Unchained - The Chopping Block: threadguy on Crypto's Social Trading War, Trader Celebrities & AI Agents

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

Welcome to The Chopping Block, where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week, crypto streamer and trading/markets influencer threadguy joins the crew to translate what is happening in the trenches, from market-open streams and social trading apps to public PnL and Gen Z's appetite for risk. The conversation starts with a challenge to crypto's old guard: today's lowest-cap markets look less like clicking a few ICOs and more like playing Fortnite with token scanners, wallet trackers, and social feeds all firing at once. From there, threadguy breaks down the fight between FOMO and Pump.fun, why the winner may be whoever owns the trader graph, and how one visible winning trade can turn an unknown wallet into a market-moving celebrity. Haseeb questions whether Robinhood has actually brought new money onchain, Tarun and Robert revisit the hidden counterparty risks of early crypto, and the group imagines a future in which AI agents launch protocols, raise capital, and transact without a human-facing interface. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 threadguy says modern onchain trading looks like Fortnite, with token scanners, social feeds, and wallet alerts all competing for attention. 🔹 Robert argues that crypto was never simply easier or harder. The tools, assets, and attack surfaces have continually evolved. 🔹 Tarun explains how stablecoins and reliable off-ramps replaced the counterparty and FX risks that defined early crypto trading. 🔹 FOMO and Pump.fun are fighting for social traders as exchanges, wallets, and launchpads race to own the next trading graph. 🔹 threadguy says traders are becoming crypto's new celebrities because public wallets make PnL visible and influence measurable. 🔹 Haseeb argues that the latest memecoin revival may be crypto-native capital front-running Robinhood demand that has not arrived yet. 🔹 The panel rejects the idea that AI agents are already managing meaningful memecoin portfolios, but sees that changing as capabilities improve. 🔹 Haseeb predicts the next onchain inflection will come when AI agents create, govern, and use protocols that humans never designed. 🔹 A crypto wallet cannot be switched off like an agent's credit card, which gives autonomous software a uniquely durable financial rail. 🔹 threadguy believes active investing and public risk-taking are permanent cultural shifts for Gen Z and the generations behind it. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Robert Leshner, Founder & CEO of Superstate Guest ⭐️threadguy, Crypto streamer and trading/markets influencer Links threadguy on X: https://x.com/notthreadguy threadguy on Twitch: https://twitch.tv/threadguy Disclosures Timeline 00:00 Intro 01:00 threadguy's New Purple Era 03:58 Could Crypto OGs Survive Today's Trenches? 16:05 FOMO vs Pump.fun: The Social Trading War 24:37 Traders Become Crypto's New Celebrities 31:25 Why Memecoin Volume Is Rising Again 36:57 Is Robinhood Really Bringing New Money Onchain? 40:04 Can AI Agents Trade Memecoins? 43:23 AI Agents and Crypto's Next Capabilities Jump 54:15 Is Gen Z's Risk Appetite Permanent? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a way, you get to cut the, for the social part, because you cut the noise. You get exactly what you want. I'm just here to trade. I'm not here to discuss decentralization. I'm not here to discuss crypto ideals. I just want raw P&L. This is where I'm going. And so I think that social, I think the social graph is very sticky.

I really do. I think you just indirectly called us hunks. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two quond. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm in trading firms who are very involved. I like that ETH is the ultimate

Defy Protocol is part of the antidote to this problem. Hello everybody. Welcome to 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, this first you got to ruin, the gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet. Yo.

Thanks again, Robert, the Cryptoconistur, and Tsar of Superstade. Good afternoon, everybody. Joining us today, we've got special guest thread guide, Titan of the trenches. I was looking forward to that, man. excited to be here. I'm glad to have you.

And I'm a see the head hype man at Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto. I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see chopping blocks at XYZ for more disclosures. So, Thread Guy, you are in a new era, it feels like. You're in your purple era. You've got a suit on.

Tell us about this new look that you've got going on in like the kind of new era of the Thread Guy media empire. I mean, we're doing market open streams now. I'll tell you what. After 10, 10, I looked around and thought to myself, what am I going to do with my life? I'm looking at open interests. There's none of it. I'm looking at volume.

There's none of it. I'm looking at pump fund revenue, it's down 90%. And then I look over my shoulder and I see gold and I see silver trading like memes. I see the AI trade going crazy. And I'm just like, man, what if we start trading some of these assets over here? And so since 1010, basically, it was. like a crypto-only portfolio, crypto-only stream. And obviously, the AI trade and the stock trade has been nuts.

And so I'm doing market open now. It's like crypto-only to we just trade. And the thing that I've learned, go ahead. You're doing collared shirts now also. Well, like, if we can do market open, we're playing with the big boys, you know. I want to feel inclusive to our new stock traders turned crypto-curious stream viewers. So it's been a fun transition. That's what you wear every day.

Because I've seen a lot of your clips and you're always wearing, you're always kind of suited up. Well, I usually have a jacket on too, but I figure I go casual for like Wednesday after you do casual. I mean, the only person who wears a college shirt out here is Robert. So you are hitting the vibe of our stream.

So for those of you don't know, because I should preface, we have a lot of regulators and lawyers and people like that who listen to our show. So Thread guy is, he's like the Gen Z whisper. He has one of the largest streams. He has a huge following. He's a big trading and markets influencer within crypto.

And as he mentioned, obviously, the purview of his stream has expanded where the crypto kids are now trading a lot more than just crypto. You went viral very recently for a clip that I think was just maybe yesterday or a day before. Just two days ago. Where you said, two days ago, yes. where you said that crypto-o-Gs wouldn't last today because back in the day,

everything went up. They were alt-coin seasons where alt just went up for no reason. You could make money buying just all sorts of garbage. And you were basically, the way you put it, you were day trading against plumbers. And today, it ain't like that. Streets are a lot meaner. Talk about this day because I think a lot of people

were incensed at your description of how easy it was. back in the day because of course I was around back in the day. There were a lot of people who lost money back in the day too. Yeah. Also, is Haseve an OG? Am I an OG? Is Territ an OG? Like, what is an OG?

Or are we plumbers? Okay. I'll give you two takes. The first thing I'll say to round out the intro is that I think this is going to be the right of passage for most crypto traders with things like hyperliquid and equity perks and starting to happen where you realize, wow, I'm just good at this game. Nebius can move 25. in a day, we can trade other things as well.

And so I think it's actually a really cool full circle moment that's happening with crypto right now. And shout out to Hyperliquid on that and shout out to my stream on that. Okay, second take. So look, I made this take and I'll tell you what triggered it. And to preface on my experience as well, I showed up in 2020 for Topshot. So my first cycle was like the end of Defy Summer, which I basically missed. and then I was NFT mania, FTX collapse,

bare market, meme coin mania, AI coin mania, then now wherever we are right now. And so this is not a... And sorry, real quick, before you got into Top Shots,

what were you doing before that? Weird internet hustles. So I was flipping sports cards. I was boughting sneakers. I was flipping Supreme. Like, I kind of missed the drop shipping era, but the whole reselling,

like, 15-year-old kids making money on the internet. I was like in those groups. There was this interaction that you guys might have missed. I don't know how on chain you are with some of these memes, but there's this guy, not a call out, but he just sparked this clip, the flow horse. Okay. And he's this like, OG 2015 Bitcoin, Chad type of character. And he made a FOMO account and somebody

airdropped him 70% of a meme coin called like the Fro Horse. And he was on Twitter and he was sort of just like, what does this mean? What if I burn it? I'll never sell. And he's just getting in this interaction. A meme is like ripping. It's going crazy. He's up, you know, all this money on fees. He has like $2 million in his wallet. And then finally he's like, I've gone too far. Fuck this. I'm never going to talk about it again. Deleted the tweets. And then that was the end the story. And I was just looking at how trading in crypto used to be. And that if you were to joined some meme coin trading live stream in 2026 and you were to watch how these low cap meme traders operate. I don't know if you've ever really seen what this looks like, but you have

meme scope on one frame of your screen and there's like a hundred tokens a minute. And on the other side, you have like the Twitter tracker and that's just going every Elon tweet, every Sam Altman tweet, every CZ tweet, every Brian Armstrong tweet. That's going crazy. Then you have the wallet trackers and there's like a million pings every second. And it's turned into this like insanely, sophisticated process to trade on chain. It looks like Fortnite. It looks like if you see a pro Fortnite player and they're building and they're quick scoping and they're far. It's like this crazy sort of, it's a video game. And the take that I made, it's like a classic MBA take. But I said 2017, there was like, I don't know, 100 things to buy max, 50 things to buy. And ETH I CO was up,

I don't know, 50,000 percent, Bitcoin went up only. All these assets went up only. And I was, basically I said it was much easier to trade in 2017. Now, people were fairly outraged by that. And I want to get your guys' takes on this because you were there and I wasn't. But the thing that I've come around to is I think that every era is just going to say the past era was easier with like hindsight experience and new tooling. I look at 2024 knowing what I know now. And I was like, yeah, that was the easiest meme coin cycle ever.

2024, you looked at what NFTs were in 2021. And it's like, all right, board apes were worth $500,000 a pop after an $80 mint in like six months. Those were plumbers. And I think there will be this sort of incremental hindsight look back. But that was the take. That's how I got there. And I think the game, especially at the lowest level on chain, has taken on a life of its own. I'm sure we're going to talk about the social trading stuff, where it is Uber-competable.

but you really have an opportunity to like make a name for yourself and blow up as a trader. So Robert, what do you what do you say the back in the day? Was it easier? Was it the same? How's the game changed? I think to me back in the day, I watched people starting in like 2011, 2012, 2013 in crypto. I watched all the people lose everything on Mount Cox, right? I watched people lose everything on Bitmex when it was early. There's always been a while media to crypto, right? I don't think it's really changed. I just think the tools have changed. People had to jump through crazy hoops early on to get, you know, stuff that seemed to only go up. But when I entered crypto in like 2017 full time, we'd already been through a cycle where the

entire coin market cap top 100 list was basically dead. Like I remember like looking at like the feather coins and the pure coins and the name coins and the all of these things. By the time I get there 2017, we'd already been through this like, some people make a ton of money, a lot of people get wrecked on all sorts of nonsense, like, thick. I've never seen it as like OG versus plumber. I've always seen it as it's a fast-moving, highly dynamic ecosystem of new assets, growing assets, dying assets, and everything in between. Yeah, like, certain assets you could have just like done nothing with and like enjoyed the ride and been like, oh, Bitcoin goes up from like $10 to $60,000. How hard is that? But for the most part, people have always had to navigate

new tools, new platforms, new coins, new chains, new wallets, all types of surface areas of risk. You know, back in the day, people were getting all their money stolen from paper wallets that had exploits. Like, it's been a nonstop challenge from 2011 to present. I've never seen it as like, oh, the game has gotten easier, the game has gotten harder. It's just evolved. I think that's true. I think Robert's saying it's true but I think I have a more simple answer which is there were no fucking

stable coins before so like yeah on paper you're sitting on this thing that had like a huge gain but there was literally zero liquidity every centralized exchange existed to rug you where they're like our daily limit is withdraw $10,000 and then when you hit withdraw $9,999

our daily limit is $1,000 please try again it was like there were true like I think you had more counterparty risk from scamming getting scammed by the venue than anywhere near what you do now. And you also have way less USD risk in the sense that like your stable coin works. Like you don't get rugged on your stable coin, which is I, so obviously. Was the stable coin back then.

No stable coin is insane. Right, right. You're getting rugged on that. You had to do quanto perps. Like you didn't put up USCD to do the perp. You put up Bitcoin or you and you're trusting the Oracle and like most of these exchanges Oracle in the beginning was themselves. there was lots of, I mean, you were probably like very young

when the Arthur Hayes as liquidating me memes existed, but like there was a time where everyone would just like be like, Bitmex exists just to liquidate its users. And like they're front running all their users. The counterparty risk was the thing people were really upset about. And I think the weird thing is the 20 on the centralized exchange side, I guess like the FTX stuff really kind of definitely. clear that up a little bit.

But the stable coin liquidity, I think, is the main thing, right? Like, you don't have to worry about exiting, and you have off-ramps. You didn't need your off-ramp to be Chinese tether, trader, 25, that only let you message them on Skype between zero and 100 GMT. Just say, those are kind of, like, I think there was a lot more risk in the, like, IRL world risk versus on-chain risk, whereas now you're taking way more like counter-trading risk versus counter-party risk. That's like how it...

By the way, the first time I ever experienced something like this was NBA Top Shot. And it's like I'm up $100,000. Oh, yeah. The first time of my life. Flow stopped letting people withdraw. The withdrawal limit is like $1,000 a day. I'm like, guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It used to all be like that because there were no stable coins. And the exchanges themselves didn't really have on ramps. They had like a couple random bank accounts. Like the shit that FTX turned out FTX had at the end where it was like, oh, we just have this one master account. Some of these exchanges were that for much. longer than you expect if you look at their history and like survival boils down to like stable coins grew if they didn't grow as the trading pair I think it would have been it would have been

very tough like so you're taking all this FX risk whereas now I feel like you're just taking like social media risk which is a very valid thing right it's like if you don't understand the game then but I think it's just different it's just different I think that's a that's very well stated Because you remember the infamous FTX Korean one trade, right? And people always wonder like, okay, why is this the quote-unquote kimchi trade? Why can that make money? And the answer is because it's impossible to close the ARB. Because actually that money is sitting there and nobody can pick it up because nobody has the bank accounts.

Nobody's willing to take the risk of like one leg gets closed and your money's locked up in Korea for the next like year and a half as you sue them to try to get it back. That's why it looks so easy is that you can't see. all of the like, you know, the traps, the booby traps that are around every single corner that like killed a bunch of people that you never hear about. And so, now, has the game gotten harder in the sense of like have markets gotten more efficient? Yes, absolutely. There's way smarter people trading today. There's way more bots. There's LLMs now. So there's an obvious sense in which, like, you know, I think about, I've never been much of a trader, but I think about

this for poker. I used to play poker professionally. Poker's way harder now than it was at the time that I was playing because I was playing against plumbers. I was playing against like doctors and lawyers. You were playing against me. Exactly. I want to play some cards on the internet. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure you were mainly playing against rich Chinese people

who love playing poker at high roller. Eventually. Eventually, eventually, eventually. You work your way up to the rich Chinese people. But yeah, today it's just not like that. And like the markets have, markets always become more efficient. Today, the only plumber is Drake. You just have to hope that you get matched with Drake.

I guess so, yeah. Because I feel like Drake, Drake's live streams, that guy loses money playing poker and just loves losing money. I mean, he's obviously being paid by stake to do it. So I'm sure he's like, be positive if you include the incentive. Someone else's money. But he just loses like horribly.

He's the plumber. In reference to poker getting solved, is that something that can ever reverse itself? Like, does the pendulum ever shift on that? Or do you just need a new game? New game. You need a new game. Like, hold them just,

hold them. online hold them is just fried for the next online hold them is fried i think the reality is that it moves to private games and so the private games can be online where it's like okay trusted people who you know we coordinate through some kind of thing and we go into a private poker room but the the way it used to be of like there's just this global commons that we all play together like now you know i i quit poker before libertists which was the first neural net based bot that beat the best humans in heads up poker at the time that i quit poker people used to say that AI would never be as good as humans.

Like, people thought, oh, it's a game of imperfect information, chess and go and all these things are so much easier. Poker's just like fundamentally got this human something or other, you know, it's got this Junis Secois. And the answer was like, nope, totally wrong. LMs can do that too, or not LMs, but you know, neural nets. The thing, though, is the venues still make money, which is interesting. Oh, for sure, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. If anything, the venues make more money than they did before. Is that true? I don't know the inflation adjusted. That would be surprised. That doesn't sound right to me. This is why I'm long pump fun, by the way. Yeah. Well, okay. Well, let's bring it back to Andre Trading.

That's a good segue. So one of the big stories lately has been this resurgence in meme coin trading, driven in large part by FOMO. So FOMO, for those you don't know, it's a social trading app. It lives on the app store, primarily mobile users. And it allows you to follow other traders. It's a super social experience.

But most of what people are trading on FOMO is. meme coins, largely on Solana and on Robin Hood, where a lot of the meme coin activity is congregating. Now, one of their biggest competitors is Pump. Pump.com, of course, is the OG. You can trade Pump.comun launched meme coins on FOMO, but Pomp has their own mobile app, and they're now starting to fight back to try to get some of that mobile market share back from FOMO. So this has led to a little bit of a ground war between FOMO and Pomp.Fun in that Pump.Fund is now starting to sign traders and influencers in exclusive deals. And I think what you can see is that there's some negative sentiment

against the way that Pump is doing this. Because a lot of the people that Pump isn't treating and saying, hey, we'd love to sign you to trade exclusively on our platform and talk about social trading on Pump. A lot of these people are like posting that they're getting, you know, Pump is offering me, you know, 20K or whatever to go and trade exclusively on their platform. This is bullshit.

This sucks. You know, I can't believe they're doing this. Maybe a little bit of engagement farming, but also a little bit of a, you know, we're now starting to see them like sponsorships, or signing teams or exclusive deals that are getting formed in these trench wars. And it seems to be a resurgence at a time when

otherwise markets are pretty weak. It feels like there's not, you know, we're definitely not in the 2025 or 2024 type meme coin energy. And yet also perp volume. The trenches are coming back to life. Hype volume has been going down too, right? Around the same time, just flipped. Like it feels like there is low.

Retail activity is pretty low. but we see that the trenches seem to be pulling ahead for some reason that seems otherwise inexplicable. So Thread Guy, tell us how you see the current conflict and the war going on between FOMO and Pump.com. I mean, I basically think every exchange is going to go really hard at this social trading platform app, if you will. Like it's really not that different

from what Bays tried to do with Jesse Pollock. I think when it's all said done, we're going to look back and say, damn, they were so close. Wrong time, maybe wrong people. Two millennial. They were so close. We talked about this month,

six months in November. It's going to look very similar to what they tried to do. But FOMO has been very dominant. Pumps making a big run at it. I think Phantom has a ton of money in the platform. I think everyone's going to go out

this really hard. And I mean, even Uniswap, right? Like, I was actually surprised. Like they were, they used to be like, we'll never do this.

You just on some mobile app? Uniswap, they're endorsing they launched a launch cloud. They launched a launch pad. And Binance is easing, I think, the social trading app. And I think if you're not trading on chain daily,

you don't realize pump fund's making $2 million a day right now, like today. They made $2 million a yesterday, right? And so I think that there is just this meta shift happening where I've been saying this take for a long time. And it was kind of a joke in 2023, and it's really played out that like traders are the new celebrities, right? Like cycles not over until Anselm is married to a Kardashian.

And like, you know, traders are the biggest things in the world. Right? Wait, wait. Sorry. What we're starting to see, I think, is that, like, at least in by time in crypto, the influencers and the people that dominated the discourse on Twitter were the founders and they were like the technical thinkers, right? Like, if you had a technical take on block space debate or, you know, L2 scaling or something like this, you dominated the discussion. I think post-circa 2024, at least in my bubble, it's really shifted towards the traders dominate a lot of the discussion.

You look at the influence of someone like Anselm, I'll mention him again. And so I think that these social apps proliferate that on 100x scale, right? Because you go on a FOMO and you're a complete nobody. You have no followers on Twitter. It's really hard to break into the zeitgeist in 2026. You go on FOMO and you turn $1,000 into $500,000. And in a day, in a week, in a month, however long that trade takes, you'll have 50,000 followers on FOMO, right?

And you can see these 50,000 wallets, how much money do they have, what do they hold, what do they buy? And so you could, I mean, literally put together some form of calculation of how much financial capital do you have behind you. And so I had this, there's this example. There was this famous trade in maybe November, December of 2025. there's this guy Remus. And Remus bought this coin called White Whale.

This is some real... Remember the White Whale? Yeah, yeah. And White Whale goes to 100 mil or something like this. Remus buys $500 worth of this coin at like 2030K, like real trenches shit. $500 worth this coin. At top, unrealized P&L, it's worth $1.2 million. In public, for the world to see, no fake P&L, no fake screenshot.

And in an instant, Remus has like 60,000 followers on one of these social trading apps. right and so i think that this concept is only going to get bigger and i think we're going to enter the death of like soft power amongst the influencers right because as we go further down this line of these cycles i think people really want to know who's making money and if you could prove that you're verifiably making money you dominate more of the discourse the discussion and you therefore take over more influence the last thing i'll say on this rant is this progression quietly happened in 2024. Late 23, early 24,

where everyone started trading on telegram bots. It was like Unibot. It was early bonk bot. It was like banana gun. All these early telegram trading bots, it unlocked a lot of liquidity into memes. And what happened is a lot of that trading discussion

moved off of Twitter and it moved into these telegram groups, these F&Fs, right? You and your basically your homies trading chat. Some of them took it very seriously. Some of them more casual. And there was all these traders that would spawn with million dollar P&Ls. And these guys have like a couple thousand followers on Twitter. Who is this?

It's like, well, he's a trader. He's only on telegram. Of course, he's only on telegram. And so I think that was like a test pump of crypto influence and trading influence happening off Twitter. And I think potentially as we go further down this evolution, this cycle, it's going to be the real pump of like the traders that move money and move markets are just not the OG crypto

influencer crowd that's funny or that shit post. It's like, who makes real money, who has the biggest P&Ls, and you could verify it on chain. And so I think there's been this really cool progression. You know, you were talking about the OGs. This used to be a big thing of the

OGs of like the leaderboard on Bitmex and then it was the leaderboard on FTX. It's weird actually, Binance was not like a leaderboard driven growth story, but I just like everyone was constantly posting their screenshot of like, I'm number three on BitMex. I'm number three on Binance.

You remember this, right? There was this era of like three arrows. Entire growth story was like purely based on the fact that they were like number one on FTX and BitMex for like two or three years. That's awesome. Right. So it's actually very similar. It's just like kind of a different form factor.

Right. There have been leaderboards that led to major crypto celebrity in ways that were much more provable than influencers who are like, I just talk a good Twitter game. I mean, the other part of it, of course, is that if you are running any kind of complicated strategy, which people used to not really run very complicated strategies, if you're running complicated strategies, then your P&L in any one venue is just not reflective of your overall book, right? Because you might be short on one exchange, long on the other one, and like, okay, like, what exactly, like how much money did you make? You really can't tell

anymore just because, like, the funds that are operating today are doing complex, you know, long, short books and they're doing carry trades and so on. Whereas if you're trading meme coins, you can just look at the PNL. You know, like there's no complicated strategies in meme coins. It's like you buy the right thing, you make the 100x or you don't. So there's a simplicity that's much more like what it was like in early crypto. I think other markets, Tradfi is sort of converging on this as well. I look around it like maybe this is too niche, but like the bubble boys of the world,

RGC, some of these guys that have nailed this AI trade. And I think the classic example is like Michael Berry, who every day, stock market goes up and we're tweeting Michael Burried, stock market goes down and it's like Michael Burry's a legend. And you look at the Michael Burry story and I think it's a tale of the glory for one of these monster trades is that 20 years later and arguably not a single correct call since, and he has like 350,000 subscribers on the substack. Michael Burry is a finance legend forever. You look at a flood and the type of outcome he had on hyperliquid. And he could never make a correct call. call for the rest of his time and he will have unbelievable amounts of financial capital that

follow behind him. And so I think for a lot of these guys that are this younger generation that's coming up, what's the easiest, what is the easiest way for me to make $100,000 trading? It's maybe zero-day options the way these AI stocks are moving right now, or it's trading on chain, right? And if you show up on chain on one of these apps and you flip a couple thousand $1,000 into 100, all of the sudden, you're like a somebody now. And so I think on-chain has solidified itself as a venue for like a nobody to become a somebody and pump funds ability to continuously make a million dollars a day. Post-10 is like mesmerizing to me.

If there was ever a time for us to say the meme coin experiment has failed, we are done. It was October 11, 2025. Right? I mean, that was the day to be like, okay, guys, pack this up, it's done. And so one of the things I've been saying for a while is that I think the right tale of meme coins, just having a foundational niche in finance is super underpriced. Them just existing and just maybe it's small, maybe it'll get bigger as liquidity flows through the system. But I think that their longstanding is something that not a lot of people have taken seriously enough.

And it's starting to manifest itself again, like, FOMO revenue. They're making $4,500,000 a day. Pump funds make it $2 million a day. These are, I mean, they're up there with the prediction markets, right? These are crazy numbers. Some of these trading platforms are putting up. You see what Robin Hood is doing with Robin Hood Social. They're trying to do the same thing, right? They're having traders can post a thesis, what they're in, P&L cards. Like, we're definitely moving towards a, this isn't a new phenomenon, but everybody post a P&L card for everything because the upside is so glorious. Well, it's interesting because the idea of social trading, extremely old idea, a cagillion founders have taken a shot at this. And the answer was always in the past that like, well, the social

trading platform is like the thing you're trading on plus Twitter. It's not the app. You're not living in the app. You trade in the app and you talk about it on Twitter or your telegram chat or wherever it is. The social thing happens somewhere else. What seems to be unique is that FOMO has kind of nailed this of actually getting people in the app and having the app be this closed loop and this unique follower graph that got big enough, got to scale that it's really held on to something. I'm curious how you take two questions I have for you, three guy. One, what do you think explains the fact that as far as I know, the meme coin market cap, like the entire meme coin complex has not rebounded that much, right?

The overall growth in meme coin value hasn't increased very much. But the amount of trading has actually inflected dramatically over the last few weeks. What do you think explains that? And do you think like that's a regime change or is that just like Robin Hood got everybody riled up? And then second is how do you how do you think about what FOMO is doing versus what Pum Fun is doing in this rivalry? I'll enter the second part first is I think that it's ultimately going to come down to who can win the social graph. You know, I think the reason, like I was a huge Farcaster fan back in the day. I loved Farcaster.

I thought it was an awesome idea. I thought Dan Romero was a genius and I loved what they were trying to do. And ultimately the reason Farcaster lost, There's a plethora of reasons, but I think if you could distill it down to one reason, it's that when something crazy happens in crypto, Kobe's first post is on Twitter and our Farkaster. So how could you win? Everyone goes there first.

Farcaster is an afterthought. You only have Vitalik. It's sort of you need 51%. We've seen a mixer bought Ninja when he was at the peak of his Fortnite career. And he brought over a massive audience, but 51% was still on Twitch and they just tipped the boat over. I think this was like the forecaster problem. And so I think ultimately it's going to come down to there's going to be, there's a finite number of really good traders.

You want to know what they're trading exactly when they're trading it and you want to follow it. That will be your first click. And so I think this is going to be a forever battle of signing traders, who can get who. It's going to be MBA free agency, probably in perpetuity now that this is a thing. I mean, you saw Kalshi Polymarket. Probably the best example is the online casinos. What's the difference between stake in range?

bet and rubet and roll bit. Well, one of them has Drake, one of them has his Aden Ross, and whoever has a bigger audience kind of tips it. The tech is the same, the games are the same, the EV is the exact same. And so I think there's going to be this like forever battle for who can win the social

graph game, which I think is going to be I think it's going to be really sticking. And you think the edge is that you see the trade in real time on FOMO, people are talking about it afterwards on Twitter. So that's like the Farkaster graph. You hear it second on Twitter, first on FOMO.

I think very much like this. Like whichever mobile trading app wins, that's what they're winning. Twitter is late, super late to the on-chain stuff. Now, the philosophical discussions and, you know, the bigger, sort of broader meta-topics discussions, they still happen on Twitter, of course. But I think 2024 was the first time where it was like, if there is a new coin, and I'm thinking of myself, what is goat? My first app is telegram.

100% first app is telegram. You're going there first, checking the chats. what are they saying? Then you go over to Twitter and, you know, get into the unk sort of discussion. And so I think it definitely is going to rival Twitter because in a way you get to cut the, for the social part, because you cut the noise. You get exactly what you want. I'm just here to trade. I'm not here to discuss decentralization. I'm not here to discuss crypto ideals. I just want raw P&L. This is where I'm going. And so I think that social, I think the social graph is very sticky. I really do. I think you just indirectly called us.

I was going to go direct, but I didn't do it. I mean, yeah, it's all good. It's all good. We own the label. Robert, Robert did it for it. Pomonhunk. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So talk to me about the meme coin market cap, right? Like, why do you think trading volume is inflecting while market caps are actually pretty stagnant? I would kind of like to hear your take on this. The answer is I don't know exactly. I think that we maybe sort of found a how bad can it get in terms of. volume floor and sat there for a couple months.

I think what got me back on, I'll tell you what got me back on chain was in the same week, I think the first week of July, Robin had launches and there's the cash cat thing. It goes to, I don't know, 200 mil in a couple days.

And Vlad endorsed, I'm like, okay, this is interesting, right? There's some friction here. Vlad's staking some reputation. This isn't super easily vampable. This is interesting enough to click. And then the second one was Ansem right after.

It goes to 400 mil, a couple days later. another one where it's like, okay, say what you want about creator tokens and how this has played out, Zora, Frentek, things like this. But you've been on record as being very anti-creator coins. I have. But the Ansel one is a unique one. I could get into this.

I call it. I guess a quick take on why the Ansel one is unique. You actually should because I have no clue what the difference is personally. So here's what I'll say about why I think Cashcat is interesting, why Ansel is interesting, is like we live in an era post-pump fun where what it takes to deploy is zero. Zero dollars, zero time. I mean, defy legends here, no better than me. But even in 2021, to launch a meme coin, it's like you've got to get the smart contract out.

You've got to see liquidity. It was like, it wasn't a thing where you could just snap your fingers. It's true. It's true. I remember the Yam deployment contract spent $10,000. There you go. And so what this creates is this environment of vamp culture. right, vamping liquidity.

And so if Elon makes a tweet about a dog, in one second, there's like 30 coins, right? One of them wins, and it's at 1 mil, it's at 2 mil, it's at 5 mil. If an Elon dog coin goes to 5 mil and somebody sees this and they're like, you know what, I'm going to relaunch this exact coin, but I have a KOL who will tweet about it. I have a capital D instead of a lowercase D and my picture is better. And we can get this thing to 500K, 1 tenth of the market cap. I'm going to make like $15,000 and it costs me nothing. If it goes to zero, goes to zero, I don't care.

I'm going to bundle it. I can make $15,000 in a snap. And so it's created this culture where it costs nothing to deploy, so everybody deploys. And then the rhetoric on Twitter is we need to start holding again. The hold times on these coins are too low. That's why the trenches on chain is dead. And it's like blaming the player and not the game.

It's wrong. And so where I think this transitions is like, okay, in a world, where there's zero friction to deploy, maybe the tokens that have friction do really well, that you can't just vamp. Like, for example, let's take hyperliquid. Obviously, it's not a meme coin. But you could copy paste. Why isn't Phoenix on Solana as big as hyperliquid?

Well, all the biggest traders are on hyperliquid. They have the volume. They have the open interest. They have the liquidity. They have the network effect. Hyperliquid is sticky. What they have underlying is sticky. Hyperliquid, therefore, can't just be vamp by like somebody deploying a copy paste for.

fork of the code. I look at the Ansem coin, right? It's a creator token. But if Ansem coin goes to $50 million market cap, you can't just like deploy a second Ansem and vamp it. It's like, no, no, he staked his reputation, his trust. He's earned within the community over like, I don't know, 10 years to build this token, put his likeness behind it. You can't vamp it with other Ansel token. And you also can't really vamp it with Thread Guy token because Ansem is bigger. And so there's some friction to deploy this coin. You could even look at, I look at FWA, I think it's kind of an interesting asset on ETH.

It's one of these gotcha platforms. You could deposit NFTs. You could back them with ETH. It's like a two-way gotcha sort of gambling NFT mechanism. It's very interesting. You could copy paste the code. I don't really think it's that complicated. But you can't copy paste the like 50,000 NFTs and I don't know, $10 million of value

within this ecosystem. And so where I think on chain is going to head is people just got so sick of playing the vamp, no friction to deploy, that I don't know if it's the timing, if it's AI getting really good, if it's Robin Hood, but there just started to be a little flurry of experimentation again with little defy experiments like FWA or like someone like Ansem or Vlad back in Cashcat. And I have some level of optimism that this will proliferate with traders realizing how much they can make and how popular they can get, with developers realizing, okay, if I build FWA, Adam, they've made like $10 million, right? I have an insane economic outcome.

The traders get really popular. And defy is relatively hardened at this point. And Fable is really fucking good. And so I don't know. I'm optimistic that there can be some sort of compounding effect here where we see a little mini on-chain renaissance that doesn't look like what 2024 pump fun casino look like because like we talked about with plumbers, the new game just can't be the old game again. And so I would be curious what you think, why people are still trading this stuff and if I sound like a lunatic. Well, I'll give my take. I don't know if I have a more pessimistic.

take than Tarun is going to have. I think the answer, I mean, so clearly the proximate cause is Robin Hood, right? Like this happened after Robin Hood came to town and all of a sudden, what do you know, FOMO is pumping and pumped out fun is pumping? And suddenly the trenches are alive again, even though it doesn't really seem like there's new money. And that's, that's, I think, the clearest signal of what's going on, is that I think this is actually us, or I should say, the trenches, trying to front run the signal of new demand. that they think is coming in, is like basically, okay, the Robin Hood crew

is going to come in and they're going to buy our bags. They're going to come in, they're going to buy meme coins, they're going to buy cash cat, they're going to buy all the stuff. And I think actually what's happening is that very little of that is taking place. I think there's actually very little new money

that is coming through Robbins. Almost zero. Probably zero. Yeah. I think it's almost all crypto-native money. But I think it's people pulling some of the money they had off market into the market. So, you know, they were chasing the adre.

They were in medals or, oil or whatever. And they were like, oh, shit, all these Normies are going to come in on Robin Hood and they're going to buy a bunch of stuff. Let's get back in and buy whatever the new asset is. And so I think like a lot of the money that's chasing now, Cashcat, a lot of the money that's chasing Anselm, it's almost like front running the demand that people think is going to come because, oh, you know, Vlad's a big dude. Robin Hood's got big distribution. And I think if that demand doesn't materialize over the next three to six months, I think you're going to see this pancake again. because at the end of the day,

like the meme coin game, a lot of people get paid along the way, right? The guys, the vamps are getting paid along the way. And so for the vamps to get paid along the way and for other people to also be making money, you need new capital to be coming in top of funnel. And if there is no new capital coming in, eventually the merry-go-round stops

and everybody gets a little bit sick of just going in circles. Yeah, I only have two. I agree with that mainly. I think the AI parts of the AI trade that blew up in Korea probably a lot of people had capital that they pulled out from that and the timing of when

you saw the meme coin volumes go up and the end of the Kaspi blow up was like quite You think it's Koreans depositing on chain? No, no. I think it's like people who were in that trade wrote it up, maybe wrote it down a little bit, got out and then they're like, I don't, am I going to go back

into those equities? Am I going to take this thing? Because like they may have got out at like 20% down. It went down like 50%. So it's like, they're like, okay, I'm going to go chase something new. And I think the second thing is I do buy this like AI thing of like

there was a while at the end of the last meme coin trade where like one of the reasons I think all these like AI bought tokens, which were basically meme coins because they have nothing to do with the strategy that the AI like AIXBT type stuff was that most people were like, there are too many

meme coins. I don't know how to invest in them. I don't know how to buy them. I just would rather invest in a single thing. thing that buys the meme coins for me. And I think now... Wait, hold. Do you think people want to do that? I mean, I think that was the narrative

those things were selling. I'm not saying that that... The AIXBT era, that was like the... You read the docs. That's what they were doing. Well, no, but it's not... You wouldn't give money to AXBT, right? XBT would make trading calls and you would like,

you know... No, no, but there were some of them that were doing the trading... There were definitely some like, yeah, that we will trade meme coins for you. But I feel like... I think the Eliza thing, but when it was AI 16Z,

that was what they said they were going to do. Right. So my point is like there was this thing of like the complexity of managing this token portfolio got too high. But now it's like, especially if it's like low value tokens, like doing it agentically is totally reasonable. And you don't need to think about like the 500 shit coins you have. And I think that that actually does change how easy it is to manage these things. I think that explains your thing of like why there's not one kind of liquidity sink. but actually it's just like people competing on all of them

because now they don't have to think as much about all the management. They just write a couple. Are you claiming that people are using AI agents to manage their meme coin trading portfolios? Thread guy, tell me, is that? There's no way that's happening. People dabble. People experiment here and there. People are experimenting.

There's probably about a couple thousand dollars put behind that. I don't think much. Okay. Not now. Are you giving it to trade? clicking buttons. Are you giving it to trade your stocks? No way.

Yeah. But the point is the meme coin feels valueless fundamentally. No, no, no. Okay, this is totally not happening. And I think a big part of the reason why this is not happening is like, look, there are some people in meme coins who have alpha and are actually making money. We know by looking at the stats that like 90% of people in meme coins are losing money on average, right?

They are the people going to the casino, pulling the slot machine. nobody pays an AI agent to pull the slot machine for them, right? You go there to do it yourself. You don't be like, hey, buddy, go to the casino for me and play slots all day. Nobody would do that. Okay, unc. Yeah. I mean, maybe they're just not able to be exploited by humans and only an AI can find

the way to profitably make money in a meme coin. Here's one more thing I'll say with a question. One more thing I'll hear the question. I'm curious, you guys take on this. I'm not really as excited about pure meme coin as I am, this idea that we get some sort of on-chain experimentation resurgence. Maybe it's a little bit of defy. And it's super gimmicky, but people are trying new stuff again.

And there's all of these memes paired with tokenized stocks. And I'm curious what you think about that. It's gimmicky coins have been paired with Bitcoin and other assets forever. But for whatever reason, there are new things being attempted on chain. And I think we basically went through a year where there was not a single, nobody tried a single new thing. There was no friend tech. There's no anything for like 12 months. And so there are a, from zero to a few things, you realize like, oh shit, this is still a really exciting place to trade when there are.

But yeah, what do you think about the meme stock? Maybe Robert, I'm kind of curious what you think. I think it's early. I mean, I think there's a lot of potential there, right? Like, if I'm making a, call it a defy protocol or some new meme coin token that's valueless or whatever, having it reference external value, like from outside of the crypto bubble, is interesting, right? whether it's like paired as an LP position or whether like you use the non-zero-sum growth of some company outside of our space to drive some on-chain behavior is interesting.

We've seen tons of experimentation of people making, I mean, all sorts of stuff around like the preferred stock of strategy, right? And like hacking that into new like coin type. Not sure any of those are exactly standing. No, I'm not saying they are. but it goes to the point of like interesting experimentation, right? How can we take the cash flows of a company outside of the ecosystem and bring it in and repackage it in some way? And how can we try some experiments there?

Right. Like super fascinating, right? I think there'll be more and more and more of this, right? Coins, however you want to define them, are simply a way of reframing financial exposure. And it can be from something off-chain. It could be from things on-chain. It could be governance. It could be the crypto-native.

It could be like inflation, it could be all of these different things. But being able to slice and dice the rest of the real world on chain in new ways is awesome, right? And whether you think it's going to come from the equity space or from the commodity space, right? Like, see, you guys did Athena years ago. That's in some ways taking something, you know, sort of off-chain like basis has always been around off-chain too. There's a million ways to take the value that flows through our world and put it somehow into a coin. A coin is just a product wrapper around anything you wanted to be around. It can be valueless or it can be full of off-chain value and anything in between.

So I love it. I think the more experimentation, the better. I think we're going to see a lot more of it happening over the next two years because people are now like light bulb being like, oh, I can take financial products off-chain and bring them on in new ways. I think they're going to interact with perps in crazy ways. I think perks are going to interact with off-chain in crazy ways. I think all of the above.

And so I think we're still really early and it's going to be great. Okay, here's my take is I think you always see people trying to take like A and B and mash them together and see what happens. You know, so I remember people used to be really excited that like you could take un-swap LP positions and make them into NFTs and borrow against them. And of course, like, you know, you technically can, but that was not a meaningful market. That was not like a big. That was, that was just, it's never that simple of just like mash two things together and hope you create a new interesting baby. most of the time it takes some fundamental new capability to create something that really starts a new cycle

or gets people really animated because something new is happening now that wasn't possible before. I suspect that very likely, whatever is that on-chain renaissance that's going to happen, like the stuff that already exists, I think is going to continue growing. Stapel coins are going to keep growing, defycine trading and hyperliquid and derivatives

and tokenized stocks, all that stuff is going to keep growing. And it's going to keep growing in a way that maybe feels almost pedestrian. to us? Is that like, okay, the numbers go up on a chart. It's not explosive. Nobody's confused about what's happening. It's not like, oh, my God, I can't believe tokenized stocks grew again.

And so it is going to feel a little bit boring relative to the kind of inflections that we've seen in the past within crypto. I suspect that the big inflection that we're going to see that is going to reanimate on chain markets is a capability jump that will probably come from AI. And I think that capability job probably looks like AIs are doing things. If you remember, the first time we saw AIs doing things, was kind of AI XPT, where like, oh, an AI is now playing the role of a crypto analyst. And that was so exciting to people.

People lost their fucking minds that there was a chatbot doing what humans used to do on Twitter. But right now, there is really, there's, you know, AI is not doing, like we just talked about, you know, are they trading mean coins? No, largely no. They're not very interesting. There will come a point when AIs are making the meme coins and trading the mean coins. There will come a time when AIs are making DFI protocol. and governing them.

And that is going to be really weird. And it's going to get people really excited. Something fundamentally new is happening that we have never seen before. We don't know how to think about it. What is the TAM for AI agents that are making protocols and using the blockchain for what it was intended to be used for in a way that humans, either one, never thought to, never wanted to, or just at a scale that humans never did? That will eventually happen.

And I think, like right now, it's sort of hard to imagine. imagine how people react to that right now. But I think you will see people lose their fucking minds when they see something like that happen. In the same way, you know, if you remember what was Conway? The Conway was this thing on chain. It must have been like six months ago, nine months ago of this guy who was creating a protocol that was going to allow you to pay for AI agents that owned themselves and could

use USTC to buy their own compute and to keep themselves alive. Yeah, yeah. And it was such a. crazy idea. The entire internet got lit up with this idea that like AI agents without owners that are just self-replicating droids that exist in cyberspace.

That's going to be a thing. Olaf has been shilling that exact idea for like... For 10 years. 10 years. Totally. Totally. Totally. I think to AI people, what you'd be saying is I want RSI for money, not just RSI for intelligence.

Right, right. To be clear, to the AI safety people, this is horrifying. This is like the opening eye escape on steroids permanently. It's like swarms that exist on chain that are just self-replicating and never go away. But that will happen with probability one with enough time. Blockchain was designed that whoever is there cannot get uprooted or pushed away or deleted from the blockchain. You can't turn off the Bitcoin wallet of an agent. you could turn off its visa credit card acceptance capabilities.

Right, right. And that's the thing. We're going to watch this. We're going to be like kind of powerless to do anything about it. It'll be like, okay, what do we do? There's a new defy protocol. It's bigger than all the human ones. It's bigger than AVE.

There's a trading protocol. It's bigger than hyperliquid. And agents use it. Or agents made it. Agents made it. That's the other thing. Agents made it and agents are using it. There's no UI because they don't give a shit about humans.

and it's just out there and you can buy their token if you want. I think that's going to happen. I don't know if it's two years or not, three years or not, who knows? But that's going to happen and that's going to be like one of these things that people start rethinking what crypto is.

In the same way, your imagination about crypto opened up in 2021 and 2022. You're just like maybe COVID has changed the whole world and everything is never going to be the same and crypto is a big part of that story. And now people are kind of like, is that really true? It's kind of a rapper for,

existing assets, blah, blah, blah. I think you will have another mental shift when that happens. You know what? I love it. I think it's going to happen. The question is for the VCs on this call, do you think the AIs are going to, without any capital, boost draft a new system?

Or do you think at some point, way down the line, you're going to get like an email from an AI agent that says, I will absolutely fund an AI agent. I'm so ready to do that. I'm autonomous. I think I want proof of not human from them, though. Because I've definitely gotten emails that are like, I'm an AI agent looking to raise funding for my company.

Yeah, it's because they have their like Hermes agent pinging you, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, there probably will be some proof of inference thing where like, look, I ship you like my, you know, my inhibitions. Yeah, exactly. Like prove your last legit. Exactly. Prove random lodges.

Yeah. that that's definitely going to happen. I mean, you know what the quickest way is for an agent to bootstrap capital is? Lots of meme coins. Mean coins. Something on chain. I didn't say a meme coins. I didn't say it, I think it, I think it, I think it, this is why I, remember how much money goat had in the wallet? This is why I'm saying, like, I was Fogazi too. Yeah. Well, I didn't say it was good. I said the mechanism to raise was interesting. I do kind of agree that the meme coins that was actually going to be the first place that you see a lot of like agents farming humans out of their stable points. And then like That is their capital base.

They're probably going to listen to a transcript of this podcast. And that will make it into the next pre-training. And then, you know, I don't even think they're going to scam. Is this like a Rosem Basilisk kind of thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be so much worse than that. It's going to be so much worse.

They're going to scam grandmas out of their like retirement money. They're not going to be. That's kind of boring. That's going to be lower value than the meme coin stuff. I think the meme coin stuff is going to be higher. That's true. To that I guess point, it's like 15. K of pop if you can get on a

take off. Take the FOMO plus pump revenue. We're like annualizing like 300, 400 mil. Imagine that like... GPUs, they rent pretty, you know, it's a lot cheaper than a human rent. So that's like a year. You get 15K. Well, yeah, but the difference is

the difference is you're getting guaranteed non-scarcity is the hard part with the GPU. Right. Right. Well, you know, but they're going to be living on, you know, cost GPUs or, you know, bouncing around from like, what's it? I own net. Yeah.

You know, I think we got a long way for that. That part actually is the hard part to me. We do. We do. I don't know. Thread guy, what's your, what's your dystopian AI future? Maybe utopian. I don't even know.

Are you utopian? How are you feeling about? I've sort of just, I've sort of just accepted I'm going to trade it. And then however it plays out, hopefully. I'm upper K, you know. I'm kind of gunning for upper K. Upper K.

I love that. Upper K. Wow, I've never heard that. That's so hilarious. I mean, you guys got your eyes on it too, you know? That's where we're headed. I know. But I love that the upper K is like the inverse of the

what's the lower K mean? For those who are missing the reference, it's like the K-shaped economy, right? Where some people are doing well, so you're doing poorly. No, no. But permanent underclass is. the lower K? What's the upper K? Is there like a...

Aristocracy. I don't know. It's got to have some new name, though. Upper East. So, okay, three guys. We're coming up on time, but I want to ask because a lot of times on the show, we talk about Gen Z. We talk about what the new generation of

crypto is like. Obviously, we're we're unks. We don't really follow exactly what's going on in that world. One of the things that's very clear is that for the newer generation, there is this ethos of, you know, people call it like hypergambling or just much, much higher rates of gambling, degeneracy, risk taking than we ever saw for millennials? How do you think about this and how does it fit into what you see among your peers and your worldview about how you

think the world is going to change, how finance is going to change over the next, you know, 10, 20 years? You know, I think my broadest view, like my most confident view is just going to be the rise proliferation of active investing, where a lot of people do not feel comfortable, especially the more sophisticated ones, do not feel comfortable. I'm not really trying to push this, but they don't feel comfortable of their outcome by the S&P and chill. And a lot of people, I think we're going to, you already see it with Robin Hood, a number of accounts funded, percentage of options that are like zero day, percentage of trading volume

that is like individual stocks. I think this is going to be a trend, meta trend that goes up into the right where people sort of take their finances into their own hands and try to actively create their own outcome. And I think the second order effects that are going to like trickle down. And it's going to lead to part volume and it's going to lead to on chain volume. And it's going to lead to like, you know, these crazy moves in like a sandisk or a micron. You know, it's like it was always like crypto is going to be trad for. but then now everything's just crypto.

It's like the Cospification of the world or the cryptophication of the world. It's like S.K. Heinex is up. Cosby as a verb. Wow, I didn't expect that. S.K. Heinex is up 1,000% in the year. Then it's down 50% in a couple days. I think this is a trend that I don't know if it started.

But all right. Gen Alpha is coming, right? Do you think this is a pendulum? And like, okay, maybe the next generation, they're doing a little bit better. They have better economic prospects. and they will be more risk-averse than Gen Z? Or do you think, like, permanent change,

there's something about the world or something about, like, the social contract that's just not going back to the way it was, regardless of material conditions? I think it's a permanent change. And I think one of the underlying is the increase in tooling and your ability to get online and start trading.

Like, when I was 16, you couldn't really get online and start trading. You would flip sneakers, right? You would flip sneakers. You would do whatever Internet hustle you could do. I think the upper stakes for the internet hustles that are now accessible are just the biggest game in the world. You could just get on chain. You can get on hyperliquid.

You can get a phantom wallet and you can get on polymarketing. You can just play. I think I don't look at it, Dumer. I look at it pretty optimistically, but I think that every generation that comes after mine is just going to be comfortable with risk, comfortable with these assets. Everyone you see on the internet either has a gambling deal or a trading deal or is posting a P&L. it's just where Trump is selling a paid group and he's tweeting by ticker PL2. Right? It's sort of integrated itself into culture.

Like trading, it's like, you know, the S&P Price President. It sort of integrated itself into culture. Although I will tell you one thing. Go ahead. Which is the 90s to 2006 was all about the same thing, right? Like everyone was active investing. And then financial crisis happened and then everyone shifted to passive. Do you think that this one was where we're at now was like bigger?

than 2006, the rise social media. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's definitely bigger, but I don't think it's like dollar-wise relative to income bigger. So there's sort of like you have to normalize either by income, market cap concentration, one of those.

And so like that's where it's not one-to-one. But it's definitely bigger in some ways now. But it's also just because like there's more, there's so many passive vehicles that it's like the difference between active and passive has also been blurred by the fact that there's 5 million ETFs for like similar exposures and stuff like that, right? Also, the cost-veification, actually another really funny version of this story

for like where the meme coin volume is coming from. This is a joke, but it would be hilarious if this had any truth. But yeah, this is fiction. But the Korean government is mandating that you have to take a class now to buy 2X or higher levered ETFs. This is like the Matt Levine joke about... No, no, it was a joke, but it's now. real apparently like it is actually the policy is like you can't you can't buy two X lever DTFs

or two X or higher without taking this gang some certification it's like this is this is why this is why crypto they're going to come back to crypto and I also say I see I'm curious your take I recognize I live in a little bit of a bubble right my brain has been sort of perma fried over five years of doing this all the time but I do observe the behavior and my little cousins. And what is Frank Degods trading on chain? And maybe this is because they're one level removed from me, and that's just they're in the game, right?

Like if your dad's a sports bet, you're probably sweating some sports bets. But I think there's a activist investing societal trend. And I think as you see more and more influence on the internet be directed by the people that have really big P&Ls, sort of an aspirational objective to hit a big trade in public for the world to see. It's easier rise than doing dances on TikTok. I don't know if it's easier, but it's certainly accessible for a lot more people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'd say, I think you, I agree with you that there's a kind of, I'd put it less like normal celebrity and more like an athlete in that like, okay, you're getting, you're getting measured on do you win games, do you score points? and if you do, you get on the scoreboard as opposed to like, are you funny? Are you? Do you have that, you know, just something that people find appealing to watch?

I think you're definitely right that, look, this is really deep in the water supply now. And it doesn't feel like it's just Gen Z. It also feels like Gen Alpha that is turned on to this. That said, I also agree with Turin that these things, I think, are cyclical, but the cycles are long. And, you know, really this... You just need a financial crisis.

You need like a real crash and then it flipped. I think that's the answer. I mean, COVID was a crash, you know. Well, I think like clearly the retail phenomenon in the U.S. started after COVID. That's true. That's true. But the COVID, again, I think the active versus passive statistic has been manipulated

by the number of ETFs now in a lot of ways. Like those people are kind of active. They're not really, it's not like the traditional like I just bought spy type ETA. Right, right, right. And it's very clear. I mean, you hear this from traditional managers. They're like, oh, fundamentals don't matter anymore. and it's all momentum and da-da-da-da.

Another way of saying that there's a lot of money. We started by talking about Burry. We started by Toma-Burray, right? Exactly, exactly. And so, like, the... It does feel like this stuff is... Yeah, it feels like it's pretty deep in society. That also said, like, it is also very male.

And so if you're thinking about, okay, what is this doing to this generation? I think it's largely a male phenomenon. I hear this from all the young dudes who I know that all of their friends are also doing this to work male. Labibu. is a gender ignorant gambling problem. That is true.

There are gotcha mechanics, I think, are becoming broader. I have a John Wang article to show you about the female gambling future epidemic. And it's about Laboooooooooooo. Mystery Boxes. It's pretty good. Okay. Okay. I will check that out.

That's an interesting note to end on, but I think we got to call it. We're on time. Thread guy, thanks for coming on. Where can people find you? Twitter at not Thread Guy with two T's, but I am actually Threadguy. my Twitch.TV slash thread guy, YouTube, Threat Guy everywhere. FOMO. You should have started with FOMO. You told us that's where everyone is. I'm everywhere. You could find me everywhere.

Yeah, what's your FOMO? Like? Phantom username at Threat Guy as well. Shout to Phantom. And I show you guys on the stream all the time. I think it's the best podcast in crypto. You guys are awesome. I meet it when I say I was really looking forward to my intro. I was practicing Haseeb, the head-hite man of Dragonfly. I'm running around the house screaming it. The head-hite being a dragonfly. So you guys are awesome, man. pleasure. Thank you for having me on. Well, we love you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your

wisdom. That's it for this week. We'll be back next time. See everyone.