Unchained - The Chopping Block [LIVE]: Bitcoin Arms Race, Content Coin Chaos, and Ethereum’s Crossroads - Ep. 825

Episode Date: April 27, 2025

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and special guest David Hoffman break down the biggest stories in crypto. This week: MicroStrategy clones are popping up, with Bitcoin-backed SPACs trying to replay Saylor’s playbook. Meanwhile, Trump launches a memecoin for dinner invites, Zora kicks off a new era of “content coins,” and Ethereum faces an existential pivot. David Hoffman joins the crew to debate whether crypto’s future is real innovation—or just financial theater. Show highlights 🔹 Bitcoin vs Ethereum: Who Wins the Future? – Breaking down why Bitcoin could outgrow Ethereum… or why Ethereum might still be crypto’s last hope. 🔹 Can Content Coins Save Crypto? – Zora’s pivot and the rise of “content coins” spark a full-blown identity crisis for the industry. 🔹 Are We Just Rebranding Memecoins? – The crew debates whether “content coins” are innovation… or just the same casino with better UX. 🔹 The Culture Clash – Why crypto’s new apps feel like they’re built for millennials — and why Gen Z might just not care. 🔹 SoftBank, SPACs, and the Top Signal – 21Capital’s Bitcoin MicroStrategy clone is here. Are we seeing the beginning of the end… again? 🔹 Vitalik’s Existential Pivot – Ethereum is trying to save itself. But can it change fast enough to stay relevant? 🔹 Bitcoin’s Macro Moment – In a world of tariffs, inflation, and chaos, Bitcoin might accidentally become the next Federal Reserve. 🔹 Crypto’s Morality Crisis – Vitalik’s attack on “bad apps” raises a deeper question: what should crypto even be building anymore? ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest ⭐️ David Hoffman, Co-owner at Bankless   HostsDisclosures Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:55 MicroStrategy Clones and Market Impact 13:40 Trump Coin and Its Controversies 20:35 Zora’s Content Coin vs. Jesse's Coining Controversy 26:56 Zora’s Market Position 32:29 Generational Divide in Crypto 39:32 Ethereum's Strategic Pivot Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone who's really into this content coin shit is like over 30. Like no one who's under 25 finds it. They look at it like, this is like millennial dog shit. 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.

D5.Eat is the ultimate problem. D5 Protocol is part of the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Chopping Block. Every couple weeks, four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So, quick introos. First you got Tom, the D-Fi Maven and Master of Memes.

Hello, everyone. Next, we've got Tarun, the Gigabrein and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. During us today, we have special guest, David, Cryptoconisur, and Tsar of Super State. Honor to be here. Yeah, amazing. So you've lost a lot of weight. You're looking great.

I love money markets. Okay, beautiful. Now to open eyes assets. Love it. And I'm a Steve, the head hype man, a Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, but I want to copy. that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice, please see chopping block that XYZ for more disclosures.

So, David, you just had a question for Turin. I thought you should run out. Yeah, Turin, I was just wondering, when you get dressed in the morning, do you know what you want to wear? Not really. How do you like pick a particular garment and then like, okay, yeah, this one and then you go on to the next or how does it compose together? I think it's like, hey, I look outside. I'm like, is today a really bright day or just a kind of neon bright day?

All right. Great. Is this, this is bright for you? Yeah, this is like the shirt's bright. The pants are brighter. Okay. All right. I like that. Well, it's summer.

It's like all of summer. Are you generally bright colors? Yeah. I mean, look, I don't believe in the whole, you know, whatever, linen after Memorial Day, never after Labor Day nonsense that, you know, is promulgated in the East Coast as a lifelong East Coaster. Got it. Got it.

Okay. Well, so today we're here at the Cornell Blockchon. conference and we've got a number of interesting topics we wanted to get through. So one of them, first and foremost, is that there's a lot of news going around about these new micro strategy clones. So I assume most of people are familiar with micro strategy and what they're doing, levering up on Bitcoin. But there's a new player on the block, which is Canter Fitzgerald. So Canter Fitzgerald, of course, is now run by Howard Letnick's son.

Howard Lettick is now Commerce Secretary. And this is a joint venture between Canter Fitzgerald, Tether, and SoftBank. So it's a $3 billion venture called 21 Capital. There's going to be run by Jack Mallor, the guy who is the founder of strike, a big Bitcoin influencer, and they're going to run this through a SPAC, which raised $200 million. They're going to combine with the SPAC called Canada Equity Partners, which raised $200 million back in January. Tether is going to contribute $1.5 billion of Bitcoin.

SoftBank will contribute $900 million, and BitFenex will contribute $600 million. They plan to raise $350 million in a convertible bond. and then $200 million private placement for all that so they can buy Bitcoin purchases. So the question is, what effect do you think this is going to have on the market? Many people are saying that like, okay, there's another micro strategy on the block. It's obviously much smaller to begin with in micro strategy. Micro Strategy has, what, 500,000 Bitcoin or something, like some crazy number, whereas these guys are going to have, you know, an order of magnitude less to begin with,

but very, very powerful backers, and they're trying to run it back and play the same game, but without having an operating business, right? So Micro Strategy has the old software business that they bootstrapped in order to become this big Bitcoin vehicle. These guys are starting from scratch just buying Bitcoin. It's the whole story. So Tom, what's your take on this new micro strategy play? Yeah, if anyone has not read the SEC, the pitch tech,

or I don't know what the actual filing is for this, you should definitely check it out. They have some really great compare contrasts and some nice little like, oh, well, strategy has half a circle and we have a full circle for a couple different. nice categories that they made up. I think it was like Bitcoin native financing or like Bitcoin native. I love when I borrow against my my worthless ordinals every day.

Yeah, no, they're going to be the biggest BRC 20 holder. But no, I think we were kind of debating for the show. Is it good or bad to have this auxiliary business that micro strategy, like micro strategy that's a software business? This is basically going to be like almost all just buying Bitcoin. these convertible notes. There's some kind of light coloring of, we're going to do some Bitcoin advisory and maybe some treasury management and do some blending. I think the lending stuff feels like it can really blow up. Like, I think people really just want a pile of Bitcoin's

with maybe some business that is asset light, not too much hair on it, no selling supplements, you know, no running big, you know, minor operations, just like, we're going to sell some software and then we're going to some Bitcoin. So you're saying the pitches, blocks on your Celsius, but a public company? Well, you know, that's one way of, you know, I mean, they, they, do have these auxiliary business lines of like, oh, we're going to do Bitcoin native financing. When you read the deck, it doesn't feature that prominently. It does feel like, look, this is basically micro strategy. And we have this like little thing on the side. If it doesn't work, who cares, right? We know what the core business is, which is mostly just financial engineering. And there's

a slide in the deck that's like, when we buy Bitcoin, the price will go up. It's like, okay, we need to explain this that like it's not like anything else in the world. When we buy more of it, people don't make more. When we buy more Bitcoin, there's less Bitcoin out there, so the price goes up. And it's like, that is actually a very important part of the pitch is that that should happen. I would actually be bullish if they can just get better execution than Micro Strategy. I feel like somehow whenever there's news that comes out that micro strategy is purchase more Bitcoin, it's always at like a terrible price. It was like the local max from like a month ago.

And like, how do you have such bad execution? It is kind of amazing that like it's also too late for it to be bullish where it's like, yeah, micro strategy, you just bought Bitcoin at 105K. And it's like, well, it's at like 90. So I want to give my strategy a little out on this, which is because they're funding via debt issuance and lending, they may be forced to just buy as soon as they receive the capital. Like the loan covenants might not let them tee up. Like I could totally see the thing where like the lender wants to know that they only own Bitcoin. They don't want to like have cash sitting around.

So like I'm sure there's some weird thing going on. I don't think it's like totally like they're trying to lose money on purpose. I mean, could be, but I'm just saying that there could be some reasons. It's not true. What's your take on this? I see two main things here. Jack Mahler's the CEO. He is another sailor-esque figure that is starting to be like a larger than life figure. He was the guy that was credited for breaking open El Salvador and making it, you know, Bitcoinizing El Salvador, the whole entire country took credit for that at the Bitcoin conference in 2023 or whatever that was, 2022 maybe. So like we were now pattern match.

between Sailor and Jack Mahler's. Two larger than life figures here. But this is actually not the only organization that's doing this. There's Metaplanet in Japan, and they've got Dylan LeClair as their Bitcoin strategist. So this is turning into a repeatable strategy that people are doing. Wait a minute. That means you're basically indicating that you're going to start the Ethereum one. I don't think I...

You would actually be amazing for this. Have you contemplated this? Yeah, actually, you're kind of like describing in a way where I'm like, oh, triangulation. I don't think I have the dog in me. Hold on. Okay. If you're going to have an Ethereum micro strategy, who do you think should be the person going on CNBC and being the bulldog for Ethereum?

That is a great question. Are some names that come to mind? Okay. Tell me some. When I think of Ethereum boosters, they're all like extremely online people who would not play well on TV. Joe Lubin obviously comes to mind, but he... You think Joe Lubin would do well on TV? He's very monotone.

I think my partner, Ryan Tron Adams, would actually be great. I don't think he wants that life for himself. It's a commitment. You have to play a role. I think he wrote a blog post yesterday that suggested very strongly he does not want to do that. Yeah, that's exactly what he did. But he believes in. Okay, so, okay, Ryan Tron, obviously, he's not going to do it.

So who's going to do it? That's not you? That's not you. I don't have a public company. They'll give you one. Someone else will do that for you. We'll spack you in there. Don't worry about it.

All right. Okay. All right, let's go. Are you, are you down? Dude, are we putting out, we're putting out the bat signal right now. Yeah. Anybody wants to do in Ethereum Microsstrategy, here's your CEO. Where we have a profitable media business and that pays off our interest rates.

Perfect. Guys, honestly, this is how bankless goes public. This is a perfect entity. It's a totally irrelevant operating business that you can use an excuse to. Hey, hey, hey, hey, not totally irrelevant. They're shilling. That's true. That's true.

Okay. We actually do have a relatively large. large, ETH Treasury, a bank list. Like, we, you know, income, you know, profit into ETH. And we've been doing that for a while. Amazing. Guys, I think, so obviously as advisors, we each get 1%. Right. Yeah, the idea was generated here. I think it was. I think it was. Okay. So we've, so we've now seen a few different entities doing this, right? So we've seen sole strategies for Solana, OPEXE also doing this for Solana. There's murmurings that may be someone

to do with it for Ethereum, but nobody's really materialized yet. So I heard, I can't remember who told me this, but there was another fund manager. who told me that they think what eventually happens, the endgame. So one of the things, when a layer one goes and raises money, they generally have two entities. So they have the foundation, and they have the labs. The foundation is the overseas thing that usually has a lot more capital and they sell tokens or whatever. And then they have the onshore entity, which is the labs, which usually exists in the U.S. It's like a software company that does services.

And these labs entities, they generally don't really have a path to exit. They really know what, these are for profits nominally, but they don't really make any money. And so one theory that this person propounded to me is that eventually all of these labs entities will do the same micro strategy thing. Is that basically, you know, think like Aptos. Aptos, labs will eventually do some SPAC and then just become like a micro strategy for APTOS and so on. And that is a way for all these things to leverage the fact that, oh, the founders are there,

they have this, they have some balance sheet, they have some capital, and they can kind of play this financial engineering game eventually. What do you guys think about this story? I think what we are seeing with the multiple Bitcoin strategy show up and then the Salonist strategy show up is there is a premium. There's like a layer one premium is what we would call this. I don't think that lasts the more of these that come online. I think the premium. You think they're going to go back to nav.

It compresses very, very quickly. I think there's only so much lending demand and like all of these things rely on lending to like. But in relative terms, it doesn't have to be that big. Like to move Bitcoin, you need to be enormous. True. But like. To move in all coin, you don't need that much. Other than Swede, which seems to have its own strategy.

strategy already figured out, so it doesn't really need one. So three strategies are operating underneath the service. I kind of think the lending demand for these lower liquidity things is going to go. So my thesis is I actually think the sole strategies are going to cannibalize each other because all of them are launching at the same time. There's a fixed amount. In my mind, the mental model is there's a fixed amount of lending capital that's willing to lend to this type of strategy.

If you start fragmenting, you're like kind of lowering the credit. Why are you convinced it's fixed? I just think generally speaking, like, who are the bond buyer? Who's the marginal bond buyer? I mean, look, if it keeps working and it keeps getting bigger, wouldn't there be more demand over time to lend to it? I think this like up-only attitude assumes that there's kind of like... I should show you the slide from their deck.

Yeah, yeah, look, look. I get the, I get... I'm sorry to be the old man yelling at the wind, whatever metaphor that I'm trying to use. I think the problem is like For Bitcoin there's probably a ton of capital There's enough ETFs There's enough ways that you can like Justify making this make sense

But for Solana I actually feel like There's probably like a fixed-ish Okay fine, maybe it grows a little bit But I don't think it grows that much faster than the staking rate Let's put that way And I think there's a fixed-ish amount of capital That is there to be lent But by fragmenting into many different entities

You're making the credit quality of any single entity worse So you can't lend as much and like you're going to have a more capped market. So I actually think the Solano ones in the long run may all merge with each other. I actually think there's going to be some like rejoining of these things if they don't work. So it's not that they can't exist, but there's just like there's going to be consolidation. Like the carrying capacity for the market is just low. I just don't think there can be like three of them all starting at the same time,

basically tapping the same lending market at the same time. I also illustrate why Michael Saylor was able to accumulate so many Bitcoins because he was just alone doing this for years and no one came online. Immaculate conception. Like there is an immaculate conception of Microsoft. They were like the stack before the spec. I think that's probably true for the Solano ones, just because right now we haven't seen any charismatic leader emerge in any of these domains aside from Saylor. And now Mallors, I think, is charismatic enough to be able to lead the charge and actually catalyze some, some really. financing energy. For these other domains, I think that's what we're really waiting for,

is, is there somebody who can really be a booster, get on CNBC, kind of be the really loud, boisterous voice in the room to get this thing going? People do not want me on CNBC. Hold on. Audience, quick. Do you think you'd be great at being the next Microsoft? Gary of Michael Saylor. Yeah? There we go. See, I think they voted, they voted with their applause. The decibels. That's right. That's right. That's right. The decibles. Okay. All right. shifting gears a little bit. There's another coin that is on the rise, and that is everybody's favorite coin, Trump coin. So Trump coin recently, right on time as when the first unlock took place,

turned out Trump coin just got a little bit injection of utility. So what is that utility? It turns out that Trump has announced that the top 220 Trump holders are invited to dinner at his private golf club on May 22nd. There's now a leaderboard based on your time-weighted holdings of Trump token, And basically, the more Trump you hold and the longer you hold it, the higher your ranking will be. So hold as much Trump token as you can. The top 25 Trump holders also get a VIP reception and tour. That caused Trump token to pump 50% in the span of a single day. And apparently a user with the name Sun is currently number one on the leaderboard.

So people are assuming I can't imagine who that might be. So thoughts on Trump. So first of all, I thought meme coins, which does not have utility? Doesn't this mean now? it's not a meme coin. Well, you're the one who called this a celebrity coin, which I really like that alignment of what this coin. This is a celebrity coin, not a meme coin.

Right. So, okay, the celebrity coin. I mean, now is it still a celebrity coin, though? I mean, I guess celebrity coins, you can. This is the Gary V strategy. This is Donald Trump doing the Gary V thing. Like, buy my NFTEs, get to go to dinner with me. Right, right.

It's a utility token. Yeah, where is Gary V right now again? He's not the president of the United States. Yeah, lost. Yeah, exactly. I was talking to someone who runs, sort of a large liquid fund. And they were like, this was news to them.

And they were looking at it. And they were actually one of the largest Trump holders because they were collecting the funding rate on Trump. And so they had a bunch of like spot Trump. They're like, oh, shit, I'm going to get like 10 invites from this thing. And it's like, it's not necessarily. Holding across a bunch of wallets. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because they're like, you know, doing a bunch of on chain stuff. But then they were delta neutral because they were hedging out their Trump exposure. Hold on. What if you hold Trump on an exchange? I don't think you counts. You have to like register your Solana wallet with your phone number. You have to self-custody your Trump coin in order to be eligible. Moonshop probably counts.

You're going bankless. I like this. Okay. Actually, you don't want to give them a little credit for that. But it's working. I was actually like two days ago, I was looking at like the floor to get into the top 220. It was like 15 Trump.

I'm like, that's like 200 bucks. I'm like, you know, for 200 bucks? Really? Yeah, yeah. It was really low. No. Since then it's climbed to, I think, like, 300 Trump. So what is that?

Like 3K? Something like that. 4K. So, yeah, it's still cheap. It's still having the effect of, you know, yeah, you can hedge it out. So really, you know, what is the... That's true. That's true.

Oh, oh, oh, interesting. Oh, he didn't... You think people are hedgering. Yeah, okay, interesting. I don't know what the funding rate looks like for Trump right now, but... It must be horrendous. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

Okay, interesting. So, okay, I mean, I think it's kind of... When you're president, are you allowed to just do that? Just be like, pay me money to get dinner with me? I thought that's like emoluments clause and stuff of, like, So I was also looking at the fine print on the site, and the dinner is run by Fight, Fight, Fight, Fight, LLC, and it's explicitly not a fundraising thing for Trump,

and they're like, Trump may or may not come, and if not, people are going to get an NFT, if we have to cancel this. So there's a lot of caveats, like I'm sure they've kind of, I don't know, made it as legal as they can, but yeah, they've thought about this question. You've done a lot of diligence on this.

I'm curious. It just, it's an absurd story. And I'm like, are you, are you on the lead board? I, well, you know, I'm not going to put my, real name on there. Okay, okay, right. It starts with an S, so. Your last name does start with an S actually.

So, yeah. Okay, well, this is, this is making more bullish on Trump coin or less bullish on Trump coin. Also, like, when do they start selling? So this is the other conspiracy theory around the dinner is a big Trump unlock, or there was a few days ago. Right around. So, yeah, the timing is quite coincidental.

It wasn't right before the unlock, but right around it. And so, but I mean, you know, that's that's cap table management right there, right? It's, you know, Yvonne lot coming up. Market cap management. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. All right.

Any thoughts? The three times that I have heard the meme coin be referenced in like other podcasts, on crypto podcasts, it's all on the Sam Harris podcast. Sam Harris, somebody I respect deeply, very critical of Trump, obviously, has referenced the meme coin three times as being the perfect conduit for corruption. It's a corruption tool. And I do think that it's just like worth considering that this one thing created by Donald Trump has left maybe one of the larger stains on the crypto industry for not the whole population.

Some people are like, hell yeah, like, let's do this. And much of the other half of the population is like, this is the worst thing I've seen even worse than FTX. And so it does leave a terrible, like, taste in many people's mouths. I don't know that there's a half that is pro the meme coin. I feel like even on people who support Trump, they're kind of embarrassed by now. Yeah, maybe the base is like a Trump meme coin apologist. But yeah, I would say like the most people are just.

The only thing more grifty was Malani, the coin. Yeah, I mean, the problem with Trump token is that, like, you can't defend it because it's just down so much. Yeah. Right? Like, so it's hard even for people who like Trump to defend it. I mean, I mean, it's, you know, in essence, it's like, markets have their own logic about these things.

And it's like, if something's down, like, that's the indictment. There's nothing more to say. So, I mean, going up 50%, it went to like 14 bucks now. It's around 12, 13. It pops back up. I think it's back up to like 13 and a half. Yeah, it's like 13-ish. but like the you know most people are buying it like 40 50 70 dollars so those people are like oh great

you know my I'm I'm now down only 70% instead of 75%. So it's a it's a small consolation. Yeah I don't disagree. I think I think it's also just the anecdotes that come out around it's kind of like insidery stuff of like are we're going to announce the dinner before the unlock or like you have someone who knew of some news ahead of time and it's like it just kind of creates this like petri dish of opportunity for like bad shit to happen and it feels like it does kind of happen. Yeah. Okay. I mean, what happens if you go to the dinner? Trump's not there or even if he is there.

Like, if it's a conduit for corruption, the idea is you get to go to the dinner. You get to whisper in his ears. Like, and hey, do something for me, do something like this. I would imagine being very disappointed if I spent like, you know, many, many thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, I go to the dinner and Trump just doesn't care. He doesn't even, he doesn't even. But they burned the dinner and created an NFT of it. So I think that's just as good, really.

I think the more hilarious thing would be like if you went to the dinner and then somehow during the next president, you went to jail because it's attempted. It was like. Attempted bribery? Yeah, yeah. Okay, wow. That would be the perfect ending to the story. President AOC announces executive order that all Trump dinner attendees. It's like the new January 6th.

Damn, okay. Well, that would be, yeah, all right. I don't even know what else say to that. Okay, let's switching gears, aside from crying on the inside about Trump token, there's another token that's got people very upset, which is Zora. So Zora, once upon a time, was an NFT platform. It is now repositioned itself, rebranded itself, pivoted into being a content coin platform. So it's kind of like Instagram, but everything is a coin. You can buy any post. And everything is sort of a meme. There's a meme coin associated with every single post on the platform. So they launched, so first they started a campaign that was very strongly endorsed by base.

And of course, Jesse Pollack, who's the head of base, he was defending this marketing campaign that he coined called Just Coin It. So any piece of content, just coin it. If you like this thing, coin it. You should coin this. you should coin this. And there was another marketing campaign about bases for X that was marked around. There were a couple terms in there that

Cryptotrude jumped on. One of them being, base is for pimping. The other being basis for squirting. And this basically got this meme coin that was titled basis for everyone. Ended up pumping, then dumping 95%, and then pumping again. So basically, people got very mad.

The whole way all this was playing out. Obviously, it was very circus-like. Then eventually, Zora launched its coin, which was branded as a for fun only coin. So I guess that means a meme coin, but it wasn't exactly described as a mean coin. It's a four fun coin. It launched with a $200 million FTV, and everybody on the internet is mad. Now, why they're mad? No, no, no, no. You haven't been on Farkaster. No one is mad on Farkaster. Okay, people on market. Farkgars seem to be happy with this. Everybody else is very, very upset. I've only been following this tangentially, but just seeing

that people seem to be up in arms about it. David, you had good Jesse on the show. You had a Give us, what's your perspective on this whole drama, base plus Zora? Yeah, there was a confluence of factors. Jesse started promoting coining as an activity. Like, he said that he did not know about the Zora token launch. That happened to be a coincidence. If Jesse said, I believe that. I think one of the main reasons why people are very mad about this

is that, you know, the Ethereum community has been broadly talking badly about meme coins. And then, like, now the Ethereum community finds a way to, like, have a high-brow meme coin. We just call it content. It's not a meme coin. It's content coin. It's high brown meme coins. And now these meme coins are okay and approved by the Ethereum community. So that triggered many in the broader crypto context.

And then like, yeah, the launch of the four fund Zora token, people are launching tokens now that are not meme coins. They are, you know, the pseudo equity-ish tokens that we want them to be. And so I think some people are also mad that why are we launching a meme coin in 2025 when we have pro-crypto regulation? And so like one perspective of it. of this is that crypto Twitter is very difficult. It is a very strong survival of the fittest arena. And something that has been frustrating me about crypto Twitter is why everyone's trying to tear down everyone else's bags.

And that's just like a bad environment. It ages you, it grays you. But that's one perspective. So a different perspective, which I am now becoming more partial to, which is, yeah, like, it's probably good that crypto is very harsh about our own internal products, releases, memes, that we are trying to meme into existence. What is Jesse trying to do?

He's trying to meme, coining it, to be competitive with TikTok and Instagram. And the broad crypto Twitter conversation is like, Jesse, don't do this. We don't like this. We don't think this is ready. And so we're not promoting it. So we're going to send the Zora token to zero,

because we don't think this should be a product of the crypto industry. And so I also appreciate that, OK, it is a very harsh environment. Maybe if crypto in our history would have been harsher about more things, we would have found scams early. Maybe if we had been harsher about Terra Luna, about FTX earlier, we would have been able to outs those things.

So the interest rate for the acceptance of your token is very, very high in crypto Twitter, which is a perspective that I also appreciate. So it's ironic a bit because one of the refrains you hear from a lot of people on Twitter is that there needs to be more funding for applications. And now here you have a quintessential consumer app. It's trying to be this fun kind of. It looks like a good app. It's well designed. It's snappy. They've done a pretty good job as far as consumer apps go.

the token, so one of the things that people are dunking on this token for, tokens trading right now around 200 million FTV with, you know, I don't know, what is it, 30, 40 million float. This token, the, Zora raised their last round at a $600 million fully diluted valuation. So it's down a lot. From Coinbase Ventures, by the way, which is part of the whole base cabal thing. Sorry, what was that?

From Coinbase Ventures. Right, right, right, right. And the other element that I think people are upset about is that, okay, the token is a four-fund-only token, and yet investors and insiders have, like, 55, 60%, which, okay, if it's for fun, they're having a lot of fun. Yeah, the investors are having a lot of fun, I guess. Like, that's why we're doing it that way.

Fun, but they're down, like, some. I guess, like, only the last round. Yeah, the last round people are not having as much fun as the early round people, I guess. So how do you guys think about Zora? Like, what's your take on this whole drama? I don't know. Tom, you're the consumer guy. What do you're the product guy?

Wow. Wow, you wear so many hats, Tom. I know. I'm pulling, like, triple duty. I don't know. I mean, I do think it's basically just trying to be a high brow rebrand of meme coins. Like, actually, if you go on Zora, it looks like if someone from San Francisco, like, design pump. Like, but ultimately, you still have, like, the shaking and the King of the Hill type effect.

And it's like, you know, what is really the content here? The content are memes. So it's a fucking meme coin launch pad. Like, it's not novel content. It's not long form essays. It's not some how-to video. It's fucking memes. So I just find that to be kind of facetious.

I think for the four fun only thing, on the one hand, I kind of, I kind of, appreciate the candor. Like it feels like a kind of a mask off moment for like a lot of governance tokens. Frankly, there is no governance, right? It is just basically for fun. Not every, not every token, but a lot of them. But at the same time, it feels like you're not fooling anyone. It feels like you and you walk by like these like janky smoke shops in New York and they have like nitrous and it's like not for human consumption. And it's like, okay, then like why is it blueberry flavored? And it's like, it feels like they maybe they think they're being legally clever, but it's like very obvious kind of what the game that they're playing is.

So I don't know. The whole thing feels very kind of goofy to me. The only thing I'll say is props to PumpDod Fund for not launching a token and becoming a revenue business. Mad respect, much more respect than like... Do you want to make revenue? Yeah, they have sequencer fees and like they do have fees from some of the... But my point is Pump.

Pumpdout Fund had a huge moment, a ton of opportunities. They could have done this. same thing and they didn't. And like, why is that a credit to them? Because like they focused on building a product that generates revenue, attracts users, has user retention,

like all the kind of like boring Web 2 stuff as opposed to like. So you think if they launched a token now it would be a mistake? I think they, yeah, basically. Why? Well, right now in particular, I guess they're trying to bootstrap their AMM, get liquidity to my gate.

They don't need a bootstrap. It's there. I mean, this thing is making a ton of money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, I think it's still. are in that process. I just don't think that, like, they've clearly focused on, like, building an experience and product that is focused on fee generation.

And it's like you don't see that. In crypto, you always see people jump for the easy launch a thing, hope it works. And you have to all our respect for being the number one app and not doing that. Yeah. It does beg the question, now that Zora does have a token, now it has to focus on the token. Right now it's an object of attention for Zora development. Zora progress, Pump doesn't have that so they get to continue to focus on product, which they've done

very well. So yeah, there's a basic question. Like now Jacob from Zora and the Zora team have this token, which is for fun, but now they're going to orient their business around too? Like, how does that work? KPI, fun. Yeah, fun, only let's go up. Must have more fun over time. Business and pleasure don't mix.

You know, this is, you can make a lot of money having fun. Okay, very good. Yeah, so it's interesting that it's true what you say to Roan is that when you have these really speculative manias in crypto. So almost everything in crypto ends up getting tokenized if it can be tokenized,

except for the winners in a speculative mania. In a speculative mania, open C did not tokenize. You saw the same thing with Nifty Gateway at the beginning. They didn't tokenize. You see the same thing now with Pump. Fun, same thing with photon, same thing with Axiom. The difference I'd say there is OpenC was cannibalized by a token later, right?

Sure, sure, but by then the revenues had already plummeted. The revenues had already plummeted at that point, right? So the mania was really in decline by the time the blur came on the scene. So I think in a way, maybe that's what you see is that the last gasp when revenues are declining for Pump. Fund Fund is when they will launch a token. Yeah. I feel like really the top signal is when SoftBank starts getting back into crypto. And that was the thing that makes me worried about 21 capital.

Oh, yeah. Did we start this episode with sort of that? Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah. What do you think this is beginning of the end? Yeah, exactly, yeah. Damn. Are the walls closing it?

I don't have an opinion on that way. I have an opinion. Okay, so I guess the other question then about Zora and the whole situation is, like, the question in my mind, because I get why the response has been so negative. Because there's a sense from a lot of people that we have too many tokens already that don't capture value. And one of the existential problems for the token industry is that we're not being grown-ups about the question of value capture. and capitulating to this degree in 2025 and saying that, like, yeah, this token does nothing, has no governance over anything, it's just for fun,

is basically saying that, like, yeah, you'll buy it anyway, and we don't have to make any promises to you. Now, obviously, you don't want a token that's security, unless you do, but, you know, obviously most people don't. But it does feel like there's something, there's some other way they could have positioned this token to say, at some point, this token will have governance over the protocol. Like, that doesn't seem that hard to do.

It does feel like they saw, the moment. If Jesse said that he did not know that the Zora token was coming. Maybe the, they saw the opportunity of, oh, Zora Minst are all time high. Zora attention is at all time high. Zora awareness is all time high. Now's our time to launch the token. And maybe they rushed it because it does feel left over from the Gary Gensler era where they said, look, this token is just for fun. And so maybe they saw their moment and they just shot their shot real fast. Would it make you feel better if the top 220 Zora holders got to have dinner with Jacob? I would feel so much better. I would make you feel.

That's like that's why I'm saying mad respect pumped out fun for for building a revenue business. All right. Well, that does sound very fun. Jacob. He's a here's a fun guy. That just sounds like a Williamsburg crypto right there. Yeah.

I mean, what do you guys feel about this like kind of fall from grace? I don't know it's fall from grace, but like the way in which Jesse feels like he's in the hot seat now. I mean, you interviewed him on your show. What is your sense of like where the stock of Jesse slash best? base is right now. I think Jesse is doing exactly what he should be doing. And I think he's getting a lot of pushback from, you know, external ecosystems, but being a founder is hard. And I, I truly believe that Jesse sees this future of content coins. Like we are kind of joking like, oh, content coins are just highbrow meme coins. Form factor does matter. You go to Pump Fun and you feel like you're at

4chan. You open up Zora on mobile and you feel like you're on Instagram. That form factor does matter. That does change the nature of what these coins look like and consumer behavior around these things. And Jesse sees that vision and he wants to bring that vision to the world. I think Jesse's doing exactly what he should be doing. He now has many more haters, but, you know, he's... F the haters. Keep going, Jesse. One very funny thing about this whole watching this from afar and being like a non-user

of either of these and never enjoyed opening either of the apps or websites is you go to Farcaster and it's like everyone who's really into this content coin shit is like over-thes 30. Like, no one who's under 25 finds it. They look at it and, like, this is like millennial dog shit. Like, realistically, like, realistic. It's always to ruin that makes the cultural comments. Wow, wow.

I mean, no, no, it's like that I, you see this, like, very clear cut divide. And I think people who live in a little bit too much of, like, 2010's tech land or have lived through that. Okay, so you're also implying by that statement that, like, that's bad. that like, because millennials have money. I'm just saying, you don't want to be Google making a social network chasing Facebook. And that's what you're saying. That's like you being kind of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. You're just not getting that culture shift might already happen. You're kind of catering to an audience that will not care about. Tom, do you agree with this? I do think content is kind of a millennial shibolive too. Like no one who's making content thinks that they're making content. You know, it's like, yeah, yeah.

It's like, Falcner's like, I'm going to sit down and like write some content today. It's like, no, it's... Okay, okay. All right. I do think this getting the demographic right thing is really important. And if you don't get the zeitgeist might have shifted, you may be just talking to an audience that will not be growing. So, okay, you bring this up often about like,

oh, the young people is the only boomers, it's only millennials that like this. Tarun to secretly hates his own generation. I think that's definitely true. That's definitely true. But I'm like, what gives you so much conviction that like we, If you're building a consumer product, you need to go all in on Gen Z always. Like, are you, like, how, why are you confident in that?

The history of social products since 2010 is you always go for the age cohort that's like 17 to 24. And, like, that's where you make, that's where you make the most money. Right, but if people don't, bigger, but what's the monetization growth? One is flatlining slash decaying. The other one's still growing. Come on. Like, if you're building a business, you don't want to be building towards this flatlining growth. Right, but Instagram is saturated. It's market. Nothing in crypto is saturated anything.

There's 20 grannies posting, like, baby pictures. Like, that's not, that's not the... Is that how you follow Instagram? My point, though, is that I just think, like, if I showed content coin to, like, my 21-year-old cousin, they would just be like, this is millennial dog shit. They would probably say, like, literally that. Everybody in your life hates millennials, even your cousins. No, I'm just like, you know, I think like every millennial I show this stuff too, they're like, oh, that's like, I don't understand this. It's too hard.

Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like trying to get like your grandmother to use a ledger. Eddie Lazaran from A66C is a CTO of A66C left a comment that I think changed my perspective on this, where he said people under index on how fast content can adapt to fit the medium. And I think what he means by that is like if you go on to Zora and the Zora app right now, it looks like Instagram-ish and it looks a little bit like people are taking their memes from Twitter and also posting them on Zora. People are trying out things.

And if Zora is successful, the content that finds resonance with being coined and being traded on Zora is going to be a new kind of content that is optimized for being uniquely funny and relevant inside of the Zora form factor. And so right now Zora Mints are actually an all-time high. and continue to sustain all-time highs, they need to go higher in order for this to work. But people are trying things, and if this does work out what a Zora coined post looks like, what a coined content is, will adapt to optimize for trading revenue and for speculation.

But it will be different than Pump Fund, which is just literally just a token with a name, it'll be something uniquely more rich because there is an actual file type that goes with a coin inside of Zora. Yeah, I was actually about to say the same thing. if you pretty much know creator is able to make the hop across different media, like no one who is big on YouTube is big on Instagram,

no one who's big on Instagram is big on TikTok. And it takes a while to figure out the format. I don't know if Zora is quite a new format. Like it basically looks like Instagram and the content is very Instagramy. And that's why I'm kind of skeptical of this claim. But I think it's like any of these things. When someone figures it out, they crack it open, they have a blueprint. You just get a huge rush of people that sort of follow in after them.

So maybe that will happen was a lot. Zora, I give it like a small single legit percent, but that's still better than nothing. Well, I think part of it is that, I mean, PumptoFund very clearly is like very foreshanny, right? It's got a certain vibe and a certain aesthetic and it's got a certain sense of humor as well. It's like, what is funny and what is likely to trend and what's likely to escape is okay, fart coin, right? Or, you know, some of these like goat goateous maximus and all these kinds of things. That's not the sense of humor of Instagram, and it's not a sense of humor of Zora. And so I think, like, it's also not true that, like, all of Gen Z resonates with 4chan humor, right?

Like, obviously, some do, but it's definitely not everybody. And so the idea that there should be different kinds of the same fundamental flywheel, but that just cater to a different style and a different brand, okay, maybe initially. I just feel like Zora, to Tom's point, just doesn't feel like it's targeting, like, a new thing. It really feels like it's targeting, like, people who are, like, like, bored of Instagram but want a clone, right? Like, I think this is actually the reason a lot of all

the Twitter clones outside of sort of blue sky were unable to really get people like Twitter, the text-based ones are kind of a funny version of this, where people actually can't distribute their content, not because it's a different form factor, but it's because like the engagement

mania is very different, right? Like in Twitter, the retweet plus quote tweet thing actually works, but everyone who's copied it, it never seems to be like a means of virality, right? And so I think that that's sort of how I feel it's like, it's like, okay, yeah, like great, we've seen something like 500 of these. We've all seen 500 of these fail because right in the 2010s after Instagram, there were like all these photos sharing copy caps have failed. And that's kind of the vibe I get from it, which is

like why I'm like, I don't know who wants that. Well, Jacob has pivoted Zora many times and sticking to the same thesis of he thinks all content on the internet will be. coined. He started with that thesis. That's always been Zora's thesis. And the form factor of Zora has adapted to where it is today, which is currently a point where, at a point where many people in the industry have been talking about this thing for two weeks straight. And so, you know, if you want to give Jacob the benefit of the doubt, he will continue to try and find that form factor. Yeah, yeah. I'm just saying right now where it is. Right now. Yeah. It does not feel like that. All right. So, okay, one last topic that we want to go through is the Ethereum pivot.

So this is something obviously that's been in the air for a very long time. And increasingly we're starting to see the discussion around it accelerate, people starting to identify that, hey, maybe this Ethereum pivot so-called is really happening. So Tomas, one of the co-directors of the Ethereum Foundation, just started, I think, a couple weeks ago. And we're starting to see more and more consistent messaging coming out of the EF, that things are changing. There's more focus on scaling the L1, more focus on capital formation and startups

and all this kind of stuff and supporting what's happening within DFI. Now, David and I actually had a debate in a private setting here in New York where he took the negative side against the Ethereum Pivot working. And I took the positive side. As an exercise. As an exercise. Originally, we were going to go the other way around. What is your feeling today about, you know, we've gotten a little bit of data, not that much, a little bit of data about this Ethereum pivot. Do you think so far it's working, what part is not working, and where do you think they still need to show more in order to have a bit?

be credible. Yeah. The Ethereum pivot was never going to happen in this one acute place. It was always going to be, Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem. The problem of Ethereum is going to show up in many different ways. And then the pivot will also show up incrementally in many different ways. One of them, as you identified, is the leadership of the Ethereum Foundation. But then also, we also need to lead Ethereum to a different future. And so we are seeing a resurgence of prioritization of layer one scale. Vitalik in February 2025 wrote that blog post about

why we need, in a roll-up-centric world, why we need to scale the layer one. He has since gone even further than that and added additional slide saying, beyond just being roll-up centric, why would we want to scale the layer one even more than that? And so there has been a resurgence

of scaling at the layer one. There's also been a resurgence of just basic product stuff. So Ethereum is reorienting its culture in my mind. to focus on like, okay, I am a product, how do I sell myself to the world? And that also just goes to very simple things as removing the swap pop-up,

the approved pop-up on a token swap. And then also there are people stepping up to be like a product for layer twos. So thinking as a product manager for layer twos, that's basically showing up as inter-op standards. And so the pivot is this slow thing that isn't showing up in any one particular arena of Ethereum, is actually showing up incrementally

in six or seven different arenas of Ethereum all at once. And it's actually been going on, I would say. It's been going on for four or five months now, and it's been slow because it's a big ship. But I think there are now signs where you could say, okay, the problems have been identified. They are being worked on. Maybe it's too little, too late.

But I think that the pivot is pointing in a good and new direction. Okay. Proposal. Sure. The ticker is pivot for your... I'd buy convertible bonds from you. I would totally buy convertible bonds for that. I like that.

I like that. I feel like I hear a CNBC guest host right now saying, David, thanks for having you on. It's been great. You know, it's like, I can just see you on the end of the thing.

All right. I mean, I agree. I think there's some good initial changes. I think in my mind, the bigger thing that needs to change is just like, it's like a velocity kind of issue. And I can remember this line.

I remember Kevin Weill joined Instagram, his head of product when I was there. and I was talking to him, and I was like, what's the plan? What are you going to do? And remember one thing he said was like, when you join a new org, when you want to sort of fundamentally change things, the first thing you do is you get one quick wind down. It doesn't have to be some big shipping strategy, but you need to show people, I have a decent idea and I could actually execute on it. And that is like so much of where institutional rot comes from is like, you just can't do anything. You can't turn the ship independent of where you think the ship

should be pointing. And I haven't seen that yet from Ethereum. I would like to see them actually ship some changes. I'd like to see them improve overall shipping velocity. That's really, I think, the thing that people clowned on the EF4 on DevCon was not, oh, we don't think the beam chain is good, but it's like five years. Are you kidding me? That is really what people, I think, take issue with. So if they can actually improve velocity, get some quick wins, then it's like, okay, now we can actually talk strategy. There's some conviction that we can actually execute on whatever that new strategy is. The increasing cadence of Ethereum shipping is one of the things that it has reoriented itself, too. So there are three hard.

force planned over the next 18 months. The first one comes in a couple weeks on May 7th or May 9th or something like that. And what is new in these two hard forks is there is going to be a 3x increase of layer one gas in this upcoming hard fork in three weeks and then an additional 3x in the next hard fork after that. So that would be a 30x. 9x. Thank you. That's a different number. That's why I see if it was that dragonfly mom at bankless. We're going to work on this before you start selling convertibles. And so these are new. These are new things. And so those are new. scaling layer one capacity increases being focused into these next two hard forks and the there has

been an awareness and an understanding that okay we need to be more rigid and committed towards regular cadence upgrades for the ethereum project so it's still slow ethereum will always be slow it's still six months hard fork cadences but that has been faster than what we've seen in the past tbd on whether ethereum can can follow through on this because shipping hard forks on time has never been as strong suit, but it is what people have identified as a problem and are working towards a solution. My sense personally is that messaging is the most important. Because I agree, nothing is going to happen fast in Ethereumland except maybe what's

happening in D.C. or maybe what Aetherialize is doing in terms of being more muscular and telling a story to institutions. Or maybe David's new project. Or David's new. Yeah, of course, that too. But I think, like, the hearing the same message, considering the same message, considering, consistently repeated from Ethereum people for long enough, I think will be the most effective change.

I agree. And so far, we've heard it. It's been, you know, a couple weeks. It hasn't been that long. And I think what I would want to hear more is that, like, we have done things poorly, and that will now change. And there's a little bit of a unwillingness to show a break with the past, but instead to say, oh, we're improving things, you know?

And it's like, you want a truth and reconciliation committee. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I want an admission that things were bad. Well, it depends on who you want that admission from. But people in the Ethereum Foundation will tell you that, yes, we effed up by being two ivory tower.

That is, I've heard that multiple times. There are some people on Twitter who I would say don't seem to reflect that very much. You know, Ethereum's a decentralized ecosystem. You can't get everyone on the same page all at once. I think you have to. I think that's the answer. I think that's the answer. That would be very beneficial.

I think you have to get everybody in the same page and say, we all have to say this. Yes. If it's like, okay, there's a cacophony of voices and some people are saying this, some people are saying that. But, you know, these people are saying the right things. That's not enough. Okay. It's funny you bring this up because I'm literally writing an article about what I think the Ethereum community should say and what are positioning and messaging.

What should they say? We should say that the layer one, we have previously as a community been weak about the strength of our layer one. We need to flip that around. The layer one is a strong place to be. We are actually materially increasing its capacity is we're getting at 10x in a year of layer one capacity. But beyond that, we're going to turn the layer one into a roll-up,

and that is going to give it roll-up speeds. That is a very strong property of the Ethereum layer one, that no one else will be able to have when that gets shipped. And we're going to have, we have the best layer two ecosystem. There are just some things that Ethereum needs to beat its chest about and be strong about and emphasize that Ethereum is not just for, the top 0.1% of transactions, actually Ethereum is for everything.

Everything goes on into the Ethereum layer one. This is exactly the thing where no one agrees on the message. I get 10 different versions of that. Yeah, and that is, because the Ethereum community is this broad, diverse group of voices and we're all doing. No,

I think some people are unwilling to admit they were wrong. That's like fundamentally, I think, I also see that in the Ethereum community. And it's very, and I'm doing my best to write this article to give myself, my future self-leverage,

to like beat my chest over the people who say that there was not a problem in Ethereum. Tom, what do you say? You're saying Ethereum is for Pimping? Is that the... Ethereum is for everything. And, you know... I don't know if that's the branding you're going to want to go with at this point. Hasn't tested well so far in focus groups.

You guys are buying each strategy? If David's selling it. If David selling it, you're buying. It has to be called pivot. I think the ticker has to be... I think Turin just made a commitment right there. Okay. All right. Well, if anybody's looking for a sponsor or CEO to run their micro strategy, ETH clone, we have one ready to go. We're at time, so we've got to wrap. But thanks so much for coming on. I'm honored. Thank you guys.

Thanks for having. Thanks for having us, everybody.