XYZ for more disclosures. Holy shit, you guys. It's been another just absolutely chaotic, just down bad kind of week. So actually, markets have been surprisingly resilient through all of this. craziness over the last week, but just the amount of just sheer unadulterated stupidity and chaos that we're seeing in the, and just what's going on in the crypto industry. Let's get into it because we've got a lot of news that we want to cover. So first I want to start with

the news of today, the day that we're recording, which is Friday, the big news is that we just had the largest crypto hack in history. So by bit, which is any given day, probably the number two, in dollar terms. Any given day, probably the number two exchange in the world. by volume is by bit. I asked her to caveat dragonfly as an early investor in by bit series A. So by bit, basically they announced as of early this morning, late night Asia time, that they got hacked for $1.5 billion in their eth cold wallet. So what was happening was that they were transferring money from their cold wallet to their hot wallet, which is a standard thing that happens where exchanges rotate to be able to meet withdrawals. And apparently, so they used a multi-sig.

So they had ledgers, they had a multi-sig using safe. And when they signed, the transaction, the transaction that it showed on the front end was not the same transaction that all of the different signers saw on their own machines. So this looks actually very similar to hacks that it took place against Wazirx and against Radiant Capital, which led many people to believe that maybe this attack pattern looks like the Lazarus Group, which is the offshoot of North Korea that's involved in many of the biggest hacks in crypto, including the Axe Infinity hack that happened a few years ago. It was just confirmed by Zach XPT that, in fact, this does look like it's the Lazarus Group. So 1.5 billion dollars in Eath was drained. Within 30 minutes,

Ben, the CEO of Bybit, went on Twitter, confirmed that the hack had happened, basically announced that, look, we have the balance sheet to cover this. We're totally fine. We'll be able to meet all redemptions. He jumped on a live stream, which is the first time I've ever seen that, jumped on a live stream within about 30 minutes of announcing the hack. He was looking very clean cut, despite the fact that it was basically like a past midnight in Singapore. Sorry, he's not in Singapore. I think he's in Abu Dhabi. And so it was. way, way middle of the night. But he basically came on there, told everybody, look, we're, we're totally good. We're still meeting all withdrawals. There's a liquidity crunch on Eath,

but we've secured a bridge loan, which looks on chain like it came from Binance and Bitgett. But they basically said, look, Binance is solvent. Even if the hack is not recovered, all of the client's assets are backed one to one. So far, it looks like there's been, obviously, a wave of redemptions that have come in. But as of, right now it's about 140 Pacific time. It looks like about, call it 15 to 17% of ByBitt's total assets were withdrawn from the exchange as of now. Now it's been about, called six hours roughly since the hack. So it looks like the outflows have roughly stabilized. And markets seem to be pretty confident that Bybit is okay. And so it looks like this overall attack. You also saw that a lot of people

came out of the woodwork. CZ, the BitGet guys, many of the other exchanges came out in support of Bybit, which is obviously very different than what happened with FTX. So many people analogize this to FTX doesn't look like it's an FTX situation with respect to them being able to meet redemptions. And also just the fact that Bybit has like $20 billion plus, actually originally about $25 billion in client assets that now, of course, with $1.5 billion missing, it's fairly understandable that they'd be able to meet a lot of the outflow demand with just the assets they have remaining on balance sheet. But despite that, it's been a really terrible day for the industry to see the biggest hack in history.

And the fact that this is North Korea, or it's all but confirmed that this is North Korea, also means that we don't really know what to expect. It's not very likely that North Korea is going to mess up. It's not very likely they're going to move their assets to a centralized exchange. The assets have all been sitting completely in ETH, and they've not moved,

presumably because the North Korea knows that everybody in the world is now tracking these assets, and it's way too large of a sum of money to be able to fence this kind of money in tornado cash or anything like that. I thought they bridge some of it to Solana, I read. That could be misinformation. Yeah, that was misinformation.

It is split across many addresses, and they were moving in and out of like steak teeth and stuff like that, but it's still on Ethereum in some form. Yeah, so they sold, originally they had M-Eath and S-T-Eth, which is Lido-Eth, M-Eth is Mantle-Eth, and they immediately swapped all of those through Defi into just ETH. And presumably the reason why I have to guess would be because ETH is the most liquid and ether is the least freezable, right? So if you're in some, if you're in some alt that's like, you know, if you're pegged, you can imagine that maybe governance goes and does something and

shuts you down. Whereas with ether, there's really no way to turn off the tab. Well, the ether is not programmable, right? There's very little hooks on it. Right. Exactly. And despite the fact that this is the largest hack in dollar terms in crypto history, nobody's even contemplating a hard fork or anything like that. I think it's pretty clear that one thing that we've seen as a pattern from these kinds of hacks is that when the hack amount is really big, it just becomes really hard for the attacker to actually get away with it. Like, ironically, if you steal like $20 million, $30 million, there's a good chance it's gone. You know, you're not going to get that back.

You steal a billion dollars and like, where is it going to go? Who's going to fence that for you? If you're North Korea, what can you do with a billion dollars in Heath? I mean, I don't know what they're doing with these giant hack warchets of theirs. I'm sure there's some online sleuth that have been following it over the years. But like I assume, you know, their hope is that at some point, they'll trade it to Russia for oil or something. Yeah, I mean, I just think with that sum of money, it's just so big, you can't hide it, right?

Like you try to mix it. It's going to completely overwhelm the mixers. Do you guys remember that Richard Hart, who I guess was under indictment by the SEC, but then who knows if that still exists? But do you remember he was the largest dieholder because he had so much ether? from Pulse Chain and basically was blacklisted from a lot of exchanges. So he just converted all of it to die. So I actually wonder if we're going to see kind of like, this is a good test of like,

hey, do attackers trust decentralized stable coins enough to go from? There's not a liquidity. There's not a liquidity. No, I know. How are you going to swap a billion dollars on chain? I don't think they're going to do it all at once. But my point is like, Hart entered in it very slowly over a long time window to become the largest die.

It wasn't just like he, like, yolo did all once. So I think this is an interesting, like, case study to see if, like, that happens. Obviously, I'm not trying to say, like, this is a good thing. I'm just saying, like, this is a precedent. I mean, even if you do, like, okay, now what are you going to do with a billioners to die? How are you going to fence that? Right. I'm not saying that I have an answer for you.

I'm just saying that it will be a case study in a way of, like, how much what, which stable coin has the most confidence from the person who is most locked out of the financial. system. Well, it really comes down to what's the financial volatility risk tolerance of the hacker, right? Like Richard Hartswapped out of ether. Ether itself is censorship resistant. He just wanted a stable coin instead for some reason, right? I guess he didn't want the price. He did buy a lot of LVMH stuff, if I remember currently. He had dollar denominated expenses. Right. It's probably a trade, actually. Exactly. So does North Korea want Ether or do they want stables? I don't know. Like my my guess would be that N equals like two here.

There's very few like massive scale hackers. And there's not enough data for you to write a paper on the risk preferences of major hackers. But I'm just saying we're setting ourselves up for this natural experiment that's going to have probably happen. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that like the most censorship resistant asset. Like if you're thinking about, okay, I'm North Korea, how do I fence this? How do I get this to Russia in terms of cash? Well, they've historically, they've historically tried the bridge son to Bitcoin. using the tools available.

But I think like right now, there's not that many good decentralized ways to go from Ether to Bitcoin anymore. Yeah, yeah. And I mean, all these things, like if they're secured by multi-sig, the multi-s, I mean, if somebody sees that their protocol

is being used to fence a billion dollars of ether, I think a lot of people would just be like, yeah, okay, cool, we're commenteering this. Like, this is going to be seized, and then we're going to, governance is going to put this into the hands of law enforcement. Like, this is one of these situations where nobody is on the side of North Korea.

you know, no protocol, no anything. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, really the only option is something that doesn't have a hook, which Die versus USDS. that was, you know, part of the point, right? There's no more, you know, there's a first focus of USDA versus die. I think, um, all I'm saying is like this there, I suspect we will see some very crazy on-chain behavior here because this,

like, what else can you do? Like, also the other thing that's crazy to me is door chain door chain going down is actually a very funny thing. because a lot of the hacks in the past would get to Bitcoin via either Thorchain lending or Thorchain's bridge. But now all the Thorchain validators are left. So I would not send a huge amount of money across it, right? Like the Thorchain market cap so low. So the bridges of Bitcoin are actually significantly worse than during times of previous hacks.

So I actually think there's kind of stuck where they are now that I think about it. Sorry. Well, I think of this like in the olden days where the pirates would hold treasure chest of gold and they would bury it, you know, and then like make a treasure map and draw an Exxon and come back like 30 years later. You know, I feel like North Korea is just going to have these treasure chests of stolen illegal crypto that what are they in a rush to use it for? You know, it's like they might just like keep it buried, you know, with like a treasure map with the X on it for like 30 years and come back to it later.

Yeah, that's an interesting theory. I mean, you know, you might predict that maybe they have some kind of a that, hey, if you return the funds, we'll give you a 10% bounty on some assets that are not that are clean. But I don't know how you would make the assets clean, right? And like the fact that North Korea is such a pariah state may make it harder for there to be any kind of deal, because which, which ultimately is like really bad for, for customers, you know, or bad for buy bit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't doubt them. If you just, if you have a sense of what the revenues of these exchanges are, I don't doubt them that they're fine, that they have the

the surplus to be able to handle it, although they don't have it in ether. So what many people have been speculating, and this is one of the things that Ben was addressing on the live stream was whether or not they're going to buy ETH in order to make all the redemptions whole. And right now they have this bridge alone, which looks like it's coming from Biggett and from Binance, which again is a very good sign because this is not what happened with FTCS. But you might, you might well ask a question, like, well, look, if your mental model of North Korea is that nobody can really do business with them. Nobody can, there's no way to do a deal.

There's no way to do any recovery. Then that probably means that maybe they do have to go buy that amount of ETH. And if they do, maybe that's weirdly bullish Ethereum, that somehow they just ended up having $1.5 billion of net buy pressure. And of course, they got to chase it up, right? So, you know, as they keep buying, like, there's not that much liquidity. And so price of ETH goes up as they're buying. Yeah.

I mean, that when you said no one's on the same. side of North Korea, I have seen some people on crypto Twitter being like, oh, man, this might be so good for Ether. Like, you know, come on North Korea. Burn it all. Like, send it to the burn it. You know, Ethereum actually does have a long history being pro-North Korea. So I feel like that's actually.

Yeah. Who's that special? He is out, though. He is out. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But I have to say, I have to say, I was sort of new to crypto Twitter when he was tweeting about that.

And I was like, had no, I was like, who are these crazy? people who are like trying to teach North Korea how to use GPUs. Like why am I, why am I on on this part of the universe? And then I realized that was like 90% of East Twitter at that time. Yeah. I've also, I've noticed a lot of empathy for about, I mean, A, I think masterclass and comms in terms of communicating directly, quickly, live stream very cool. I've never seen anyone do that. But also just speaking in very concrete terms and not equivocating. I feel like so many people default to corpse peak in these kinds of situations and be like, oh, we're evaluating the incident. And I think Ben just got out there and be like, no, we're good. We're going to make people whole.

Here's what's happening. And I think that was great. But also, I mean, the hack itself, I think there was some misunderstandings floating around. But like, it's like you said, very similar to the radiant capital. There was your X hacks, which are very sophisticated and difficult to protect against. You know, really these are probably from the radiant capital debrief. They're like, you know, machine level vulnerabilities. And unless you are really going through and looking at every single hash, and it's very hard for safe transactions, multisic transactions, to validate those. Like, it's just a very, you can follow so many of the best practices,

95% of the best practices in crypto and still miss this. So there's a lot of empathy for the, for the ByBit team too. Yeah, it really was absolutely masterful. If you compare that to what FTX was like, I mean, we were all there. We were like live streaming that shit. And FTCS was just an absolute joke compared to how Byb had handled this. One what? So I think-

Well, FTX was fraud. Okay, like the fundamental difference here is you have a bad actor, FTCS that was doing lots of fraud, which is why they didn't have the money. And then you have a plausibly good actor who got hacked and is a victim, right? Like, these are like not even in the same arena. You have the bad guy and you have a victim. And like, they're just totally opposite sides of the coin. Totally. I think you also see it, though, with hacks generally, right? So I think most people's

instinct when they get hacked, so I mean, unfortunately getting hacked is kind of a right of passage in crypto. Most people, when they get hacked, their instinct is to say something very obscure and vague and like don't directly address it and let the story kind of brew through other channels, right? So other people are talking, like other people are breaking the story, other people are talking about what it means, other people are tracing everything on chain and contextualizing the story because, of course, everybody wants to know what the fuck is happening. And so by bit, just coming out immediately, within 30 minutes of this thing being posted online, we're like, yes, it happened.

Here's what happened. Here's what happened to us. We're going to go live and we're going to explain to all of our customers what's going on. And everything's good. Like that, to me, it's like, okay, that's what everybody should be doing. When there's a hack, first thing to do is to own the communication. And, like, you know, it's going to, like, everybody who's been in crypto for long enough has gotten hit at some point by something.

Now, this is obviously, you know, a sort of a three sigma event with respect to the size of the hack, But relative to the strength of the balance sheet, yeah. But I mean, relative to the strength of the balance sheet, the other thing to recognize is crypto is a lot bigger today than it was in the past. Right. So, you know, on a relative basis, I think this is probably like, it's definitely the biggest hack ever, but relative to their balance sheet, it's actually, you know, there's a lot of hacks where the entire balance sheet of a company was taken out or all the assets were stolen.

And that's very, very far from the case here where it's closer to a couple percent. Speaking of FTX too, I mean, Bibate started a proof of reserve system, post-FTX, where you could check your inclusion in their Merkel route and it was all very transparent. And so you could go on and see like, yeah, they actually did have the customer assets. Again, there was no fraud involved. It was just a hack. But there was not a concern that, oh, there would be some huge gap in the balance sheet, you know, as a result of this.

Yeah. So, to be honest, I was kind of hoping that evidence would point toward this being some kind of insider attack. You're hoping? Because it's more likely that you're going to be able to recover the assets if it's an insider. That's true. But if it's North Korea, then this is kind of a worst case scenario. So heart goes out to the Bybit team, and it's always unfortunate to see stuff like this.

But thankfully, I think the industry is in a strong enough place that they'll be able to bounce back and make sure that everybody's okay. So we'll hopefully check back in on this next week and see how Bybit is holding out by then. I feel like, you know, I don't believe in astrology or luck or circumstance. But like, but like, but I think crypto got like too high. on this own supply post-election, and then now we're having this, like, tragedy of calamities. It's like, it's like, it's like, you know what I mean? It's just like we've just, it's just feel like we've been rolling downhill nonstop for three weeks. Like as soon as Melania, the second meme coin hit the Salana blockade, it was like all downhill. All right. Well, speaking of the Salana blockchains

also. Yeah. No, no. And this is not, by the, again, it's a more meme coin news that we have to share with This is not a dig at Salana. Salana has actually performed well as a blockchain. It's just more like stuff on it. Well, that's what we're about to cover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the other major story of the week, which at this point, I'd be surprised at most people have not gotten some wind of this.

But there's this new story around a coin called the Libra. So this is not the Libra that you might remember from Facebook. This is a new Libra, which is an Argentinian state-sponsored meme coin. It was backed by Javier Millay, the new president of Argentina, himself a controversial figure for very other reasons. But this has been dubbed the biggest insider trading scandal since FTX. So what happened with the Libra? So first, Javier Malay promoted the Libra token through a tweet.

This happened very suddenly. Nobody was expecting this to happen. This token, this meme coin called Libra, quickly ballooned to hit a $4 billion market cap. And then subsequently crashed 95%. As the meme coin was crashing, Malay deleted his tweets. Once there was news that the insiders from this token were selling into the frenzy. And they sold on the order of, I think, believe almost $200 million of cash that they ended up selling into this rally.

And a bunch of other craziness was pointed out after this thing wound down. So first, Malay, then later tweeted again about the project, then later deleted the second tweet. But there was just a bunch of confusion about, okay, what the hell is this? Is this Malay's meme point? Is this the Argentinian government's meme coin? So it later came to light that this, you know, Malay himself did not have any financial interest directly in this meme coin. Neither did the Argentinian government. This was a private company that was, an Argentinian company that was launching this meme coin that supposedly was going to be for the good of the Argentinian people and or the Argentinian community.

It was all quite vague. So there's this figure that appears at the center of the story who's this guy, this white dude named Hayden Davis. Okay. Not to be confused with Hayden. Yes, not to be confused with the Crypto Hayden who's the founder of Uniswap.

This is, so Hayden Davis is the CEO of what's called Kelseyor Ventures. Okay. And I just, I should reiterate because it appears later in the story. He is the whitest guy

you've ever seen. All right. He went to Liberty University. What's that from the race? It shows up. It comes back. It comes back. Okay.

So, so it turns out, Hayden Davis is a meme coin businessman, I think is the best way to describe it. He's a meme coin. He's not a promoter and he's not a launcher. He's a facilitator is the way that he put it in one of his interviews. So there's a whole, he explained this in an interview with Coffeezilla, who's a big

YouTuber who covers a lot of scams. And he explained that there's a whole host of characters that goes into actually launching a meme coin. And his role in the meme coin supply chain is very specific. He's a facilitator. So he brings all the parties together, but he is not himself responsible for press the buttons. He's not himself, you know, he doesn't himself own the treasury. He doesn't himself do the promotion. He's just kind of the guy who brings everyone together and facilitates, right?

So he apparently has been known as being an insider actor in the Argentinian crypto scene. And he's bragged in private texts that were later leaked about paying Millet's sister, Karina Malay, who's also a prominent figure in Argentinian politics. And in a tweet to somebody about his control over Javier Millet through his sister. He wrote, I control that N-word. I send money to his sister, and he signs whatever I say. Now, I should note, both Hayden is white and Javier Malay is white. Everybody involved here is white.

So apparently he was in control of the $100 million plus that was extracted from the insider wallets that were dumping. And he later, after doing a bunch of seemingly guilty interviews, kind of SBF style. He sort of came out and started doing all these interviews, did one interview directly in a tweet stream, then he did one with Portnoy, who he talked about last time on the show,

and he also did one with Coffeezilla. And in these interviews, he basically admits, one, everything went horribly wrong. Two, he sniped the Libra coin himself and or instructed the people who were running the bots to snipe the coins. He basically completely explained how all of this stuff works,

the whole supply chain, how these meme coin, launches come together. Some of the, apparently Dave Portnoy invested $5 million into Libra. And when he lost almost all of that $5 million, Hayden personally refunded Portnoy the $5 million. Well, I don't know personally is the right word. He took the money, the proceeds from the scam.

Well, he claims he did it personally. He claims this was not from the proceeds. I don't know if this is confirmed. This was what he claimed. But where does the money come from? I mean, his business is launching meme going from his business generally, right? but not from the $100 million multi-sig that was specifically responsible for sniping the Libra. So he claimed, I don't know whose money this is.

I thought this belonged to Argentina. Or maybe this belongs to the Kip Protocol, which is the company in Argentina that launches. I don't know whose money this is. I don't want it. I'm stuck with it. I control it. You tell me what to do. If you don't tell me what to do, I will just, according to him, dump it back into the chart,

which means to just buy the meme coin, to buy more of the meme coin using all the money they have in reserves. So, okay, just a little bit more I want to add here. From the interview on CoffeeZilla, he broke down a lot of how memecoins work, and I want to talk through it because I think it's really, really fascinating, you know, kind of lifting up the curtain that most people have not seen. So the first thing he says is that most meme coin big launches happen only after private deals take place in which a huge part of supply is bought or given to KOLs and other entities at a lower market cap than whatever it launches at. So any big meme coin launch, such as Melania, such as Libra, such as, you know, and this includes even Trump. He claimed that the Trump token, there was a private round that happened at $500 million at an insider meeting in D.C. where all of this was communicated to people in advance. He claims that there's a lot of these deals where these things are shared with so many insiders

in KOLs that it leaks very often to other parties who are not even in the deal. And those parties who it leaks to are the people who end up sniping the tokens. Now, we have to explain sniping. what is sniping? Sniping is when you launch a token and before any human beings ever have a chance to respond, a bunch of bots immediately buy up the token

and drive up the price to a very large amount because they know that this beam coin is going to be a big launch. And then after retail starts actually buying up the token, you know, human reaction times are much slower than what you can do with bots.

Those snipers then sell back into all the demand that comes in. And so they end up profiting a huge amount basically just by being first to buy the token. And because these meme coins off and launch at a low market cap, that's possible, right? There's no auction. There's no initial clearing price that the meme coin has initially launched at. So from the mouth of Hayden Davis, he said, how else would you make money? If you're not sniping your own token, like what else do you

think you're supposed to do? He claimed that all these entities, everybody involved in the supply chain, believe that the only way to make big bucks is to be insiders in a rigged game. The groups that have these big hype launches, they say that they hope to see the meme coin live for hopefully one to two years. But the reality is that almost every meme coin lasts no more than a few days. And there's a widespread cynicism among these groups that basically all of crypto is useless, that this is all just a zero-sum game. And the only way to protect retail is for the teams to do the sniping themselves. Because otherwise, the retail is just going to get sniped into. And so them, as the promoters of the coin, as the good guys, if they snipe first, they can use

the proceeds that they get from sniping to help protect the coin. And once the sniper's done, they can buy back in. So that's the picture. This has all been a huge scandal. The moment that this unfurled, the Argentinian stock market dropped more than 5%. And there have been charges now brought by the opposition party against Javier Malay. This is called, within Argentina, this is called Cryptogate. It is a massive scandal. And Argentina, I think they've basically seen a huge pockmark on their reputation, both internationally and domestically because of this scandal. So I'll stop there. There was obviously a huge dump of information. Did any of you guys actually see any of the interviews that Hayden did?

I couldn't bring myself to, I couldn't bring myself to watch it. I watched some of the clips of Portnoy and like, I mean, come on, each one was more ridiculous than the next. This guy is just, this is worse than Avi who hacked Mango Markets, you know, going and like doing a publicity toward being like, I'm the good guy. I'm a smart trader. Hayden is worse. Like, Hayden is worse by an order of magnitude.

He's getting on these things and just saying, like, crime is good. good. He's just like a quintessential crypto fuck boy. Like it's kind of like the most kind of just completely amoral person. And you can just tell from his response that he's like flabbergasted that anybody would not be on his side. I mean, do you remember when we came up with the hinged to unhinged scale on the chalked block like nine months ago or something like that? The hidden of Kelseyor Ventures might be actually one of the farthest out on the unhinged scale in the history of the industry. And that's saying a lot.

What was your reaction? It seems like you saw a lot of this content. Yeah, I, well, I mean, I agree. I think he didn't, from hearing him speak, until he's like kind of unintelligent. I actually had a very weird announcement. It was obviously out last week. I was skiing.

And randomly, this guy I was skiing with had heard this was happening because he passive employees in Argentina. And I was like, okay, this sounds kind of stupid. Some of the people who were skiing with were also Argentinian. And they were very jazzed about it. And so I actually feel, a lot of empathy because it's like these are, I'm guessing in their minds that they thought there's going to be similar to Trump, right? Whereas this big, I mean, like, I feel like Trump, when it

came out, there was not a lot of flack, other than people in crypto. People thought it was like kind of cool and he was promoting it and they had this site and they thought, oh, there's going to be our Trump coin moment. And then obviously it was turned to this huge scandal. And so it was just a very bizarre. I mean, it was very offline for most of last week. And coming back just seeing the shit show was not the most welcome, but I think there was a great clip of Malay being interviewed where he dropped a, I mean, effectively, there's no crying at the casino was the quote. What had been ridiculous quotes? Yeah, yeah.

The truth is if you go to the casino and you lose money, you know, whose fault is that? It was basically what he said of the people reappropriately. This is the Spanish version of there's no crying in the casino. Wow. That's phenomenal. that is phenomenal. Yeah, I mean, it's so bizarre to see how big, first of all, like how much, like how big the ripple effects from just like a stupid fucking meme coin has been that it just, it just kind of, it's just like a whole country is now being rocked by a stupid meme coin.

And like, I feel bad for the people of Argentina because like how is it that this like just consummate grifter ends up being the guy closest to the president who represents the crypto industry? And it's like, hey, if you're going to promote something in Argentina, here, promote this, like, stupid piece of shit. Instead of, like, Argentina has such a long history in being pro-crypto and cypherpunk and, like, being in the, like, I remember in the very, very early days of crypto, like, a lot of stuff happening in Buenos Aires as being one of these centers of, like, die and Ethereum. And, you know, what's the, open zeppelin, I think, aren't they from Argentina? Like, it's really been one of these, like, cultural centers for crypto innovation. And then you get this guy. The funny thing is like there were like people on Twitter and I don't know enough about this.

I just kind of was going. But I guess like a bunch of like Vitalik and some other researchers were in Argentina for Cremiantos, which is like this Ethereum developer kind of event in Buenos Aires. And I think they like tried to meet Malay and he didn't want to meet them before or something. It's because they didn't give his sister a bunch of money. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably what it is.

like that. But then Vitolic was like, hey, maybe we'll have DevConnect, which is one of the big conferences that like people have been pushing to be in to try to be in Argentina. And Malay retweets it. And it's like, yes, look, we're happy that people are are like bringing smart developers to our country and appreciating our talent. So I thought it was funny. Like if the kind of hearsay that like they tried to me with Malay and he kind of brushed them off or told him the fuck off and then now he's like trying to embrace everyone in Ethereum. I think that's a pretty funny like about face post meme coin. So part of this scandal has also rippled, of course, through the crypto world. So it was it was proven that the team behind Kelsey Reventures was also responsible for

the Melania token. And they were also the snipers who sniped the Melania token as it was going. So basically this is a playbook that they've run again and again and again. Now part of part of what's interesting about the story is that it also ended up affecting some of the folks in the Salana universe. So of course, Meteora, which was the platform that Trump token launched on, and I believe also Malania, so Meteora, they end up having an investigation that supposedly some people who were associated with Meteora, the platform. So Meteora, I should explain, Meteora is a part of the suite of products under Jupiter, which is the big defyceiver aggregator on Solana. And Meteora is kind of their pumped up fun competitor. Mediora ended up having,

I think, what was it, the lead developer or something, this guy, Ben Chow, he, he, He ended up being investigated and then fired, or I guess he resigned, because of accusations that he basically enabled this behavior. And as it may have insider traded or something, I didn't quite follow if this was proven or just an insinuation that there's some connection there. Well, I saw on Twitter, and correct me if this is misinformation, but I saw that people had dug up that he had a huge history of, like, securities laws violations that he was charged with in the past.

That I have no idea. So, okay, let's not amplify anything that we're not confident in. That's true. So I will say, so Ben is co-founder of Meteora. It was founded by him in Meow, Ming, the founder of Jupiter. I actually knew Ben way before crypto, because he used to actually run an insurance company startup that, like, I interviewed out a long time ago, like 2012. And he definitely did like normal tech startup stuff.

not crypto until basically 2021 when they started Meteora. And Meteora was kind of like existed for a while, but couldn't get product market fit, whereas Jupiter post-FTX actually started growing a lot because it became the only place to trade Salana coins because they weren't listed on most exchanges other than FTX, not Solana itself, but like SPL tokens. And Meteora slowly over time grew more for, yeah, this kind of like early stage of launch thing. But unlike Pump. Fun, Pump. Fun, right, is like, I have a bonding curve, people deposit, and then once it hits a certain threshold, it just goes to an AMM and then no one controls AMM, right? So there's no admin key. Meteora, like, does have that, like, the issuer kind of has some admin control over the pools and how much liquidity is in each pool. And so, like, that's why you can snipe it more easily in some ways. But yeah, I, I would say this was more like the founder was sort of, imagine.

if you had a board and like the founder was kicked out. This is not the same as like the developer was kicked out. Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, I apologize missing a little bit of context. So the story, I think, is one that has cast a pall over meme coins generally. And I think after Libra, you know, I think after Trump and Melania, people kind of had a bad taste in their mouth. I think after Libra, people seem to really feel like, okay, one, lifting the veil of all the interviews that Hayden was doing and basically explaining what meme coin boosters fundamentally do and the way in which the game is rigged against retail for all of these big meme coin launches. I think that really changed the vibe in crypto and changed people's perceptions about how meme coins fundamentally work

and whether this market is sustainable for retail investors to keep playing at this quote unquote casino. And second, I think it's led to a lot of people now prognosticating something that, you know, I've been saying on this show for quite a while that meme coins are not sustainable. And that, the show is maybe coming to an end soon in that this this this this carousel of constant meme coins and new ones launching every single day and retail you know having fun playing this game it feels like the game is not it doesn't feel so fun anymore doesn't feel like people really believe that actually they can win at this game anymore well the illusion is yeah yeah i mean people used to think that the meme coin game was one that was winnable and now once the rock has been lifted and we're looking on underneath

of it and seeing all the bugs and all the really disgusting behavior and like how it actually works, people are grossed out. They realize that it's a completely rigged game, that they are victims, and that you really can't win. I mean, in absolute terms, like the volumes on Pump. Dot Fun are still pretty strong, right? You look at the Salonodex volumes. I mean, everything has come down.

Most of just because volatility has come down. But, you know, it's sort of like what I'm seeing right now, and I'm curious how you guys perceive this. is that the sentiment has completely turned against meme coins. I think I see almost a complete reversal where people before were like, oh, you know, fuck the tech coins, fuck the VC coins, everything's a meme coin. You know, what's the difference between, you know, some VC vaporware and a meme coin? And now I feel like, okay, that argument has just lost all of its valence.

And people now are like, okay, I guess we kind of have to build real stuff again, unfortunate. And at the same time, like the numbers aren't telling the same story, though. the numbers seem to say, and this may just be like, okay, the sort of Wiley Coyote thing, which is that it just takes some time for everybody to get the message and for the activity to really drop off. How are you guys interpreting this moment? Do you think this actually is the end? Do you think that if we see a macro reversal, prices come back, meme coins are bound a bit, that we just party comes back to life? What do you guys think happens? I mean, I don't see how this can't be the inflection point. Like,

it's such a toxic event that I think shifts the narrative, just in the same way. way that FTCX, yes, well, it was a bad actor or not a good actor. Like when FTX went down, it was the inflection point and shifted the entire narrative. And I think we're at that point with MemePoints right now. I think very few people have the same level of enthusiasm that they did for the, putting product in air quotes here. I would not even call it products, but for the MemeCoin product. And I just can't see how there's the same level of capital that's going to go into these, knowing that it's at such a large negative EV. To run, what's your take?

Memecoins over? Yeah, to some extent, I mean, I kind of think the interesting thing this shows is like the meme coins that have the least control, like pumped off fun seem to be able to survive, whereas a meme coins that need lots of management of liquidity and like not are not really fully autonomous are the ones that you kind of have this distinction with, which is why I think you see the pumped up fund volume is not decaying that much. is that like I think there's a general agreement that maybe these more kind of fully decentralized mechanisms are better. That being said, though, I don't know what the demand is. I would say the thing I'm kind of more curious about.

And prior to the by bit today, we're starting to see the rotation back into infrastructure coins. Like all of them were up like crazy. Like story protocol is up like 200% yesterday at one point. So like all of these like infrastructure coins that everyone was kind of fudding. and shitting on and saying would never be useful, like all had this huge rally in this week in response. So I thought that was like the market being like, we're moving out of mean coins and some. Yeah, in a sense. Yeah, meme coins attracted the hot ball of money capital, right? And now meme coins are

basically toxic. And so that hot ball of money capital is going to find its way into other you know, verticals within crypto. It's going to find hot balls. I hope not. I hope there's no mean coin called back. Okay. Tom, what's your take? Yeah, I agree with Tarun. I mean, I think it sort of reminds me of Matt Levine always like talking about like how do you define insider trading? It's obviously this, you know, spectrum. It's like if you overhear, you know, news on the train, is that insider trading versus, hey, do you have some sort of material knowledge? If you knowingly make a trade on it,

is that insider trading or if you knowingly don't make a trade on your positive news, that insider trading? And obviously the law is still, these are like, open cases that are sort of trying out these different components of it. But I was reminded of this, looking at this. There was another bubble map of this other guy. What was his name? The seam? Who, yeah, who was not part of the team, but just independently sort of found out that, hey, like the Meteora team is interacting with these pools and sort of did his own independent sniping. And I think that kind of comes back to the pump point, which is people like playing fair games. They like playing transparent games. And when they don't feel like they can't make money anymore,

then yeah, they're going to roll out. And this happened with ICOs that have both NFTs. And I think it's your marketplace. So if people aren't going to get excited and don't feel like, hey, there's any edge or there's any opportunity more, then that sort of destroys the entire market. So until that changes, I don't know who would launch a coin and as a result who would buy that coin. Yeah, it's interesting how you guys point out the difference between Pumptoffon and some of these managed launches, which are more. I mean, there's really more celeb coins, right? I mean, effectively Libro was kind of a celeb coin, although it, you know, formally wasn't.

It basically was with Malay. It was a celebrity. tense. Yeah, I mean, it was trying to follow the, like, Trump playbook where it's like, this is the leader of the country, this is the official meat point of the country. Yeah, yeah. And so I think we can say with some confidence that this meta is dead, or at least is losing steam very, very rapidly, if not it's already completely out of steam. Well, so there's, there's also this story that was just broken by Coin desk a couple days ago, or I think it was just yesterday, that Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, apparently he is, he is, is planning to drop a meme coin. There's a pretty, or I should say a celeb coin. Thankfully, he has read the room and has realized that maybe it's not the best time to launch one right now immediately after a gigantic looper scandal. He doesn't seem to have much trouble launching anything at the wrong time, though.

As we learned during the Super Bowl. You would think that. But actually, I heard about this. I heard about this like over the weekend. And apparently he delayed because people were saying that he was going to launch it on Monday. And now it's Friday and he still hasn't launched it. So clearly, I mean, they say the team says, where is this quote? Yeah, so it's quoted by CoinDesk, YZY delayed as the team debated whether it's, quote, unquote, too close to the Malay thing.

So clearly they're responding in some level to, to, you know, the news cycle. But apparently this, I thought this is hilarious. So it's called the YZY token. The details leaked after Yeezy's CFO accidentally tipped off CoinDesk. He emailed CoinDesk with a Yeezy official email asking, basically, basically, basically giving them a document, describing exactly what the plan was, and in the same email, asking for an embargo. CoinDest said no to the embargo, and then just basically wrote the story.

So just complete, just absolute amateur hour stuff. And for the tokenomics, 70% of the tokens will be owned directly by Yeh, 10% for liquidity, 20% for investors. So apparently, it's already been sold 20% to investors. And of course, Yeh, I mean, he's had all these sponsorships got lost because he's been tweeting neo-Nazi shit. Apparently, just very recently announced, oh, wait, no, I'm not a Nazi anymore. Somebody convinced

me to not be a Nazi. But that also happened a couple years ago that he, Adam Sandler, Adam Sandler. Really? It was Adam Sandler? Adam Sandler. He credits Adam Sandler for talking about Nazism. But he's done this before. So I feel like there's sort of a

regression to the mean thing happening here. So I don't know. Whatever. Crypto is having a bad week. This is all I'm going to say. The one thing I'll add to the Easy thing is just a few days ago, he tweeted that Celeb coins are extractive of your community and are bad just days ago. Yes, he did. You know, following on the lever thing.

And just a couple days later, it comes out that Easy's going to drop his own coin that's extractive of his community and serves no purpose. I don't. And so I just want to. Does Easy have a community or like? Yeah, he has fans. I mean, I just want to publicly acknowledge the hypocrisy and how gross it is. Can we, can we just, I mean, look, I know that, okay, I know that people hate this story.

I know that people hate that he's dropping this meme coin. And I know that people will buy it anyway. Can you just, can people just please not buy the token? Like, please. But you're going to be able to use the token in the easy store for merchandise. Please, just please don't buy the token so we can be done with this whole fucking thing. Like, because if you, because if people buy this token. token, there will be more. This will not be the last one. But if we can just not buy this token,

then this will be the last one and we don't have to ever talk about this kind of thing anymore. And that I will be so grateful to all of you. Because I know, I know there's a lot of people in the trenches who like listen to the show and they're like, yeah, I totally agree with you and they go fucking buy the shit anyway. You know, so I, yeah. Yeah, people are cross-motivated, you know. We just have to, guys, as an industry, we just have to come together to this one and not buy not buy this one, just this one token, and then we can all be done. Yeah, but you know the launch is going to get sniped and, you know, they're going to dump it on people and it's just going to be a fiasco. Yeah, I mean, so we've seen the same thing happen now with Dave Portnoe, who we were talking about last week on the show.

Dave Portnoy, founder of Bartisw Sports. We claimed last week that he's been basically just pumping dumping tokens onto his followers. He has continued to do that for the last week. Watching multiple courts. Even more aggressively. Even more aggressive. Last week I was like, he kind of seems to be pumping dumping, dumping on his followers. This week has been, no, he's like very, very pumping dumping dumping on his followers.

So he launched a token called Greed 2. He launched a token called Greed. He bought 35% of the supply, sold everything in one transaction, causing a massive crash. And then he just responded, you were all greedy. At least admitted it. You bought a token called Greed. I've dumped on you. What did you expect me to do?

It's called Greed. Then he launched another token called Greed 2 after greed collapsed. pumping up that, it hit $28 million, then crashed if he sold everything. Then he just, yeah, he then taunted his followers again. He then went down to Twitter spaces, said that this whole thing was a lesson to his followers called meme coins to be just pure extractions. And he said that the people who are trading these are lazy fucks who don't want to get real jobs. So no crying at the casino, basically.

No crying at the casino. No crying at the casino. Again, this is just Findom. As we talk, this is even more explicitly. fin-dom than like the last week's. I've seen actually that meme is now kind of penetrated to crypto-twinter, this fin-dom meme of being a... Thank you for your

word choice there. Hasid really, really, really, really. I wasn't going to point that out. Yeah, yeah. No, it's... Look, I mean, I've been tweeting about this over the last week, is that like, I do think the meme coin cycle is cooked now. And I think it really

comes down to this thing that I was saying on the show, like, I think nine months ago, where I was basically saying, look, this is a casino, where every single slot machine is owned by a different person. And that's not sustainable. It's like every single slot machine owner will do the best they can to extract you as much as possible until you move on to the next one because it's a one-shot game.

Like if you're actually in a casino, the casino owner wants you to come back. They want to treat you well because they know that they have to earn your business, they have to earn your trust. But if you're gambling with somebody on the street corner and they'll know they're never going to see you again. You're never getting free drinks in the meme coin casino.

There's just no free drinks. It's even worse. That's right. No, no, you get the drink. The drinks are spiked. The drinks are spiked. Maybe they're spiked or it's like they get, you kind of get tortured as you're playing the game. You know, it's like, I mean, what is what is Portnoy doing?

What is Portnoy doing? Right. He's insulting his victims. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what I mean. But like, it's like the opposite of getting a free drink. It's like getting the drink, the glass thrown at your face. Yeah.

Yeah. Somebody needs to create an AI. rendition of this for for turn's sake. I do think I don't I don't need any more of this. I do think someone's going to make a fin dom AI that is incredibly successful. I look forward to that. All right. Robert is telling you his investment what what investments he's looking for.

You have to message him only. Okay. If you're building a fin dom AI, please message me. Perfect. Okay. So I look guys, I feel really exhausted by just all this shitty news. I'm also surprised at how well crypto's held up, despite all of this.

I think maybe it is, like you said, Turun, just people are tired of buying these shitty, do nothing meme coins. And so now they're rotating into real stuff. And then maybe that's why crypto's had something of a bid over the last week. There's been a bit of a macro dump today. And I think that's also affecting crypto. But at least there has been one halo of good news, which has come on the regulatory front. So we've been talking again and again going into this year about how

this is going to be the year of this regulatory reversal for crypto, we're finally seeing that. So the big news that just came out this morning was that the SEC is dropping their lawsuit against Coinbase. So there's still a 90-be rubber stamp. This is not completely, completely formal. But Coinbase announced it. I think we did basically all but confirmed. This, of course, is a huge signal that everything that we wanted as an industry is coming to bear.

So the Coinbase was getting sued by the SEC for being an unregistered securities broker, for unregistered exchange and basically facilitating unregistered securities transactions, that is now all getting reversed, right? And so we're likely to see many of these other cases that have been brought by the SEC to be completely dropped. People are wondering, oh, is it going to be, maybe they're going to lower the surface area of the cases, maybe they're going to do settlements, but no, completely dropping the case is as bullish of a signal as you can give to the market, that the SEC is going to get out of the way and let good actors thrive and work with them to create a positive environment for digital assets. So this is great to see from the SEC. We've also seen

the nomination of Brian Quintenz to be the CFTC, which of course is likely to be the dominant regulator for crypto going forward. Quintenz was the head of crypto policy at A6 and Z crypto. So, you know, he was one of the foremost people who was on the side of pushing back against the administrative state during the time of the, you know, crypto inquisition that we saw over the last four years. So from the regulatory front, it's an awesome day. And again, it's sort of a sign of things to come. So I wanted to at least end on a positive note and get your guys' reactions from what we're seeing here for, you know, the light coming through the clouds in the future of crypto here. Well, I'll just add two more things onto the pile of good regulatory backdrop here

from the SEC side. So one is that they've rebamped the crypto unit that was the one waging war against good actors as opposed to spending their time and energy pursuing fraud. And they revamped it into a basically a digital fraud unit, which will include people doing bad things within crypto, but also any other sort of like online activities. But it seems like within the crypto focus, the focus is going back to fraud, which is, you know, what everybody had been hoping for over the last four years is get the bad guys so that the good guys can flourish. And it's really interesting. to see that that's sort of like the mindset from within the enforcement side of the SEC. And, you know, the second is just a couple hours ago.

Commissioner Perce released a new statement, which, you know, broadly outlines all the things that they want to see change. And it's a real sort of like policy working document for the industry itself to work with the crypto policy team to enable all sorts of things that should be existing. So it goes into broker-dealer rules. It goes into custody rules. It goes to the trading rules. It goes into safe harbor rules, which have been discussed a long time ago.

It goes into tokenization. It goes into crypto lending. It grows into pretty much every possible area. And they're saying, come in and talk to us. We want to develop good policy alongside the industry. And so, you know, that's also like an incredibly nice breath of fresh air. and it shows that the rubber is hitting the road in a productive way, as opposed to just being talked from a couple weeks ago.

Like, oh, it's going to change. It is changing. And so, you know, hopefully against this backdrop, you know, we see good policy getting created. We see the good actors like Coinbase no longer being on the receiving end of an unnecessary and vindictive attack campaign. And hopefully there's more. a focus on stopping the bad guys again, which I think one of the reasons why we're in this

meme coin mess in the first place is that under the Gensler regime, they let bad actors basically operate in the open because they spent all of their time and budget and mind share on building regulation by enforcement through case law against the biggest players they could. And so, you know, obviously the best players in the issues as opposed to the Haydens of the world. Bad hate it, not good hit it. Bad hit, bad hated, bad hitting. I mean, I will say it was funny looking at good Hayden, meaning Unswap Hayden's tweets, because normally he gets a ton of engagement, but he was getting ratioed on every single tweet

because of like how crazy the mean coin thing was. I think people might have been confused about who was the Hayden involved. It was like it was very palpable that like a lot of people who entered the cycle after 2021 don't know who Hayden Adams is. That's true. All the Salon. Everyone who uses Phantom would never have a reason to know what Uniswap is, right? All the Uniswap's deploying on Solana, I believe. Are they?

You've just been a chalk full of rumors today that. I feel like I read this somewhere. Is that true? That sounds like this information. I don't think so. I don't think. Let me go on to Twitter. This is about the same person who told you the bi-bit person was bridging to Solana. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, what's going on, Robert? What's going on, Robert? I don't know. Maybe my, like, newsfeed on X.com, the everything app has been, like, poisoned by misinformation people. Because, like, my four-year-old is taking over your feed. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. So maybe EurSwap's not going to Salana. Maybe it was people saying that. Yeah, I could never imagine that, to be honest, if that happened. I think my worldview. So I'll- I apologize for misinformation if I've created any. Uniswap is not going to Solana.

But I, um, I guess, I will give two anecdotal things, which is I went to a Salana developer conference this week. And then I also am going to Ethereum Developer Conference next week. Actually, we'll have a live show there so we can give a vibes update when we're all there. But the Salana developer event was like, I would say like it completely packed and there wasn't like people were not really talking about the meme coin side. So like I feel like it does, there is this thing about eco-ecoyside. that are resilient where like there's like the people who are working on building infrastructure and apps who are just completely oblivious to the market side of stuff.

And I think any successful ecosystem has to have like a pretty significant portion of those people. And I think like, yeah, the vibes did not seem like that negative from this whole thing, which I think is like generally good for him in that standpoint. Yeah. I mean, it does feel like it's too early for there to be any real vibe shift. on the infrastructure side. Like, you haven't really seen outflows from Solana.

You haven't really seen Dex volumes meaningfully diverged between Ethereum and Solana. Like, they've kind of moved down together, but I think it's mostly a function of volatility. Obviously, today, very different story, given that, you know, this attacker is, like, moving, you know, is clipping like $40 million a pop of state to Ethan into Eth. So I guess Ethereum maybe did good volume today, unfortunately. Tom, give us the people are hurting. What's your message of hope? I didn't have a message of hope ready.

I was going to say that the timing on all this news is also very funny. The Coinbase news came out of like 8 a.m. Eastern, marked to rallying. People were very like, jubilant and are like, oh, great, this is what we're looking for. And then like two hours later, like the bibit hack happens and it's just reinforces. This is opposite of hope. Give me hope. There's never a hope. There's never hope.

Give me hope. Well, I think I'm pretty bearish on this easy coin happening or getting any traction. So, you know, maybe we, you know, the last celeb coin has actually turned off the lights. And we can move on to talk about something else. No, Easy's definitely going to launch a coin because he sees it as a path to easy money. I know it's going to happen. Has to. I do think it launches.

It also certainly launches. The question is, like, how badly does it stumble? Totally. If investors have already bought it behind closed doors, it's happening. Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe it's more like what is the sound of the last subcoin launching? And it's like no one buying it. And I think that's maybe more what I'm thinking of is.

I think overall just sentiment is soured so much that maybe this will deter, you know, everyone else. So if Yeezy is the last celeb coin, I can live with that. Yeah. True, you were going to go on the LA Vap Kabaal show. I assume that did not happen. I didn't happen. Yeah, they're gone.

LA Vap Kabaab. So actually, we should reiterate. The L.A. Vave Kabil, apparently was like also connected to the Kelsior Ventures world ecosystem in some way. I don't exactly understand how, but they were like affiliated slash connected, slash they were buying the token or tweeting about it or something, something weird. All I have to say is my favorite thing about the episode where I went and said like, okay, Solana's the Gen Z chain and all the eth chains are millennial and older,

is that after that episode, a ton of people were like, I'd never heard of this LA Vap Kibal thing. And then like three days later, they were like, wow, you guys really top ticked the L.A. Vap Kibal because like you mentioned it. Yes, we did. Holy shit. Listen, once the chopping block learns about something, it's no longer part of like the cool kids club. It's already over.

That's right. Yeah, we are the talking about. It's no longer in the show for emerging trends, unfortunately. No, all of us, all of us are boomers. We are explaining things already in the rearview mirror to the other boomers. That's our show. But it's funny because like when I first heard about it, I was like, oh, that's a funny name. They're calling this as a cabal.

How ironic. It turns out like they actually were the L.A. cabal. They actually were the meme coin cabal. and now the whole it's not cool anymore to call yourself a cabal even it's too close to home. The bad Hayden is also from L.A., right? So it's like,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like everyone's from L.A., which is like funny. That's right. I never think of anything in crypto that's good from L.A., and this is only reinforcing my stereotype. All right, well,

I'm hoping we don't have a lot of L.A. listeners who are going to drop the show after this. All right, well, hopefully by next week, things calm down. And we're really hoping that you guys do. not buy the easy meme coin we'll check back in to see if anyone bought it but don't buy it please please please please don't put just whatever you do please don't buy that coin

until then see you all next week stay safe everybody