Unchained - The Chopping Block: Robinhood Chain's Memecoin Mania and Tokenized Stocks

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Laura joins Haseeb, Tom, and Tarun to unpack Robinhood Chain's surge, the strange fusion of stock tokens and memecoins, the damage speculative entertainment can do to retail, Solana's competitive position, and why regulated onchain markets will still look different across jurisdictions. Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, and Tarun Chitra are joined by Laura Shin to chop it up about the latest in crypto. The panel examines Robinhood Chain's second wave, stock-backed memecoins built from old DeFi mechanics, the line between financial entertainment and retail harm, the race with Solana, and the legal constraints facing global onchain markets. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 Robinhood Chain's activity spikes as FOMO, tokenized stocks, and memecoins converge in one retail product. 🔹 Tarun explains how Ohm-style mechanics can pair a memecoin incentive with an underlying stock token. 🔹 The crew compares the new speculation to DeFi summer, GameStop, and what they call financial Jackass. 🔹 Haseeb argues that traders should ask an AI whether a supposed retail short squeeze can work before handing over their keys. 🔹 Laura separates the cultural appeal of speculative entertainment from the real damage repeated losses can do to retail confidence. 🔹 The panel asks whether Robinhood captured the tokenized-stock opportunity that Solana pioneered too early. 🔹 Tom and Tarun compare American FOMO culture with the more explicitly profit-driven social-trading pitches they heard in Asia. 🔹 The group explains why KYC is only one part of bringing HIP-3 markets onshore, alongside clearing, surveillance, collateral, and local law. Host ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Guest ⭐️Laura Shin, Foun of Unchained and CEO of the Show Disclosures Timestamps 00:00 Intro  00:58 Robinhood Chain's big wave 04:00 Ohm forks & stock-backed memecoins 10:50 Financial Jackass & generational speculation 15:13 DeFi code gets a second life 19:10 Does memecoin trading entertain or destroy retail? 34:37 Dream stock-memecoin pairings 36:12 Is Robinhood Chain overshadowing Solana? 44:19 Building FOMO for Asian markets 50:35 Hyperliquid in talks with Kraken parent  52:59 What regulated HIP-3 markets would require 58:26 Why global onchain markets still face local law Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You sound like a grandfather, like lecturing a child. Look, it's kind of our role now is to be grandfathers for the industry, you know? Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quans. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unimmed to trading firms who are very involved. I like that ETH is the ultimate policy.

Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone.

Nice to go to go Toon, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo. And coming back, we've got Laura, CEO of the show. Welcome back, Laura.

Thanks for having me. And I've received the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is an investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Lecy Chopin Block.

At XYZ for more disclosures. So the story of this week has been the rise of Robin Hood Chain. So we've alluded a little bit to what's going on on Robin Hood Chain, but it seems to have hit a fever pitch recently. So when Robert Hood Chain first launched, there was a little bit of a peak, kind of started to come down and people thought, oh, maybe this is a flash in the pan, kind of a one-hounder, maybe got people a little bit excited.

If you recall, when we had Thread Guy on the show, Thread Guy was speculating that, you know, I don't really know that Robin Hood is bringing in new users. These might just be people front-running other users who haven't shown up yet. But now all of a sudden, we've got this second rally in Robin Hood chain, and it seems to be much more explosive than the first. We are now seeing over 125,000 active wallets, 5.7 million transactions per day, $1.2 billion in Dex volume, $2 million in REV in a single day, REV standing for realized, what is it, realized value or something, basically the total number of fees

that are paid on a blockchain. So all of a sudden, there's a lot of economic activity happening on Robin Hood. And a lot of this academic activity is being driven by some of the meme coins, as well as some of the stock tokens that have been tokenized on Robin Hood. We'll get to talking about some of those and what's happening there. But a lot of this has gotten people excited that, hey, maybe, in fact, Robin Hood chain is working. We are onboarding real normies into crypto again, and all of a sudden there's a new distribution channel that's bringing people back online. This has led to a rally in Arbitrum, which, of course, they're built on top of the Arbitrum stack, a kickback of fees that the Robin Hood chain generates to Robin Hood. There's also been a

discussion about Ethereum. And of course, Ethereum does get some of the fees, but a very small amount because these are just data availability fees. It's basically just paying for the right to publish certain data into the Ethereum blockchain, but it doesn't really capture any of the transaction fees or the value in the same way that Arbitrm is doing. So some people have argued, hey, look at this. It shows that there's almost no value that's being captured by the layer one. Isn't as bearish for layer ones, even if it's bullish for layer twos or for some of the layers that are actually participating in the rally?

Tom, what's your reaction seeing what's happening on Robin Hood chain? Is this the nail in the coffin for L1s being able to benefit from L2's built on top of them? I thought Turin was the Robin Hood chain guy. Why is he the Robin Hood guy? He was the one who was excited to talk about Robin Hood Chain. I am surprised that, like, you know, you have a corporate O chain that has like this kind of activity. It's also not, like, I mean, I guess like they do have, you know, half the volume in these like tokenized stocks. So it's not like totally meme coins or it's these like interesting kind of synergies, which I guess we're going to kind of talk about it at some point.

But yeah, I don't know. I'm curious what the reaction is internally at Robin Hood. Like, I'm sure when they were building this, like, oh, you know, we have this, you know, beautiful vision of this new financial system and 24-7 stock trading. this global permissionless chain. And then it's like, I know, people want to trade, you know, vulgar meme coins. And, you know, there's something very human about it. I don't know. Mr. Robin Hood.

What do you have to say? I don't know if I'm Mr. Robin Hood, but I would say I enjoy seeing Omforks show up again when it's like, you know. Their own forks? Yeah, their own forks. So the most interesting dynamic. And I think Tom is being able to PC and not being insentier. So for those who don't know, Ome is an old, like, basically stable coin-ish Ponzi scheme.

Basically the best way I can describe it, there were a number of OM and OM forks on Ethereum that blew up famously in 2022. But the real protocol survived. That's actually the more important thing, right? The original one is still around. I mean, their treasure is huge. It did also spawn the 3-3 meme,

which still is around to this day and I feel like it's outlived, actually. So, you know, it did some good. I mean, it survived in the sense that Rome has survived. Yes. It's like it ain't what it was. Yeah, it's true. So anyway, the most interesting thing to me is people have basically, it's too bad Robert's not here.

Because people have basically tried to do the thing he was doing. Do you remember when Robert bought a bunch of this public company and was going to, yeah. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. An interesting thing is like the OMForks are sort of like using meme coins in a creative. way. And it's not just, they're not exactly own the contracts are modified enough, but you can think of them as like some kind of like meme coin launch pad where you launch a meme coin and you have to bond to the meme coin. But the asset you pair it with is an underlying stock. So the idea is sort of like you to mint this meme coin, you basically have to buy the stock and you lock some of it into the LP. So it's like imagine you take $100 of stock. You, you mince. You mined. and you get $10 of $10 of your meme coin is locked and 90 is back to you. The 10 that's locked is to provide liquidity,

just like this kind of classic bonding curve, OM type of thing, right? We're like some of the... But the interesting thing is that the stock pairing basically makes a meme coin almost like a token incentive for an individual stock. So if you think about the OM case, you had OM, locked OM, and ETH, right?

And ETH was like the stock. And so like everything kind of revolved around that, right? And the locked ome was sort of used for liquidity to like make sure that you could trade ome for Eath. And then the Ome itself was like what was, I'm simplifying things. There's G-O-M-S-Oam and some other tokens that we don't need to remind everyone or of the brain damage from. And so... I saw the best minds of my generation. Yeah, that's like that Jeff Hammerbocker quote about the best minds my generation worked in

advertising. I guess, yeah. But anyway, the main point is that the meme coin is the incentive to mint the stock token. So the most famous one that grew a lot over the weekend was the meme coin called Boner, which was paired with Hymns, the online drug retailer who is famous for having, in New York City, at least, lots of ads of phallic symbols to represent ED medication you can buy from them on supply. description. And so the idea was the Boner token was paired with the Hymstock,

the tokenized Hymstock. And over the weekend, obviously, the HM stock had depegged from the last traded price quite substantially. Peg is wrong word, but deviated from like where it traded. Because, yeah,

sorry, there's too many puns here. Very good, very good. And so the idea is a boner token kind of was used, it almost became a liquidity incentive to mint the Hymns stock. The Bonner token had a liquidity incentive. Yeah.

That's why this is beautiful because it's like you can't, you try to avoid any innuendo and like you can't avoid it. But the most interesting thing is like you're using the meme coin, the way you use like token farming incentives, right? Like oftentimes a protocol might issue its governance token

so that people deposit liquidity. Here you're using it to incentivize people minting the RWA. Grow the RWA, right? And I think the most interesting thing about this was the user base seems to kind of be like the Solana meme coin traders who are using FOMO and they, because the experience is abstracted it away so much,

I think it was like 90,000 of 125,000 addresses were originated from FOMO. I saw some statistic like that. I didn't verify it, so whatever. But FOMO tweeted something like that, or said something like that. And so, that sort of is an interesting thing of like,

meme coin traders are not loyal to a chain anymore. That was the first lesson I got from this, right? They're not this Solana loyalty thing. There was certainly a time that was true. I think if that is there's any left, it's gone. But the second thing is using the meme coin as a liquidity incentive to mint this kind of like off-chain asset is sort of a very clever hack in some ways.

Well, okay, so I think it's stupider than what you're described. because what you're describing sounds like the incentive, like maybe Hymns is doing this in order to create more. I don't mean that Hymns is trying to do this. I mean, right, right, right. People are doing it as a joke. But it's incredibly,

they're like optimizing Robin Hood's KPI's, which are like, increase the number of tokenized stocks. Well, it's worse than that. It's worse than that, right? So, like, okay, so what people are doing is they're getting really excited about this meme coin over the weekend, which is only kept in line by Hymns tokenized stock trading with the true value, right?

And because people are like, oh, this meme coin's running, better buy in now. You know, you buy over the weekend. Hymns has de pegged massively. So a bunch of people start buying this meme coin because they think it's going up and people on Robin Hood or on FOMO are buying it. And of course, on Monday morning, when you can start to mint this stock again, everybody who's bought this stock or this meme coin is going to get destroyed by the people who can run the ARB. Right. So you're handing all of this money, every time one of these meme coins runs up, you're handing all this money in this big massive DPEG to like hedge funds.

And that's the thing that everyone's getting so excited about. And people seem to be like relishing this. Again, I don't know. I think a thing about meme coins that is like fundamental to them that like I don't get and you don't get because we're unks or plumbers or whatever the fuck old people are called this cycle. I think the plumber meme is like the people who are around. the defy summer who are suddenly going back on chain or the plumbers.

I'm sideline. I didn't even download FOMbo. I didn't try this. I feel like I'm enjoying it more from the like reading the smart contract code side, which means I'm not my capital is kept away from this. But it's interesting to look at. It's like it's kind of very fun. So actually, so this kind of, I feel like is some weird mashup of

DeFi Summer with like the GameStop Mania. and then also reminds me of like the LA Vap Cabal thing, where basically like there's some element of like, oh, look, ha ha, look at how much money we can lose a little bit. Yes, exactly. There's entertainment value in losing money. That's what's happening for sure. Yeah.

That's what's happening for sure. So it's kind of some kind of weird generational. It's sort of like the game, so the game stop. It's like financial jackass. That's what this is. Yeah. Yeah. I called a BDSM, but I think jackass is probably a better girth rest of it.

That also dates us, by the way, as like super awesome. Yeah, but the defy summer element is just like kind of this super creative people. People are, there's just sort of this like frenzy and like all these people are getting in and they're doing all these like wild things that they haven't done before. It's kind of like that feeling. So there, I don't know. Like to me, I'm watching all this and obviously I'm like older than I'm sure like 99% of people who are engaging in this. So I'm looking at this and I feel like there's something kind of generational or like this is it like so I know normally we talk about. Yeah like meaning so I know I know generational anti wealth losing all your money.

Yeah. Yeah. You say they're just stupid? Like what do you say? No, because it's not only about that. It's like something about like the tech and yeah. So what I'm trying to say is that like if we look at the GameStop thing like even not like seemed kind of weird, right? Because, like, GameStop, like, obviously it wasn't like some amazing stop, right? So there is something about... Well, okay. GameStop, there was a theory that, oh, we're going to short squeeze all the hedge funds and we're going to beat Wall Street. Oh, no, no, no. The same thing was here. The same thing was,

we're short squeezing all the hedge funds and hymns by trading this over the weekend. That really? That was the meme? And there was also... There's another one. There was a meme coming called Cinema, which was paired with AMC. And that one, that one was funny because, like, Monday morning, market opened and it deep-hags so badly. And, like, the tokenized stock was just trading way below the real one for a long time. Oh, well. Well, I mean, like, the problem is that, like, the math doesn't work.

Like, these tokenized stocks are tiny compared to the underlying stocks, which was different from GameStop, right? GameStop, it was like, oh, all of us are going to come together and we're this huge, you know, like, a school of fish. Yeah. I'm not saying that like the logic. I'm not saying the logic is the same. I'm just saying there is something about like the, like,

it's more like the mob comes and they can use this technology or like with GameStop. It was, you know, they were doing things with like actual stocks. But like it's more like this kind of internet. It's sort of like 4chan meets defy meets stock token. I don't know. Do you understand what I'm saying? It's more like an online behavior. It kind of rhymes.

Yes. It kind of rhymes if you zoom way up. That's what I meant about like generational and cultural. That's what I'm talking about. The problem, okay, so I think many. Yeah, I'm not talking about the logic. I'm not talking about the logic. So like one, no logic obviously cannot work.

Like, ask your AI. People have AI now, right? If you're like, hey, I have this idea that I think we can we can short squeeze people by buying a meme coin. Like, Astero AI would be like, are you a fucking idiot? No, give me your keys like you're not allowed to touch this. You know, I'm talking about like behavior. That's what I'm talking about.

Not watching. There's no proletariat against the Wall Street thing going on here. It feels to me much more like these are meme coins. These ones are running. Here's a new game. You don't understand this new game. Every cycle there's a new game. This is an RWA themed game because RWAs are the thing.

And here's how you can play a stupid speculative game that is RWA themed. That's what this feels like. No, no, no. But I will say one thing that is kind of. of interesting is this mania got much more Uniswob V4 hook usage than Uniswap got in its entire time. A lot of the forks of these Ethereum protocols

that didn't... It wasn't like the code was wrong. They were just kind of launched in a weird market. They didn't have a fervor to incentivize people to build things. I think that's the interesting thing about this. It's like there was no new code written. This is like a mashup of a lot of existing protocols. Like there's one

Omfork, I'm forgetting the name. I think that one is called net capital. And there's Pons, which is even more funny. Ponds is like the Uniswop v4, token there V2 thing. And I just think, hey, look, if something is going to incentivize people to go use this old, this like code that people wrote and like it's going to maybe at least temporarily increase the net supply of these tokenized RWAs, am I going to be like, complaining because like otherwise who you kind of need some like fervor yeah i was going to say like

with enough demand you can get new issuance and and total rwa issuance on robin hood chain has gone up um i think they're up to like 7080 mill and so hey you know for some of these like low cap public companies like you can imagine a world where like 70 to build total across the entire chain yes okay and that's how big is the base of rwAs of our rWA equities You mean, like, globally? I think $3 billion-ish. Yeah, but that also includes like... Very small.

I feel like a lot of that are like tokenized treasuries and money market funds, but they... No, no, no, no. I think the $3 billion is equities. It's ondo plus B stocks plus X stocks is like three to four. Yeah, I had to look this up recently, so I... Yeah, that's... Yeah, it's mainly those three. This is not a...

This is not an accelerant for the tokenization boom. No, but before... They had like basically no minting. There was like sub a few million total. Sure. And like over the weekend. On Robin Hood. Over the weekend.

So I'm just saying like, look, they came for the boners. They leave for the hymns. And like maybe the hymns stay minted and don't get burned. No, no, no. So I think the right way to understand this is that, you know, I often describe a lot of the meme coin stuff as casinos. See, why don't you want people to have fun? Like, why don't you want people to have fun?

Because they will, because like a good casino operator, it's important how people have fun. You don't just let people just get destroyed by all the the game that destroy them. But the phomo win rate is already like 6%. So why are you making it worse with like this kind of stuff that's definitely going to result in capital destruction? Yeah, I know. But to see this, honestly, I feel like, so this is kind of a very similar point to what I was making last time when I was on here and I was talking about MSTR and STRC. And you guys like only were looking at it like literally through the math. And I was trying to explain that the larger point was about human psychology. And it's like, I feel like sometimes you're like so stuck in like always

looking at things like a VC. But like I'm just talking about like, look at the whole entire meme coin mania. Like you had 99% of all people losing money on this. But it was like it went for a very long time. It's still going on. And like you don't get it and you like keep saying like, oh, it doesn't make sense and whatever. And yeah, okay. Like right, if you're looking at it super rationally through the numbers and right, it doesn't make sense. But that's what I was trying to say about like it's a cultural thing. It's like, and that's when I've been about my LA vape cabal comments. It's like there's something where it's frankly just very nihilist, which I know is like the commentary about meme coins generally.

But it is almost like, and I would even apply this to prediction markets actually also because that's another place where like, yeah, people lose money. But it's almost like there's- We are investors in prediction markets. We understand that people gamble and people do stupid stuff. People buy meme coins. Obviously, we invest in crypto. We get that.

But there's a difference between, okay, I'm going to go buy some stock or some token or whatever that I think maybe it's at 100x. And I am going to play a game that I'm guaranteed to lose. That's bad. We should not encourage that. We should not talk about that as though that's okay. Yeah, I'm not making a moral judgment on it, which I agree with you. Those aren't good things.

What all I'm trying to say is like, I'm watching this. And to me, I'm, that's why earlier I was saying. I'm seeing something generational. I was talking about something generational or cultural because I agree with you. It doesn't make sense, but we're seeing like the same pattern over and over again. So yeah, that's my point. Laura's an anthropologist. She's not, you know, passing passing judgment.

Look, there might, there's someone is getting some utility out of it. It's not financial utility, but there's some utility. I don't know what they're measuring it. No, people have expected, they believe they are getting utility out of it. And they're very quickly going to learn. Have you watched some of these streams? I don't think they. These people are not going to have money very soon if they keep doing this.

Okay, thank you. This is a self-correcting problem. Thank you. You sound like a grandfather like lecturing a child. Look, it's kind of our role now is to be grandfather's free industry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. I get it.

I'm just saying like, let them, if they want to have fun, I don't know. Like, I'm not here to like stop you. Yeah, no, but I agree. So like I agree with Haseeb. Like, so my comments before were observational. But I agree with Haseeb. And the reason why I agree that. it's really not good is because basically, you know, with this bear market, we truly saw it, like,

it just really felt like just retail kind of evaporated. Like, they just got super fucking wrecked. Like the whole meme coin thing, they just, they, it just felt like they completely wrote off crypto. And it's funny, I had Jeff Dorman on the show and we were talking about how actually, when you look at so many objective measures, crypto is in a better position than ever. And so I was saying, oh, but it makes sense that sentiment is down so bad to. spite the facts given the whole meme coin crisis. And he couldn't, he like couldn't understand what I was saying or he couldn't see that perspective. And I was so confused. I was like, how can you not understand this? It doesn't matter what the facts are. It's like if you were in the trenches and you were like

losing money constantly, like you were going to feel down bad and you don't care like, oh, stable coins are being adopted. We have the genius act. You don't care about the ETFs. You don't care about like any of that stuff. It just doesn't matter. The fact that crypto is a better position than Everforges doesn't matter. So anyway, I agree with Hasseed. it is bad. Anyway, sorry. So now I feel like I'm, my first points were just observational.

Now I, I'm saying if I'm going to make a judgment, I agree with Haseep. I just don't, I don't know what you can, you can't really stop people. We literally, look, we literally have a show

that people listen to in the crypto industry. I'm not telling you, look, you're not allowed to deploy on fucking Robin Hood chain or whatever. Obviously you can. But look,

here's the perspective I come from, right? We started this year from the perspective of retail has been destroyed, the meme coin supply chain has just been just absolutely just scalping people and like all the people in the middle who are getting paid of like the Libras of the world and like just all the scandals that have plagued meme coins, right? Now we're getting to a place where it's not just, oh, we're in this big Ouija board and some of them go up and some of them go down.

Now literally you are mechanizing things that will definitely result in things going down, even if nobody in building a meme coin makes money, the hedge funds will make money. So I think I think crypto has this way, and I think we talked about this last time with thread guy on the show, that any time there's like a new primitive, crypto finds a way to remix it and create a new game, right? And I thought that, okay, maybe it's going to be AI. There's some new AI capability, and that's going to get people excited and it's going to drive a new cycle. Turns out it's RWA's. What can you do new with RWA? I didn't think there was much, but turns out this is something you can do with RWA is that creates a new game.

And it's pretty stupid. You're almost certainly going to lose money if you do it, but it's a new game. And people clearly on Twitter did not foresee that this was how they would end up. But if you spent 10 minutes thinking about it and talking to your AI, they would tell you, here's exactly what's going to happen to your stupid meme coin. I think this goes to in the future, I actually think there are going to be so many tokens and there's going to be so much value floating around all the time that I actually do think that, I know this is like a weird thing to say.

But yeah, there will be ways where people entertain themselves and they lose money in the process. but like is that that different from you know you literally like go to a concert or you go to a comedy show and you're like spending the money like is it that different like either way you are you you you have no no no has see has see i think you need to torture yourself for about 12 hours and watch a bunch of streams it's a worthwhile endeavor to understand that there's this entertainment value that's like completely divorced from the mean coin that's like watching someone lose them it's a thing and i you just have to respect that. I used to be a professional gambler.

I understand that people gamble and it's fun. Right. Okay, but separate from gambling, let's talk about it as entertainment. How much do you think you spend on entertainment a month? I don't know. Not that much, but. No fun has seen. It doesn't even matter what the amount is.

Sure. Yeah, I don't know why it matters. So let's say it's like $500. If people were to play around with these meme coins and you get entertainment value out of it and you end up losing $500 a month on it. Like, is it that different? Yes, it's very different. It's very different.

The reason why it's very different is that the person who is playing around with the meme coins, they don't think they're spending $500. They think they're making $500. They are diluted. And if they are deluded because they've been informed by some meme coin influencer that, oh, you should get into this trade, you're going to make a bunch of money, you're going to get financial freedom, lever up your saving, you know, do all the other stuff. That's why the meme coin thing was so bad last year.

What if they're doing this in a group chat and they're like treating memes with their friends and they're making jokes? Like then, okay. I look, are people who did this last year happy that they were like, I got so much entertainment out of all the money I lost last year on meme coins? Like, do you read this coin special stuff? I don't, I'm not trying to say that that you're wrong, but I'm just saying there's like some demographic that this is like an entertainment source. You go to a casino, people in a casino know why they're there. They are not confused. They don't think they're making money.

they know that they are being entertained. Nobody in the casino is telling them, actually you're making money playing a slot machine or you're actually making money playing roulette. Like a casino is honest, straightforward, transparent, right? Now, if you're buying a stock or if you're buying a crypto asset that represents a real thing,

then you are potentially going to make money and it's a matter of your judgment whether or not you succeed. If you are yolowing into some mean points that an influencer is telling you to buy, you are almost certainly losing money. You and I know that. We have the stats.

we saw what happened over, you know, pumped out fund buyers over the course of 2025. It's like 95% of people lost money, right? The odds are overwhelming that you are losing money doing this. The problem is not that people are losing money. It's that they think they're making money. That's the problem. Tom, you haven't weighed in at all. Yeah, I don't know.

I've kind of been like, I think it's almost sort of like a question of like, you know, is it a swap? Like, is it strictly zero sum? Or like, I think to your point, I actually think the entertainment value is the fact that there are like paper gains for people. And like that's the thing that it's sort of like as long as no one sells a thing goes up and then people think that they're making money for a long period of time. And so that's maybe the kind of pernicious thing that you're calling out versus, you know, literally for a sports bed or playing roulette or something like there's just a very

transactional, you know, dollar amount that sort of goes through. And there isn't sort of this inflated paper wealth. I think that's kind of thing that maybe traps people or I think you feel it's kind of cruel. Yeah. I think especially if you're designing these things, Obviously, people are now copying this mechanism. It's the hot thing. I've been reading all these posts about, oh, this is the new meta and blah, blah, blah, blah. And what does that mean? That means that the supply chain of Munecoin grifters is out in full force.

And they're going to create a bunch of these and they're going to market them and they're going to hire the influencers. They're going to do the whole thing. We know how this industry works. It was all gruesomely unveiled to us over the course of 2025 when the last cycle blew up. Those people aren't gone. They don't have anything else to do that's going to make them this kind of money. So now, I do think this mechanism is so brutally inefficient that they will quickly move away from this, right? Like, you only need a couple weekends before people realize, oh, don't do this one.

This one is not good. It leads to a very short half-life. But the meta of, oh, find a meme coin and attach it to some RWA, that's definitely going to continue. And in principle, that's, look, I mean, I think if you're buying meme coins, you're probably going to lose money. I think the data is pretty irrefutable on that. That said, as long as you understand what you're doing, cool, have fun, do your thing. I just think there's a cynicism about the simplicity of saying, oh, well, you know, caveat, mTOR, like, what are you going to regulate the blockchain?

No, that's not what I'm saying, but I am saying that we, as a voice in the industry, I think it's important to kind of mark where you stand because people make choices about what they advocate for and what they promote. I'm for what's right. I'm not trying to say, hey, you should go put, this is not like me saying financialists. But I think it's like funny to watch. Like there's something fundamentally funny about this like idea that like RWA's, no one can fucking organically induce them on chain, right?

It's like look at the number of like RWA launches that have like had trouble getting liquidity on chain, getting users, getting distribution. And then it's like this shitty beam coin is like increasing RWA distribution like in a way that like you don't really see. We just establish it's like. No, no, no, no, no. The difference is actually, a lot of the RWA issuance on chain is like mainly whale issuance in a lot of RWAs. It's not, it's not like, this is all like pure like $5, $10, like tiny retail bets.

So I think there's like kind of an interesting thing here that's like, this is exciting to like the small, the GameStop small trader. And like, look, I'm not, I'm not like, look, you can, you can, you can, you can, it's not like I can, it's not like I. It's not like I can disagree with your moralization. It's more that I just think it's like, how the fuck did they convince someone to incentivize RWA's? The hardest thing that incentivize because it's like the no-fund anti-token industry

part of crypto. And like this thing found a way to like shove a token in, right? That's the impressive part. Yeah. I mean, the 70 mil is also up 50% you know, week on week. And some days there's like several times more pure stock volume than like meme coin in stock volume. So there is like a price. possibility that maybe people stick around or maybe people go and did they just use this as a primary

venue for trading? I don't know. But more stock volume than meme volume? How is it possible? On some days, yeah, versus like the paired assets. People want to trade RWAs or they want to go buy some names. I don't know. It's not every day, but some days it is the case. It's probably because they're deep pegging them so hard. That's probably what's going. That's, yeah. That's also possible. I haven't looked into it. That's probably what that is. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Just to make clear my comments, I agree with the seat.

Like, I would never do this. But I'm just saying from an anthropological perspective, I can see why it's happening. Yeah. So I didn't mean to grandstand. Obviously, I don't think that you guys think it's good that people are losing their money on stupid. No, I just think it's like, how the fuck is this the thing that's entertaining? Yeah. It's what?

Yes. It's obviously funny and bizarre. But I wouldn't be interested if in 10 years there is, like this is just part of like how stuff is. Like there's entertainment in losing money on stupid things that have value, honestly. I don't think so. I really don't think so. I think like, again, these things are self-correcting. There's a lot of times in history when people spent money doing stupid things that didn't work.

And they stopped doing all those. But so then why do you think that like yet again, are seeing this, even though we already went through the meme. Because it's new. Because it's new and people haven't been hit in the face yet. And they just got hit in the face. They'll need to get hit a couple more times. And then once they do, they will stop doing this.

Okay. But how many times, like that's what I'm saying. Like, don't you think 10 years from now there might be a new thing where people. Oh, for sure. Oh, okay. Well, in 10 years, look, the AI is going to be doing all our trading. So, you know. Okay.

It's going to be harder to full levels. Another thing that's actually kind of interesting to me just from a like market structure point of view is most. most meme coin launch pads are like single numerare, right? They're all in Seoul or all in ETH. Or the own type of things with bonds. They're also like kind of ETH is the main asset. There's like one stable, real high liquidity asset and many small assets.

Here you have many reasonable liquidity assets on nine to five. And then many small assets. Like the many to many thing versus the one to many is like different. So I'm kind of curious if that changes the like structural dynamics. here. That's like kind of the thing I'm looking for. Yeah. And I think Uniswap also started pairing the stocks against indices. You know, if you want to trade hymns, I guess it's traded against triple Q or whatever the equivalent is. I don't know what if. So I'm just saying like there's something interesting about the fact that there's more than one numerator here for a meme coin versus one.

That's that, to me, that's the thing that stands out as like market structure is going to be different. I just don't know how to predict what. Because right now it's just like idiocry. Right. So we have to wait until it calms down a little bit to figure out like, Yeah. But I do love the plumber meme. I love the idea that the unks are plumbers. Like you've been around crypto long enough, you're like Mario and Louie. So you're not plumber.

Plumbers were the normies who came in in 2017. We are unks because we made money from the plumbers. I think like all the, all the FOMO traders are calling all the old DFI people plumbers right now. Is that okay? Because we're, yeah. Okay. All right.

Fair enough. It's just like the memes are funny. Like I just feel like I feel like maybe it's just like I'm enjoying the entertainment of being a spectator of this. You know? Yes, yes. There was a tweet where somebody said, Boner is one of the token that's paired with him or hymns. That Boner is the fart coin of RWA's. And I was like, okay, this sentence is this sentence.

Boner is the fart coin of RWA's is just like put it. Put it in the little. I mean, I'm just hoping we get to the level of it's stupidity that was like, you know, there are all these like traditional hedge fund managers when Fartcoin was like a billion FDV. Just like going on Twitter being like, this is why capitalism is useless and has all these,

you know, it's not optimized and like kind of like what you were saying, but about Fartcoin. So I'm just kind of like, you know, I think the top is in when you hear the like, you know, what's the like AQR guy going on the Dye tribe against crypto? you know like like if that happens at least we're back in the news we are back in the news we are back in the news for but we are back in the news

so related to this whole before we move on I have a question for everyone we have to go around is what is your dream stock meme coin pairing if you had to choose just aesthetically you know like aesthetically which one do you want like which which which which pair do you like of an existing meme coin I don't think I know no no just take a stock take and make a meme

meme coin name. Like, imagine you're hitting, you're sitting in pond stuff family and you're like, do I, do I make the Nvidia meme coin? Do I make the SK-Hynakes meme coin? Do you make the Ford meme coin? Come on, you got to have some. This is not something I've thought about. You needed to ask us in advance because we're going to have to take a little while to think of like. Take one. Take a public company you like. All right. True. Why don't you begin? What did you begin? Do you start? The exercise. Yes. I think I want to pick cargill and

cow shit or like fertilizer or like horse you know like horse manure manure I want like manure to be the token and then like you know something that has to do with fertilizer okay incredible payoff I just you know like the point here is that like

I can't believe you were denying being the Robin Hood chain guy at the beginning of this segment by the way I have one used Robin Hood chain once I'm just saying that I like if enjoyed watching. I only use it to benchmark it. Okay. Yeah. No one else has any ideas of like an aesthetic. No. The answer is no. I have no. I have no vulgar memes about any stops. This is why you don't get the people who find entertainment. I will readily admit that. I will readily admit that. I look. So the other story that I wanted to get to was there's a lot of talk about is Robin Hood Chain

now overshadowing Solana. So Flood came out. and he wrote this tweet, Salana is in the most perilous place it's ever been since its inception. Some of the points that people have raised toward this point is that Solana was the first to do tokenized stocks. And of course, it had all the meme coin share, you know, pumped out fun, was on Solana.

And so if people were going to do crazy stuff with RWA's and meme coins, why is it happening on Robin Hood chain and not on Solana? Right now, Solana has no purpose exchange that really has any meaningful market share. It has almost no RWA market share now with, you know, Robin Hood, and Ethereum, I'm kind of taking over the game.

It has most of its trading pairs are now, I guess not most, but many of its trading pairs are increasingly moving to stable coins rather than against Seoul. And it seems like it maybe had a first mover advantage that now is being co-opted by Robin Hood as a second mover. So a bunch of people going back and forth about whether or not this is sleeping on the king or if, in fact, Salana was just too early and it basically wrote a playbook that Robin Hood is now in the position to be able to capitalize on, or to your point, Tarun, if you're coming in through this through FOMO, which we know majority of Robin Hood traders are

using FOMO, if you're on FOMO, you don't care what chain is on. You can be on any of these chains. It's immaterial to you because the chain lock-in has disappeared. So thoughts around the room is this death nail for Solana because of how Robin Hood is taking over the mantle. I mean, you know what's so interesting to think about those rumors about how Robin Hood chain almost went with Solana in at the last minute switch to Arbitrum. Could you imagine if you don't remember that?

I don't remember that. Yeah. While back, well, there. Yeah. I mean, this was like last summer, if I recall correctly. No, longer. I think longer than that. Yeah.

They already announced it last summer. They'd already announced it by last summer. I think it was like six months before, like late 24, probably, 2024. Yeah. So I never was able to. to verify this beyond just something that was. Was this to be a separate Salana instance or they were just going to be on Salana? I think they were going to be on Salana.

Okay. Nobody, so, to root, you remember it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure, for sure. So there was a lot of stuff where, like, both the Arbitrum and Salana Foundation were, like, tweeting a lot trying, you could tell there was like a kind of bakeoff going on. And then, like, there was some article that was, like, rumors that this is happening, yeah. Yeah, and I had, I think, H.A. on the show at that time, I'm pretty sure to be like, so, like, how did Arbitrum, you know, get this deal? And, you know, the way he explained it, and he didn't, like, confirm that, yeah, they were about to go with Salana. But he basically said, well, you know, when you're your own L2, then it flips the economics. Like, you're not paying, you're making money. And, you know, so that seems like a pretty obvious thing. If it was. the case that they were considering starting on Solana. So it's just so interesting that we're

having this conversation because it's kind of like, oh, well, what if things had actually gone the other way, then like Solana might be in a really good place. And, you know, who knows? So it's just an interesting counterfactual to ponder. I feel like, I mean, it's always, I feel like people who were early, even if they missed execution details or too early, like they always feel like they're the most bitter, where they're like, I was here first. I should therefore deserve credit. And you see so many waves like that in crypto of like, you know, the biggest text was not the first text. The biggest prediction market was not the first prediction market.

But and then those founders end up being the ones that are salty. And so this kind of rhymes a little bit like that. Like I actually think like the biggest bungling, I think was negotiating like the X stocks relationship with Sala. We're like Salaanian was greatly incentivizing X stocks liquidity and activity on Salaana. And then they let it get purchased by. crack and ends. It feels like either you invest in you partner or you have some sort of aligned incentives or you don't. And here it was like, okay, you, you pump a bunch of money in this ecosystem and then there's not really like, you know, loyalty to the chain per se. But I think it's,

it's tough for foundations where doing it in house ends up being kind of subpar, but doing it with a third party, you know, it's also hard to sort of get them actually really aligned with, with your own goal. So I don't know. It feels a little cute to say, oh, well, Salana had these things early and they should have been able to combine them when there are like so many other I think, you know, complicating factors. Well, I think it's important not to gravedance too early because Solana still has, is still the number one chain by Dex volume by a pretty wide margin. If you look at 30-day, 62 billion, Robin Hood chain is at 17 and Ethereum's at 33 BSC,

then base, then Robin Hood. I was going to say, today, I mean, even the FOMO volumes are also very comparable, like across both chains. I mean, even as of like a week ago. And so, yeah, I, anyway. Yeah. Robin Hood chain today is $1.5 billion. Salana is $2.5 billion. And then behind them is Ethereum at $1.3 billion. So Robin Hood chain is number two today by 24-hour decks volume. Drew, what's your take on Salonover's Robin Hood? I mean, I brought up the FOMO thing because I think that's just fundamentally true. I think like the wallet and app level is like making it very, very, much people not locked into an ecosystem.

I think that's just like a trend that will continue. I think people are comfortable with a lot of types of bridging, especially for small volume transactions as like running in the background. And it's sort of like I'm not sure it one will. Like obviously Robin has this huge distribution, but like if you think about the chain, most of its distribution is coming not from Robin's proper, right? And so that sort of already says, like, these people who are aggregating might actually be a much better player in the long run.

So I don't know if you can really pick a winner or loser. It actually just really depends on, like, the applications that are able to create the most. I would have said value, but Hasebel will get mad at me, so I'll say entertainment. Well, right now, I think actually if you look at trading volume, it's about half and half FOMO and then, GMGN that's driving a lot of the users to... Sorry, I mean, but it's not Robin Hood itself driving. Right, exactly, exactly. That's what, yeah.

And so by volume, it's about half GMGN, about half FOMO. By users, it's a vast majority FOMO, which means that the people in GMGN are more of these power traders, they're running bots or whatever, and they're trading in bigger size. And these are probably more sharks than they are winnows, who are, you know, the people on phoma who are more likely losing money as opposed to people who are kind of more professionalized traders. That said, you know, the interesting thing, Robin Hood right now, number two by Dex volume, by TVL, they're still tiny. TVL Robin Hood is 730 million, which presupport them at number 11 by chain, but they're number two by volume for a 24-hour dex volume, which tells you small amount of

assets right now. Solana has 5.7 billion in TVL, base has 5.4 billion TVL, Ethereum, of course, lion share with 48 billion TVL. So it's still early. And I think one should be cautious not to index too much, especially when I still more or less think what I thought before, which is that I don't know that there's a lot of new users who are being onboarded into here. And I feel like I'm not hearing about this from anywhere outside the crypto bubble. It feels like this is just where the crypto kind of center of gravity is or where the heat map of stuff happening in crypto is. I saw this big, long Chinese post about RWA stock memes. So actually, one thing I will point out was Tom and I were in Asia thing last week, right?

Almost everyone there was like, we need a FOMO for Asia because Asian users don't use FOMO. And there were like a million people who were like working on projects like social trading, Asia, Asia localized. Remember you made fun of me for saying Asian, Asian, but like localized, localized to meet social mores. I guess you have to write the Justin Sun actress memo as a social trading thing. But we never covered that on the show, actually. But whatever. But yeah, my point is, like, the entertainment value is different.

I do think there is a higher expectation of wanting to make money in Asia, which was very clear from a lot of the pitches we were seeing. of like, people were not like, I want to watch the stream and, like, throw money away, right? Like, I'm paying the streamer, basically. People were definitely like, I want to make money. So there's an interesting divide, I actually think, between the Asian. It's funny you say that, because, like, Asia also does have much more of a streamer kind of tribute culture than the U.S. does historically, right?

Like, Tom, you must know this better than I do of, like, all of these streaming apps where people, like, just tip their streamers all day long and, like, they kind of watch them eat and buy stuff from them and all those other stuff. It's true. I was going to say, I think the GMGN team is also Chinese, but I don't know. Yeah, I think they really have the kind of, yeah, I think they really have like this kind of social features that Turin's talking about.

Is it mostly Chinese? I don't know. I would assume it's mostly in Asia, but I agree. Like, it's not, it's more, you know, axiom-like, and it doesn't have the kind of, you know, sort of entertainment value that Tren's talking about. But, yeah, I don't know why it hasn't really taken off. I guess they're too busy trading Chinese IPOs and Korean stocks.

Hmm. Okay. They're actually making money. Well, I think there's a good explanation for why they're not. Yeah, I think there's kind of some, but the thing is like all the people pitching these companies were like, oh, like, you know, once we localize it, we'll make it more fun. Like that was kind of half their pitch was like, like, FOMO is too American. Like our users would never really want find this entertaining and whatever. It's too American. What's American about FOMO? I guess it's like Twitter-centric, right? Isn't your social profile, like, connected to your Twitter?

So it's like kind of, it's not like, I don't know. I don't really know because I don't use these things. But I'm getting pitches, everyone tells you like what their differentiator is. And like this differentiator was like, you know, like, yeah, these Americans, they like, they make these apps that it's not, wouldn't be fun here. That's kind of the pitch you get. So did I go validate those claims? No, I didn't use any of the Chinese apps.

I do share that perception that a lot of the Chinese crypto traders I know, it doesn't feel like they're in it for the lulls. It feels like they're like, I need to make money and I'd better be dumping on someone. It's like, I need to almost be able to like isolate and localize the harm I'm causing to be confident that I'm going to make money here. And I feel like in America, people are just more like, oh, no, we're all just going to get rich together because. Yeah, yeah, this waggingy aspect doesn't.

I seemed like it's not a thing. Yeah, yeah. Like in China, like, I feel like, they're like, okay, tell me who's losing money. Okay, got it. Okay, yeah, I can do that. That sounds like it'll work. Whereas in America, it's like, well, none of us are going to lose money. We're all just going to beat the hedge funds and the hedge funds are going to lose money, you know?

Yeah, Chinese will lose money. I mean, I think, again, to make a cultural comment, I do think it has to do with the fact that Americans are born with financial privilege. And in China, they were poor much more recently. And also, you know, their government. If you're kids in China, you were not poor recently. You've been watching Standard Living just up only. Yeah. Yeah, but unemployment's, youth unemployment's like 17%.

That's true. That's true. That's true. Yeah, I guess if you're young, probably, you're maybe a little more. I'm scared now. Yeah. I mean, I think actually someone at this conference gave me this long story about why, like, I didn't ask. He just decided to go in this 20-minute diatribe while we're stuck in a bus,

so I had no choice but to hear the entire. of like his explanation for why Chinese people love crypto so much. And he was like, it's the one child policy. You know, it like made too many men and not enough women. And this excess of men have to gamble to like have a chance of having a wife. And like this imbalance is what creates this perpetual demand. Wow. I was like, I'm probably butchering.

The sort of hypergamble gen Z thesis in America. Yeah, but it sounded like the money has. The money had to be made because it's like, otherwise you won't own a house, so you won't how, you won't get, feel to get married. Part of the first of the underclass. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was definitely like a more like you need to own material objects, not like, I lost 500 bucks, but my favorite streamer made me laugh. You know what I mean? Like, but isn't Korea like the most into crypto out of all the Asian countries?

And if so, like, they don't have that reason. So like, what is the reason? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, again, this is just this one guy raising. Can't me? One child policy is done, by the way. I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

That was a long time ago. But look, I just thought that was like a funny thing to hear because he was like, you Americans don't understand anything about crypto, right? You don't know why we like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, I was like, whoa, man. Like, I didn't ask anything. Korean, young people in Korea do have very similar problems to young people in China.

You know, low fertility. They also don't have the, I don't think it's like mostly men or I don't think they like. I don't think they like. I don't think that. Okay. That's a thing. But it is. certainly a thing that, like, there's very low fertility, which means that most people are not

get, you know, the dating pool is very difficult. And also the economic prospects where new grads are pretty bad. Oh. I can give you the causality flipped. It's people are too busy gambling. They're, they're, you know, they don't have time to have sex. And that's, uh, yeah, there you go. I did see what was it. They, uh, the fertility was up for like the first time in 20 years this year. And people are like, in Korea? In Korea. It's like, S.K. Heinex and Samsung are ripping. And so now everyone's rich and yeah. Okay, I see. They're having stock bubble babies.

Okay. All right. Final story. Just got to rip through this before we wrap for today. So hyperliquid, we announced, or it was announced previously that the CFTC was looking to bring hyperliquid on shore in some kind of regulated fashion. There was a story by Bloomberg that Hyperliquid labs apparently is in advance talks with the parent company of Cracken.

A story came out from Bloomberg that Hyper Liquid Labs apparently is in talks with Cracken, their parent company Payward, to potentially do some kind of JV that would allow them to use Bitnomials license and Clearing House in order to come onshore and have some kind of product available to U.S. users. Now, this would be KYC'd. There would be some kind of liquidity bridging from their main book. It's unclear exactly how this would work. And both parties, both Payward and Hyperliquid, did not comment on the particular speculation.

But of course, on the announcement that, or on the news that Hyperliquid and Payward were talking, you saw both CME price go down on the stock market as well as Hyperliquid's token go up. So any thoughts on what the likely impact would be if we were to see a onshore version of Hyperliquid? I think it's kind of comments Tom made last week. It's going to be more like the lighter instance on Robin Hood or like Polymarket U.S. versus like true unified liquidity. And like that's, I think that's just inevitable because like one has just no requirements and the other one obviously it will have different requirements.

Collateral management probably is going to be regulated completely differently, right? For instance, for regulated US ND versus decks the way kind of risk limits and stuff percent and liquidations ADL, etc. I mean, I think it makes sense for expanding the brand. I'm not sure it will be the same product, but it seems fine. Like in the polymarket case, in the polymarket case, right, polymarket U.S., like as much as everyone seems to give them a lot of shit, I mean, the thing has grown, right?

Like the World Cup was done at a great time. And like, yes, they have less volume in the culture now. But I mean, they've been able to manage this dual product thing. it both have grown. So it's just that it's a very different experience in a lot of ways. And I don't see how that won't be true here in this case. Yeah. So something that I need to understand is so like all the HIP3 markets,

they'll be like ones that just require KYC, but it'll still be like HIP3 or like what does that look like? But the problem is in the U.S., there's lots of clearing requirements, which means that you have to have centralized. clearing. You can't have ADL effectively. Like there's maybe they'll make it. They'd have to make a lot of jumps

to allow like the liquidation mechanisms, ADL, like collateral requirements stuff to be done the way you do in Defi. I'm not saying it can't happen, but it's like many changes all at once versus like the one change of like hey, you're kind of this, you just follow the normal US stuff but you get to use

your brand and like the HIP3 exchange will be different than all the other HIPP3 exchanges because it does KOC, but also has different liquidation mechanism that has centralized clearing, there's prime broker stuff built in, like all the market monitoring stuff has to be there, which goes beyond just like pure, just like K-YC. Like there's a lot of other stuff that goes into market surveillance. So I just sort of imagine it's going to end up not looking like it's, it might be a HIP3 instance,

but it's going to have a totally different feel to an advanced trader. And to the average user, maybe it doesn't matter, right? like small-sized trader, retail trader or whatever. But I think for institutional traders, it's going to be quite a different experience, as my guess. I don't see how that doesn't happen. Yeah, agreed. I mean, this is, you know, very similar to what we were talking about last week in terms of hybrid liquid coming onshore. I think the question with all these is just like, hey, can you actually create real synergies

where you can get the offshore version and the onshore version greater than the sum of its parts. I almost kind of think of it like if finance U.S. were extremely successful with that, like, relate back to B&B. I don't know. I mean, it's kind of a weird, you know, I actually maybe it's not the right analogy. But yeah,

I think that that's, that's kind of the question. But I also just don't know how much the brand is going to transfer. But I don't know, it feels like everyone's just gearing up to go after this market. Have any of the Asian exchanges,

U.S. versions been particularly with successful? I don't think the answer is, yes. Well, crypto.com, supposedly. But that's my point is, is like, I think, like, it hasn't been proven, and maybe they'll be the first ones to do it, that like the brand

transfer, but the UX and experience being so much different will work. It's not even Asian. It's even like, you know, if you remember, FTX U.S., OKX obviously tried one, Hoeyb tried one, Binance U.S. But KX still has one, right? They're really investing in it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But like, it's kind of always been a laggard. Like all these international foreign exchanges trying to land in the U.S., it's just a graveyard. But I also think a lot of it is just the regulation makes the UX different. It doesn't like have the same feel for a lot of these exchanges. You kind of have to rebuild a lot of stuff from the ground out. So I'm not, that's what I'm saying. Like, I'm not sure it's, there's no way it's going to be like bijective to the decks thing. Like I, that part I just don't.

Cracken doesn't get them over the line quickly. Well, it gets you over the line under the regulated function. So you're going to have centralized clearing, right? But no meal has, so it's like it's, then you don't look like a normal decks. The centralized clearing aspect changes a lot. The clearing stuff is the part that's, you know, all the clearing ISDA rules. If you're going down that route, that's just not the same, right? Like, it's not going to look the same.

So I have a question for you guys because I get, so I understand like why the U.S. has to do this or like why it is doing it. But like essentially what I keep coming back to is that eventually once, you know, crypto becomes a much bigger thing. like all of this stuff kind of, you know, comes on shore and whatever. What we're going to end up with is like the U.S. is, you know, crypto markets and then like the rest of the world is on something else. It's sort of like the tethered finance, whatever. And I'm like, that to me feels like China's internet versus like the internet. And I'm just like long term, is it good for the U.S.? And I'm like worried. I kind of am like, I don't know how that is good for the U.S. But I'm curious to hear what you guys think. I understand they're doing it now because we have the biggest markets, the most important

market, like whatever. So they're trying to protect, you know, but kind of like, I don't know, I don't like this idea long term. Like, I feel like there should be a process where, you know, 10 years they revisit and see if it like makes sense to just wall off the U.S. markets because, yeah, anyway. I think it's like really hard to imagine those systems co. like coexisting in a like collateral identical way, like the way collateral is treated and the way like the rights of like, I can sue my clearing agent when they blow up,

when they make a mistake and I can't on chain. I can't sue someone for getting a dealed. Like I don't think that's like a legal system difference. Like I don't know how you get around that. It's not, I think the goal, best goal you can have is like have them be harmonized and then like have some sort of a way for you to. to move assets between them more efficiently. And then maybe you can use your portfolio for margin or something else.

But I don't think you're going to get this one-to-one system. And this is true with a lot of stock markets in the world, right? Like the difference between like how UREX operates and JPEX operates and the U.S. Like each country has a lot of idiosyncrasies. And like ADRs don't trade the same way in different countries, like when you have an ADR of the same stock. So it's like, I think this is a government legal thing that it's not clear to me the like internet one that's like everyone uses the same standard will win because like I just think local governments have a lot of incentive to really disincentivize that because they do want control over a lot of asset capital flight stuff. Yeah, I agree.

I mean, part of it also is obviously the U.S. has the longest arm of the law. And, you know, other countries do, you know, IP ban, you know, some of these. or request IP bans for some of these other sort of on-chain products and sometimes they get implemented. But you know, the point being the more probably if you want to like be in like Latvia and go access hyperliquid, you can do that.

There's not like a whole lot that, you know, the government's going to kind of stop you from doing versus like explicitly being onshore and marketing to their citizens. That's a whole other kind of different product. And really part of the answer is the US just has this very attractive, large, singular market. And that's why it remains a sort of hoop

that so many teams are willing to jump through. But functionally, it's not like, oh, there's something, you know, very, very specific or special. It's just, you know, this is the one thing people are willing to do. I mean, what I would say is that most countries have both formal markets and informal markets. Right. The U.S. is kind of unique in that historically, or at least within the last 50 years, we haven't really had that, is that the markets have been almost all formal with respect to, like, you know, stocks and trading and so on. And, you know, most countries, like, I mean, you know, it takes like China, for example,

China formally bans almost all non-Chinese social media. Informally, obviously there are Chinese people on Instagram and on Twitter and all these other places. It gives VPNs. They can't get around the law. And the reality is that it's illegal in name, but it's like not really illegal in the sense that no one's going to do anything about it. It was to throw you in jail.

Everybody's going to find you and like break down your door. In the same way, there are a lot of these kind of peccadillos that you can do where like, oh, you know, I used an unlicensed image or I played some music at another rights to in my stream or like whatever. And if you're just like some little person, nobody cares, no one's going to do anything about it. But if you are a company or you are some kind of big deal, then like, yeah, there are going to be consequences for you breaking these rules. So I think where we're going is that, like, crypto is going to bring these informal markets everywhere. And that means also to the U.S., you know?

And like the Internet kind of has done that to some degree. But it like that is just going to happen to everything everywhere. and we're just going to live with that. So if you're a regulated entity, you're not going to be trading on hyperliquid global. You're only going to trade on the domestic one, if that. But if you're a retail user, you probably will. You'll figure out how to get on hyperliquid global. And if it's not hyperliquid, there will be a next thing.

And there'll be a thing after that and a thing after that. And that's kind of what crypto does by its nature. Yeah, yeah. So maybe, yeah, the way that I was imagining it wasn't really how it's going to pay out because in a way, probably what will happen is that every single country will do what the U.S. is doing. And then the hyperliquids of the world will sort of be like Napster or something. But yeah.

That's what I suspect more than that. Yeah, that's kind of how this is, that's kind of how this stuff has evolved. Like, unless you suddenly get like the largest companies IPOing on chain directly and like completely avoiding the, regulated exchanges and then suddenly everyone's like, oh, we need to go. Like that's the dynamic that would switch things, but it's not clear. I don't know. Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate because it does feel like there is something appealing about the idea of crypto being like the internet where it feels so borderless.

The crypto part is borderless. The liquidity part is not, right? Capital flight is a very real thing that countries spend a lot of time trying to mitigate. Yeah. That's right. Okay, well, we are up on time, so we got to wrap things there, but we will be back next week with more crypto craziness. For now, thanks, everybody. Bye.