Unchained - The Chopping Block: Memecoin Presales, MakerDAO’s Endgame, and BlackRock's Blockchain Bet! - Ep. 622

Starting point is 00:00:00 I don't think an exchange created slurf. I do think that the destruction of the contributions as a marketing strategy is plausible. You think that's plausible? You think $10 million burn is a plausible marketing strategy? Yes. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two-clan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

Starting point is 00:00:21 I'm named the trading firms who are very involved. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, let's get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Next, we've got Robert, the Cryptoconassur, and Tsar of Superstate. Good morning. Then we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo, what's that? And finally, I'm Haseeb, the head hype man at Dragonfly. So we are early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here as investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice, please see chopping block.

Starting point is 00:01:03 at XYZ for more disclosures. So bull market in full force, although we had a little bit of retracement today, it seems like Bitcoin's back at 60, what is it, 64 or something? 63. 62 and a half. 62 and a half, yeah. So it kind of pulled back a little bit, very disappointing.

Starting point is 00:01:22 But we kind of went all the way to 70K. Solana top 200. So a lot of really strong bull market vibes that we're getting here. But things are kind of flailing around quite a bit, which is, I think, pretty standard for a market that's this wild. So did you guys hear the Laura Shin interview with Kyle? I haven't bookmarked. It's like one of these things I'm really, really, really, really excited for.

Starting point is 00:01:52 I was actually, you know, when I first saw that it was announced, I was like, oh, no, Laura, what do you? you doing? Like, he's a terrible person. Like, why are you interviewing him? But the response that I've seen on Twitter and online has just been, like, really impressed with the quality of her interview and the fact that she asked hard-hitting questions. And so, like, you know, when I get, you know, a free moment, like, I'm really looking forward to watching. All right. Well, if you guys haven't seen it, we can circle back when you guys actually. I'm actually very afraid to listen to it just more because like because like honestly just even the clips just sound like listening to a psychopath I don't

Starting point is 00:02:31 I don't know it's like a little too like disturbing I feel like I'm like a person who hates watching horror movies and like you know this feels like you're like trying to go see like a horror movie it's like I don't know somehow I have that feeling about it it was it was pretty painful it yeah I funny enough I listen to the Don Lemon interview like right after I listened to the John Lennem interview of Elon Musk right after I listened to the Kyle interview, which were both painful, both painful listens, but in different ways. Anyway, all right, cool. So let's talk about Solana. So Solana, as we have mentioned many times now, meme coin frenzy.

Starting point is 00:03:11 And there's this new trend on Solana of, I guess, what are called pre-sale tokens. So pre-sale tokens basically, they seem to be like basically ICOs, but whatever. They have a name, the name is pre-sell tokens. They're 100% ICOs. 100% of ICOs without the contract. They're worse ICOs, yeah. They're worse versions of ICOs. Okay, so here's it.

Starting point is 00:03:33 So normally in an ICO, so you remember, this is the 2017 vintage, you know, kind of a flavor of the week at that time. So in a normal ICO, you send money to a contract. And the contract essentially ensures that you will receive some amount of tokens based on the total amount that's raised. And that was, you know, more or less sensible forms of fundraising. But you can imagine that eventually we're deemed to be not okay by the SEC. Okay.

Starting point is 00:03:59 So now what is a pre-sell token? A pre-sale token is you decide that you're going to launch a meme coin and you tell people, send money to my address and then later I will send you some meme coins. But there is no, there's no enforceability of like I sent you the stuff and you send me the stuff. It's kind of just like, bro, trust me. Send me a shitload of money and I will send you some amount of meme coins. And there's like multipliers often. So if you like retweet the original tweet, then they'll give you more tokens.

Starting point is 00:04:28 If you drop your address, you get more tokens. So it's all very, it's all, I don't know, it requires not even writing a smart contract at this point to launch a meme coin. You just need some Twitter game essentially to get off the ground. To be fair, Ethereum, the greatest ICO was also a trust me, bro, send me some Bitcoin and it will send you some ether or whatever the network. But that was cross chain. That was cross chain. So I'm going to give them a break on that. I'm going to give them a break on that.

Starting point is 00:04:52 But when you're intra-chain, I feel like, dude, this is why we invented these things. Yes. To allow contracts without trust, right? Ethereum was also before smart contracts existed. They raised the funds. Great point. To create the EVM and contracts in the first place so that nobody would ever have to do that again.

Starting point is 00:05:12 There are a lot of things that devs and I think I see what participants should be doing that they're not doing. And I just feel like, you know, not having smart contracts is just one more. step, you know? It's, it's, uh, just incredible. Vitalik died for our sins. He did the first trust me bro ICO so that we don't have to. Uh, but here we are full circle. Um, so there's over, there's been over a hundred million dollars sent to various meme coin pre-sales over the weekend. Uh, the most notable of them is this meme coin called slurf.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Slur, um, slurf. Or Robert, are you a, are you a proud slur folder? No, I haven't bought any of these, uh, horrible, horrible assets. Well, Robert, however is the, the D-Gen lore master. of this podcast as we've learned over time. So maybe we should get him to give us. Let's circle around the fire and let Uncle Robert tell us about the story of Slurf. Okay. So Slurf originated like many of these pre-sale tokens do with everybody sending their money

Starting point is 00:06:10 to a random stranger on Twitter who simply posts a Solana address and says, send me all your money. Trust me, bro. And clearly there was some preparation. foresight that went into this. Slurf had a website that had a ugly picture of a sloth, hence the name slurf. It's like a mispronunciation of sloth. And it was a relatively well-built website. It had a couple of cool innovative features that probably took a couple hours to build. Like there was a pie chart that showed the top contributions by sender. Things that went beyond what these average

Starting point is 00:06:46 tweet fundraisers that people spin up with zero preparation at 30 seconds generally hold. Slurf raised about $10 million with a somewhat, you know, cartoonish website and all appeared well. A short time later, the Slurf developer, and I don't have his name on the top of my hand, but the slurf developer announced something along the lines of, I'm terribly sorry, I messed up big. I took all the money from all of the pre-sale contributions, and I locked it in an LP contract, and burned the entire LP contract and the entire supply. Now, normally what happens in these pre-sales is the developer creates an LP token with the money and some tokens and then gives the rest of the tokens to the pre-sale contributors. In this case, he put all of the tokens into the buy-by bin.

Starting point is 00:07:40 And the entire supply of Slurf was locked in this LP token of which he didn't own anymore. And so there was a market, the entire supply of slurf and the original financial contributions in Seoul were all locked in this liquidity pool, which was an AMM. And he announced that he messed up. I think it was like, you know, he cursed or said something, you know, to that effect. And everybody made fun of him. A short time later, trading volume in slurf exploded. It was rapidly listed on Binance after hitting a $700 million market cap in a matter of hours. And at this point, there was a public analysis and investigation of the situation.

Starting point is 00:08:26 A couple really interesting details have come out. And I only know this because I listen to a Twitter space. I don't have deep personal first-tamp. How are you this deep in this? Research on this. Don't you have a job? I do. We gather around the campfire so we can discuss like the truth.

Starting point is 00:08:40 Sorry. Sorry. Didn't mean to interrupt. Sorry. His job is part of his job is being entertaining for this podcast. So I know what you're saying. That is true. That is true.

Starting point is 00:08:48 All right. I apologize. Part of my job is being with it, Haseeb. Okay. Okay. So people came to the realization by doing some on-chain analysis that the slurth developer actually rugged his own presale immediately before vaporizing all the funds. So the slurf developer was one of the first contributors to this

Starting point is 00:09:10 He put a thousand soul into the pre-sail of his own money and used this to build confidence. And then immediately prior to the slurf token being deployed and the pre-sale contributions being locked forever, he actually rescinded his own contribution and took his thousand soul back. And this led many people to the expectation that this was a very premeditated event, that in reality this was marketing. It was something new and innovative to cut through the noise. of all of these cookie cutter pre-sales.

Starting point is 00:09:43 And there's a widespread expectation, which I'm personally a believer in, that this was a non-accidental set of circumstances. So there's a conspiracy theory about the meme coin. That's correct. It was $10 million. $10 million. $10 million. $10 million of soul.

Starting point is 00:10:04 Correct. I believe Robert also overheard another conspiracy theory about the source of the Oh, there's more. Oh, good. Oh, good. I also overheard another conspiracy theory. And this one I put it a lower probability, but the other conspiracy theory was that a lot of these presale tokens

Starting point is 00:10:20 are actually being created by offshore exchanges that are looking to build trading volume in new assets and build up excitement. You know, this conspiracy theory comes from the fact that a lot of these tokens have been listed so quickly on these exchanges that it's led some people to believe that there's a relationship between the exchanges listing them almost instantaneously and the development of some of these assets. But I don't have any evidence there. It just feels a little bit like the 2020, 2021 era where some of the tokens were a little too close to exchange operators as we learned in hindsight. And somehow the fact that these got listed really quickly and then also, I don't know if you saw Justin Sun said,

Starting point is 00:11:07 Bobi, H-TX is donating all the fees to cover the, like, there were just so much that was done by the centralized exchange world around it that it's hard to believe it was organic, you know? All right. I look, I'm not going to take a view either way. I mean, it wouldn't make sense in principle for a centralized exchange to do it, but the fact that they got listed on Binance immediately, like, finance is not manufacturing coins. They make so much money doing all their normal stuff.

Starting point is 00:11:34 Well, it might not have been them. I could see a long tail. Lower down, lower down doing it, and then it just like went up quickly. Yeah, but I mean, defy protocol doesn't get listed quickly. Burning $10 million is not, that is not a good way to do anything. Well, that might have been. Surely there's a better. That might have been.

Starting point is 00:11:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's, but that's the core conspiracy, isn't it? Well, the core. What else is manufactured here? Yeah, I don't think an exchange created slurf. I do think that the destruction of the contributions as a marketing strategy is plausible. You think that's plausible? You think $10 million burn is a plausible marketing strategy?

Starting point is 00:12:12 Yes. I think $10 million is like a great take for a meme coin. I think, well, so, I mean, the other thing that I learned recently, I was chatting with somebody who was talking about meme coin fare launches. And there was some meme coin that was fair launched. And they were like, yeah, you know, I'm part of this meme coin team. And we did a fair launch. And it's doing really well.

Starting point is 00:12:37 So, you know, but I'm going to donate my share. And I'm like, wait, I thought you just said it was a fair launch. How's their share? And they were like, oh, no, no, no, no. It's a fair launch, but like in meme coins, fair launches are different. Fair launch and a meme coin just means that there's no VCs. And I'm like, what, what about that is fair that there's no VCs, therefore it's fair? And then I looked it up and I, there was an article in Coin Gecko.

Starting point is 00:13:03 Because, I don't know, meme coins, I guess, saw culture. so it doesn't live document anywhere. But there was an article written by Coin Gecko that talked about what Fair Launches were and I was like, oh, I was going to show this to them and be like, yo, fuck, this is not a Fair Launch. And there was a sentence there that said, for meme coins,

Starting point is 00:13:18 fair launches often refer to that there's no VC allocation, which is insane to me. Just the bastardization of terminology. Fair Launch used to mean literally like Satoshi-style launch, everybody gets on equal terms. There's no devout.

Starting point is 00:13:35 allocation. And now it just means no VCs, which I'm like, what VCs are even investing in the meme coins? What does it even mean no VC allocation? What VCs are doing these? Yeah, that's definitely marketing to attract participants. To be fair, I think I heard rumor that there's a round going around for DGEN, the Farcaster meme coin that VCs are looking at.

Starting point is 00:13:56 That wasn't a rumor. That was announced on, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a real round. Okay. Who's doing that round? Not fair launch. I think it was one confirmation. I think it was one confirmation.

Starting point is 00:14:12 Yes, it's on the website. It was one confirmation. Oh, geez. Filthy VC coin. I don't want that. Did you get the pitch? What is a meme coin pitch? I want to know. I don't think meme coin founders talk to me.

Starting point is 00:14:24 They launch before. Yeah, we mean, we're not cool enough for the meme coin teams. I mean, the pitch has got to be like we're going to make good vibes and somehow make the meme coin go up. I think the pitch is that we are going to take funds and burn them as a publicity stunt and that's how we're going to take off.

Starting point is 00:14:45 And then we're going to take donations from exchanges. That would be pretty next level. Yeah. I feel like every time we talk about meme coins, I get dumber and dumber. I don't know. You're like spending your whole day on this stuff. Dude, what are you talking about?

Starting point is 00:15:03 I spent like nine minutes listening to the slur. You spent nine minutes and you got all of that in nine minutes out of Twitter space. Of course. They cover the base really quickly. Okay. So the meme coin teams are very to the point, very efficient with their communication. Okay. Well, damn.

Starting point is 00:15:26 Well, we're at a point now where so Solana is now at this point. I mean, it's a meme point chain at this point, like almost all the activity on Salana. is meme coin trading. The ETH and Solana volume are basically on par at this point, if you look at Dex volumes. So I'm just looking at Defi Lama right now. It actually looks like 24-hour volume Solana is actually higher than Ethereum, although Ethereum is higher on seven-day.

Starting point is 00:15:51 But Solana has basically flipped Ethereum for total volume. I mean, also Solana flipped Bitcoin and transaction fees recently, which is a great big. But still below Ethereum. It's a little of Ethereum, but it's like a big accomplishment given their level of Cs. Yeah, yeah. So really dramatic. I guess the question is like, I mean, how long do you guys think that this meme coin mania is going to persist?

Starting point is 00:16:17 I mean, it's already at the point where Solana U.X is very degraded, where, you know, I was talking with some folks who are telling me like 50% of transactions are dropping now in Solana. That's how just crazy the activity on the chain is. Yeah, I mean, I saw, you know, people are obviously critiquing the, UX right now of Solana and totally, you know, tweeted a video of him doing a transaction, you know, and he was like, look, guys, it still works. And it took like 40 seconds to confirm a transaction. And I was like, okay, well, it's definitely still works.

Starting point is 00:16:45 But, you know, they just spun around for like a 40 second clip. Yeah. And people are setting like insane slippage limits. Like I saw people talking to Twitter like, oh, you got to say your slippage like 50% so your trade goes through. And it's just like, you know, yeah. anything I will fill my slurf at any price that's uh yeah yeah who knows what the price the fair value of slurf is you know you never know i just really wish i just really wish i wish we could do

Starting point is 00:17:13 like anonymous interviews of like people who ape try to ape into these pre-sale things i just want to hear their stories you know like i really want like the real talk like the real housewives of imagine a reality TV show like like the real housewives TV show but for like and on DGens who send money into I would watch I would watch at least it would be good as a podcast maybe there's nothing to see

Starting point is 00:17:38 I think we're overthinking this I have a friend of mine's younger brother who's much younger than me and this person was lamenting the fact that they didn't ape some pre-sale Salana meme coin and all of his friends did and all of his friends made like half a million dollars off of like a thousand dollars. And he felt like, you know, a fool because he didn't participate.

Starting point is 00:18:01 Now all of his young peer friends are suddenly rich and he's not. And I think the people that are participating in this are basically just like yeeding their savings into these opportunities and hoping for the best. And like because they've been working out, you know, book of meme and all of these like tokens that have come out of nowhere. I mean, slurf even, you know, people are feeling. feeling like it's a positive some game when in the long run it's probably not, but in the short term, it feels like it. I think whatever a new meta gets discovered, the move is just, you know, exploited as much as possible until it becomes tired. It's kind of like doing every NFT mint in like early 2021 also probably a great idea, doing every ICO in like early 2017 also probably a great idea. And then when it becomes sort of played out and oversaturated and they take it.

Starting point is 00:18:51 But the question is just like, you know, when is it a new meta? versus a weird one-off thing, you know, when is it over? That's always kind of the trick. Yeah. All right. Well, let's transition away from the excitement of Solana to the boring old Ethereum, which just shipped the long vaunted upgrade of Ethereum 4844, also known as a Denkoon upgrade, which enabled blob storage.

Starting point is 00:19:14 So we talked about it a little bit last time on the show. I'm sure most of our listeners fell asleep while it's live now. And L2 fees are super low. So now, you know, most L2s, I've been. I believe the fees are, average fees are something like, you know, point, or, not point, one cent to send ETH and maybe a couple cents, a few cents to swap. So fees are incredibly low now on L2s. They're sort of not quite salina level of fractions of a fraction of a cent, but low enough

Starting point is 00:19:40 to the point where these things are basically, you know, almost as good for most people as using some of the all-del ones that had significantly lower fees. So there's been basically almost all the major roll-ups now have a done. adopted blob storage, there was a lot of speculation that maybe blob storage was going to be more expensive than originally anticipated and that, okay, in the very beginning, maybe the first couple of days or the first week, it was going to be relatively low. But it's been about a week now, and it seems like the demand on blob storage is actually fairly limited.

Starting point is 00:20:11 And so we are seeing, at least for the moment, even with all these roll-ups, now using blob storage. And obviously there are some roll-ups that are on Celestia and using external DA, but the ones that using blob storage or the blob stream of Ethereum, the fees are maintained as being pretty low. So I guess first question to you guys, one, do you think that these fees for blob storage persist or do you think that people are going to find a way to do more stuff on blobs and drive up the fees? Well, I think eventually people are going to find ways to do more stuff with blobs. Like people will do things to take up a lot more storage.

Starting point is 00:20:49 There are already blob inscriptions, by the way. that people have made, for instance. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, give it like three weeks and there's some like blob storage video game that just like uses like a ton of, you know, blob. But like I think like those use cases are slower than like the L2's being like,

Starting point is 00:21:05 oh, we can put more transactions in. Like, hooray, like Costco down. Yeah, I think people kind of kept citing this, you know, induced demand, L.A. highway kind of meme where it's, you know, this sort of misconception, I think particularly in L.A. And it's like, if you're a highway that's super congested, you add one new lane and people think that's going to fix traffic.

Starting point is 00:21:26 But of course, like eventually the market renormalizes and people see that maybe there's reduced traffic for a period of time and then more people drive and then it kind of gets back to square one. And I think we'll see a little bit of that with bluff storage, but it is a little bit of a paradox because, you know, even though, yeah, like, you know, there is induced demand and sort of maybe renormalize at some sort of market clearing price, which is probably similar to what it was before, you do have greater throughput, right? Like all is equal, it's better to be have more storage for call data because you're just

Starting point is 00:21:56 processing more transactions, you know, on these L2s than kind of what we had before. Similarly, like even the highway is still the same, you know, as slow as it was before, if you have five lanes instead of two lanes, you are technically moving more cars, but you know, solve traffic, quote unquote. Tarun, as the resident game theory expert, what's your, what's your view here? Where are we going with blob storage costs? I mean, I think it's kind of interesting. I mean, one interesting thing you saw was, you know, teams, L2 teams that were posting.

Starting point is 00:22:28 I mean, some of them completely fell over on the upgrade, like blasts and needed to get a lot of fixes. Some of them optimized how much they were posting over time because they realized they were overposting like Starcware. And then some people took a bit more time to see the market developed before launching like Arbitrum, which you know, I think was probably the kind of most safe approach that we've seen. But I think what people have realized is like L2 teams have a lot of incentive to optimize how much they're writing. I also think it's a good time to have launched because of how much demand has been taken away via Solana.

Starting point is 00:23:10 It's just like, it just means that like a lot of the kind of very dumb spam transaction type of stuff wasn't there during launch. Like, they really weren't. Like, imagine if Slurf launched at the same time as 4844. I guarantee you we would have seen some sort of like very dumb thing. Like, hey, we're using blob storage, send money to this wallet. And it'll buy blobs. And those blobs will be, you know, like somehow a future token.

Starting point is 00:23:38 It kind of like inscriptions. Like what I mean is like people would basically make some inscription like thing and like try to sell it. Do like BRC 20s on Blobs Street? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I think because Solana seems to own that market has completely, at this point, you could argue. How would you describe what, how would you reify that market? Is that like stupid things? Well, I think the meme coin market for new meme coins that are either tokens or promises of future tokens. I, you know, I think if you look at the L2s, they've all been trying to have these meme coin economies, whether it's Avax, arbitram or, I'm trying to think who else actually has been like really, basically. a little bit. And I just like, you look at the volumes, you look at the usage. It's not even coming close to where Solana is, right?

Starting point is 00:24:24 Solana is clearly take like this, remember when there was Pepe Mania, that all that type of user seems to just completely have gone. Like I feel like WIF was the moment like dog with hat that all those users were like, actually we're going to move. And it just, it doesn't seem like they're coming back. And I think that's actually good for Ethereum for launching this because you don't have that type of like, crazy spam and you can have this thing grow a little more slowly. But the long-term outlook on it.

Starting point is 00:24:55 I was going to say, I mean, that's kind of true. But if you look at the biggest meme coins, I mean, Shib is right behind Dogecoin, Dogecoin is on Ethereum. What's next? I think Pepe is next. Let me see here. Whiff is right below Pepe, though. Like they were very close, like in the peak last few weeks, they're very close. My point though, if you look at the long tail,

Starting point is 00:25:16 there's like none that like the Ethereum one. The long tail is all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flokey is on Ethereum. Where's flokey? I believe so. But these are all the boomer dog coins, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:27 They are the biggest, right? The only one in the top 50 is with. They're the biggest, but they don't have like the on-chain transaction volume generated by them is not as high right now, right? Like they have a ton of central trading. They have, but like I think an aggregate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think for the new issuances, it's just, I just don't feel like you're seeing, like

Starting point is 00:25:45 even on base. There were like a ton of these random small meme coins launched, a ton of like Brian Armstrong, like we misspelling meme coins. But like none of them really like got anywhere near the the kind of Bowdoin or Trump type of things, like in terms of like the frenzy in terms of usage. So I would say like Ethereum's probably lost this market for a while. Maybe it'll come back. Maybe not.

Starting point is 00:26:08 I'm not sure it's like necessarily the, you know, the market you always want to own. But. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I suppose the difference is that, you know, although Ethereum does host more market cap of meme coins, it's mostly traded on centralized exchanges. It's not settled on chain.

Starting point is 00:26:30 Whereas on Solana, the number one place for price discovery of these things and trading is actually on Solana itself. Do you notice that actually, is that literally true that there's more of this stuff traded on chain for like WIF, that there's more trade on chain than on Binance? It feels true. I bet we could quick check these numbers in like four seconds. Okay, let's check these numbers in four seconds.

Starting point is 00:26:52 Let's check. I'm going to look at Slurf. I'm going to pull up Slurf. Slurf has got to be on-chain. Slurf was. Surf was weird, though, because like I said, the listing was like, yeah, slurf is right. Number one venue is radium.

Starting point is 00:27:05 Number one venue is radium for slurf. Oh, with is all. Yeah. Yeah, with is. You graduate. Yeah, with finance. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:13 My point is like it does happen, but I think that the launching aspect, the like ICO-like aspect, it does feel like Solana's won that pretty. Yeah, so look, so, okay, so for WIF, Radium does 29 million a volume a day. Binance does 320 million a volume a day. So I think for like once an asset gets out of that very initial critical period, then it does graduate to centralized exchanges, I think, pretty much regardless of its scale. I'm just saying if you look at the, it's like the stuff that was on, what was the website you showed last time that was like,

Starting point is 00:27:48 pumped out fun. Pumped out fun. Pumped out fun. Yeah, I feel like the pump dot fun stuff, like everything that's sort of in the meme coin carousel of like the first second day of, you know, birth, that's what is primarily being traded on Solana. I'm just saying that like in 2021 when Shib happened, that was on Ethereum, right? It feels like that has like that entire. market has shifted. No, it is totally. I mean, the new, the new generation of coins 100% has shifted. And I think the on-chain activity for meme coins has definitely shifted to Solana.

Starting point is 00:28:21 It's absolutely a shifted to Solana. Yeah. Okay. All right. Let's, let's move on to MakerDAO. So again, we're sort of moving from very exciting to moderately boring and now to extremely boring. So let's talk about MakerDAO. So MakerDAO, you know what? You love it. It's, you know, the biggest centralized stablecoin, been around forever. You know, caveat where investors in Maker, MKR tokens, it's a very long time. So MakerDAO has announced that they are going into the end game. And the end game has now been defined much more clearly than previously. I think previously it was kind of a word salad of various things that the ruin has been saying

Starting point is 00:29:01 that they're going to do. But now it's going to get a lot more definition. So what's going to happen supposedly in summer 2024? there's going to be basically rebrandings of a new stable token, which will be replacing die. You can transfer from dye into the new stable token. With a new stable token, you'd be able to farm the new governance token. And the new governance token, you know, all these names are obviously TBD.

Starting point is 00:29:27 This new governance token, you can convert from MKR to the new governance token at 24,001, lower price, more retail friendly. I see where they're going with this. So there's going to be farming, defy mechanics. You know, BZoom. You know, it's very, very much, almost like DFI 2.0 type mechanics that they're kind of throwing into MakerDAO, it feels like. Second, more sub-dows. There's going to be a new chain. That new chain is going to host new stuff.

Starting point is 00:29:58 I don't know. Honestly, I don't follow all the stuff here. I should have spent more time reading it. But there's going to be farming. There's going to be a new chain. There's going to be tokens. everyone is excited, maker prices up. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:30:13 Reflections on I, reflections on where MakerDA is going with this new end game. I feel like Rune was like possessed by the ghost of Andre or Sifu. And it's kind of like you said, it feels like very not makery and kind of very, oh, these are all the things that kind of more, you know, D-Gen-E, D-5 founders would do, like the rebranding, the unit cost bias reduction, the new chain, the farming, like, in some ways it's very exciting because Maker has been so boring for so long. But it worries me a little bit because I think part of the boringness is also why Maker

Starting point is 00:30:51 has this brand. And I mean, frankly, Dye is still maybe the only decentralized stable coin that people actually use as a quote currency. They actually use it for payments. And I think that's, you know, the large part of tribute, because it is so stable. And that was part of what people got upset about last week when they were jacking up the rates, which was very out of character for them. Yeah, I mean, I think the goal, if I were to phrase it really simply, is Maker wants to transform

Starting point is 00:31:16 from being die and the system around it to being a brand that has every type of project all in one place. And, you know, I've seen a number of, you know, attempts at this over the years where there's projects are like, oh, we're going to do everything. We're going to have lending and AMMs and a chain and this and that. And it's like, and they like go through like the list and they check every single one off, you know, and it's like, we're going to do it all. And like my biggest concern is that like Maker turns into like a sushi and, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:53 completely dilutes what originally made Maker special. Now, that being said, obviously everyone's really excited about this because it's like, oh, we go from having one project to having seven projects. Surrey. Yeah. Yeah, it does feel like there's definitely an embrace of token mechanics and sort of crypto-cryification, let's say, of Maker. Maker so far has been pretty staid, kind of this sort of august protocol that sits in the wings and never really enters into the popular attention unless it jacks up rates or, you know, something,

Starting point is 00:32:28 something. Like that is what we think of as a scandal in Maker, is that, wow, the rates went up too fast. But yeah, this seems like Maker very much embracing a kind of new generation of, hey, we're back in a bull market. Like, it's time to start mixing things up and being, you know, it's kind of like when, I don't know, when like, you know, 3M hires a social media guy and they start being like, you know, sub-tweeting people and like dropping in the comments and roasting other brands. I kind of feel like that's where Maker that's kind of a little bit what Maker wants to be and like look, maybe it's a good idea. I'm not totally sure.

Starting point is 00:33:09 I don't have a super strong opinion for this stuff that doesn't seem to really affect the underlying mechanics of Maker itself. Yeah, it is a little bit like that, you know, how do you do fellow kids type meme where, you know, Maker is very quickly reinventing itself to go from being a very mature project

Starting point is 00:33:28 to being a new project. Do you think it's net good or net bad? My hunch netbed, simply because I think if Maker were to put all of its efforts and like triple down on the stable coin die and the systems around it, I think they have an opportunity to grow. I think they have an opportunity to build something really more special than they already haven't. It's already special. And so, you know, I just don't necessarily immediately appreciate the sort of. of like distraction of like do eight things when you have one thing that's like almost working and they can triple down on that one thing that's like almost at like real scale.

Starting point is 00:34:12 Tom, what's your take? Not good, not bad. I think a mix of both. I think the rebrand, I mean, we'll see what they come out with. I'm hopefully it's not bad or cringy, but you know, at face value, I think it seems like a good idea. I actually kind of like what Maker has been doing with the product. spin-outs so like Oasis or formerly known as Oasis is now like summer is now

Starting point is 00:34:38 you know actually one of the top defy-apps and same thing with Spark. It reminds you a little bit of kind of the Nosis model done right of you kind of incubate these these products internally and then when they're mature enough they have to swim on their own they have to go find their own funding that they go find their own sources of revenue I think having too much of that stuff in-house kind of coddles the projects and they don't feel as much pressure to find PMF there can be you know weird conflicting incentives of maybe this is not the ideal solution for a defy aggregator or for a lending market,

Starting point is 00:35:08 but it's really good for makers. We're going to do it anyway. And instead having these things sort of be, have some sort of stake in it, but have it be external. I think ultimately it's going to be more beneficial for these things than trying to keep them in house. To ruin, what's your take? Maker, not good, not bad.

Starting point is 00:35:26 Yeah, I don't have too strong a take because I haven't actually spent enough time reading the forum posts because sometimes they're very long. And like I feel like I wish, I really have been meaning to actually go, just fine tune a simple model on some Dow forum posts. So I can just ask stuff for some reason, instead of like reading through the detritus that is the minds of people in crypto, within the minds of people in crypto. And so I, I find some of the diatribs very hard to distill to simple things oftentimes,

Starting point is 00:36:00 because they're like, they go on all these kind of crazy tangents and they're really saying, like, we're taking a path for A to B, but instead it takes 10,000 words to say it. And so I've been a little leery for that reason. But it does seem like they're sticking a lot of things into this. I think the spinoffs, to Tom's point, are probably like the best version of this. They have so many of them now, actually, like everything from Chronicle to Oracle, Ajana, Spark, etc. But I find the kind of crazier side of things too hard to understand.

Starting point is 00:36:38 And I try to stay away from that. But I do think like there is a version of this world where like, yeah, the spinoffs are a really good idea. And like arguably the sub-Dal concept is meant to make more of these and to make them efficient, right? whether it remains to be, whether that can continue remains to be seen. But yeah, I feel like I agree, Tom. Like, that's the part that's like the shining light in all of this. I think the, I mean, Meeker's already done the sub-dab transition. I think already that's been pretty beneficial.

Starting point is 00:37:11 Like you, instead of just getting this, you know, lump sum payment and telling some Dow, hey, go uses for productive purposes. The sub-dabs have to apply for funding individually. And, you know, some of them get denied. They say, no, like, this is too much budget or we don't really think you been effective, you're fired effectively. And so it feels like you're finally applying some market pressure to this part of the market. I will say one of the upsides to this shakeup is, and I know this is something that Rune has

Starting point is 00:37:39 personally been very oriented around is there have been a lot of bureaucrats in MakerDAO. Like, MakerDow is probably the single most bureaucratic org in crypto, I would say. And a lot of those bureaucrats are just kind of like locked. into this like this web of just all the stuff going on within maker now. And so there is something, uh, just kind of healthy about shaking things up and kind of just loosening the cobwebs around everything. And yeah, maybe it could be a bit cringe. Maybe like some of it's kind of a no-op or it just, you know, is a kind of temporary excitement.

Starting point is 00:38:13 And then, you know, when you actually see what gets delivered, it's kind of like, well, this is basically just still MakerDow just with some, you know, fancier gloss over it. But I think some of that can be useful institutionally. So, I mean, we'll see how it actually plays out, but I can, I mean, right now with the token price responding, maybe he's not going to get that much pushback on it and it'll actually be pretty easy to get this through. But you can imagine if the market was responding in a very different way that it actually would be more of a struggle to get some of these things implemented. But right now, it's bull market. If token go up, people will mostly get out of the way is my sense. Yeah, when one token turns into like seven tokens, people like that.

Starting point is 00:38:54 Always bullish. Always bullish. Yeah. Cool. So speaking of new tokens, so there was a story reported. Actually, I think that Robert broke, which is that BlackRock is launching an on-chain fund. So still not a lot of details about what this on-chain fund is. And I've heard around the way, so again, this is all kind of shrouded in mystery at the moment. But I've heard from around the way that Black Rock is launching some kind of basically, totally, tokenized money market fund. And the idea is that, okay, you've got all these shl, you know, all these shlubs on chain who are holding stable coins, they're not getting any yield. They should hold a tokenized money market instead, and then they would get yield,

Starting point is 00:39:37 but still be, you know, dollar pegged effectively, you know, make sure we don't break the buck on the money market. And we're black rock, so we should be able to beat all these losers and scale much bigger. So that's what I've heard is what they're doing, but I don't have any first-hand knowledge. This is all kind of around the grapevine. So any, first of all, anybody else have any finer-grained detail? Well, I have a question for Robert. Do you just get up every morning and read the new reg D filings?

Starting point is 00:40:05 Or, you know, how do you find this stuff? I mean, don't you? Well, well, he's reading the reg D filings while he's listening to his Twitter spaces about meme coins. Correct. Yeah, yeah. Like, I like multitask like 12, like, streams of media at all times, you know. Yeah, that's sense. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:22 No, I mean, it's interesting because, you know, I feel like the reg D filings are so much alpha on just like who's doing what, when and where that like I do. Yeah, of course. Do you actually read reg. Do you actually read Reg. D filings? You got to read the reg D filings. Well, I mean, a lot of journalists read the reg D filings. So like, you know, I'm not a journalist, but a lot of journalists read these on a daily basis because they're like.

Starting point is 00:40:51 Robert, how do you have time to like. do your job. Don't you like run multiple companies? Wait, but this is actually part of this. And of fun. This is how you get diligence on other funds. Reg.

Starting point is 00:41:02 Defiling? Yeah, of course. What are you talking about? That's like the ultimate way. That's like the old school like hedge fund way. Yes, that is the very old,

Starting point is 00:41:10 very, very old school. Like 1950s. It's true. There are services that just give you alerts for all this stuff too. So it's not, you don't really have to like. Yeah, maybe there's services and you just put in some keywords and like,

Starting point is 00:41:21 you know, who knows. Yeah, I've heard of a few of them, yeah. Okay. Wow. Hold on. Okay. Actually, I'm fascinated.

Starting point is 00:41:28 I want to go a little bit deeper before you finish the story. Okay. You wake up in the morning. You kiss your wife. You brew your cup of coffee. Like, do you just like literally open up Edgar and just like read? No, I don't.

Starting point is 00:41:41 No, I have like some Google set up. Like, this is not like. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right.

Starting point is 00:41:45 All right. I wasn't sure how much of this is real because Tom seemed very taken aback. And I was like, oh, fuck. Okay. No, it's not my, it's not my weight. up routine. Okay.

Starting point is 00:41:54 But the Reg D filing was interesting because, you know, there has been a lot of chatter in the market that there was going to be a fund that Black Rock is doing a partnership with securitized. And it's actually really interesting that the Reg D dropped because it is the first definitive proof to a lot of the rumors that there's something happening, they're gearing up, it's exciting. And, you know, I'm personally really excited by this. I think, you know, seeing huge incumbents. getting excited about new product launches on chain,

Starting point is 00:42:26 seeing them get excited about tokenization, seeing them get excited about partnerships, seeing them try new things and experimenting. This is great. This is great for the whole industry. This is great for everyone who's a listener. It's awesome. And so I'm really excited to see what the product looks like when it goes live.

Starting point is 00:42:45 I saw there were some people talking about, like, oh, we found the token contract. And like, oh, we found the wallet where $100 million was pre-fellate. funded to it, you know, I'm not sure which of those is accurate. But when the details come out, I think it's going to be really exciting to see what Black Rock is doing on chain because it's a great milestone. It's huge. It's watching someone that's always, you know, been a little bit of a slow mover embracing the crypto native life. And I think it's going to be inspiring to a lot of other institutions. I think it's going to be inspiring to regulators. I think it's going to be inspiring to investors.

Starting point is 00:43:19 and, you know, I think people don't appreciate how cool it is. I'm just waiting for BlackRock to tweet. Yo, send UstC to this address, 2X if you. To that's a story tweet. Blackrock. Dot soul, blackrock. Dot soul. Okay.

Starting point is 00:43:34 It's time. It's time. I think we're ready. And then BlackRock is like, sorry, guys, you lost the keys. We ended up burning all your USDC. One day, one day. They'll become D-Gens in like 30 years. Hmm.

Starting point is 00:43:49 I can believe it. Cool. Well, I think we're, unfortunately, we're up on time. We got to wrap early today. But very interesting. Hopefully by next week, we'll have more clarity on this BlackRock thing

Starting point is 00:43:59 and see what it actually is and what's happening in the wild. Until then, hope your transaction fees go down and your Solana meme coins go up very heavily. And we'll see you all next week.

Unchained - The Chopping Block: Memecoin Presales, MakerDAO’s Endgame, and BlackRock's Blockchain Bet! - Ep. 622

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.