Unchained - The Chopping Block: Memecoin Frenzy, Unichain Reaction, & Kamala’s Crypto Agenda - Ep. 720

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner slice into the juiciest topics in crypto. In this episode, the crew dives headfirst into the “Memecoin Supercycle,” sparking a debate on whether these wild, meme-powered coins are just a fleeting obsession or a genuine revolution. They then dissect Uniswap’s bold leap to launch its own chain on the Optimism Superchain, asking if this move could steal the spotlight from Ethereum and forever reshape the DeFi landscape. And just when you think it’s all about tech, they dive into Kamala Harris’ latest crypto play, with an eyebrow-raising appeal to memecoin investors. From soaring hype to DeFi drama and political power moves, this episode is packed with hot takes, spicy predictions, and a glimpse at what might lie ahead in the world of crypto. Show highlights 🔹 “Memecoin Supercycle” and whether memecoins are on track to overtake traditional altcoins as they fuel a new wave of financial speculation. 🔹 Unichain: Uniswap’s bold move to launch its own chain on the Optimism Superchain, questioning whether this could pull DeFi liquidity away from Ethereum and reshape the crypto ecosystem. 🔹 Kamala Harris’ unexpected crypto appeal in her new “opportunity agenda for Black men,” which includes a vague promise for regulatory protection for digital assets. 🔹 Memecoins vs. VC Coins: Murad’s thesis on memecoins outshining VC-backed tokens sparks a heated debate on whether financial nihilism is driving this trend and what it means for the future of crypto investing. 🔹With the new Unichain possibly diverting DeFi liquidity, the crew ponders whether Ethereum is at risk of losing its dominance as the “home of DeFi.” Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Timestamps  00:00 Intro 2:10 The Memecoin Supercycle 9:13 VC Coins vs. Memecoins 25:30 Unichain: A New Era for Uniswap 31:51 Token Issuance on Ethereum vs. L2s 35:59 Uniswap's Future and Asset Creation 38:30 Predictions for Unichain's Impact 44:11 Retail Flow and MEV Extraction 53:31 Kamala Harris' Crypto Policy 56:05 Trump vs. Harris Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If Uniswap is successful, it's going to be almost entirely a zero-sum withdrawal from all these other chains that are going to lose a lot of their liquidity and lose a lot of their TVL to Unichane. They're aiming for, I'm going to suck up all the liquidity from Ethereum. Like, that's the wild success case. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quons. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm in the trading firms who are very involved.

I like that eat is the ultimate pump. DFI Protocol is part of the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together, give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first you got Tom,

the DFIven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Next, we've got Robert, the Cryptoconassur and Tsar of Super State. Good afternoon. Next, we've got Turun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Conlet. You.

And I'm a Cee of the Head Hype Man at Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto, I want to caveat that nothing we say here is an investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping block that X, Y, Z for more disclosures. So, boys, market seems to be alive once again. Seems like prices can actually go up. How are we all feeling? I think, Robert, you were just telling us that you're not allowed to feel anything anymore,

given that you're now a Tradfai guy? No, no. Is that correct? I asked if that was true. Yeah, pre-show Tarun asked if me as a Tradfai guy could even possibly enjoy a crypto rally anymore. And I said, of course, there's nothing greater than when crypto finally starts to go up. Rob, do you have any meme coins? It depends.

What you consider a meme coin? What's on the boundary that you're not sure whether it's a meme coin? I own some Bitcoin ETFs that you might call meme coins. No, I'm kidding. Bitcoin, B-I-T-O-I-N? No, I don't own any meme coins currently. There are times in the past where it dabbled, but like zero. Zero meme coins.

Okay. that's unfortunate. Well, meme coins have been crushing. It seems like kind of on every leg up, meme coins are outperforming most of the, as they call them VC coins. There's kind of few other standout stuff going on. So actually, maybe a good segue to talk about one of the big stories that has been occupying a lot of crypto Twitter is what people are starting to call the meme coin super cycle. So

I always have good feelings whenever people are bringing up supercycles. And this one has been coined by Marad. So Marad, he kind of goes back a long way. He originally ran a hedge fund. He's an ex-Prinsman guy. He kind of ran in a lot of the kind of print in crypto circles. And last cycle, he was a super Bitcoin maxi, if I recall. And he ended up having a hedge fund that blew up.

I think after three euros exploded, if I recall correctly, I think he was doing it. No, no, no, no. It was March 20, 2020, Black Thursday, yeah. Oh, it was Black Thursday when he blew up. So, yeah, so he adapted. He was running a head fund. I think that was the name. Adaptive.

That's right. That's right. And they had like all of. their var, like all of their funds were on Bitmex and got liquidated during a 45-minute outage or something. It was like, it was a little bit one of these things where it's like, I feel like kind of both like the exchange and the counterpart both made mistakes, you know, mistakes were made. Well, okay. Mistakes were made in a wallet he controlled. Yeah, fun went down and he sort of disappeared from crypto for, it feels like a couple years. And he reemerged within the last, call it, you know,

call it 18 months and has become this meme coin megabull. And as of recently, he was considered by Kaito, which is a portfolio company, to be ranked the number one influencer in crypto, overtaking Ansem and overtaking many of the other folks who've been driving a lot of the meme coin cycle. So he's been advocating for this thing he calls the meme coin super cycle.

And he gave a talk about this at Token 2049 that a lot of people are now talking about. And his claim is that the era of all crypto assets, that's moving in unison is over. Mem coins represent the spiritual reincarnation of the 2017 ICO wave. If you look at all the meme coins, they're still pretty small in absolute terms, about 40 to 50 billion in total market cap.

However, they turn over much, much more than any of the quote-unquote VC coins, which characterize most of the other all-coins. His claim, there's a few very quotable lines from here. One of them is that all coins aren't primarily about tech and meme coins aren't primarily about memes. Both are simply tokenized community. And the meme coins have this structural advantage because of the fact that they are building

these really strong religions and cults that the VC coins are no longer able to effectively create because there are too many insiders and there's much of this kind of structural bullshit that makes it more difficult for the VC coins to win relative to the meme coin. So his claim is that you're going to see crypto become more and more dominated by these meme coins and they're going to overtake the all-coin tech story. This is the death of the VCs, the revolver. of the public. It's all part of the meta narrative that now is coming to dominate more and more of the crypto-twinter timeline. So wanted to get your guys reactions. We've seen over the last

year, meme coins grow and continue to dominate the meta. What do you guys think about this meme coin super cycle thing? Tom, I see you grinning. What's your reaction? Yeah, I would just saying before the show, I hated this fucking talk. First of all, like, I think there's a question of if it's prescriptive or descriptive. I think if it's descriptive, I'm more open to it. Like, it's more just saying that objectively, yeah, meme coins are outperforming for these reasons, which I totally agree with.

I think if it's prescriptive and it's trying to sort of advocate for the mean point super cycle, this feels like extremely, I think, cynical and kind of sad. Like, yes, there is obviously, you know, a purpose of, you know, being a VC to allocate capital effectively and generate returns for your investors. But, you know, in theory should be doing that through creating value and, your, new inventions and things that are good and sort of create the increased utility for, you know, the world or for the

industry or whatever it might be. It's not just about sort of PPP trading. And I think his point of view, and granted, if I were in his shoes and were running a hedge fund or running my own prop capital for a very short-termist thing, yeah, I would totally be trading mean coins. Like, that's sort of the point. But it feels like it's kind of not really understanding the distinction between these these two objectives.

Like, this is not about sort of allocating capital efficiently if you're just literally trying to pump this thing. But I think also, and like maybe to be fair, this is like an ESL thing,

but I just thought like the wording on it was like really bad. Like it is this slide, what is it? Talking about, oh, like the utility of Mune coins. And it's like having fun, lowliness reduction,

identity, finding a similar crew, hope provisioning. I'm like, okay, that's all the same thing. All you're just saying is like a community and like a group of people, like a guild. That's all the same thing.

Like this, it's like, you know, like you have to like hit your, 10,000 word count, but the papers do it at midnight, and just like, you're pulling up to source.com and they're throwing a bunch of bullshit. I mean, that's basically what this is. And it just was not, it's maybe a succinct talk and that's why people like it.

But I don't know. I just like, it's kind of like, what are we doing here? Like, what is the purpose of this conversation? You know, I think there is credence in the idea that social consensus slash memes have value, right? I, you know, I go all the way back to Bitcoin, which is value. really is based on social consensus that they need. And like, in some squishy sense, it is also a meme coin and that the idea of Bitcoin spreads from person to person. And along the way, more people become believers, you know, some people call this religion. Other people call this

memes. Other people call this a shelling point. It's like, it's all of the same thing. And, you know, you can't argue that like Bitcoin originally isn't a product of this as well. And, you know, we all agree that Bitcoin has value. We all agree it is value because of its market price that, you know, indicates that it has value. But it's formed that through the social consensus process over, you know, 14 years or so, right? Having experienced that, there's nothing, you know, limited by the laws of physics that prevents another token based purely out of social consensus or meme or whatever from achieving, you know, breakout success. Like there's not. But I do think that Bitcoin crowds out a lot of other ideas. I think that, you know, other meme coins crowd each other

out. Like, I don't think there's a genuine path for there to be a $10 trillion asset, you know, created out of, you know, the 947,000 random salon a meme coin that somebody deploys, right? And so, you know, I do think there's credence to memes and meme coins. I don't. just don't necessarily think that there's going to be, you know, sustainable breakout success for Meancoins as financial assets in speculation. And so, you know, I take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, I mean, there's nobody's really questioning like, oh, is Dogecoin going to go away or is, you know, Shiba or Whiff, are these things going to go away? Like, they're probably not going to go away. They've been around basically forever. And something like that will always exist.

I think the Munecoin super cycle thesis is much stronger claim than that. The claim is that these things are sort of, they are, the claim, I guess, is a sort of collapsing of the distinction between the VC coins and the meme coins, right? What Maraud's claim fundamentally is, is that these two things are basically trying to do the same thing. They both are basically just vehicles of speculation and the meme coins are better ways of doing it because, you know, it's part and parcel of this financial nihilism stuff of that, you know, the falling away of this illusion that any of this stuff is useful and that it does anything. This is all just kind of, you know, tech, circle jerk nonsense. Like nobody's really using, you know, fucking Celestia or Unitoken

or any of these things for anything useful. And so therefore, if it's all about just people telling a story and creating vibes and building a community of people who quote unquote get rich together, as many people have described the Salana story of like, oh, people went through this value of darkness and they got rich together. It's like, okay, well, yeah, that you can recreate that much more efficiently. If you remove the VCs, you remove the tech circle jerk, you remove all this other stuff, and in the future, this will get out competed by the meme coins. They're better ways of creating this kind of this big role play that we're all doing together that is speculating on tokens. That's Maraud's claim. And I think that's not just, oh, okay, yeah, meme coins have a place and memes have

value. It's that meme coins will eat everything. That's his claim. Yeah, I think that doesn't stand a chance. Yeah. I think there's also a scale component to this. too where it's like, you know, it's kind of like when people say like, oh, like, Monster Energy is like outperformed Google over the past like 15 years. I'm like, yeah, that's because. Abercrombie and Fitch outperformed Nvidia. Yeah, I'm like, these are like tiny companies compared to several trillion-dollar companies. So obviously, yes, it's easier to outperform when you require two orders of magnitude,

less capital. Very similar thing happening with meme coins where it's like, where is the actual, you know, capital that's going to deploy these things. Again, maybe I came out of the gate too harsh. I think if I were in Maraud's shoes, or frankly, if I were in a retail trader's shoes, I would probably agree more with this sentiment, which is like, yeah, maybe it's easier for me to buy into this thing. I think, again, it is describing kind of the phenomenon that's been having in the past two years,

but, like, it feels kind of disingenuous. Again, I don't know if it's intentional on this part or if you just genuinely doesn't understand, like, kind of the purpose of a VC or kind of like how, where the returns come from. It feels like it's sort of this like PDP hedge fund mindset of like, oh, I get into something earlier than you and then I sell it and that's how we make money versus like, no, I funded something that creates some value that the market is realizing it is valuable. And like that's how the GDP of the space goes up.

And it feels like that sort of utility creation idea like doesn't really exist in this meme coin super cycle story. What's your take? I'm probably more charitable than probably both talks about. HOM and Leshner, maybe closer to Leshner in that, I think the VC coins have had a calamitous problem in their inflation curves and unlocks and all of this stuff that has kind of made the, made the like air drop hunting type of thing even worse and more competitive in a way that like does, I can see why you would say that it's almost like the meme coin cabal insiders are more fair in some ways. than a lot of the token launches and airdrops. So I think it's more a complaint about the airdrop mechanisms and like the pre, you know, like how the unlocks work.

Then it really is a thing about the utility. I mean, I know there's kind of this idea that, hey, there's this circle jerk, whatever, about the technology. But I feel like the real thing. And this is a sense of anger that I feel oftentimes the most when I leave the U.S. I think in the U.S., everyone in crypto is like in it for the tech and like not ironic. And when you go to Europe, everyone is kind of in it for the tech ironic. And then you go to Asia and everyone is not in it for the tech at all.

And there's kind of this like thing where I think people in Asia, I would argue, we're sort of abused by a lot of the way different airdrops worked. And meme coins seem like a more fair version of that. And that's, to me, that's where the anger, I think, kind of that powers this sentiment comes from. The question of how it will change is just like, hey, a bunch of airdrops have horrible performance. And people mark losses. And then all of a sudden you have to. So like, I actually think I prefer thinking of it as like meme coins are competitive with these.

But they'll both, you know, there'll be some improvement into to the economics of a lot of these coins that. hopefully will be driven by the fact that, like, you can't kind of can't take for granted your users the way that people had been doing in 2022 and 2023. I think, like, 2021 set this, like, bad precedent in a lot of ways with the abuse of users prior to launching a token that... When you say the abuse of users, can you elaborate, what do you mean? I think there were just a lot of, like, false promises of, like,

hey, you know, if you put your capital into my liquidity pool, you'll get this much of the irdrop. And then like, oh, oops, sorry, the points don't convert at the price you thought. I thought they're converting one to one. Now they're converting one to 10. You know, like, there was just a lot of chicanery, I think that came from like how the realized token events occurred versus like what was sort of implied. And I feel like that the whole complaints about these like low float high FDV things are exactly dual to the meme coins, which are like, hey, everything's floating immediately. You're like most of it, right?

So there's this kind of this interesting thing of like this, this feels more like a reaction to that than anything else. And like, I'm not sure I buy his precise thesis, but I do agree that there's going to be some relative value trade between these coins where like the airdrops kind of use. didn't get what they thought they would get, right? Like, I wouldn't say this is like a thing where it's like, oh, the FTC would like go after this, although who knows in the current FTC.

But like it does feel like a lot of, you read a lot of the blogs about like, oh, why you should put stuff in my protocol. And then you look at like what happens after theirdrop and like that delta is clearly some anger, right? Like that. So you're saying you're intellectually long meme coins as a category and you're intellectually short VC coins as a category,

but you fall short of this super cycle hypothesis. Yeah, I don't think it's super cycle. Well, you're saying there's a relative value trade. I think there's a relative value trade that will flip, right? I think the VC investments will have better unlock schedules, air drops, whatever. Like, they'll have a different, like, you already see this with how the point systems have crashed, right, like in the last six months, three months. So you're saying then that this is sort of retail chastising the entrepreneurs and the VC-backed projects

and the VC back projects are adapting. Yes. This seems still like a far cry from being, like, sympathetic to Marad's thesis, though. I'm not sympathetic as much as, like, I just feel like the thing that's missing in the, like, oh, you don't care about technology or utility thing is actually this is the underlying market force,

not the utility. The utility stuff is like a nice just-so story that you can package and tell. But really, I think it's this that it's getting it. I agree, again, in terms of price action, I think it's absolutely true. And again, I empathize with him. And I think a lot of people in a lot of retail investors.

And so like, yeah, why like large FDV VC coin launches are not attractive. I think I take issue with like positioning these as, you know, competitive or like, you know, replacement products of like, oh, well, instead of the VC's backing the thing, we do the meme coin. I'm like, okay. And like, how does it actually like get money to builders who are like, like, you know, like, building the shit that you're using. Like this is just like a totally different. Like I think ICOs, yes, are maybe competitive with venture in terms of, you know, capital formation and sort of early stage backing and creation and funding of new ideas.

But like mean coins don't do that. I mean that's why I would picking on the utility side. I'm like, okay, you said the same thing 20 times and these are not products. Like this is just people getting together to like on the token. Yeah, it does feel like there's a, obviously there's a populist appeal to this idea that the VC coins are done, meme coins are on the rise. Rob from Dragonfly made a tweet this morning that I thought was very good, which is the difference between meme coins and VC coins

is just there's a different cabal that's making the money before you do. And I think in the late stage, and I've made this point before, I think in early stage meme coins and late stage meme coins are quite different. There's stages. I love it. There's very much stages. Yeah, yeah. I know, I know, but you see the supply chain.

It's funny to hear that phrase. I haven't, to me, that was the first time I ever heard. Yeah, I mean, the same thing is true with NFTs. Like, in the early stage of NFTs, it really was people who were in for the love of the game. And it was like, you know, like hash masks was a genuine moment of inspiration. And they were trying new things. And then by late stage NFTs, it was just a formula. It was like every single day, somebody is just, you know, just vomiting out a new collection.

And we see which one wins for the day and which one goes up and down. The life cycles get shorter and they get more brutal and the white lists are more predictable. And the same thing is happening with meme coins is that we sort of know it's increasingly congealing into, okay, there's the miras and there's the Anems and you've got to get on their radars and you've got to pump this thing in the right way and you've got to do, you know, this, the extractiveness of markets that are mature is just a feature of anything where there's too much retail money. Like, it's always going to happen.

So it doesn't matter if it's NFTs, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, tokens, whatever it is. It'll find its way such that the average buyer who is not sophisticated is going to get hurt if they don't know what they're doing or if they're not, you know, very explicitly being protected. Memecoins, I think it's pretty obvious at this point. I mean, the backlash against Pump. Pump.

It's a lot fund has grown to such an extent that I feel like now it's the modal view that pump. Dot fund is not good for retail and that most people are losing money on these platforms. they're not making money. So the idea that this is, in general, good for people, I think, like, that's hard to justify. The idea that it's good for people who are, that people who are not VCs can make money, that's definitely true, right?

The Marauds of the world and the people who know how to play the game, it's a game that, yes, VCs have no advantage in, and folks who do understand that game can make money. And so to Tom's point, I can understand why if you're a Marad, you want to tell the story. The thing that seems also really obvious to me, though,

is that, I mean, again, there's a distinction in my mind between something like WIF or Doge that, you know, they just exist. They're probably never going to go away. They're self-sustaining. And there is really no cabal at the center of it. It's just, you know, an emergent trauma. Hey, hey, Whiff hasn't been on the sphere yet. Dog has not been on the sphere.

Sure. Maybe post-in-weather on the sphere, it'll finally get to that, you know, vaunted place where they're now like Doge. But I think for everything else, you know, like all these new, you know, what's the SPX-6,900? And all these new meme coins that are popping up Nero that, you know, they may have staying power. They may really develop this cult. They may be the flavor of the day. Nobody really knows. I think this thing is the thing that feels temporary.

Like it's going to last for a while, but then it's eventually going to fall out the same way NFTs did and it'll move on to something else. And the big thing, you know, I was looking at this the other day because I was arguing with somebody about this, that, you know, although it is true that meme coins are getting a lot of volume and a lot of attention, the reality. is that it's still not what most people are trading. Just go look at the volumes on Binance or on ByBit, and you go look at the top 10 tokens, and one or two of them are meme coins. Most of them are VC coins. And most of the quote-unquote VC coins,

even ones that are still got unlocks that come, not just Solana, that still are spewing out unlocks and the VCs are making money. There's still most of what people want to trade because at the end of the day, most people don't want to feel like they're trading just random nonsense.

You know, I saw a tweet talking about this the other day, which I appreciated. And to your point to root, it might be a geographic thing, I don't know, but most people like, you know, they may be buying weird stuff.

They might be buying XRP or buying, you know, Cardano or things that, you know, I don't necessarily think that are the most exciting technologies in the world, but they're buying things

and they're doing something that they identify as research and they're telling a story to themselves that they think is about technology. And that's important that there actually be some aspiration about what they're doing

and that they're not just gambling with their friends. There are some people who just want to gamble with their friends, and that's fine. But that's not what most people want to do or think that they're doing when they're investing in crypto. I think meme coins would benefit from the localization teams that most VC coins have in the sense that there's a Chinese language description of what your protocol does. There's no Chinese language description of a meme. Well, I think that's the idea you don't need one, right? But some of them I think you're kind of, some of them I think actually the names are like puns in English.

or something, right? It's like, yeah, I think some of the ones that don't work. I think some of them are just, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I actually think there's like that limitation, which is like even more fundamental. Like, I don't think the memes themselves translate. Like, Joe's easy.

Joe's easy. Yeah, the biggest one, the biggest ones are all kind of obvious, right? You don't need to speak the language to understand it. Right. But SPX 6900,

I don't know. That might be hard, right? Like, I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I agree. There's a lot. There's a lot. seem somewhat esoteric, I will say. I mean, it's on the nose if you're familiar with the,

if you're familiar with the memes. Anyway, components. Cool. Components. Yes, exactly. Robert, do you want to get the last word on meme coins? We'll move on. Yes. I think, you know, the biggest problem I have is the sillier the meme, the more successful it generally is. Like, we're talking about SPX 69,000. You've become so trad-fi. I know, I know, I know. You can rag on me after the show. Is that a unicorn on your shirt? I feel like that that's, what is that on your shirt, Robert?

I don't even know. I found an old t-shirt in my closet. Okay, that's very trashy of you. All right. It's just like a team building exercise or something. Okay. Nice. I would say, I think it's my white.

I remember during the NFT boom, I had this idea that we should create an index fund of NFTs called the NFT-5. Sadly, no one ever did that. And mechanically, I don't know that it's really possible to do that with NFTs. But I'm glad to see somebody finally was able to make that meme work. So good for them. Only best wishes to, not financial advice, but only best wishes to the SPX 6900 community. I mean, I do think it's funny imagining the person who made that like going home for Thanksgiving.

And they're like, so what do you do this year? I invented SPX 69. No, no, no, it's like 70 cents. If it hits 6,900, I quit me. No, no, no, no. The actual S&P is like 58, 59 right now. Oh, you mean if the S&P 500, well, it's SPX 6900. So it's like the reference to the SMP.

Yeah, yeah. If that, who knows, probably this thing is going to. We thought, we thought meme coins would get lost in translation to non-English speakers, but apparently they even get lost in translation to English speak. Even to financial investors, it turns out. Okay. All right, let's go back to VC coins. This is a VCCcoin podcast after all.

So let's talk about UniChain. So Uniswap this week or last week made a really big announcement during permissionless conference that they are launching their own chain, a layer two on top of the optimism super chain. So what is Unichane? Unichane is an implementation of the OP stack. it has reduced transaction fees because of course it's a roll-up

so it's not going to have anywhere near the fees that Ethereum 1-Lar1 has. It's going to have one-second block times which is pretty standard for chains that are part of the super chain. However, they partnered up with FlashBots and FlashBots is going to be making a trusted execution environment-based block builder.

So essentially that's a kind of trusted hardware that allows them to make blocks faster than the one-second block time. So they're going to create these 250-millissecond sub-blocks that allow basically really fast confirmations even before the full block is actually produced. And because it's trusted hardware, you can trust the design,

whatever we don't have to go into details. This created a lot of conversation about this move. So they're the first real DFI protocol in Ethereum to verticalize and build their own chain. Now, Uniswap, much like AVE and compound, launched on many different chains first. So Uniswap is on almost every single EVM-compatible chain you can think of that has a meaningful volume.

and the way that people thought about uniswap was that the way they go multi-chain is by going horizontal, meaning that they have an instance of uniswap that has segregated liquidity on every single chain. So on every single chain, you can one-click, go trade on uniswap. Now the architecture is going to be,

presumably, they haven't described exactly yet how they're going to be driving liquidity, but the idea is that people go to unichane to make their trades. And ideally, it sucks up a bunch of the liquidity from layer one, from Ethereum, from arbitram, from base, from some of these other platforms

where Uniswap is deployed and congregates that liquidity into one place. And from their perspective, this is good for users because this means, you know, lower fees. It also means less MEV.

It means, you know, a better trading experience because the latency is going to be lower. But of course, from the perspective, and, you know, there are a lot of flow-through effects from doing this. From the perspective of users

and from the perspective of a Unitoken, this is a big boon because now it means that Unitoken is going to be accreting more value if it's used as the validator, you know, something, something, something of how you get the fees that are created on Unichain, as well as users are going to get better execution? It remains to be seen, though, are they going to be able to actually suck up their liquidity and get people to start depositing capital?

Are they going to create a bunch of incentives to push the deposits there away from where it currently lives? And second, is this bad for Ethereum? Is this going to be sucking up some Ethereum defy and pulling some of that capital and pulling some of that demand into unichain? So this has triggered a lot more conversation and hand-wringing in the Ethereum community about, oh, crap, is the roll-up-based scaling architecture that we've embraced actually, in a way, leading to our own demise? So there's a lot to work with there. I want to get everyone's reactions.

I'll start with Tom. What do you think about Unichain? It's funny. I think Dan Helzer from Naysa had this post like over two years ago talking about how Unicham was inevitable. And I think it felt, you know, very out there at the time. Even if even if you didn't like it. And now here we are with Unichan.

I think it makes sense. Like it's in some ways weird that the U-largest application does not have its own L2 and like all these other smaller, crappier applications do have their own L-2. I think the flashbot stuff is actually, it means very cool, obviously we're investors in flashbots, but I think it's underrated in terms of a better way for these apps that have their NL2s to monetize and that you now have a sort of trustless, arm's-length way

to get way better UX and to internalize your MEP. All the other sort of MEPR recapture methods for apps right now are very kind of hacky, and it's like, oh, you feel like send your transactions to this separate M-Pool, and like it's a shitty, but hey, if we're all using the same L2, great, would just be this private, separate thing. And obviously the revenue goes back into the app itself, which is great.

I think there was a question of, like, how many uniswap transactions are sort of self-contained within uniswap? A lot of the transactions that we've seen, obviously, are going across different applications. So people are running arbitrages or they're, you know, swapping into uniswap to then go do something else. Like, I need to go pay in one currency. I'm going to go swap into uniswap.

then atomically go do something else. I think Unichain is a bet that people just want to go to Unswap to trade, and this is obviously going to be a better experience for them. Or maybe someday down the line, they can have their own sort of robust that you can sit on the chain itself. But it feels like today maybe just, hey, segregating out some of this flow will make it better for both people versus having to be co-located. Yeah, it's a good point. The Unichain is fully EVM compatible so you can deploy smart contracts and create other applications besides Unoswap itself. So that's an important. note. Robert, what's your take? I'm going to focus on a small part of this, not a large part of

this. I think the most interesting effect might be on where tokens are natively issued and how they're bridged. Right now, the vast majority of assets are issued either on Ethereum L1 or Solana L1. And those are basically your two picks. There's very few teams out there that issue a token where the core issuance and, you know, accounting of it is on some L2. It's been very rare. Oftentimes it's like you start on the base and it's bridge to an L2. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the most interesting side effects of this is that teams start to rethink where tokens are natively issued.

And we start to see things that are issued on maybe even union chain, but maybe other like optimism or Arbitrum or wherever. Because if tokens become more mobile in terms of their trading and transacting, and it's like less of an opportunity cost to be hidden away in this L2, you know, I think you might see teams start to prefer. It's like, oh, okay, well, it's just a lower cost, you know, ledger for us to track ownership on of like the root asset. And you might start to see teams for the first time really move away from like, oh, we can only issue one Ethereum or Salon. And I think the biggest beneficiary, ironically, is not going to be, you know, necessarily

even union chain. It might be other L2s, might indirectly benefit from this. And I think unanticipated ways. Why do you think this makes people want to issue on L2s? I didn't totally follow the rationale. If you're creating a new token, right, and you're like, you know, currently thinking about issuing it on Ethereum, which is, you know, for those that go in the EVM world where 99.99% of tokens are first issued.

You know, there's some coming on base, you know, and they live on base natively. But like, you know, costs and transaction volumes are prohibitive. It's why, like, Ethereum has lost to Salauner in a lot of ways with the whole meme coin arena is because, you know, $3 per click, you know, is too much for people and they want to have, you know, a fraction of a cent per click. And so the biggest problem, though, if you're in the EVM world of going to an L2 has been like, You know, it's really hard to go from an L2 to other places, right? It's much easier to go.

It's much easier for it's going to move from Ethereum to many different L2s, you know, etc. And like, yes, there's cross-chain interoperability solutions out the wazoo to help solve this. But like a simplification of this is everything in the EVM world is issued on Ethereum. And then it can move from there. And I think, you know, we might see a renaissance here in unanticipated ways where people are like, you know what? like let's all just start issuing tokens on arbitram or optimism or base or wherever, you know, and then later, you know, they can be traded through a uny chain more easily and, you know, the interoperability, you know, expands.

And so native issuance moves away from Ethereum. So Ethereum might be a bigger loser and L2s and other, you know, EVM chains might be bigger winners outside of just, you know, having the biggest application sort of leave. Yeah. True, what's your take? Yeah, I kind of agree, Tom. I think the most interesting thing is the flashbots piece by far. I think, well, what's the phrase?

If you attract the most hate when you launch a new product, that means that you must have done something right, something like akin to that. And I feel like there was, you know, obviously they attracted a lot of, I think the other L2s, there was a lot of L2 on L2 violence on Twitter after this launch.

I'm mainly focused on the flashbox piece, so that's a data point that I would use. I think it's actually, yeah, the MEV capture thing is nice. I think the 250 millisecond block time makes it competitive with Solana. And I still think there's going to be some like UX issues overall. Like I feel like I'm still not convinced that we've gotten to a point where the UX really feels sufficiently good, but I'm hoping to be wowed, you know, like when it launches that, like, hey, there's something they've thought through the super chain interoperability stuff.

I'm a little skeptical from what I've seen code base-wise, but like, you know, maybe there's some secret. I'm hoping there's some secret sauce. To Lesher's point, I do kind of agree the reason the Ethereum has sort of been losing its monetary premium is people don't want. to issue new assets there. Like, it doesn't have the asset creation velocity that other places have. I remember in 2020 and 2021, I used to follow these telegram groups that would tell you,

like, new uniswap pools and you could like see the velocity at which there would be, that was just the proxy for new tokens, right? Because like, at that time. And you can just kind of see the like new pool creation really decayed quickly. So I think for uniswap to continue. the network effect of like, hey, I want, I want people routing order flow across from across many pools all the time. You need to win back the asset creation market. So you need to win back the place where you're the primary market. I think that what Robert's getting at is really that,

right? Like, that's the thing Ethereum lost. And so the question is, will an L2 win back that title? And I'm not convinced. I'm just saying, like, to me, that's the measure of success is like if they win that. I think that's really only true. for meme coins though. Like if you look at any of the new, I don't know, larger tokens that have launched in the past year, they've launched natively on Ethereum or Solana. Like I don't think people are willing to take the risk of, you know, launching a token for their new startup on an L2.

But I think for Uniswap, it has the highest, like, sort of network value growth from new assets and fees from routing across, right? And I think like if there isn't that, it's different than being good for the asset itself versus for the network effect of uniswap routing, right, of like generating fees overall. And if we think about the sequencer fees and the unitoken holder implied fees coming from that, you want the new asset creation. I think like that's just going to be a fundamental thing. And that's sort of where I'm like, I don't know.

You know, like, I don't know how to predict that. I agree that Uniswap wants that. It seems like a big leap to say that they're likely to get it. Sorry, I'm not saying they're likely to get it. I'm just saying that that is the indicator of success of this, that like I don't really have a prediction of, to be honest. I need to see what the U.S. feels like, right? Like, does it feel like phantom trading meme coins on phantom?

If so, then like, yeah, sure, why not? Like, I could, then I could see, right? But, like, I really, it needs to be, it needs to feel like Phantom. And this gets back to this fact that, you know, a lot, you know, and this is anecdotal, but like a lot of people I know who know nothing about crypto, but who like meme coins because they're funny or cutesy or whatever, they think Phantom is Solana. They don't even think Solana is Solana. They're like, I'm trading meme coins on Phantom, right?

Like, and the UX feels good enough that they don't even have to learn that there's salana underneath. I feel like if this is what you kind of need for this to flourish. Let me ask you guys a more pointed question. Let's say fast forward a year from now. I think Unichine is going to launch like toward end of this year or something in a month or something like that. TestNet is live. Yeah, TestNet is live, but I think Mainnet is like a month or something away, something like that. Within a few months, it'll be out. Fast forward to let's say this time next year, October next year. What percentage of uniswap volume would you predict is going through unichain? Tom, what would your prediction be? Like all uniswap volume or percentage of eF volume?

What percentage of uniswap volume is going through unichain? I'm going to go 20%, 25%. 25%. 25%. I will say, I think, 10%. I will go with 13%. True. I was trying to do some very tiny research in that I think what no research that's against the spirit of the bed. Okay. So I think whatever volume is on Uniswap X will get migrated naturally because it's like they control the auction and front end for that. So why would you move it? There's so much envy you're extracting while looking up these dashboards. Yeah.

Yeah, but I know. Give us a number. Give us a number. We agreed to do the bet in Red Bull. You got to give us a number. I'll go low. Nine. Nine.

Okay, so, all right, interesting. A seed-up sandwich attacked. Yeah, I definitely did. I got absolutely fucked by that ordering. But I guess what I was going to say is that I am relatively bearish on this thing, actually taking up most of Unoswop's volume. And it sounds like you guys are all two. Given these estimates, you guys think that Unoswap is not going to drive that hard.

to push the liquidity from all of these native chains into unichain. My back of the envelope is like uniswap native to L1 and L2 or whatever you want to call it is pretty much deeply integrated into the ecosystem or whatever lives in that chain. Like if you're using it on Ethereum, like you know, you're not even using it through the uniswap interface most of the time. You're using it through zero X and one inch and like all of these other like platforms. forms, right? And so no matter what, even if unity chain is like incredibly successful, like in my head, it's like, well, what percent of the user flow are they going to be able to

take? Even if we're 100 percent, you know, adoption of that user flow somehow miraculously being on Unich chain, I still think they're only batting like 30 percent of totally uniswap volume. And so, you know, I figure it's like, okay, of like, and I haven't looked up the numbers. I wasn't soft cheating like to ruin as he was typing while we were making this bad. But, you know, my hunch is that, like, you know, two-thirds of their volume at this point doesn't come from, like, un-swap interface products. And of that, they could probably get a third of it somehow to move. So that's how I got to, like, you know, trying to send that with a little over time.

Terud, what was your rationale? I guess, yeah, if I think about to kind of emphasize Robert's point, I think about the integrations aspect and the fact that like other contracts will automatically trade against Uniswap to net their positions like other D5 protocols already have them built in, right? You don't have that ecosystem on the chain on day one, right? It's not like all those apps immediately move and integrate whatever. And then this is why I was making the connection to Unoswap X and sort of the order flow auction type of stuff is like that stuff can move more easily than the integrations because

it's like fresh. And also it comes from their front end. So it's like very directly tied. So I sort of feel like that stuff will move. And then everything else just requires you building the ecosystem locally and or new assets coming on. Like this is why I'm saying the new asset thing is important. I think you need to like have new pools such that there's pools to route through. If there's only ETHUSDC and WBTUSDC and like a couple other pools, then you don't get the network effect from like the routing fees to the sequencer fees and then it's like not you know so i think you really do need this new asset thing and an ecosystem so that you get the kind of network effect them in the other place so hearing you guys descriptions at first i thought i was the odd one out in thinking

that okay you know this it this is a classic example of it being difficult to disrupt your own business in that you know uniswap has won on almost every chain it is dominant you know basis like probably the only chain that it's deployed on that it's not dominant. And driving that liquidity away from these places, I mean, they can do it. They have the token emission incentives and probably a lot of those LPs. They can kind of nudge, nudge and say, hey, you know, get onto unichain and you'll get some extra rewards. They can push people there. It's easy as to push the uniswap X volume there because it's just some market makers.

You have to go put some inventory there and they get the flow from the front end. And they say, okay, this front end automatically is serving on unichain. the natural constraint is that it's just difficult to move a lot of money in and out of the super chain to the same degree as it is if your if your customer is on Ethereum and you're like oh you know go bridge into the unichain and then bridge back out to like go get your capital out or like go do it you know into some intense space bridge and jump in it you know there's just a lot of complexity to make that happen and users are lazy protocols are lazy like you know you see this happening now with Sky and Makers that it's just difficult to get it.

get people to change. Their integrations, there's just a lot of friction when everybody has kind of built their smart contracts and their UX and their things around certain expectations of, you know, how they're interacting with you. And I think UISWP will honestly probably get scared at a certain point when they realize people aren't moving on their own. And they'll say, look, we don't want to take that big of a risk. Like, this is cool.

We want to internalize some of our flow. We want internalize some of that MEV that we're right now leaking, especially on the Uniswap X side, that feels pretty free. but for a lot of this other stuff, it's not worth trying to disrupt our own liquidity. I mean, you see the same thing with V2, right? V2, there's still a bunch of V2 pools that even like however many years later,

it's hard to get rid of them because there's just liquidity in there and it's just sloshing around doing its thing. And part of it, I mean, part of it, obviously V2 works for certain use cases, but also part of it just that people were lazy. It took a really long time for all that capital to move from V2 to V3.

And my guess is they'll see the same thing with respect to Unichain. I agree with a lot of, lot of that. I do think, you know, one thing to maybe not discount is, you know, every dollar of retail flow that moves over to unichain also substantially shrinks the denominator here, which is like, you know, all the sort of bot and any of the activity that occurs on the main chain, right? Because, hey, if you're not actually moving market price, it's not going to be prices, the location, does that maybe you've extract. And so, you know, if you are moving that retail

flow effectively, you're actually very much shrinking the sort of, you know, flow that you're sort of offsetting on the main chain. And so, you know, It's not like the current number is the high watermark that you're trying to eat into, but it's actually the two are sort of working synergistically. So I don't know. I think, as Turner was saying, with Uniswap X, you know, they sort of naturally built to be cross-chain with this sort of intent architecture. I was also checking orderflow. So between the Uniswop front end and Uniswap X, yeah, it's about 30% of all flow is going through a Uniswap.

interface. It doesn't seem infeasible to me that they can direct, you know, some percentage of that over to this new chain and then in tandem sort of shrank a lot of the botons or any, the extraction activity that's happening on the main net. Yeah. And to be fair, I, I sort of, yeah, again, just view unichane success as new assets go there, not exist. Like, there obviously need to be existing assets, but I really do feel like the new asset creation effect is what got V2, its network effect and people routing, which then they could expand the V3. And I think like Ethereum has sort of lost that in terms of asset velocity,

not in terms of like volume, like not in terms of market cap of asset. And it's ceded that to Solana, right? So like if you're trying to compete back on that, then you, yeah, but base's new asset issuance is still kind of low. Like it's compared to Solana. It's actually like the base meme coins didn't really go that far. Obviously, they've created top 100 assets like aerodrome and stuff, but that's a different, that's a different beast.

But I guess my point is just more like, I think Unichain success should be that it can attract that new asset creation back from Solana. To me, that seems like the number one KPI. And that is going to be totally different order flow than the current order flow. I mean, when you're saying new asset creation, it feels like that's code for meme coins. Because like what else are we talking about? I think in a lot of cases, yes, but this goes to my point, like, there will be also, like, non-mememecoin VC coins that might also over time see what's working and change their habits. Yeah, I'm just very skeptical of this story. Like, every single token that I have seen that was launched in the Ethereum ecosystem within the last two years that's VC backed, I can't think of a single one that's not, that's in the EVM ecosystem that's not on Ethereum Maynet.

Like, literally can't think of a single one. Like if you decide I'm going to list my token and natively issue it on like almost anything else, it's tougher to get Kastodian integration, it's tougher to get, you know, listed on Kho and Korn Market Cap. And just like all this stuff is harder for you for basically no reason. Well, AeroDrome is a great example, though. That's why. Yeah, yeah. Aeroom is the only example on page one of Korn Market Cap of an EVM token that is not primarily listed on Ethereum because it is a base token.

But I think for for for Unichane that you want you want to be able to. And also it's not VC backed, right? Isn't that the guy's whole thing is that they're not VC back? Yeah, I guess. Oh, yeah. That's true. I guess my point is just more like I think that you want to bring back that market. Right.

Like you, why are you competing on all these fronts that are meant to be like lower? I mean, that would be great. That would be amazing if you can do that. I just think it's like really freaking hard. Like that does not feel like a realistic goal. I mean, that's why when you said one year, you know, it was hard to be like, oh, yeah, like 50%. I was going to see, we're just going to come back here October 14th, 2025.

And, you know, wait, is it one year from launch or one year from today? One year from today. From launch. Wait, from today. Oh, from today? Oh, then. That way we know when the bet ends. It's supposed to come out in like a month or so.

So it should be doable. Although my understanding is that all those features will not be there. Like the flashbots, T.E stuff is not going to be live on day one. but that's on the roadmap to have that up and running eventually. I think they're going to have the block streaming, but it's like a very scope down set of what the air of what the flashbox is doing. Or roll-up boost. I told them that needed to work on the naming convention a little bit.

How many formats going around? Got it. Interesting. Okay. Look, I like this idea. The other thing about this story that really struck me was that, you know, if we're all wrong and Uniswap is incredibly successful at galvanizing volume and getting this native defy-ehy ecosystem.

to come over to Unichain and build stuff. And as you mentioned, natively launched tokens and created as a sort of system of record for defy assets or meme coins or whatever, that seems really bad for Ethereum. And it's kind, like the way that I, I was at a dinner and I was talking about this for some folks in the Uniswop team,

the way I described it is it's like, Ethereum is kind of the super tanker. It's like very difficult for it to respond to new threats or new emerging change. in the meta. You can see, you know, it's taking this long to respond to Solana, and now there's this increasing conversation about, you know, lower block times and becoming more snappy from a UX perspective. I think if something like this were to happen, that basically there's a roll-up that just sucks up a huge amount of the TVL from layer one,

I think that's kind of game over. I think it's like, okay, there's no way that Ethereum is going to get back. Uni-Beghan's biggest competitor isn't Ethereum. It's hyper-liquid, because they're both trying to build defy ecosystems at exactly the same time. Yeah, kind of. I mean, I don't think that's really true. Liquidity-wise, they're competing. I think, like, liquidity-wise, it's biggest, biggest competitors.

Hyper-liquid is, hyper-liquid's a derivative exchange, and there's nowhere near the quantum capital. Hyper-liquid is going to have, no, but it's going to have the same. They announce it. They announced that they're launching their chain, and it's an EVM-compatible so you can launch stuff there. But there's a ton of, there's a ton of protocols going there. Like, like, I'm telling you that that is a bigger competitor for them than me.

I totally disagree with this. I think that if Uniswap is successful, it's going to be almost entirely a zero-sum sort of withdrawal from all these other chains that are going to lose a lot of their liquidity and lose a lot of their TVL to Unichain. Right? I mean, that's kind of the vision.

Have you ever looked at the hyperliquid bridge? How much TVL is there in hyperl? That's literally the thing you're talking about. From Arbitrum? It's the biggest contract in Arbitram. Yeah, how much TVL? I want to say over a billion, at least. Okay, so Arbitrum is what?

what, like $4 billion, 5 billion TVL? Yeah, it's $9.58 million. Okay, yeah. So, I mean, sure. Uniswap is not aiming for 950 million of TVL, right? They're aiming for, I'm going to suck up all the liquidity from Ethereum. Like, that's the wild success case. Again, I don't think it's likely to happen.

But I don't know. Do you guys think that this is a unfounded view that if Unswap chain is really successful, that it kind of fucks Ethereum Mainnet. I kind of think it does. Like, you know, forget the fact that Unoswap is basically one of the biggest, like, gas consumers of, you know, Ethereum. Like, yeah, like, there will still be gas consumption, even if it moves because, you know, from trades executed on Ethereum, like, even if it's settled, it'll go up there,

and that's a transaction and all this stuff. Like, losing your top application to its own shit. chain like is only a net negative. And the fees and the MEV and the TVL and all that stuff, it just like DeFi goes away. Yeah, like a huge amount of like activity could go away. We'll have to check back in a year. Okay, yeah, yeah. We'll check back in a year.

Slight, slight change. Just so Jeff doesn't get that out of me, it's $6.24 million. I was going to say that was like $600. But yeah, it's like $6.24. I looked at the wrong. I added two things that were. Okay, okay, got it. Good, good real time correction.

Okay. One last story I want to get through. We'll move away from this and we'll talk about another anxiety-producing topic, which is the election. So we are only now three weeks away from the U.S. presidential election. And right now, we're still in the dead heat between Kamala and Trump. Prediction markets have been moving a little bit at the margin. It doesn't matter that much, but it's, you know, going now closer to 55-45, Trump Kamala, still basically a coin flip.

But we recently, so we've been lamenting for a while that Kamala Harris has not really made clear what her agenda is going to be with respect to crypto or digital assets. She's been, you know, saying a few positive things and speeches, but nothing actually as part of her platform. Until today, we just got the first piece of Kamala policy that relates to crypto. And it came in a very weird package. So she laid out what she calls her opportunity agenda for black men. So just a little bit of backstory. There was some reporting, I think, in the New York Times over the weekend, that Kamala is losing ground among black men. black men in particular in terms of her support. You know, Obama came out to try to, you know,

scold some of the black men communities who are not fully supporting Kamala. And weirdly, Trump has started to gain in the both black and Hispanic men demographics relative to 2020 and 2016. So people are in the Democratic Party a little bit concerned of like, oh, shit, why are we losing some of the minority, especially minority men? And so she announced that, this opportunity agenda for black men, presumably try to win back some of the black vote. There's some stuff in there about forgivable loans for black entrepreneurs, up to $20,000, legalizing recreational marijuana and allowing black men to be able to work in the marijuana industry.

And then on digital assets, this is the line, she will make sure owners of investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that black men and others who participate in this market are protected. So that was the line. That's all we got with respect to, you know, it's still pretty unclear. But it got crypto Twitter pretty weirded out, I think, by the statement of black men and other people to be protected in crypto. So I think a lot of people found the framing of this note of crypto policy to be somewhat disingenuous. Curious to get your folks' reactions to this opportunity, or sorry, what's it called?

opportunity agenda for black men and her stance on crypto there. I honestly have no opinion or kind of, it just feels like someone she clearly, you know, if I can, you know, we compare, if we compare Trump's crypto policy where he talks about pardoning dread pirate Roberts. And we compare that to this. It's like, Jesus Christ. Like, I don't know what to say. Like, I might as well just like walk.

myself out the door right now. There's nothing to say. Yeah, I feel like Trump took the most, like, naive and therefore effective approach of just like someone else wrote this list of shit that people in the cryptocurrency want to hear that they want them do. And he's like read it. And we're like, yes, that's great. And I feel like Kamel is doing everything to like not do the most obvious things and just like say the very simple things people want to hear. And it's like, it's like weird shit like this like like why is it so hard to just copy this one for one? Like people want very simple regulations. They want to know that the U.S. is going to be a home for crypto. Like they want to hear or say, you know, fucking free Ross, even if she doesn't meet it.

Like, and instead of there's just like this weird shit. And there's also this like, they say, they said, they stuff where there's stuff where it's not even clear like how you would implement such a thing. Like, sorry, do I have to add metadata to every address that says my race? Like, what? The entire thing is ridiculous. Yeah. I don't really know.

I think there's a stat that like, I think it came maybe out of that Coinbase. Survey that like black men in the U.S. are disproportionately more likely to own crypto than, you know, other investors. But this feels like kind of a stretch. Like I think things that would be good for the industry would be good for everybody. And so it's like why make this part of this? Yeah. Yeah. Also why talk.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I feel like these things should be more like equal opportunity things. And it's like sort of like this one was shoved in with some other things where it makes a lot of sense to discriminate on that basis. This one doesn't make any fucking sense. Robert, what's your take?

My take is, I feel like this is like a rider attached to a bill, essentially. Like this is like a policy attached to like a pandering package. And I don't think it's been that clearly thought through. I think it's still extraordinarily vague. And I think that, you know, when it comes to the actual wording of this, you could read anything you want into it. Like, if you're fearful of the existing Biden-Harris regime approach to crypto, you could read this and be like, she's literally just promising, you know, more investor protection. You know, we've heard those words before, and it doesn't lead to more innovation and more, you know, entrepreneurship and more, you know, investor participation. Or you can read and say, oh, she wants to create a regulatory framework for crypto.

Like, we've been waiting for this for 14 years. thank goodness, you know, I don't think, and this is like semantic parsing, like I don't think it's actually targeted where the policies will only be for black investors. I believe the policies will be for everybody and a large beneficiary group of us having a clear regulatory framework happens to be black investors. But again, it's poorly worded and written and it's pretty confusing. Yeah, I don't think I have much to add, to be honest. It just feels like very late, close to the election pandering. And I don't know.

I mean, I guess this is what happens in a close election is that you just start giving away the pantry and finding anything that anybody wants that'll get you some votes. I just think it reflects poorly upon the ability to do research of whichever lobbyist wrote this. This doesn't feel like it was written by a lobbyist.

Whatever staff member wrote this? Yeah, if a lobbyist wrote this, they need to get fired because this is absolutely horrible job that if you're doing anything for the crypto industry. Yeah, exactly. Like, I do take this as evidence that Kamala is going to be better on crypto than Biden. And I know a lot of people doubt that. And a lot of people are like, well, you know, give me the evidence. But everything that I have been seeing and hearing, some of which is public, some of which is not public, give me more and more reason to think that, like, Kamala just doesn't have this vendetta against crypto that Biden did. I don't think it's Biden. I think it's some of the people in the administration. Like, I don't think Biden himself knows what crypto is. Like, I'm not a hundred. hundred percent short common. Biden did. I mean, first of all, Biden is really old, and he probably has a

negative, just kind of proclivity against crypto, the way that Trump did in his first term as well. And secondly, remember, SBF was the second largest donor to Biden's campaign. Biden has never used the word crypto or blockchain to mine else. There was an executive memorandum that came from the Biden administration at one point. There's almost no way that he doesn't have some opinion on it. I mean, it's been a hot topic. And he was the second biggest donor to his campaign. in almost certainly it's on his radar and he's intentionally not talked about it. Like I don't think it's, I don't think it's a, it's a mistake or an oversight that I don't know. There's no data either way, but there's no data to indicate that he is familiar with

I mean, Trump talked about crypto and those four years earlier and that was before FTX blew up and like this was national headlines for multiple days and he didn't say a fucking word about it. Like it's not because he's not paying attention. As someone who doesn't generally feel that much affinity for, for Trump in many ways. But the one thing I'm impressed by was the wallet thing where he was like, Baron has four wallets. It's like,

you know, like that for a grandfather for like granddaddy talking like that, that's fucking whatever, father like the grandfather age like like contemporary. Oh, I did not think about that. Like that was, that was,

if Biden even mentioned the word wallet, I would probably pass out and just out of like what the fuck happened. Wait, so hold on. So Trump was in his late 50s when he had, Barron? Yeah, the math works out. Yeah, I don't want to think that much about. Yeah, just don't, don't, don't think too hard about it.

Just think I'm just trying to say like someone that age saying something about college. I'll start about it. Yeah, that's very bizarre. Yeah, well, okay. I mean, I don't know. I don't give him much credit for that. I feel like that that is a high bar for a president of that. That's such a low bar to step. That's like the bare minimum step stool.

and like Biden's falling over the stool. He can't even like get on. Sure. Well, Biden's not running for president. So I think that that situation did eventually resolve. Look, as someone from Delaware, it pains me that the most famous person from my state is Biden.

It's like really embarrassing. Okay. Well, I'm glad that we got our Delaware fact for the episode. Thank you, Tarun, for that recurring segment. I guess with that, we can wrap. We'll be back next week. The election is getting closer. So markets will probably be pretty wild between now and then.

But until then, thanks everybody. We'll see you next time.