Unchained - The Chopping Block: LA Vape Cabal, Market Meltdown, & SEC’s Crypto Pivot - Ep. 779

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. In this episode, we dissect the chaos triggered by Trump’s trade war, which sent Ethereum and alts into freefall while Bitcoin held strong. Why are alts struggling, and is this just a flight to quality—or something deeper? We also dive into the LA Vape Cabal phenomenon and its bizarre influence on memecoin culture, debate whether the SEC’s new leadership is truly a game-changer for crypto, and analyze Binance’s latest scandal. Plus, is the memecoin cycle really over, or is this just another phase in crypto’s endless casino? Show highlights 🔹 Trump’s Trade War Wrecks Crypto – Ethereum and alts nosedive as Trump’s surprise tariffs shake markets. Is this just macro panic or a deeper shift in investor sentiment? 🔹 Biggest Liquidation Day Ever? – Crypto saw its largest mass liquidation in history, with Bybit’s CEO estimating real losses closer to $8-10 billion—more than the FTX collapse. 🔹 LA Vape Cabal & Memecoin Mania – A bizarre Twitch-fueled trading cult is shaping the memecoin meta. Is this the future of crypto speculation, or just another fleeting grift? 🔹 The Great Altcoin Capitulation – Alts are bleeding while Bitcoin holds strong. Has the market finally given up on everything that isn't BTC? 🔹 Hester Peirce’s Crypto Reset – The SEC’s new approach could rewrite the rules for token issuers. Will the industry finally get the regulatory clarity it’s been begging for? 🔹 Binance Under Fire (Again) – CZ’s former empire faces backlash over insider listings, alleged bribes, and a wave of vaporware projects that tanked after launch. 🔹 Pump.fun = The New NFT Casino? – Memecoin speculation is bigger than 2021’s NFT boom. But is it sustainable, or is the exit liquidity running dry? 🔹 The Memecoin Endgame? – Some claim the bubble has burst, but if history tells us anything, a new wave of degens will always find a way to keep the casino open. 🔹 Bitcoin’s Macro Dominance – BTC’s macro story is unstoppable, with talk of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund investing in Bitcoin. Will the market ever rotate back to alts? 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 Links Hester Peirce’s Blog Post – “The Journey Begins”: https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/peirce-journey-begins-020425  David Sacks' Plan for Digital Assets Press Conference: https://youtu.be/LqTsyTuLSSI  Timestamps  00:00 Intro 01:08 Market Turmoil and Trade Wars 07:10 Bitcoin's Dominance & Altcoin Struggles 10:33 Memecoins & Market Sentiment 25:05 Cultural Phenomena in Crypto 33:54 The L.A. Vape Cabal 40:45 Millennials and Memecoins 44:51 Binance & the Chinese Community 50:45 Regulatory Developments in Crypto Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, all I'll have to say is Binance was just the LA Vap Kabaal 10 years earlier. That's your take? I mean, it's like, it is funny. There's a lot of rhyming here. I'd love that, I'd love that the new analogy is analogizing things to the L.A. Vap Kavol. Not a dividend.

It's a tale of two Kwan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. Dalek.Eat is the ultimate defy protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Chauvin'clock. 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 us, first you got Tom, the defy maven and master of memes. Hello, everyone. Next, we've got Robert, the Cryptoconisour, and Tsar of Super State. Let's do it live.

And we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yeah. And finally, I'm going to see you, head-hide man at Dragonfly. 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 chopping blocks at XYZ for more disclosures.

So if you cannot tell from my energy levels, I think all of us are uniquely exhausted. It has been an absolutely harrowing week. I think multiple of us are running on just a few hours of sleep. Obviously, all eyes this week have been on the trade war that Trump has started against America's closest allies. And then, of course, now we have a trade war being started with China. Trade war with the Allies is on pause at least for 30 days. But crypto markets absolutely tanked over the tariffs.

Kind of weird because you would think like, okay, maybe it's going to be steel or something else that's going to react to tariffs. But no, it turned out that Ethereum reacted absolutely horrendously to tariffs on steel. And Ethereum ended up crashing almost to $2.5,000, which up from $2.1. It was sitting around. Sorry, you're right, absolutely. At the bottom, it went all the way down to 2.1 in a really crazy wick. And EF was down over 20% during the day.

BTC went all the way down to about 91K at the bottom. And you had the single largest day of crypto liquidations in history. Now, there's some dispute over exactly how many liquidations happened. So Ben, the CEO of Bybit, estimated that the real number of liquidations, it was reported around $2.2 billion, which is more than the COVID crash, more than the FTX collapse, but Ben estimated the real number of liquidations was probably closer to $8 to $10 billion because of the fact that the exchanges don't actually publish full data on liquidations.

They only push on a one-minute granularity, which is probably not enough given how many liquidations were happening at any given time. So absolute craziness. And some people were speculating that the reason why this was happening, of course, China and the broader Asia market was on break because of Chinese New Year or the lunar New Year. And the U.S., of course, closed because it was the weekend. There was really nothing else that you could trade. There was no liquidity for anything.

Every other market was closed, except for, you know, we often are very proud of the fact that our markets are 24-7, 365, but this is one of the downsides, is that when nobody can panic and sell anything, they can sell and panic crypto. So that seems to be our unique role now. One thing I will say is like, Joe Wisenthal from Bloomberg always comments on crypto's number one use case. is being the futures market over the weekend. And no weekend in other recent memory has just been more true. I mean, this was a wild weekend. Yeah, it was, it's, it's, it's, I will say, again, so I'm, I'm in Asia right now. Being in Asia sucks when the U.S. is driving all the news cycle. Because it certain times in crypto, it's like, okay, Asia and the U.S. like kind of hand control back and forth of the market, that is not, that is over. That is not happening anymore. U.S. is dominating

everything. So it basically just means like I wake up and the world is totally changed. I go to sleep. Markets are just puking and reacting like crazy. And it's it's very, very, just disorienting, I think, to having that deep and living experience. So thoughts on what's going on in the market. Do you think, one, do you expect this to be short-lived? Are we in a new regime now? Are we just are we just going to be subject to tariffs? And is that how crypto market is going to trade? How are you guys trying to comprehend this? And does this change how you think about the trajectory of crypto under Trump's presidency? Well, I don't think the trajectory for crypto under the Trump administration is significantly different, right? Today, there was a press conference held by David

Sachs, which stated that it's full steam ahead for crypto. We had a major policy announcement by Hester Perce at the SEC, talking about the road ahead for the SEC as a regulator of crypto. You know, the overall macro landscape for crypto has not changed from last week to this week. The only thing that has changed is the introduction of tariffs in an unexpected time, which led to a lot of speculation and liquidation cascades and fear in a very condensed amount of time. But, you know, to walk through the timeline of events, I mean, major tariffs against our two closest neighbors were announced. They were punitive, large tariffs. The market freaked out.

The price of goods is going to go up in the U.S., you know, it's going to be inflationary, you know, oh, my God, they're going to have to raise rates or they can't cut rates. Like, this is a, you know, people are speculating on like macro implications, you know, like mad. I mean, like some of the things I saw in my check groups that I'm a member of were just wild, people forecasting, you know, just rates and like inflation being like crazed about what is the implication if we start taxing our partners at 25 or 50%. But I think it quickly came out that these are just a negotiating tool in the Trump administration's arsenal.

You know, I don't think their intent was, you know, to necessarily implement and levy tariffs. I think their intent was to demonstrate to our neighbors and all of our allies around the world and all of our enemies around the world, that the U.S. is going to use all of the tools at its disposal to renegotiate a lot of contracts in terms that they find disadvantageous. And this crisis quickly abated when, you know, just, you know, the morning after, you know, Mexico and Canada said, all right, we've had calls with Trump, you know, we agree that we need to secure our borders and all of these, you know, items that were being. alluded to as the cause of the tariffs, Canada and Mexico were immediately responsive to.

And the crisis ended and it was like, okay, well, maybe there's tariffs in the future, but we're all friends again. And it demonstrated these tariffs were an incredibly effective negotiating tool, right? And as these resolutions started happening, I mean, crypto markets rebounded incredibly quickly. You know, Bitcoin went all the way back to like almost 103. You know, the world was back to normal. So that's true. What's interesting is that ALTS really have not recovered, right?

So ALTS just sold off massively on the imposition of tariffs. And they're still, they're still bleeding. Like, also just now incredibly weak. And it's difficult. I mean, so if you saw the NASDAQ, NASDAQ was down, I think, two, on the, two points, on the day that people were like, oh, the tariffs are here. And like, it's happening and there doesn't seem to be a recourse. when the tariffs got pulled back on Canada and Mexico,

NASDAQ recovered most of the losses. Crypto recovered, I think, also recovered maybe like 50% of the losses. And so it seems like it's more than just that. It feels like there's a just real weakness in crypto sentiment. And I see it on Twitter. I see it like just everywhere, just kind of the vibes of crypto have really seemingly capitulated outside of Bitcoin. And Bitcoin now, of course, just feels like,

like a much bigger macro story than it is for like what we do on this show, which is more about tech crypto. It feels like tech crypto has just completely capitulated. Well, I don't know if tech crypto has capitulated. I think like a lot of the capitulation was in like the meme coin sector, you know, like people who are long fart coin were like in a panic. You know, it's like the things that were the least. I mean, people who are long, eth were in a panic also. Totally. I mean, to be there was a lot of page one that was getting hurt besides farkoin yeah absolutely but you know when you look at the things that defy i was getting crushed like almost i know but the majors have bounced back you know ether has recovered a lot of the lost ground not really not that much yeah but

i was 2100 to 2800 you know and it's not to add much worse than where we started at like 3 000 is i mean just remember bitcoin eth you know bitcoin was at like 103 you know bitcoin was at like 103 when ETH was at almost 4K. And every time Bitcoin retests, ETH ends up lower and lower and lower and lower. Until now, it's like, oh, no, ETH has made it all back. And then like, ETH is sitting at 2,500. And we're like, oh, no, no, it's fine.

Heath is fine. So it does feel like something is definitely changing in the market about the general sentiment towards alts. Yeah, I agree. It feels like most of the capital is rotating into Bitcoin, right? And that's just when it feels. feels like, I'm sure there's a lot of data on this that's held at exchanges, that's held, you know, in a million places. But like, that's just the vibe right now that, you know,

the worst assets are being sort of tossed aside and people are rotating in the Bitcoin because the macro story of Bitcoin is incredible, right? The macro story of Bitcoin is, you know, there's press conferences today announcing, you know, that there might be a sovereign wealth fund of the U.S. and it might invest in Bitcoin. And that might be the path that we used to, you adopted as a significant asset. I mean, like, the fact that these are the conversations means nobody wants to rotate out of Bitcoin. They want to rotate out of, you know, the latest memes that were made up yesterday. Yeah. Tom, what's your take on the general market vibe? Yeah, I think there is general bit of malaise. And when you have these big, oh, I wipes, when you have

sort of uncertainty, I think that kind of amplifies it. This wasn't, you know, a pure sort of isolated, unexpected or it wasn't unexpected selloff in the sense of if you look at like the polymarket predictions also for tariffs, it's just whipsawing all over the place. So it wasn't just your standard liquidation cascade. It's just like this general sort of pit in people's stomach. And you mentioned like, you know, equities recovering, but really it's also still like mag seven concentration, right? Like that, the concentration in those stocks can use to go up. And so it's really just this kind of like flight to quality to Roberts point. In this case, it's Bitcoin and next. It's Mag 7, but like it's when there is a general uncertainty and people are not expecting

these tariffs, I think that sort of pushes down people's risk tolerance. So do we think this is the new normal? Do we think like this only clears up once the macro picture stabilizes? Or like, how are we interpreting this given that I thought the whole story of this administration was like, okay, yeah, obviously it's good for Bitcoin, but, you know, we've got the new SEC, like tokens are okay again, like everything. All the pressure that was making it difficult for token. and entrepreneurs to build stuff.

That's all like that gigantic exhaust valve just released. And yet, you know, everything is down from a month ago. Melania killed the market. Melania killed the market. Melania killed the market. It really has been, alts down only has been like the second, the second Trump coin hitting the tower was the end of the alt, all season. I mean, yeah, just to go to your point, though, like you're assuming that there's an

efficient market hypothesis that's effective across all crypto assets that is based on am I assuming or why am I assuming fundamentals well to say that like you know why are they going down like the tailwinds are incredible like the market in the aggregate is so market driven right and like random and sticastic and unexplainable in so many ways that yes there's an incredible tailwind right now that should be there from you know the policy. side. And that has not, aside from, you know, almost everything rallying after the election, you know, almost everything's up from the election. Either it's not, right? But like everything else is, for the most part. You know, we have seen it, you know, Bitcoin's up to 100K. Salon is at 215 or something.

You know, it's like most of this stuff. It's closer to 200 now. Okay, closer to 200 now. But it's, again, it's above 200, which is like a very high number for the asset over the last year. It's pretty much the top, right? So I don't know. Like, I think some of that tailwind has played out mostly since the election and speculation. To be clear, even Solana, Solana hit 200 in like March last year, didn't it? All right, Tom, pull up a chart. Yeah. To be clear, like, even Solano, which I agree, has been relatively strong. Salana doesn't, hasn't had amazing price action since the election. It's really just Bitcoin at this point. Like, Solana, I mean, Salana went all the way up to like 285. Salana had Trump.

That's the difference. The theorem had... Yeah, exactly. That's when Solana went up to like 285 was on the back of the Trump launch. But it's so down in BTC terms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Almost everything is down in BTC terms.

Yeah, yeah. So, okay, I mean, look, I think we all agree on the picture, which is that, okay, also bleeding. I guess my, like the way that I look at this picture, so I think, you know, Tommy probably put it best in terms of this flight to quality thing. It's happening all across the board,

and it's maybe not easy to perceive that if you're just looking at aggregates. So whether you're looking at aggregates in the NASDAQ or whether you're looking at aggregates within crypto, like crypto aggregate market cap actually looks okay. Any given day, you go look at, you know, how much is crypto market cap down? And it says like, oh, it's down 1%. And it's like, you know, altered down like 15 or something, right? And that's in large part because like, oh, Bitcoin is pretty stable and Bitcoin is just so much of the market cap now because it's just so big that, yeah, in absolute terms,

the answer is that people are just rolling into Bitcoin. And maybe I, you know, my thought is that once the macro story stabilized and probably also once we get a strategic Bitcoin Reserve, I think you could see this, this vibe shift go in the other direction and go towards more risk taking and go towards more tech crypto. Because I think on some level, like, that's the big thing the market is anticipating is strategic Bitcoin Reserve is the big news story that everybody is, is, is. is waiting for on Bated Breath and like every conference, every announcement from either Trump or from David Sachs

is kind of waiting for clarity on this big thing. Once we get that, then it's kind of like, okay, well, now it's just, there's no other real Big Bang event that you're waiting for. I will say an interesting theory that I have observed people like gathering steam

around. I'm not saying I sort of advocate or don't advocate it, but 2017, 2020, 2021 versus now, there just weren't 35 million alts you could enter into. Whereas now there's just like a sheer insane number of tokens. I totally disagree with this story. You don't like, you don't like these. There's always been on limited pages of all coins.

It's always been true. It's never not been true. I'm just saying that like now there's enough alternatives, even a high market cap to invest in. that's like, you're not going to see like the single name go crazy, unless it's like the Salana Trump type of thing, that there's just like, there's too many, you know, above billion market cap coins now that like people are kind of, you know, in some ways that's, that's part of the reason why there's no.

Yeah. So I've heard this theory many times. I think many, many people claim that this is the reason why Alters so weak is that there's just too many of them. I think this is just a bad theory, right? Really what this theory, if this is correct, what it should predict, is that there is basically a bunch of stuff on page one of coin mark cap that does well and then like page two and beyond us terribly. Right. That's where you should see the dispersion is if you're big enough, okay, you're going to get a rotation into you, but like anything that's past page two, page three just does terribly. And you don't see that. What you see is just Bitcoin and then all the alt are doing terribly together, whereas in previous cycles, you saw everything moving up and down together. but this idea that like, oh, there's too many tokens now, there's always been too many tokens.

I don't remember a time that I've been in crypto and they didn't feel like there was too many tokens. And like this is just not a problem that markets have, you know, like stock market doesn't have this problem of, oh, there's too many stocks. And so only the good ones are getting all the business. Like that there's just such a terrible theory of how markets work. I think one one reason that I personally am willing to humor it is like I feel like the net new on-chain users of crypto came into me. Meme coins where there is a very fast rotation. That is a better theory. That is a better theory.

A very fast rotation, very fast rotation out of, no one stays in anything. Totally, totally. So people are claiming, people, many of who are claiming that pumped out fund, there's this chart that's going around of like, oh, the moment that pumped out fund came in, alts have started doing really, really poorly, which normally in a market that ends up, where Bitcoin ends up doing well, alts end up following after some period of time, right? So, you know, we have this Bitcoin season and then this old season. It seems like this cycle, there's been really no alt season except for shortly after the Bitcoin

ETF launched last year. There was a bit of an alt rally and then it died fairly quickly. And the claim that many people are making is that this is because of pumped up fund. Now, I think this is a more plausible theory that is at least a, okay, this is new. This wasn't happening in a previous cycle. And the scale of pumped up fund or the scale of the meme coin complex is obviously much bigger than the speculative kind of, you know, games that people were playing in previous cycle. So obviously in 2021, there was the NFT mania.

But the NFT mania, in absolute terms, was way smaller than the meme coin complexes, you know, in terms of the total amount of capital and also the total amount of earnings that was being sucked out of the market. If you look at how much money pumped out fun is making, how much money Photon is making, if you just look at the entire meme coin supply chain, there's a lot of just profits that are being pulled out of the system. Yeah, but in the supply chain, right? So, like, this is one of the few areas where I think the picks and shovels are better

than the rest of the investable asset class because, you know, to both of your points, there's going to be an infinitely long list of tradable assets, you know, 100 years. It'll be infinitely long, right? And all of the infrastructure required to trade an infinitely long list of assets will accrue a lot of value, whereas the assets themselves are fundamentally, I'll call it random. What do you mean the assets themselves are random? Well, like how they accrue value. I mean, like if you have like an infinitely long list of assets, like some will be valuable,

they'll all trade, they'll all come out, they'll all be vehicles for speculation. But like in terms of the long term amount of value creation that occurs, you know, I don't think there's going to be, you know, a median or a mean per asset that's like extremely high. Sure, just because there's so many of them. Yeah. Right. And therefore the picks and the shovels and the infrastructure is valuable. Right.

Right. I mean, so I mean, Solana is part of that infrastructure, right? 100%. All of the L1 is. Yeah, totally agree. That's right. That's right. Aerodrome, you know, all these things have been a lot of their income is also from the

meme coin complex. So many people have been claiming that I was responding to this tweet that I think Ignis, the guy with the big defyne newsletter, he was claiming that, or he wrote some wrote some tweet to doing a post-mortem on meme coins and pumped out fun. I'm just like, how is there a post-mortem when it's still going up? Yeah, yeah.

That's what my reaction is that people seem to be now all of a sudden talking as the meta is over. No, no, no, no, no. People who have never bridged off of EVM chains are talking like this, right? Like, there's a very clear gap between, like, Ignis, if you read a lot, there's a clear, like, not understanding the Salana ecosystem.

which is like very different. It like looks qualitatively different than Ethereum. So I feel like a lot of people are just like... Sure, but I've been seeing a lot of this idea that like meme coins are past their prime. They're on the way out. All the meme coins are down bad. Like, you know, anything that's... People don't go to Defylauma and sort by revenue, daily revenue.

That's what that tells me. Because like if you do that, you will see. So that I agree with. That I agree with that. I posted a chart showing the revenue of Pumpd. And it's still making insane amounts of money. It does not look like it's over. But I think people's claim.

is that the sense that you can make money from trading meme coins is rapidly dying. And that I can believe. That I can believe is that sentiment on a casino can turn really quickly when all of a sudden, like the slot machines, the pull doesn't feel like it works anymore. Tom, I see you noddy. What's your thoughts? Yeah, there was a, totally in the launch today while you were sleeping. Enron.

I know, you've probably seen these videos. Two thumbs down. Wait, actually. Nuclear personal endron? No, it's fake. No, no, okay. There is no nuclear egg. Okay, okay.

Fake Enron. Yeah, it's fake Edron. This guy brought the, I feel like it's so manufactured and fake. This guy bought the, you know, trademark, bought the domain, made these like kind of hype prank videos that he thought would be funny. I don't think anyone really thought they were that funny. And then they like launched this token. It's like, you know, he's like this clown in the corner of the room trying to make everyone

pay attention. Everyone's like, cool, bro. but they launched the meme coin and you know got snipped immediately just like instantly ran up to like 500 mil and it's kind of slowly been bleeding out but it kind of goes back to you know almost like the meme coin complex is also getting professionalized where it's there's this one age where it's true you know hey it's it's it's a marketplace of ideas marketplace of memes someone can launch a meme maybe it does well and you know takes off and people really have a community around it and instead it's like no this whole thing is very organized, manufactured, and that's part of the reason why.

Maybe there's also just, I think, tiredness around meme coins. But I think, you know, the arguments around, you know, something like pumping, extractive, I think you could also make that argument around centralized exchanges, right? Like, they sort of slowly withdraw heat from the system. And yet, I think, you know, people don't usually make those same critiques other than maybe, like, you know, a listing fee or something like that. I think they also do, obviously, reinvest a little bit back in the, ecosystem if you think about sort of, you know, incubations or investments, but not really on the same

level. All of this reminds me of the Warren Buffett quote, which is talking about stock markets, but it's also talking about crypto and every other asset class in the world. In that, in the short term markets are a popularity contest and in the long term, they're a weighing mechanism. And in crypto, I think it's like incredibly acute that it is a popularity contest. It's like people are literally speculating on things based on how cute the icon is and, you know, how fresh the meme is. And it's purely based on like memetic social consensus about like what should be popular in this like small millisecond of time.

And it's not being waged based on the underlying value. But in the long term it will be. In the long term it is. You see this with Bitcoin, right? Like you see this with Bitcoin dominating everything else and trouncing through and like continuing to have major capital. flows because that's what people truly value on a long time horizon. And so there's just like this extreme barbell that's occurring between, you know, the ultra short termism and the like the ultra long termism.

I want to maybe take a slightly different view of them. Like you guys are talking about this as if the users who are participating in meme coins only want to make money. Yes, they do. There is there. Okay. All right. What am I about to hear?

I want to hear the counter. I think there's a cultural cachet thing to being the first one to launch some meme coin like this. Have you ever watched any of streams? I destroyed a couple neurons watching this LA vape cabal shit, maybe more than a couple. I heard about it. And there's clearly this thing when you read the Twitch stream that people are getting like entertainment out of like trying to be the first one to make the meme coin for something. It's almost like, you know, the one that most failed. and continuing to fail investments in crypto

has been like blockchain gaming because it's able to like blow up but then people stop using it like gets too financialized and the gameplay goes away. I feel like there's a world in which meme coins like they start with the financialization and they add a little bit of gaming from like these streams. If you like watch these streams,

that is very different from investing. Like there's a lot of stuff that's like I'm buying this meme coin because like this cabal told me and I want to feel like I'm in a part of it. It's like, it's very, it's like a weird subculture where I don't think people, I think people are fine losing, not everyone, obviously, but there's definitely people who are fine just like losing money just to be like, I got the street credit of being first. That's definitely true.

There's people who are fine losing money just following their favorite KOL or doing some trend and whatever. Those people are the minority, right? Those people always exist and they will always get fleeced by whatever KOL they're following. That is, that does not explain this like millions of people. people trading in the number of assets increasing quickly there's like there is kind of this weird thing where like there's some other value of like I was the first to this asset for 10 seconds you know which is like very different than than like most other parts of the token economy and I think like

that there's some different utility to that than just like pure did I make money on this coin which I don't know how to explain it but like you you watch these streams and you're like these guys are just getting their face ripped off and they're laughing about it and being happy in the live stream comments because they still have money yeah like look you go to a casino and you watch drunk guys playing blackjack it's like okay yeah like there's there's there's that's also happening in casinos yeah they're hooting and hollering you know only as long as you still have a bank roll are you having fun in the casino right eventually you get kicked out and you're like okay no more free drinks like go fuck off yeah i've never been kicked out of a casino i'm sure you have his seed

No, I've never been kicked out of casino. Well, I think your casino analogy is missing one thing in that it's not like there's new slot, the rate of new slot machines coming into the casino is the same as the rate of new participants. Like there's something weird about the fact that the number of possible games is growing with the number of users, right? Isn't it the same game, it's different poles? That's true.

That's true. It's like skins, right? Like you go, you walk to the next law machine and you're like, oh, this one is Robin Hood themed. And this one is based on, you know, you can add your own slot machines to the casino, which is like a very different. There is some, there's something weird about that. I mean, it's skins for the same game that you're playing over. Guys, guys, I have a great idea.

We should back a company that combines actual real life casinos and meme coins for like the slot machine. You can make your own. This LA Vap Kabaal streamcoining stuff is like not that far from like that. That's what I would say. What are you talking about? What is LA Vap Kbalt launching meme coins? What are the new coins of? Some random shit.

So like today they were with this podcaster who I guess is like help Trump win the Gen Z vote or something. I don't know. Aiden Ross or whatever. And they were like literally launching coins and trading them on stream and you could like, maybe this is yesterday. And you could just like read the thread and like people were definitely buying things. were like, I'm losing money. I'm going to lose money on this,

but I'm buying it because like the cabal is telling me. I was like, I mean, there's like a level of like, okay, people are actually doing this for some other utility that's not just like make money on the coin, which I don't understand,

but also it's because I'm old compared to the people doing this. I don't think it's because you're old. To be clear, I don't think it's because you're old. I think most people do not understand what is going on in LA vape coin Twitch streams. I like if Cabal, Just eight L.A. Vibqqqqabal.

L.A. Vibqqqal. Sorry. Yeah. Turun is our culture whisperer. Okay. No, no. I just, I look, I know I'm old. I know I'm a millennial and I know that like there's clearly some gap in understanding. Yeah. Tauru's a cultural ambassador to Gen Z vape kids.

Yes. We're in bad shape. I just like I have been trying to understand like what. Because like clearly there's a social element to the launching of the coins where it's like, oh, I have to stream myself or like, you, you know, like do a TikTok or whatever. It's like, which is very different than other coins, I feel like. It's like and that thing. But this also happened in the NFT boom, right? Is that there was like this, there's this bigger culture that formed around NFTs that was not just, okay, yeah, there's the

NFT traders who just, they don't care. All they don't want to do is make money. But there was, you know, the GMs and the wagmies and the, okay, you put your thing on and you like become really tribal about your NFT collection. There's always these accoutrements, these cultural accoutrements that form around any mania that's this big. But I think you cannot look at that and say, okay, that's the causal backbone of what's going on here. The causal backbone is that people are making money. And if they start losing money and they like know that they're losing money,

because that's the thing. We've known for a long time that the average pumped up fund user loses money. Right? I think it's something like I've seen the stat floating around for many, many months, even in the middle of the meme coin boom that like 60% of traders lost money and only, what is it, like 3% of traders have ever, made more than $1,000, right? So, like, most people are not winning in the casino.

And, like, people, yeah, that's also true of casinos. It's just math. But, like, for most people, it doesn't, that's not their lived experience yet, right? By the end of the NFT cycle, everyone's lived experiences, I cannot make money doing this. Like, everyone is losing money buying NFTs. And once that's your lived experience of meme coins, like, it just, your brain very quickly picks up on the pattern, you know, like, even before you are. getting charts and people are explaining to you like, no, no, no, the EV of beampoints is very low.

Like, your hindbrain just knows how to adjust the probabilities change. Yeah, I mean, I like to look back at the ICO wave of 2017, right? It's like everybody was making money in ICOs. And so the quantity of ICOs increased exponentially. When the meta shifted and there was not enough buyers for all of the sellers, ICOs basically immediately died out. Same thing happened. with NFTs. Same thing happens every cycle. It all happen with meme coins in the same way, right? When there's more sellers than buyers, like structurally, it's over. I don't, I'm not trying to disagree with all the stuff you're saying is like econ 101 for rational agents. But the people involved in this are not rational agents. Like that's, that's what I get from like going to

these street. But there's always a set of non-rational agents. I think every cycle there's a set of non-rational agents, but they're not driving. It feels higher than an FTAs. There's no, Because they're in a Twitch stream. I mean, it's also just like everyone is talking about, oh, like, they're literally talking about how it is a pump and dump in the comments. And they're all trying to be like. There's always going to be idiots who are. I just, I just think it's like it's at a certain point,

NFT who are intentionally buying pump and dumps and are doing it for the lulls. Like these people will soon be parted with their money. Right. Like there's just a raw kind of. law of the jungle that like these people will run out of money. I don't disagree. It just feels like there's the percentage qualitatively when you go to these streams feels much. NFTs were like there was like a totally different thing where people were either trying to convince you it's art or it's like the future of culture or

whatever. There's no pretense of that here. It's like literally just like oh, KOL said X. I'm going to try to to what you're talking about sounds to me like a culture. Like that's a subculture, you know, like obviously most people don't. identify with that. They don't understand what it would take to do that. But the people who do, they're just like, yeah, it's hilarious. Like, this is totally how you show that you're a cool alpha person in this new economy. Yeah, maybe, like I said, maybe I'm too old. This just sounds like Wall Street bets, but it's, it's Gen Z. I mean, like, why else would people post, you know, screenshots of them, you know, punting 50K in options and like losing it all like that. And then,

you know, you, it's like voyeuristic and you kind of revel in it. But that's my point. There's some utility to losing money. There's some utility. you get. You get the story that you brag about on. Yeah, you get that. Exactly. Exactly. But my point is that feels like a social network. But it does feel like self-defeating culture. That cannot survive. I don't disagree. It can't survive. But it feels like this will last way longer than an FTs. Like you go to these streams and it's like, I cannot believe what I'm watching. Like I highly, I highly recommend everyone guys and watches this LA-Baked-Cabbal stuff. L-AVIC, okay. You've got a new search term.

You'll lose some brain cells. You will definitely lose some brain cells watching it. Okay, give us a search term. Give us a search term. How do we find the L.A. Vap Kabauls? L.A. Vap Kabaul stream, I think. Singular. L.A. Vap Kabilms stream.

Literally, that's what you search for. L.A. Vapabal. I'll find it. Yeah, I mean, like, if you, they were on this Aiden Ross stream today and like, or yesterday. Yesterday. I'm delegating my cultural ambassadorship to Turin. No, no, I don't want, I don't want this, but I just want to understand. I was just trying to understand because, like, all these people are like... He's just a cultural anthropologist, Robert.

Talking about how they're finding meme coins via these streams. Like, the game is now like, you go to the stream to find that. And it's just a very different culture. I think NFTs tried to, like, do a totally different thing. They were like boomer coin, like targeting millennials and older. I hear that, but I do think there were components. to of those parties for meme coins as well like how many you know vCs were buying meme coins or talking about oh meme coins are your community bootstrapping tool and use that to then go build

great products and like everyone tries to intellectualize you know the market and and the market is almost sort of reverse causality you're saying oh like the price is the product and actually maybe I'm wrong and you know I'm not trying to intellectualize meme coins for the record no but I was like people did people are the same way people uh you did it for So I guess all I'm trying to say is like there's something different about Mumecoins that's making them last longer. And I think it's the rate of growth of the assets, number of assets seems to be very involved in that. I don't know. This feels a little revisionist history, right? Like NFTs, there were new NFTs launching every single day, even in like the late NFT cycle.

That's true. Totally. There was ICOs launching every single day. But there was no, there was no burnt liquidity pool to exit always be able to exit something from. Right. That's the difference. Blur came to life around the end of the end of the other. Right. Blur is too hard to use for someone who does, who needs to understand the lending protocol.

This is literally like hit a single button. Absolutely terms of it was much smaller. Right. No, I agree with that. I agree with that. So, let me maybe ask one more question because we're, it sounds like we've kind of converged in this idea that like, okay,

we're in the late throws of this meme coin cycle. One thing that I'm not clear on is, it's very clear that the sentiment in the meme coin world is really bad. Now, that being clear, That being said, the sentiment in the all-coin world is also really bad. Everybody's feeling really bad besides Bitcoiners. So it's plausible to me that if you see a macro reversal and all-coins start to rally, that meme-coin start to rally too, and we like forget this ever happened.

And it's just like, oh, okay, well, actually now people are willing to gamble again and people make money again. And this idea that's like, oh, people finally caught on and they're getting bored of the game and they're bored of getting fleeced, that we just completely forget about that. Do you guys think that's what happens or do you really think that the meme coin cycle has run its course and we'll now need to find the next game. Well, I don't think it's like over, over. I mean, because there's still new meme coins shooting up to $500 million market caps,

billion dollar market caps, like basically every single day, right? When it becomes impossible to launch something and like the next day it's worth a billion dollars with like no actual idea of what it's supposed to be without, you know, any fundamental value. Like when that's still happening. If you see what happened to whiff, you know, you see what, like, those are like the blue chips of this meme coin cycle. Yeah, blue chips. I know.

They've been decimated. They've been absolutely decimated. Yes, I know. The picture of the dog. What's doge? Doge is just a picture of a dog with nothing. Without hat, I know. It doesn't even have hat.

Yeah, exactly. Tom, how do you think about it? Yeah. I mean, I think Trump is almost kind of like the ceiling on, you know, meme coins is a way I think like you could say punk's for like the ceiling on FTEs. And it's like, you know, you could say, punk's for like the ceiling on FTAs. And it's like, it's like, as that kind of trickles down, I think that kind of changes people's mental calculus. And so in my mind, that's kind of the barometer to look for.

And yeah, I think if anything, the only constant in crypto is people have an endless appetite for new games. And I'm sure someone will invent a new game that people want to play. But right now, I agree. I think, you know, I look at the Enron thing. And yeah, it was goofy of that you factored. But someone is still buying it. It's still doing crazy volume.

And I think until those numbers and that EV kind of changes, people are going to keep doing it. It has a $2 million market cap right now. as it's another two million two million 200 million oh 200 million yeah yeah okay no if it was two million i would say the meme coin cycles over it's over okay let's stop talking about it's 200 million i i guess like there's something feels qualitatively different about meme coins and i think the main thing is like a you aren't you can exit more easily and without having to think that hard versus like needing to have loans or things like blur. NFT microstructure sucks for like Dgen new user

who's never used crypto before. And Phantom is a blockchain to them. But like I just somehow think like I think Tom's perspective is right. There's going to be some bellwether market cap and everything is indexed to it. And like if that thing goes down, then the overall thing goes down. But it doesn't feel like NFTs where like,

When that thing went down, everything had like crazy leverage. Like, you know, if that thing went down 20%, everything went down 40%. Like it's 2xler. Because there's so much more liquidity and it's easier to exit these things, it kind of feels. So it'll be a slower kind of leakage, I think. At least that's what it seems like. Compare to an Fuse. Yeah, fair enough.

I do kind of think that the moonpoint cycle is not over. I think if things rebound, like this game. is just too engaging for people who don't really care about the tech. And it doesn't feel to me like we're done. It feels to me like the fact that everyone's saying that, oh, meme points are over, you know, look at all the blue chips. They're all down. To me, it's kind of like, that's never how it ends.

It never ends by, like, everyone agreeing that it's over. It, like, ends when, like, the, like, people just are, like, something deep or has to go wrong. Yeah, it ends when it just stops working. And it's like, it's still working, right? like Enron went to 500, it went down to 200. You were like, oh my God, you know, it was like Vine, the Vine token that the Well, actually, we should talk a little bit about this Web 2 VC meme coin thing because I feel like

that is a little embarrassed. Like the Vine stuff, the, the, the, the, the Sam lesson one that was such a scam. Yeah, like that was cringe. That was like really bad. Like I, I, okay, do you want to explain? This is what I'm saying millennials should not should be banned from launching meme coins. Millennials should be banned from launching meme coins because we don't. We do not understand the fucking buyer.

We do not understand the buyer. Let's get Tarun on the Crypto Council. You'll set a law. No millennials allowed to launch a mean coins. Millennial or older, no meme coins. You're not allowed. All right, right, right. Does somebody want to explain the jelly, jelly story?

Because I don't even know what happened. Turin, why don't you rip it? Tarun as a millennial. I don't know if you're allowed to talk about. Yeah, I don't know. But wait, isn't everyone here millennial or older? That's true. I think we're all millennials.

Yeah, I don't think. Go ahead, Drew. Yeah, so basically, I forget what company it was that this person who founded it was from, but it was like some big old Web2 company. And Sam Lessen, who's general partner at Slow, they were really like pumping this meme coin for this new video chat app. The chat app barely worked. And, you know, I think like obviously people's expectations relative to the app,

actual thing, were quite varied. But A, all the communications they made were cringe and looked like old people stuff that would never get bought by anyone who's a meme coin trader. Like, it just was, and it did go to some crazy market. You were so savage about the age gap in meme coins. Like, why are you so negative? Like, older people playing. Because I, I wasted some brain cells on going to some of these streams. And I'm really like, wow. I don't know if I'm okay with this meme point ageism that I'm getting for you to ruin. I'm sorry that you've aged out of a crypto trend, but it is a truth.

You know what? I want to hear in the comments for like millennials and older that are in the trenches. I bet they're out there. I bet they're out there. I'm sure they're out there losing money. I bet there's something with good P&L. I want to hear about it. I want to hear about it.

Yeah. Anyway, so this this jelly jelly thing, like some of the stuff like obviously. like obviously inevitably when the price went down uh sam lesson who's like you know early facebook employees started this big VC kind of upstanding millennial was not used to the heat obviously and then he started trying to be like we're going to have a audio streaming like team board meeting to like help help the price go up and it was like it would the entire thing was like the cringiest thing I've ever read I know and then he had to like apologize after and be like, oops, I launched a meme coin.

Ha ha, I didn't know how it worked. I hope you didn't lose too much money. Yeah, but he brags about being an early investor in Solana too. So that's like, it's like, I feel like this happens all the time. People are like, oh, sorry, I didn't know what I was doing. And it's like, what are you talking about? Yeah, I mean, I have to say this was one of the most embarrassing VC moments in history, but it also shows, proves, proves like the Silicon Valley VCs are just not going to survive

in the trenches. They will die in the trenches. Assuming the trenches themselves survive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, that's, it's interesting you say that because there's, there's another story that was going viral in the Chinese community. I think I've largely not seen any reporting on in the West, but basically this was animating most of the Chinese speaking Twitter for the last couple days. So speaking of, you know, VC is not going to make it. So there's been a lot of heat on Binance, specifically on Binance Labs, which is recently, be branded to YZI, which I guess is pronounced easy or easy, or I'm not exactly sure I just

pronounce it, but that's the, it's now explicitly the family office of CZ, CZ and Huli, who's, you know, the two co-founders of Binance. And a lot of the heat that's coming on Binance, the formerly known as Binance Labs, is because of accusations of bribes, kickbacks, kind of insider, paths to listings, you know, people explicitly taking these fees of like, hey, you know, if you get listed on Binance, you have to pay this amount of money. If your token goes down below the listing price, we take that money as like a deposit, quote unquote. And basically the supply chain of this inner circle, people who both work at Binance Labs and people who are affiliated with Binance Labs or friends of the family who fast-track these like really terrible check-coin projects that

get listed on Binance, despite the fact that Binan's listing is otherwise very hard to come by. So you had a huge amount of pitchforks coming out in the Chinese community very, very angry at the fact that most of the things that were listed on Binance in the last year are down, you know, 80, 90%, almost across the board. And it's not just like, okay, we'll alter down. It's like, okay, these things in particular are just vaporware that are now, you know, teams are nowhere to be found. They never shipped anything. A lot of this was like random gamefire crap that, you know, if you remember just random stuff getting listed on Binance back in the day, they think like hooked, sleepless protocol. I mean, I'm sure most people in the West have not heard of these, but these were kind of big, hyped projects in the Asian community that went down very bad.

So point of the story is that- Which projects, which projects, again? There was one called Hooked Protocol, another one called, I think, unsleep or sleepless or something like this. Okay, I'm glad I haven't heard of anything. Yeah, there's no way you've heard of any of these. So anyway, the point of the story is that you're seeing this anger. So the way that I interpret the story is that like,

Okay, I mean, it sounds like there was some shady stuff happening in Binance Labs. May or may not be true. I don't know. Obviously, I'm just following the second hand. But there's this general uprising that's happening in crypto that people are just being very, very angry at the capital structures. So whether it's people being angry at Pump. Fun, whether people being angry at Sam Lesson, now you see the anger coming at Binance.

There's just general backlash that is happening across the board. Hey, all I'll have to say is, finance was just the LA vape cabal 10 years earlier. Is that, that's your take? I mean, it's like, it is, it is funny. There's, there's, there's a lot of rhyming here in terms of. I love that, I love that the new analogy is analogizing things to the LA Vibqbal. The L.A. Vibqabal? Yeah.

What's, okay. Tom, your reaction? Your reaction? No reaction. No reaction. Robert, what's your reaction? Give us your reaction to the new L.A. vapeqabal. I'm not in the old, the old, the,

old L.A. The old L.A. Vig Kaba. It's the Chinese cigarette cabal. Okay. I mean, Chinese cigarette There's always been a propensity for offshore entities to have a lot more leeway in how they interact with the ecosystem, right? And this doesn't really surprise me.

The real question is, does this stuff still work on a go forward basis? And I'm skeptical that it'll be. be as effective as it used to be. Yeah. So my understanding, and again, I, I, you know, don't, my Mandarin is really terrible. So it's not nowhere near good enough to parse any of this firsthand. Wait, see, try to do this in Mandarin. Try to speak Mandarin as you parse it.

I won, we'll be sure, well, the Zhongwan. Well, the Jong-un poor. John the Bohal. Tom actually has good Mandarin because Tom, Tom has studied Mandarin in university, right? Yeah. Well, allegedly. I mean, I'll imagine. I'm not a legend.

Yeah. Tom, Tom is actually really legit Mandarin. Tom is really legit Mandarin. I have no idea what he seems talking about. Okay, all right. We're not going to make you speaking. We can't talk about this anymore.

Tom isn't going to beat the allegations. That's right. Trade war is on. Tom still wants to win deals. So anyway, yeah, what's my point? Okay, so my point was that, you know, even the Biden's leadership team generally never addresses any of the FUD,

unless it's like, you know, FTX level stuff. Basically, it's always like, oh, you know, just keep on building, you know, ignore it, whatever. But you had Huli and CZ getting on Twitter spaces to respond to the mob over these allegations. Now, again, I don't know anything at all about how true of these things are or whatever. It doesn't really matter. But it does feel like there's a general vibe shift that's happening in crypto across the board, whether it's in pump.

Fund, whether it's in the traditional VCs or, you know, like the party feels like the lights got turned on. And now everybody's like, wait, how much did I spend? Like, this is like, what the fuck? Like, where's my stuff? Like, this, this, this sucks. I'm not going to give a good review to this party. So I, now I think, given that this is crypto, I think all the stuff reverses as soon as prices turn around, you know, like people are more or less okay with getting fleeced as long as, you know, the party's good. But right now, party's not good. So everybody, everybody has something to complain about. And to be clear, you know, I think there's always some back. background radiation of Gryft that exists in crypto. And everybody, everybody knows it.

I don't think there's anybody who's, um, anybody who's deluded about the fact that, not unique to crypto, all private investment. Not unique to crypto at all. All private investment. Totally. Absolutely. Absolutely. Right. There's always some, there's always going to be the Theranos and there's always going to be the, you know, whatever, blah, blah, blah. But, uh, it does feel like there's a lot more pressure now, which is, I think, a very, very good thing, to be clear, uh, to have this kind of pressure of like, oh, okay, people need to clean their act up. And to be clear, if you're running finance, obviously, like, you don't want this kind of thing happening. You have a gigantic,

incredible business, one of the biggest businesses in the world. Yeah, you don't want random people taking kickbacks. And so anyway, you know, my heart goes out to the people who are dealing with all sorts of weird bullshit going on in their ecosystem. Last thing we should talk about, there's been a lot of developments on the regulatory side. We talked a little bit last time about the emergence of this crypto task force, which is being led by Hester Purse, also known as Cryptomom. person recently came out with a blog post called The Journey Begins, where she describes basically the first kind of opening solvo of the new SEC crypto policy platform. And it was a very,

very positive statement. Basically, here's saying, like, look, we're, here's, here's the game plan. We don't have all the details left. We don't have all the details yet, but we're going to be much more pro-crypto. A few pieces that we already know. One, the new SEC has required approval from the commissioners for any new probes to be opened. Second, we know that there's been a lot of reassignment of enforcement lawyers. So it used to be basically enforcement lawyers were very, very heavily involved in the crypto space. Now they've been dispersed. It's like, hey, guys, there's a lot of other stuff to do. We should not be overly focused on crypto, which was one of the big tenets of the Gary Genza regime. In this blog post, what Heserper says

is a few choice quotes. One, we do not tolerate liars, cheaters, and scammers. But if people want to buy a token, let me pull this quote, if people want to buy a token a product that lacks clear long-term value proposition, they should feel free to, but should not be surprised if someday the price drops. In this country, people generally have a right to make decisions for themselves. But the counterpart to that, wonderful American liberty is the equally wonderful American expectation that people must decide for themselves, not look to mama government to tell them what to do or not to do, nor to bail them out when something that turns out badly. This sounds like a call to the Meanpoint, LA, what is I'm sorry?

L.A. Vap Kabaul. L.A. Vave Kabaul. L.A. Vave Kabaul. So L.A. Vave Kabaal. Sounds like you're going to be okay. I think I think if I get an email from them tomorrow or sorry, email. See, that's boomering myself. If I get a, if I get a TikTok or Discord DM. That's like, that's like, that's like thank you for marketing us to the boomers, aka the millennials. Yeah. There you go. I don't think they are our show, to be honest. No, no, no, they won't, but their parents might. No, no, no.

Oh, yeah, exactly. Their parents are in the L.A. v. Cabal. Yeah. All right. All right. So a few more specific pieces that she claimed in The Journey Begins. One is that no action letters are back, are a thing again. So what is it no action letter?

No action letters when you can go to the SEC and you can tell them, hey, I'm building this thing. Can you please tell me that you won't come after me as long as I build the thing the way I described? This is a thing that normally exists within the regulatory frameworks. Basically, the SEC under the prior administration, never gave a single no action letter. And it was kind of a trap. They were like, oh, if you want a no action letter, hit us up. You hit them up. And they're like, oh, yeah, what you're doing is please send us more information and we're going to subpoena you.

So no action letters were kind of a trap now. She's sort of signaling that, hey, no action letters are a real thing. We can't promise we're going to give you them, but give us a try. Second is that she claimed that they're willing to offer retroactive relief on token issuances that have been done in good faith to try to signal to them that, like, hey, so let me just quote this. Task Force is also thinking about the possibility of recommending commission action to provide temporary perspective and retroactive relief for coin or token offerings for which the issuing entity or some other entity willing to take responsibility provides certain specified

information, keeps that information updated, and agrees not to contest the commissioner's jurisdiction in event of a case alleging fraud in connection with the purchase and sale of the asset. So basically, look, you guys did all this complex, weird shit, and I understand why you did it. You know, you have these, you know, weird jurisdictional thing, something in the Cayman and then a Singaporean nonprofit and this thing and that thing. And it's like, I don't know if you were the issue or you were not the issuer or whatever. If you come and you say, look, we're going to offer disclosures of who owns what, where the open source code is, you know, blah, blah, this kind of thing, presumably we don't know yet what the details are. If somebody, I don't care

who it is, somebody comes in and says, we will do this, then we will be. potentially agree to say this is not a security and you will be allowed to trade it as long as we do not see allegations of fraud. If you see allegations of fraud, then it's all off. We're coming after you and like, you're toast. But like, look, basically there's a little bit of a jubilee as long as you are willing to play by the rules and show that you're a good honest actor, which to be clear is all the industry has ever wanted. We're very happy to provide disclosures. We're very happy for there to be a clear, like, set of frameworks of how these things are transparent to the community and to investors, just tell us how to do it. And I think this is great

and very, very welcome. She's also mentioned some parameters run lending and staking, as well as potentially creating a cross-border sandbox given the fact that so many of these things are happening in multiple jurisdictions, not just in the U.S. So to me, you know, reading this, I'm like, wow, this is fantastic document, very, very, exactly what everybody wanted to see coming from the SEC. How do you guys react to this? Robert, why don't you go first? I mean, I'll second that it's a fantastic roadmap for the SEC over the next four years. I think it touches on the things that have been talked about for a long time. It's just that, you know, Hester Perth was out of power when the commission was, you know, led by Gensler.

You know, a lot of these concepts have been talked about previously, safe harbors, right? If, you know, tokens meet, you know, good behavior standards, while society at large, figures out if legislation is needed, if policymaking is needed, and how it will work. And so, you know, nothing in this shocked me. I don't think, like, this document contained any approaches that, you know, I said, like, oh, my God, I can't believe, you know, they thought about this because we've all been asking for this for a really long time. I think when it comes to, you know, no action letters, it's really a call for people to,

it's almost the equivalent of come in and register. It's, you know, but come in and register under the Gensler administration was a trap. Yeah, without a gun behind your back. Yeah, there was a gun behind his back, right, the whole time. I think this is a call for engagement and for people to directly engage with the SEC staff to help, you know, figure out the rules of the road. And I think that's probably the most encouraging part is that the mindset has shifted. shifted 180 degrees. And the prospect of coming in and talking to the SEC has gone from

something that would existentially threaten a project and increase risk dramatically to something that should reduce risk and actually be something that teams are excited about. And so it's a 180. I mean, I think that's the most powerful piece of this is that the attitude of the SEC is no longer like there's a gun in our hand that we're lying to you when we say come in a register to one in which it's like, hey, we have a notepad in our hand and we actually want to figure this out with you. And that's a really healthy change. And I applaud the statement. Yeah. It feels to me like what happens, at least like, you know, fast forward to six months from now, a year from now, is that the SEC just kind of disappears in the sense that we stop

talking about them. We stop thinking about them. Like, if you're in equity markets, you're not thinking about the SEC all the time. Like, it's a weird thing that we are obsessed with this one agency. That's not true. Ken Griffin sues the shit out of the SEC all the time. Like, what are you talking about? Okay, fine. Everyone who bothers reading anything knows the SEC is like equity markets people hate them, too, for different reasons. Sure, sure.

Obviously, they're the primary regulator of securities markets. So, yeah, okay, you're going to care about them. What I mean is that, like, your world does not revolve around thinking about what the SEC is doing, you know. And that has been our life for the last four years, longer than four years, really, you know, seven years. I think that is what's going to go away, is that you go to the SEC. Like before it was like, don't even, don't talk to the SEC. Like, it's like the cops, right? Don't talk to the cops. Right. You're only going to get in trouble. So it's like, don't talk to the SEC. Don't ask them for advice. Don't ask them for perspective. Don't, like, hey, we're doing this. Is that okay?

It's like that total trap, amateur hour. Don't ever do that. You can probably just do that now under this SEC. It's just go and like, hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing. Is that okay? And they'll just tell you. And it's like, wow. It's just like getting free legal. perspective from the people setting the laws that that seems like a really good thing to have. And so I think probably what happens is that, of course, the SEC is still going to bring cases. They're still going to bring enforcement. There's still a lot of fraud. Against bad guys.

Exactly, exactly. And like that will always be as it should be. As it should be. As it should be. As it should be. And there will be laws, rules promulgated. And some people who are good actors won't follow those rules and they'll also get in trouble, right? Like all this stuff will happen, which is normal.

That's part of how any market functions. But the idea that everybody is constantly fixed at in the SEC as like this is, boogieman, you know, casting this long shadow over the whole industry, that's going to be gone. And we're just mostly going to not think. It's just like, oh, just pay some lawyers, do the filings, do your disclosures, don't break the rules. And you never have to think about the SEC. Like, that's kind of how it should work. Tom, what's your take? I think Hester sounded up well in the first line around, or not the first line, but talking about the fact that we should be switching to more of a disclosures regime and people should be free to, you know,

trade the asset to want to trade. It's sort of like the Matt Levine was a certificate of stupid investment. And it's like, yeah, as long as there is not explicit fraud, which again, it sounds like the remaining, you know, SEC members would be focused on looking at, which is good. Yeah. Can you explain the concept of the certificate of stupid investment? Yeah, this is a Matt Levine. It's a Bloomberg writer who writes money stuff as his idea that, you know, hey, the SEC should offer this thing called a certificate of stupid investment, which is something that you sign. and then you come to the SEC and they say, you're going to lose all your money. Are you sure? And you say yes, and then they slap you. And then they give you the certificate that lets you go and make any sort of stupid investment

that you want. And if you, you know, complain to them afterwards, you get shot out of a cannon. And I think this is, I think the general sort of framework that people are looking for is, you know, a freedom and a liberty to do investments versus sort of having the sort of, you know, protectionist sort of regime. Yeah. And to be clear, this is one of the things that I really respect about the meme coin world. is that, you know, part of the reason why people are so mad at Binance is because Binance is supposed to be a gatekeeper.

And some people lament that Binance is a gatekeeper. And it's like, okay, it's, you know, wow, it's so bad. They take you these listing fees, blah, blah, blah. But it's kind of like, okay, to me, I'm like, okay, if you're going to be a gatekeeper, then gatekeep. You know, do a good job of gatekeeping. If you're not, if you're doing a bad job of gatekeeping and you're extracting fees for being a gatekeeper, then okay, then fuck you. Like, you deserve what's coming. The beauty of the meme coin trenches is that everybody knows there's no gatekeeper.

That's the whole idea is that zero gatekeeping. everybody is free to like just get absolutely fucked by the next person, right? There's no, there's nobody who's supposed to be complaining to if things go wrong. And that there's a, there's an elegance, I think, to the fact that everybody knows the rules of the game. You know, there is this class action lawsuit that's floating around by one of these, uh, whatever, predatory class action firms against pumped off. There's multiple of them now, which sucks. And I think, I think Gabe, Gabriel Shapiro, who's been on the show before, he was sort of saying, like,

look, now that Gensler is gone, the new status quo is going to be a tiny little baby Gensler's, you know, doing class action lawsuits. Like, that's now the way that, you know, de facto these things are going to get, quote, and quote, regular. Let me summarize for you, dear audience, what Haseeb just said. Mead coins will be the most egalitarian thing we will ever see. It's insanely ambitious. And if it works, can really reshape the fabric of society.

That's exactly what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm saying. That is what you're saying. As a VC, that's right. That's right. I'm going to publish a blog post about this on media. medium. Medium.

Such a millennial. That's right. Jesus. I know. That's the point. That's the point. That actually... Just be a notes after screenshot.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. Notes half screenshot. That's the move. That's the move. We will circle back to that Ellen next episode. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Well, let's hope that these, the blues that we're feeling in the market and the blues that the whole market seems to be feeling is going to be short-lived. I will say that I, despite the fact, all the, you know, kind of negative stuff that we're talking about, on the show, which we often talk about negative stuff on the show because it's more interesting. I am actually feeling very positive and very bullish this year. I think, you know, like everything

on the fundamental side is just set up fantastically. The vibes, whatever, Trump war, Trump tariffs, all this other stuff, like, it's going to be chaotic. It's going to be volatile, it will work itself out. But everything that we really wanted is an industry, we're basically getting. So I feel really good and really positive. And actually, I will tell you guys, to be honest, when Trump token launched, I was really, I was really disillusioned. I was very disillusioned. I remember.

I really lost a lot of motivation. I remember, yeah, it was very, yeah. It was two weeks ago. We could tell us. I know, I know, I know. But I was really like, man, fuck this. It's moments like that they really make me not enjoy this industry. Now that everyone's down bad and everyone's like, oh, you know, it's over,

whatever. I'm actually a lot more motivated right now. Like, all it's being down and people being like, oh, man, it's over. Like, who cares? Like none of this stuff, everything's dead. I'm like, great. This is the time that I love investing. Everyone making meme coin infrastructure flood Haseeb's DMs. That's right. He's ready. He's waiting.

Hit me up. His body's ready. That's right. That's right. L.A. L.A. baseball. If you guys have great ideas in the chat, hit me up. All right. With that, we got a wrap. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back next week.