Unchained - The Chopping Block: Trump’s Crypto Shake-Up, Solana’s Big Moment, that Changes Everything - Ep. 770

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

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. In this episode, we dive into one of the wildest weeks in crypto history, unpacking the unprecedented launch of Trump’s memecoin and its explosive $70 billion valuation. We discuss how it broke every record imaginable, the fallout from Melania’s token, and the chaos it unleashed across the Solana network. From the ethics of a sitting president launching a coin to the implications for retail investors and the future of memecoins, we’re covering it all. Plus, we debate whether this marks a new chapter for crypto adoption or a troubling precedent for political grift. Stay tuned for this jam-packed emergency episode! Show highlights 🔹 Trump’s Memecoin Craze: Breaking down the historic launch of $Trump, its unprecedented $70B valuation, and how it shattered every record in crypto history. 🔹 Melania’s Memecoin Fallout: What went wrong with the $Melania token launch? Exploring its disastrous impact on the market and $Trump coin’s rapid crash. 🔹 DeFi’s Ultimate Stress Test: How Solana infrastructure held up against unprecedented volumes, Moonshot’s rise to the top, and why this reshaped the memecoin landscape. 🔹 Retail FOMO vs. Institutional Doubts: Examining retail’s overwhelming rush to $Trump coin and why some insiders remain skeptical of its long-term implications. 🔹 Crypto Meets Politics: The ethics and implications of a sitting president launching a memecoin—and how it could distort the future of crypto regulation and perception. 🔹 The Memecoin Economy Evolves: Could Trump and Melania coins signify the end—or a new era—of memecoins? A debate on the future of speculative tokens. 🔹 Solana’s Big Moment: Why Trump coin positioned Solana as the go-to chain for memecoins, and how it outperformed competitors during this chaos. 🔹 On-Chain Innovation or Grift? Is this a turning point for crypto adoption, or just the latest example of right-wing opportunism? The crew debates the broader implications. 🔹 Adversarial Predictions: What happens when other world leaders witness Trump’s success? The panel speculates on who could be next in the memecoin race. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Disclosures Timestamps -  00:00 Intro  02:23 The Crypto Ball 07:11 Trump's Memecoin: $TRUMP 13:21 Market Reactions & Infrastructure Challenges 26:25 Melania Token: $MELANIA 38:52 Solana's User Surge, Start of Ethereum Civil War? 45:12 Speculation: Crypto's Killer Use Case 49:59 Partisan Divide in Crypto 54:22 Trump's Crypto Strategy 01:07:32 Crypto's Social and Political Implications Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We just now had the fucking president of the United States launch a meme coin. And that is going to have a huge trajectory on what this technology represents to people. No one remembers Leland Stanford for all of his kind of scammy bond issuances that built the railroads in the West. Everyone remembers him for creating Stanford University. Sure. But people do remember the antitrust cases against the railroads. But you never know the side effects to Robert's point. It's like it's like.

Yeah, you never know, but you can try your best. To think about it. That's what our job is. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two clon. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. I like that eight is the ultimate pump. Defy 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. Who quick and chose for us to get Tom, the DeFi Maven and Master of Names. Hello, everyone. Next, we got Robert, the Cryptoconassur and Tsar of Superstate. Good afternoon, everybody. Next to you get Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grant Puba at Gauntlet.

Yo. And finally, I'm Haseeb, the headhive, the headhide 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. Please see chopping block than XYZ for more disclosures. Okay, so we're doing an emergency episode today because there's just been so much craziness that has happened in the last three or four days. And, you know, it's a little bit, it reminds me of the Stalin saying that there are decades

where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. One of those weeks where it feels like a decade happened, I kind of got hit by a train, very little sleep over this weekend. I don't know how you guys are holding up, but this has been a shout out to our fans. Shout out to our fans who requested the emergency episode also. I think it was requested on Friday. Yeah, I think it was. There is a lot of people requesting, but I want to give them the shout out because

there are people, there are many people kind of saying we should do it. I was in D.C. I took an early train back just to record this episode. That's how newsworthy was. Okay. So let's try to go through the chronology to help people understand what exactly happened and why this has been so monumental for the crypto industry. So let's walk through it one step at a time. So it started on Friday night. So Friday night was the crypto, The crypto ball was an event thrown by the Trump inaugural team that invited a bunch of crypto leaders, influencers, KOLs, politicians to come to one place to celebrate the advent of the new administration and presumably the very different stance toward crypto that this administration was going to take.

So Trump himself was not there, but many of the leaders of the Trump administration were going to be there, including David Sachs, a bunch of political appointees, as well as. a bunch of industry leaders, such as Michael Saylor, Brian Armstrong, the Winklevoss twins, and of course the biggest industry leader of them all, Robert Leshner, I believe you were there, you were caught on camera at a bunch of places. Tell us about what the crypto ball was like. And also, how much did it cost? Because that was also widely reported. That's a great question. So it cost, I believe, $2,500. A lot of people had donated more money than that. There was a number of... Yeah, that was the entry-level ticket. There was like an invitation

going around on social media. I think the highest tier was, was it a million dollars? I think it was the highest year. Yeah, I think it was. And so what you really got out of this was like a full gamut of participants, you know, people that, you know, thought it was a good investment to spend $2,500 to put on black tie and join the celebration of crypto. And they didn't. And they didn't, you know, you had people that spent dramatically more than that, not to buy their way in, but because they wanted to show support. And so you had a litany of companies in the crypto ecosystem, some of the most powerful companies all demonstrating their support with, you know, million dollar potentially plus

donations. I don't know the specifics there. And at the event, I mean, from the hours of 8 to 1230, you know, after midnight, it was the center of the universe in crypto. To your point is, Steve, about who was there, everybody was there. It felt like everyone I've ever met within the crypto industry was there, plus another five times that many people that I've never met before and didn't recognize and had no idea who they were. But within that, there was everything imaginable. There was Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, walking around and talking crypto, all the way down to George Santos, the disgraced former member of Congress,

you know, walking around talking about crypto. Yeah, you had a full spectrum. Wait, wait, wait, wait. What, George Santos? Embarrassingly enough, yes. But you had, you had, you know. Foreshadowing. Foreshadowing.

Yeah. Yeah, but you had most of, you know, the cabinet appointments were in attendance. You had, you know, politicians from across, you know, the aisles, you know, coming in. You had really everybody who cares about crypto all in one place. The conversation was pretty much 100% focused on crypto, you know, across the board. I don't think most people are talking sports or, you know, the weather. And for most people there, the conversation was just about, you know, how exciting it was to witness this change from the headwinds of the Biden administration to the tailwinds of the Trump administration. And the excitement was palpable, you know, there was an incredible amount of optimism.

There was an incredible amount of thoughtful discussion. And honestly, it's the best crypto event I've ever been to in my life, hands down. I don't know if there will be the opportunity, you know, again, to have such a watershed moment, which brings everybody together. You know, I can't think of anything bigger than, you know, the switch from Biden to Trump on crypto. But, you know, this was an incredible event. And, you know, should we stop the timeline there or keep going? Yeah, yeah.

So there was a line that was widely reported by David Sacks, of course, who's the new Cryptozar, he stated, the reign of terror against crypto is over and the beginning of innovation in America for crypto has begun. And this is kind of marked, I think, this energy that was defined the crypto ball, all the reporting, all the images that were coming out on social media, is just this unbridled optimism that everything had suddenly changed and we're now in a totally new world. Now, at the same time, this was happening Friday night in New York City, or sorry, in D.C. At the same time, this happened.

Another thing was happening for the people who are online. I was actually in Singapore at the time of the crypto ball. And so I was just waking up as this was happening. At the same time as the crypto ball was taking place, Donald Trump tweeted that he was dropping a meme coin called Trump. Now, this meme coin was largely unexpected. I don't think anybody was anticipating that this was going to happen. And it was also not communicated to anybody who is at the crypto ball, which you would think,

okay, maybe the value of going to the crypto ball is that you get information about what Trump is going to do. Trump, of course, was not there, but presumably this was somebody on Trump's team, a group called CIC Digital, which was actually responsible for launching the meme coin. This meme coin launches on Friday night. And it is a Solana meme coin. and it started with roughly, you know, within about 20 minutes of the launch of this meme coin, the market cap rose to about $3 billion. And that was when I first saw it was, you know, about 20 minutes after it launched.

And within a few, basically within like eight hours, this thing hits a market cap of $30 billion. By Sunday, it hits an all-time high price of $72, giving it a, no, I'm sorry, giving it a 70 billion fully diluted valuation. This thing very quickly went into the top 15 of all tokens in crypto. And from launch, depending on if you were able to snipe the initial launch, was a 400x for some of the snipers who got in very, very early. Now, this thing is very weird. It's a very weird meme coin. Now, why do I say it's weird? It's weird for a few reasons. First of all, 80% of the allocation of this meme coin goes to quote unquote Trump NCIC digital. 10% was in the public distribution and 10% was allocated to initial liquidity, which is very abnormal for a meme coin,

right? Usually in a meme coin, like the economics are reversed, where the team might have 10 to 20 percent and the rest of the community is supposed to have, you know, 80 percent gets the meme coin community energy that we associate with meme coins comes from that kind of a distribution. This is the complete inverse. The other thing that's notable about it is that of this 80% insider allocation, I believe it's the first unlocked, so the unlocks are staggered. The first unlock happens in three months. But despite the fact that the first unlock just happened in three months, it's been reported that some of the Watts have already started selling and that there have been hundreds of millions of dollars in sales from the tokens that were supposed to be allocated

to CIC Digital. So there's a lot of fog of war right now about what exactly CIC Digital is doing or what the rules are, it's very vague. On the back of all of this, Solana, which of course was the place where the initial distribution of this token happened on Pools on Meteora, which is a Dex on Salana. On the launch page for this token, it was announced, go buy this token on Solana

using... Shoot, what's the name of the app? Moonshot. Moonshot, using Moonshot, which is basically a meme coin, you know, kind of direct-to-consumer app that you can download. on the app store. It's like Robinhood for trading salana coins. Yeah, but it's directly on chain.

And so Moonshot shot up to the top 10, top 10 apps on the iOS app store in the US. I think it was like number seven. It ended up causing Solana to have massive load, more load than I think we've ever seen in crypto history on Solana. The Phantom wallet was basically knocked, like their RPCs were knocked over. They peaked at 8 million queries per second. Transaction failure rates on Salana Maynette went up to 40%, according to Waydie. You saw all-time high dex volumes, 28 billion on Saturday, almost 40 billion on Sunday. And it was just absolute pandemonium that you saw on chain. We've never seen anything like this. And it also caused Solana during the course of the Trump coin rally to go to an all-time high of $292. And so absolutely, records just

shattered everywhere and complete pandemonium. So I'm going to stop there. What was your guys' experience of seeing Trump coin and the biggest meme coin launch we've ever seen from an incoming presidential candidate? Well, I'll start with my perspective as somebody that wasn't paying. You were at the crypto ball. I was at the crypto ball. And I started getting like one or two, you know, messages and group chats that I'm a member of, you know, mostly from people that were not at the crypto ball saying, you know, in all caps, like, Trump just launched a meme coin, you know, and as somebody that was like mingling with some of my closest friends and, you know, a lot of industry participants at the crypto ball, I said to myself, I'll research this later, you know, when I get home tonight,

I will look into whatever is going on. You know, a few short hours later, it would prove to be a very long amount of time. And by the time, I did. get home, you know, the launch had basically fully occurred. I mean, it was trading at a $20 billion valuation or something like that. So I missed it. Almost everyone at the crypto ball missed it, because everybody was just so engrossed in some of the best conversations, you know, that have been had in a long time. But, you know, with extremely high quality people talking nuanced crypto. And so I would posit that. So when you go home, how did you feel? How did you feel seeing what had happened while you guys were hanging out of the crypto ball.

I mean, honestly, just shock and amazement, you know, there's never been a crypto token that has launched this successfully in history, period. You know, nothing has gotten to a billion dollars faster. Nothing has gotten to $10 billion faster. Nothing has gotten to $50 billion faster. I mean, this has shattered every possible record. And it moved markets far outside of just, you know, Trump coin itself. I mean, this fully was moving the Solana versus Ether market.

You know, when I got home, most of my friends were talking about like putting on pair trades between Solana and Ether. You know, this was like fundamentally changing the narrative of what blockchains are going to have adoption going forward and why. And so that's the magnitude of the launch. It was not just that. It was also that every other token besides Solana, I think Radium and a few other Solana based tokens, everything was down because people were selling everything to try to go buy Trump

token on Solana. I'd never seen anything like that. It was crazy. So by 1230 when I left, most of the excitement had already occurred. So I think the narrative should start with somebody else because I missed the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Turin, what was your, how did you experience it? I hadn't felt anything like summer 2020 as I did that night. I mean, I have never seen my group chats goes crazy. I've never seen so many Oracle failure alerts. So we run a bunch of vaults on Solana as well. And I mean, I was just like half these things.

There were a ton of assets on Solana that were depagging because like everyone was exiting all the LSTs all at once to go by Trump. There was a ton of pandemonium in Defi actually. Also that like this is more the underreported stuff. But I think if you're in the the Solana transaction world. trenches, you'll see a lot of the stuff. I think the minimum priority fee was like 10x, the all time high for sustained for hours. This is remember when like Yuga Labs have the other land drop and hit other side, sorry, and it had like the Eth all time high transaction fee for like

sustained for like eight hours or whatever the whole time to draw. This was like crazier than that. And I have to say, I was actually really impressed. The things that I think didn't go well for Solana were probably, yeah, like the oracles were not, you know, definitely had the most issues that I think I've seen. And admittedly, it's not their fault, right? Like, I don't, I don't think they were like sort of ready for like this level of like, I can't even submit a bundle. I think Jito had some issues, uh, yesterday and on Saturday, but they were fixed really quickly. I think like the firefighting from the Solana defy teams who are behind the scenes kind of like making sure all this stuff runs. was crazy. I mean, a lot of them, I was on a bunch of, you know, that kind of like Zoom calls where like people definitely look like they didn't sleep for three days. And yeah, but I think like in general, I would give them like a B plus a minus, right? Like, sure, it wasn't a plus. There were definitely things that didn't work. But like, had this happened on like realistically right now, like O.P or Arbitram or Base,

I'm not sure it would have been able to handle this amount of demand. Like this was actually the craziest demand of it. This is like natural disaster level. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This was like FTX crashing. This was like FTCS crashing except Solana did well, right? Like then you can like see the difference in quality of transactions landing. Like I agree there are tons of mistransactions delays, whatever.

But the proposers were proposing and generally minus like a few small sense, like the MEPV auctions were clearing and stuff like that. As I said, like the oracles, I think, didn't realize that, like, there would be so much demand that, like, they could not even get a transaction landed for a while. But eventually that kind of got better. But I think in general, this was, like, a very impressive stress test. Like, and so, again, I'm thinking of this from, like, the on-chain. Yeah, you're like the train engineer in the back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rumbling like crazy. It's about. Look at tracks. Years are falling out. Or, like, I'm adjacent to that. and that was that was like a lot. So it was like kind of that was like,

but I think like the Salana teams deserve a lot of credit for like a lot of the stuff working behind the scenes. So that's the first thing. The second thing is like I think it was very interesting that they kind of like chose Meteora and Jupiter effectively. And like honestly, that was like a very smooth launch for something of such high liquidity over such a small amount of time where like, you know, you even forget about on the just people buying side, which is like normal meme coin stuff. The standard automated market makers and even the sort of RFQ systems on in a lot of places would not have been able to handle

that demand. And like, I actually thought Meteora did really well. And basically, you were seeing like very active market making on AMMs in a way that I also hadn't seen in a long time. Like the last time I saw that it was really like an emergency like like FTX. It was like funny. FTC is like the down emergency and this is like the up emergency if that makes sense. They're sort of like and the two stress tests are kind of different also, which is like but yeah, that level of demand, that level of liquidity was insane. I think the other thing that was crazy to me was just the sheer number of people who'd never use crypto before who had wallets. Like I, that was, I have never gotten more messages than I did on like Sunday morning of like, how do I download crypto?

Or like, how do I? You know, like download crypto. Like literally like stuff like that like from people I haven't heard from in a while. I got that from people that had never bought crypto before. This is this the scope of what happened. People that have never bought crypto before were messaging me saying, how do I buy Trump? How do I buy crypto?

And I was amazed that this would bring in people that just had never traded me. mean find the phone. Actually, people I know who hated crypto were like, how do I? I thought was also funny. Yeah, I think by Monday, it was listed on Binance. It just got listed on Robin Hood, I think like 18, 16 hours ago. So now there are many more places where you can buy it more easily. I think it's not on Coinbase yet, but it's on a ton of exchanges. I think Bybit was one of the first to list it. So now, it's at the point now where most of the volume is coming through centralized exchanges, but there was a good 48 hours. that almost all of the volume was happening on chain, even after it got listed.

I think Maxi or something was the first to list it. But even then, vast majority of the volume was happening on chain. Tom, you were in D.C. What was your experience? Yeah, I, there's always, I think, a lag between when something happens in crypto and when it kind of starts to go mainstream. And we kind of joke about Coinbase hitting the top of the charts as being kind of a top indicator.

And obviously that's sort of a lagging effect. I think it was the shortest latency between something happening in crypto and normal friends and just people in the mainstream understanding it. Like I had journalists texting me like what does 10% liquidity mean? Like what do you think of this thing? Random friends of mine, you know, saying, yeah, how do I buy, how do I do crypto basically? So I was very just shocked by like how online everyone was and how mainstream this went. I guess it is the president of the United States launching a meme coin, which is also kind of unprecedented. I also, I mean, you could do a reactions session, but I think overwhelmingly for people I know in crypto, I think there was sort of a sense of dread and fatigue.

And I think the reaction to the meme point launch was actually not great. Obviously, impressive that infrastructure held up super well. And like the fact that this worked, but it's kind of like, what does this mean for the industry? What does this mean for Trump? What does it mean for, you know, future potential launches? And kind of like you were alluding to, the whole thing feels a little riftery. It seemed like there was a lot of insider trading. It's not, there isn't quite like a destination at the end of this.

It's not quite clear about what the point of this was. Whereas with World Liberty, you could make some sort of, you know, vague argument around, A, this being some sort of TFI application. It's like, you know, how does it actually create value and look good for the industry? And I don't know what the answer is. I will say one... Go ahead, Drew. Sorry, one thing I kind of will add to it.

I just never thought there would be so many people who are willing to go on chain at the same time. And it's kind of crazy that you needed something like that, to Tom's point, to that extent to get people to move from centralized exchanges.

But it did feel like that was crazy. To be fair, Moonshot is a pretty slick experience in terms of abstracting out most of this sort of on-chainness, right? Really, it's more C-D-Fi in the sense of, yeah, you're trading on-chain, but the actual experience is not you get a seed phrase and you have to, you know, back it up somewhere. Also, amazing coup for that team. I mean, Moonshot, you know, been around for a while.

I think it's a slick app. Never, I think, had insane volumes if you look at, you know, Defi Lama. And this was, also, that would be something of flashed. the pan, hey, over the weekend, there's sort of this surge and then it comes back down. And like, their volumes and their fees are still going up. So pretty crazy that they were able to, I think, sustain all of this or being a pretty small new team. And then also, I think, frankly, I don't know that the backstory, but being selected as

the destination, when you go to the site, you click on the link and it sends you out to Moonshot. Like, that's a pretty insane get. Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely incredible. Yeah. It built their brand from not that much to be. being a power player instantly. Yeah, I think there's still number five in the App Store ranking.

So they're just crushing it. Oh, that's crazy. Wow. Okay. So there's a lot to, there's a lot to process here with respect to what this means. And I think, you know, when I was watching this happen on Friday, Saturday, it felt like the reactions to Tom's point were kind of mixed. I think some people were like, this is great.

You know, Trump is putting crypto in the limelight. this is bringing a bunch of people into crypto, and he's, like, embracing the craziness and the intrinsic chaos that crypto represents, right? Meme coins, okay, that's kind of a lot of what crypto is about. Some people had the opposite reaction of like, oh, it's, you know, going to be four years of grift, and it's a lot of people talking about crime. You know, you saw Zach XPT in the responses talking about, oh, I guess crime is legal now, implying that, you know, we're calling this thing a meme coin.

Of course, this thing is really more of a celeb coin. And we've talked about celeb coins before on the show. It's not a meme, right? I mean, he owns 80% of the supply. He's responsible presumably for making sure that this thing is going to be successful. And the other thing that is very weird and distortive about Trump coin is that on a market basis, this is now overwhelmingly the vast majority of Trump's net worth is Trump meme coin.

If he owns 80% of the supply, or let's say he owns, you know, a majority of. of that 80% of the supply, then this dwarfs any of his other economic interests. Now, it's unclear whether or not he's actually able to monetize that. But from what I read, the, the teams that were, or sorry, wallets that were tagged to the team already sold $500 million worth of Trump token, meaning that almost certainly he's going to be able to make billions of dollars of cash from Trump meme coin. And billions of dollars is probably an underestimate given the amount of demand that we're seeing for this thing. what all this tells you is that, okay, you know, World Liberty Financial is interesting.

People were talking about, oh, he owns some ETH on a pass-through basis, right? And that was maybe, I don't know, like some tiny portion of his net worth. Trump meme coin is the most important thing now in Trump's portfolio. He now really, really, really is incentivized to make sure that Trump meme coin is successful, or in other words, that he can successfully divest from the Trump meme coin. And there was a lot of reporting that I saw from the mainstream press, obviously, all the mainstream past was covering this. But most of the reporting was about the ethics concerns around this, which I think are also

pretty obvious, right? Part of what was unprecedented about this is not that, oh, you know, a president is launching a meme coin. What's unprecedented is the fact that, you know, he's basically engaging in a new kind of grifty, a kind of PVP business enterprise, the moment that you're going to be able to moment before he gets inaugurated. That is unprecedented. That is really weird. No president does that. That is really uncharted territory. And it's also been pretty clear from Trump's positioning is that he's kind of not having it with respect to following traditional norms about what a president is supposed

to do with respect to divesting their business interests. Very clearly, he's not planning to do that. Or if he does, it's going to be divesting on retail's heads with respect to the Trump token. Okay, this is kind of the backdrop of the drama that's been unfolding with respect to Trump token and a lot of the conversations that were happening online. Then, about 24 hours ago, we get a second meme coin. And the second meme coin, surprise, surprise, it's Melania token. So Melania tweets and Trump retweets that Melania is launching a meme coin and it's called Melania. And it's largely the same playbook, although it looks like it's a different team because the, you know, the way in which they did it was a little bit different.

but the Melania meme coin is let's see, let's get some of the details here so the Melania meme coin, unlike the Trump meme coin, Melania was 80, let me sure I get this right, I believe it was 86% owned by the token, or sorry, owned by the team. So even more owned by the team than what Trump did. And it looks like it was a lot more chaotic

and like not well executed. I don't, I didn't see a lot of, the details. But it appears to be that the moment that Melania coin dropped and it was retweeted by Trump, the entire crypto market started tanking. And Solana started tanking. Trump coins started tanking. I think Trump went down something like, what was it, like 30 to 40 percent the moment that Melania coin dropped. Yeah. It's like it went from like 70-ish to like 35 in a very short amount of time. Yeah.

One other thing. The Melania reaction. One other thing that from the infrastructure trenches, not the trading trenches, is that that was the worst time period, period for infrastructure. Like that was when the MEPA auctions were having the most trouble. So the Melania drop was actually much even crazier than the Trump drop because tons of people were trying to exit. I see.

I see. So the, so the craziness was that the Milanians. a drop, unlike Trump, so Trump, I think, was controversial. Trump was very polarizing. Melania, uniformly negative. Everybody hated this. Even if you were like, oh, I love Trump and I love this thing, everybody was like, oh, my God, Trump, what are you doing?

You are diluting your own token. You're diluting the narrative. Now this looks extremely grifty. The token mechanics of this are even griftier than the first one with 88% going to the team. And markets just were absolute, just, you know, just welching in response to seeing this thing happen. And this, I think, is really the tone setter. This is really the tone setter in that this is like, oh, okay, you're just going to keep

doing this. This is not a, wow, I'm going to have like this one thing as an homage to Trump and I'm going to really put my weight behind this thing. This is like, oh, Trump sees crypto and meme coins like he sees for profit universities and steak knives and casinos is that this is just another way. to monetize the Trump family name. And I think this has now caused something of a really significant reversal in the sentiment of what this means for crypto.

Now, as of right now, Trump is trading somewhere in the 40s, so it's like, I think, 45-ish right now. Melania is, you know, slightly sub-10. So these things are in absolute terms are still worth a lot of money. These are two of the most valuable meme coins in existence. But I think the pall that it's put over crypto is now pretty clear. So with that as context, I want to go around and get your reaction of what do you think this all means? Tom, why don't you go first?

I was going to say, the other thing that happened at the same time was also World Liberty ended up selling out the rest of its allocation. And like Eric Trump was tweeting. So it was like a very dense like Trump family crypto like 48 hours of sort of all these things happening on chain. I agree. I think this is the tone setter. This was like the, oh, are you to do one for everyone in the family? Like where does this really end? And yeah, I don't know.

I think this kind of cemented my view, as you were sort of saying, of this isn't just some cool one of one. And I think you can make a story around like NFTs and why you would want multiple collections. And it's much more clearly a sort of transactional collectory kind of thing. Actually, that was interesting in the terms of conditions for the Trump meme coin. They call them cards almost as like, I don't know if it's like a regulatory allusion to kind of the NFTs or like what they think they're buying them. I mean pasted from the original card collection, but maybe I'm wrong. I think it's the same holding companies. So maybe there's some sort of like tie in there.

But yeah, it was, yeah, just I think overall very disappointing. And the funding rates for Melani Russell crazy, it was like, you know, 4,000, 5,000 percent annualized or something. So like just, I think that's not that high. The funding rates on Trump when it first launched, going back from like, you know, group chat conversations were like 10,000 percent, like 15,000 percent. And also they were worse on hyperliquid and drift for a little while. Oh, yeah. It was like, it like completely blew out on chance. Shorting that trying to collect the funding rate?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this was the way around. This was long funding rate. So people, it was going down so much and people were shorting it. Oh, Maloney was going down. Oh, I see. Yes. Yeah, it was negative 4,000 percent.

Negative. Yeah, 5,000 percent to be long. So people really hated this thing. And the markets kind of spoke to that. And then obviously there was a lot of speculation around. There's a good, I think a polymarket for like, well, you know, baron launch a token because he's supposed to be the crypto Trump guy. I think people also found the wallet of this guy who runs students for Trump who launched this like TikTok meme coin when there was sort of a rumor around TikTok potentially being bought or sold and revived.

And then he like sold all that. So it was just a very kind of gross, I would say, 48 hours around Trump and crypto. And it did feel like there was really anything kind of giving back to the industry, which is ultimately what people want is a real embrace of the ethos. and the mission behind crypto and not these kind of, you know, very surface level sales effectively. Robert, what's your reaction to this whole situation? Yeah, it's interesting. I'm sort of of two minds and I'm split, sort of equally. You know, on the one hand, I think that it distracts from what should be the focus of the Trump administration and crypto.

I think the focus should be on, you know, how do we create good tax policy and, you know, regulation and how do we, you know, establish Bitcoin as a, you know, strategic asset and like all of these things that the crypto community has been talking about for years, right? Like the hot button issues from the perspective of the crypto industry. And I do think fundamentally, you know, because this went to $70 billion, it distracts from that. I think if Trump coin was less successful, I think honestly, if it was like $1 billion, I don't think it would be a distraction at all from these larger issues. And so I think because of its success, which I don't think anyone could have expected. I'm sure Trump and his team didn't expect that. I mean, you know, I don't think anyone in crypto commentariat, it's.

expected that. I don't think, you know, this was part of the status quo expectations. And so because of its runaway success, it just dominated the conversation in a way that I think does distract from other policy conversations. On the other hand, this goes to what you said earlier, Haseeb. This is the largest portion of Trump's net worth is crypto. Prior to this, he had like $10 million of crypto from NFT sales, you know, approximately, which to a billionaire is vaguely material, right, but not enough to spend 24-7 thinking about it. This amount of wealth is something that would cause anybody to think about it roughly 24-7. I mean, we're talking tens of billions of dollars that have appeared out of thin air. That is so meaningful. And, you know, if there was any

question about whether Trump was going to care about crypto, he's financially bought in at this point beyond anyone's imagination. And so from that perspective, I actually think is good, you know, in unexpected way. But only one very tiny sliver of crypto, which is his own meme coin. For now. Like, it's possible that over time, you know, he converts some of that into Bitcoin. It's possible that who knows what happens. But he's now, I would imagine, the biggest crypto-beliefer there is. Like, of anyone on Earth, besides maybe Satoshi, who has more, you know, he's probably, I haven't done the math on this, the second largest holder behind Satoshi.

It's possible he's larger than, no. It, no, he's not larger than Satoshi. But there's no way. But, yeah, but it's close. That's the thing. In a matter of two days, he became the second largest crypto holder on Earth. That is crazy. I mean, to be clear, there's absolutely.

no way that he could actually realize, you know, his 80% of the Bitcoin. Just like Satoshi starts selling it. A million coins. I mean, come on. Like anyone disposing of. There's a lot thicker order book for a lot, a lot thicker demand side for Bitcoin than there is for Trump coin. So that's the thing.

We've yet to see what that divestment process looks like. But almost certainly, he will divest. There's no freaking way that he's going to be like, you know, I think with truth social, Trump has been very assiduously being like, oh, I'm not going to sell. I'm holding on to Truth Social. True Social is his SPAC that controls the company that's like the Twitter clone thing that he runs, which I think on paper is worth billions. But of course, like the liquidity for it is very thin.

If he unloaded it, it probably wouldn't have anywhere near that. I think with Trump Coin, probably there's more liquidity than there would be for Truth Social, I assume. But I think it's also, it's not, you know, it's nowhere near one for one, right? It's not like you're holding Bitcoin or real estate. There was a good Kiko breakdown. And obviously, you know, functionally, given that there's such low float, there is going to be very little liquidity. But they kind of compared Trump to like Doge, for example.

And there's like 10 times less, you know, rusting bids for Trump than for like Doge, which, you know, is sort of a maybe people think about what they think about meme coins. And it's still early. But I'm just like, I think people underrate the liquidity crunch. I mean, just to talk technically. partially because it's crazy volatile right now. Well, that's also because it's almost entirely on chain and almost everyone training it on chain is using market orders, not sending limit orders. There's very few market makers, I would imagine.

This is a meme coin that was launched on chain to a retail audience that is just trying to hit the buy button. And when it's gone up enough, hit the sell button, right? Like the structural liquidity is not going to be there yet versus a doge coin or something. like that, but like it's very rapidly being integrated throughout the C-Fi, you know, ecosystem. So like every exchange is listing Trump. I mean, within- Yeah, I think that's what this analysis is about. Even on exchanges, you're looking at like a few hundred-k.

And you're right that it's still early and it's volatile. I think that also does explain it. But, you know, we talk always about the issues with like barking to market and considering sort of liquidity conditions in crypto. And this feels like it could be a poster child for that. Yeah, I do think, given another couple weeks, I think Trump will stabilize and that will probably result in a lot more liquidity than what you see today. I mean, this thing is going down, it's going up like 50%, down 50% in the span of a few hours. So this is a crazy fucking asset right now relative to Dogecoin.

You know, Dogecoin is comparatively tame. Where do you think the price stabilized? I think it probably stabilizes around 40, but I think that's like four, three months. I think in three months is when the first tranche unlocks. supposedly. I mean, I don't know what's been going on with respect to the wallet selling. But the first Toronto is supposed to unlock in three months. And I think that is going to be the beginning of a very different market reaction to what's happening with Trump coin. But it's hard to say. To ruin, we didn't get your reaction. What do you think all this does

from a macro perspective? I mean, in general, I do agree there is certainly a sense in which to this very opportunistic. I think I prefer looking at, and like, you know, a lot of people I know who are like, have been in crypto for a while, we're certainly quite dismayed. On the other hand, I think it's like the greatest source of on-chain users.

So like, if I take the dialectic, I'm like, we literally got the most number of users using a chain. I think pretty much everyone that's not Solana has to count it as an L in some way because like they were not able to attract user. demand in a way anywhere near this amount ever. Not saying that that won't change in the future. I'm just saying that like, you know, this puts Solana in a certain tier category. It feels pretty over with respect to meme coins, right?

I think anybody's ability to attract meme coins. I think, I think it's kind of Gigi. Once Trump coin launches on Solana, everybody else who launches a meme coin is going to pick Solana like 100%. Yeah, I think that might be true. But the other thing, I think that's actually really important that I, again, I'm just more focused on this like people using actual on chain stuff and not just like living on centralized exchanges and pretending they know, you know, what the transaction is. I thought it was actually quite crazy to have such a large amount of liquidity moving on chain ever. Like I think we've really never seen this.

And the way the derivatives exchanges on chain were able to handle low. launching way faster than CFI. And the, the decks to centralize exchange volume numbers are all-time high. Like, you know, it was almost a joke when GMX launched in 2020 or like, I guess late 2021, but like 2022 when people started using it to even imagine that there would be 12% perpetuals on-chain volume to centralized volume, market share-wise. We've surpassed that, right? And so like the idea that that that things are going to move on chain, I think that to me is actually the beauty of it. Now, the other thing I thought was really funny was like watching people's reactions who are like really,

you know, really I would say like maximalist of some form, not necessarily Bitcoin Max was, but maximalist and like staked their social reputation completely on the election. They're like, you know, I'm I'm super pro pro Trump and whatever. and then watching their reactions over the weekend and looking at the different buckets of different people. So there was like the Bologi bucket where like at first he was like, ah, it's a little grifty, but you know, whatever. And then the second coin came and it was like, no, everything's aggrift, you know. I think there's the Bology Naval Camp, which were like that. Then there was like the Bitcoin maximalists who are like completely confused because they're like,

Trump is our savior. He's going to buy a strategic Bitcoin reserve, but he's a shit coiner. I can't like, you know, watching the like confused like Psyduck face on there on them was like amazing, like one of the, I think reading Twitter was hilarious. And then the Ethereum side was like, half of them were like, Solana's fake and all the volume is fake and the Gryft. It's like, you guys don't fucking even use a blockchain and have never, are clearly not understanding how real this volume is. That was one side. And then there's the people on Eath who are like, oh shit, like, roll-ups would never have survived this. And actually, we need to get our shit together.

And I think there's a civil war that on the Ethereum side is starting a little bit. And it's going to be very interesting to watch in 2025 because it really does feel like we went from like kumbaya to like the pick, pick axes are out and the knives are out. And I think that this kind of like you said, cemented salana from meme coins, but also cemented salana in terms of ability to attract liquidity when there is a really sharp demand change. Yeah. And I was just I picked up on defile lama. There was four billion dollars of stable coins that came in to salana in the span of about a day and a half. So basically double the stable points of supply in Salana. I was going to say, I think that number correlates very closely with the increase in the market cap of the circulating supply of Trump, honestly.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And it's basically, presumably that was almost all liquidity that was getting injected. That was new money coming in to Salana and buying Trump. That's right. There was a tweet by Ben, the founder of Bybit, who was saying, this is the biggest day, you know, besides FTX, this was like one of the biggest days of outflows from every single centralized exchange

of people just running USD, taking Seoul, and running to go on chain. Like they'd never seen anything like that before. And I, to me, like, so there's obviously the mindset of like, okay, are meme coins really fulfilling the mission of permissionless money and so obviously not. But are they getting users on chain and now they have wealth on chain and they're like, now they can go explore the city? Absolutely. Absolutely.

And so like to me, that's the question. Here's the question that. Here's the, I hear that perspective. And I think that's, that is the most positive way that you can frame, you know, what's happened in the last, you know, 72 hours. But the way that I see it, I mean, look, most of these users are using moonshot, right? Moonshot is basically just like a trading interface. Like, I mean, if you're using Moonshot, like to Tom's point, it abstracts everything from

you. You can't necessarily even tell that you're on chain. It just looks like a Web 2 type experience. It's like you're using Robin Hood or something. just trading meme coins. And I think the idea that there's going to be this sort of GDP leakage from these people of participating in the on-chain economy, I think very, very unlikely. I think they might buy other meme coins, and maybe like on, you know, it sort of leaks out

through people who are really on chain. But I would guess the amount of conversions of people who are buying Trump coin, who are going to spend any other time doing anything else, you know, it's like people who go to Paris and they only go to the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and then they leave. That kind of feels like what people who are buying Trump coin are doing. But it's a lot more. And then they're out. It's a lot more people going to Paris, though.

Like I think like, yes. It is. It is. But is this actually going to like, you know, some guy who runs like a little, you know, boulangerie. Is he going to see any more people come in and like some, you know, back? Yes. Yes.

Yes. Of course. I mean, speculation in trading is the first killer use case of crypto rails, period, full stop. Right. And it's not. the last use case, it's the first use case. Just like the internet in 1993 was almost entirely porn and like things that people didn't love. And they said, oh, is this really what we're using

the internet for? You know, you can critique the use case of like meme coins, but we are getting almost everybody to get off their couch and learn what crypto is and try these rails for the first time. Yeah, in 1983, they probably used it for porn on the internet. But like this is like, And maybe you could say this is equivalent. Like, oh, it's not a great use case. But it is getting everyone to experience this new thing for the first time in that way. And I think there will be a lot of people that go from trading a crypto asset for the first time to saying like, oh, what else do I do with this wallet? How does it work?

Can I send it to friends? Can I like, what's the browser? You know, almost everyone I know who's like a deep in the weeds D-Gen started off by buying some shit coin, you know? So another thing I'll say is like, to the, you know, the vertically integrated hypothesis from Defi summer like 2020 of like someone will build a defy protocol, get a lot users, then they'll build a better front end, then they'll build a wallet. And like, I think that was just too early to do them in 2020, whereas it's showing that now you can do that.

And like, I think that is a very, that to me is also a kind of big shift from to developers, right? which is like, actually, you want to own eyeballs and the funnel to your protocol, not just the protocol. And like, I think that was like a money losing endeavor for a lot of people for a while. And in general, that sort of, that sort of new funnel, like, yes, I agree. Most people will just go to the Eiffel Tower. But 10% of them will go to a nightclub. And of that 10% of the night went to a nightclub, 1% of them will come back to Paris because they, like had such a good night. And like now you have recurring users and recurring usage. And like,

yes, it's not going to be everyone. But, but if you, if you actually have this compounding of the new So I hear your point. And you're absolutely right. There are some percentage of people who will say, hey, what is this thing? Looks like I can export my key from from Moonshot. And like, okay, what do I do with that? And yeah, there will be there will be some people who show up and are interested in learning more about what's going on on chain. I think to Tom's point, you know, World Liberty financial, whatever you might think about the quality of it, very clearly was like square at the center of the heart of what crypto is supposed to be about, which is about financial innovation. You know, look, you can argue about how innovative it actually is, but at least ostensibly,

it's trying to build a defy protocol, a stable coin, whatever, I don't really understand exactly what they're trying to build, but that's like the general area of what they're trying to do, right? To me, it's very clear, what was the point of Trump token and then the point of Melania token, right? very clearly it is of a kind with his spec. It is of a kind with a for-profit university. It is in some way to say crypto is a great way to have an even faster transfer from retail investors to my wallet.

And I think that's what were you going to see. I think it has also turned a lot of people against crypto. I think we had a moment before Trump's inauguration of bipartisan agreement that crypto is good. And it took a lot of work and a lot of, you know, fucking bloodsuit and tears to get to the point that everybody in America seemingly had a positive valence for crypto for the first time, almost ever. Well, I don't know.

I don't know about that. I think that is over. I think greater than 50% of my friends probably would still be like I hate credit. Way more than 50%. I mean, just look at Congress. Just look at Congress. Like, Congress basically completely turned over with respect to crypto. And I think what you're going to see now is that the Democrats, the Democratic coalition of

being pro-crypto, my prediction is that this is going to fall apart. And the way in which Trump is now positioning himself with respect to crypto and what crypto is going to represent, now he's going to say, look, we should deregulate crypto. Oh, immediately you're going to ask why. And the answer is fucking obvious, right? Why? Is because basically, crypto is now about him. It's about him personally and the Trump family. And that is how it's going to be perceived. I think this is ultimately bad for crypto. Now, in absolute terms, is good relative to where we were in the an administration that I agree with, but relative to what we thought we were getting, I think this is a much worse meal to be eating than what we thought we were going to be eating just a month ago.

I'll agree and I'll disagree. So I will agree with the idea that this is increasing the partisan fissures surrounding crypto. I think in general, you have a lot of people that correlate Republican who just got rich by buying Trump. The retail public in general, I have neighbors that have never bought crypto before that are like, I'm buying Trump. Like, you know, I can't wait. This is amazing. You have a lot of people that just made money out of thin air. And there's a lot of new support, mostly correlated to the Republican side. And I think a lot of the critique is coming from the other side. You know, you're talking about there's a lot of skepticism now. I would say that correlates Democrat.

And so if anything, it's just going to create more of a partisan gap that will play out over the next series of elections. And that could be good. That could be bad, right? It's hard to say. Why would that possibly be good? Well, it's possible that like it forces like, you know, tight majorities around crypto in, you know, like the House Republicans become even more in lockstep around like we are pro-crypto or the House. you know, Democrats, even if they're a little bit more opposed to it, you know, get stopped on or whatever it might as it being. It's hard to say. Like, politics is so complicated and so

intertwined. I think you are, I think you are underestimating how badly this is going to go. Like right now, a lot of people own Trump coin, right? It's probably floating right now 45, 40 billion. Trump is going to start selling or whatever, CIC Digital is going to start selling in about three months. And in a year, even more unlocks, right? Like, there's, there's more unlocking than the entire supply owned by retail within a year. This is going to be a fucking bloodbath, right? I don't think it's just Democrats who are going to be unhappy with the way that all this plays out. And I think there's a reason why people don't do, like the reason why this is such a norm violation with respect to mean coins. The people who are buying this stuff do not understand. They do not understand

what they're buying. They don't understand the mechanics. They don't understand the They're not discussing FD versus circulating supply. Like none of the people that have traded crypto for 30 minutes are that deep. I think it's like a slight book, maybe more nuanced for you. I think if you're buying a meme coin, like I think you know you're buying a meme coin. And I think people get the game. They like the PVP casino kind of thing. I think the thing I don't like about this is this 80% going to Trump.

It doesn't feel like you're actually, you know, hey, we're trading back and forward. and maybe it'll make some money, maybe I'll lose some money. It's like, you're playing at a casino and there's an 80% rate. And that's a 90% rate. And you're going to lose money. And I think that is really the thing that I feel like I issue with. In addition to, I think potential risk of, as you mentioned, hey, they don't have to release their holdings when they take office for something like crypto. Very easy to be compromised by, you know, a foreign adversary buying a lot of your token or doing something with respect to your token or value leakage happening that way as well. I mean, you already see a little bit of this, frankly, with World Liberty Financial, buying

WPTC and Justin's son saying, hey, thanks for like buying WPTC. There's this weird value leakage on sort of the outskirts of the apparatus that it's designed to prevent this kind of political interference. And it just was not prepared for something like this to happen. And I'm worried that you get one bad incident or story like that. And it just kind of poisons the whole well. I mean, look, none of us. I agree.

That's a huge risk. That's huge, yeah, fine. None of us doubt the Trump token will be down a lot in a year, right? I think all of us understand enough about crypto to understand that will happen, you know, 90% likelihood. That when the team starts selling and they're going to sell a lot of fucking tokens, this thing is going to go down and retail investors are going to lose money. It's not people in the crypto trenches are going to lose money. They're going to get out way earlier, right? They're the ones who are watching the unlocks. They're the ones who are looking at, you know, looking at some of these accounts that are

tracking the wallets. The retail investors who came in through Moonshot are the ones who are going to be sitting there holding the bag, the people buying on Robin Hood, the people buying on, you know, whatever other platforms. What effect do you think that has, Robert? Okay. So first off, I don't think it's inevitable that the price of Trump will be lower one year from now than it is today. I know there's a lot of probabilities that go into it. It's not inevitable in my mind. I think there's a... What's the probability you think that happens? 70%. I think there's a 30% chance it's higher. I think there's a 30% chance that becomes the largest meme coin in existence.

And it has staying power in a way that people don't expect. Everything about this is unexpected. There's so large of an incentive to let it not die that I think we might see things we've never seen before. I don't think it dies. There's no way it dies. I mean, but like fizzles, fizzles out. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you know, there's so many people. that are probably surrounding the Trump camp right now with, like, creative ideas to make this thing even bigger and even more successful, that I wouldn't count this out. I mean, I think this was like satire, but maybe it was just, you know, off of Twitter I was reading, but people were, you know, saying like, oh, what if Trump air drops this to everybody? You know, like, you could easily give some to every single American and have. I mean, who knows? I'm not saying it's a good idea, but I'm saying- You saw what he did with Melania, right? Like, really, you're having this degree of optimism about his stewardship?

I'm just saying don't count it out yet. This is like n equals zero for anything like this before. It is so unexpected. It's so black swan. It's so like. Sure. Okay. But you still think the median outcome is that this thing is down in a year?

Yes. I think from the technical structure of the ownership, if the 80% that's held by Trump and the developers is sold, then I think there's good odds. If it follows the playbook that he's using right now with DJT, the SPAC, right, where he says, I'm not going to sell any. I actually think you get into very different territory. You know, it's possible that he has diamond hands and has a time horizon longer than one

year, right? He's going to be in the White House for four years. And so I just wouldn't rule out the fact that this asset does something we haven't seen before because it's already done that. It's already shattered every possible record. you know, it's possible that, you know, this continues to like break our expectations. I guess like the one thing I say is like, I agree that there's obviously a lot of like very unseemly unfavorable negative stuff around this, right?

Especially if you've been in Cryptoferral. Like I think like the funniest person to read, I talked about the different hierarchies of people's coping mechanisms. But Nick Carter really, I think, took the, took the S tier. Like, I was like super pro-Trump. I did not see this. And he's like,

Amali Min's clause is being violated, you know, et cetera. He came out hard against it. From the context of being that he's, you know, a huge Trump supporter. Yeah, yeah,

exactly. So, so I would say that I don't, I think you have to always never underestimate your adversaries and like, the Democrats will obviously

seize on this, right? Like, this is the easiest fucking thing to go after. So I kind of think there will be some creative thing like Leshener is saying where it's like they're not, they end up not selling,

but like more due to like having adversaries found a way to pin them down so that they can never sell. Like there's going to be a lot of political rang. Like I would not say that launching this token was a locally rational decision for any individual.

But I would say it might actually globally be very interesting, right? It made the on-chain economy way crazier. But also B, it might actually like turn this whole thing into this weird contest of like how, what to do with these funds, which will

be kind of like the world's biggest bounty hunt. Like, I don't know how that ends. All I know is we've gone into Squid Game territory more than like normal. 100%. This is a crazy. This is like I couldn't even like think about this way.

How many countries have a GDP less than what was was was was was involved in this? It's currently 35. You think they're all not looking at the same thing thinking that they want to do the same thing? I think there's going to be a lot of very weird adversarial games played that. The dam has broken open in the most interesting. Yeah. I would have agreed with you guys pre Melania token because I think there's also like a little bit of

precedent in like the Trump NFT thing where it's like. you buy the empties, you can come to the dinner. And Trump is also a businessman as a long history of understanding that you can add assets and borrow against them. And there's ways to get liquidity that involved just like, you know, market selling a bunch of your stuff. The Melania thing feels like you really tipped your hand. And it's just like, okay, this is actually just a cash grab. And we're going to try to do as many different things like that as possible, coupled with the fact that we really have not gotten, and regret that it's day zero. The only count we have not and I'll just interject Tom.

From what I understand from Twitter research, the Melania coin was launched by a totally different team and probably not in collaboration with Trump. So like, yes, I mean, you launched both. So I agree that there was a different team.

There was no way that they did not coordinate on literally the president and the first lady launching meme coins within two days of each other, right? Like that, that's clearly wrong. They definitely coordinate. Well, technically, also also a very important correction to what you just said.

almost president because technically he wasn't president when they launched which is a very this is an important technical point that will show up in this adversarial war I'm expecting is the fact that it was right before the right before is the most important didn't do it as president we also have not gotten I think a lot of love around the things that people actually cared about in crypto and were promises granted you know we'll see what comes about but you know people I think we're very disappointed by no crypto mentioned in the inaugural address. No executive order. No executive order.

As of no. So we'll see. I think maybe that also changed my opinion as well. But right now it feels like a lot of lip service and a lot of grift and very little of substance. So to your point, Tom, the inauguration just took place. We're recording this right after the inauguration. And in the inaugural address, you know, he made a lot of promises to the crypto community that he was going to do a bunch of things on day one.

none of those things have happened. Now, Gary Gensler actually did get, he did depart, so he didn't need to get fired. That was one of his promises. And apparently now we have Mark Uyeda, who's going to be the acting chair until Atkins presumably gets confirmed. And we also have Carolyn Pham for CFTC because Ross and Benham, he ended up stepping down. But there was nothing at all, no mention of crypto in the inaugural address. and he had a big stack of executive orders that he signed on stage and then like threw the pens into the audience.

And none of them involved anything with respect to crypto. And so you saw crypto markets actually go down significantly on noticing that Trump did not have any mention at all of crypto in his first day of executive orders. So now all that being said, like you said, it's, you know, it's day one. It's still a lot of room to see what ends up happening. But all of this, I think, tells a consistent story. And the consistent story is that Trump's a businessman. He sees crypto the same way that he sees a lot of other ways to monetize the Trump name. Trump is first and foremost, a celebrity.

And he knows the game. The game is you monetize your fame through brand deals and sponsorships and mugs and steak knives and all the shit. And then the executive order. That I think is real politics. That right there is real politics. But with respect to crypto, it's, it's, it's. it just, it really seems like this is just part of the Trump portfolio of how you monetize

the Trump name. And so, you know, I don't know. You guys clearly have a much more positive valence toward this or you guys being Turin and Robert than I do. I look, look. You have to understand. I think incredibly disheartened, like incredibly disheartened. I'm not saying I'm not, I don't like, for the record. I said there's a lot of stuff that is, is as negative as you could want from a person who's been in crypto for a while in perspective. But I think the fact that we got users and we actually were able to like prove a new modality on chain. Like, you know, I don't really care that much about like 90.

Like, I mean, I do a little bit, but I don't really care that much about 90% of the regulation because most of it is like helping CFI and onboarding and stuff that's like not at the cutting edge. The fact that we were able to test things much more near the bleeding edge at the utmost capacity thanks to this, I think that is in an insane silver lining. And the fact that it's actually making decentralized protocols used so much more. What you're describing is a fucking stress test. I think what I am describing is like what is crypto going to represent to the next generation of people who are going to be onboarded. Is it this right wing, grifty fucking way for politicians

to fleece a bunch of money from retail? Is that the point of crypto? Because that's, what it looks like to a lot of people. And I think it's what it's going to look like if Trump ends up hurting a bunch of retail investors. I think this stress test says financial infrastructure, nothing has proven that it's better than all the CFI shit. That to me is the beauty of this. This entire thing proves that DFI was a better place to do this than CFI.

Totally. My view is that we don't even know what the butterfly effect of this is. We are literally like... Okay, I agree with that. I agree. We're like 60 hours into the craziest. crypto launch of all time, right? And it's possible that this just has like major changes to the landscape in good ways and bad ways. Like I can think of a few right now. It might suck all the oxygen

out of the meme coin market forever. It might be the end of the meme coin era, right? It might end with Donald Trump as being, you know, a consolidated astrolux like Doge coin. It's like, all right, well, memes are done. Like, you can't do a better meme than Doge and Trump. So like, you know, People shift their attention. I assume you were going the opposite direction is that, like, Trump basically fucks over retail so badly that it ends the meme coin cycle. Well, I think this might end the meme coin cycle, but because, you know, there's an inability, like what pump dot fun thing that was made is going to have the gravitas of, you know,

a trap. Like, it's possible this just changes the direction of, like, what people find. I think it's the opposite. To To To Roone's point, right, there's way more people on Moonshot now, right? Like Moonshot's a fucking top five app. Of course you want to be launching things on Pump Fun now. Like it's, yeah,

I think it's precisely the opposite. I think like this has breathed more life into the mean porn market. All right. I guess my point is we're like 60 hours in. I have no idea what the medium term effect of this will be. Like it's impossible to predict. Fair enough, fair enough.

So like that is so volatile and so crazy. Yes. We're still in the fog of war. It's very easy to try to draw the line out forward. But there's the line is obviously itself incredibly volatile and is changing day to day. It may well be that when we look back on this in six months, we look back on this the way that we look back on, you know, Elon Musk pumping Doge, which is that it was interesting. It was an inflection point, but it wasn't like, oh my God, this really changed the trajectory of crypto. Or we may look back on this the way that we look back on, you know, the three arrows. And we say that was really a turning point. And something fundamentally changed when that happened. And something fundamentally changed about where crypto was going. right in something that seemingly was like kind of okay this should be disconnected from all the other things happening crypto but somehow it wasn't um i don't know yet the silver lining again is that

the three arrows piece involved the technology failing and proving that it could not handle and was not designed correctly no that was a hedge fund failing you know for loon no no but but my point no no no but three arrows failure was really predicated on them being insanely over levered on luna and like just yes well jbc Well, okay, yeah. And GBTC, yeah. But my point is like, they're on-chain stuff. You know, it showed that like a lot of stuff was just like not ready for prime time. A lot of the validated networks went down. Like, if I look at the technical infrastructure failure around that, it was even worse in some ways. But the fact that this work, do you have to,

you know, like, if you think on a 20-year time scale, regardless of what the current politics is, you want to know, does this infrastructure work? Do, are people able to control their own assets? And are they able to do what they want? And you were focusing a lot on the infrastructure point. He's the train engineer. A lot of RPCs hold up. Yeah, exactly. It's very like train engineer perspective on like what railroads represent in society.

And I think like the reality is the Leland. is fundamentally social. It's political. And we just now had the fucking president of the United States launch a meme coin. And that is going to have a huge trajectory on what this technology represents. No one, no one for, no one remembers Leland Stanford for. for all of his kind of scammy bond issuances that built the railroads in the West.

Everyone remembers him for creating Stanford University. Sure, but people do remember the antitrust cases against the railroads. But you never know the side effects, to Robert's point. It's like, it's like... Yeah, you never know, but you can try your best to think about it.

That's what our job is. This is the equivalent of like, in using the railroad analogy, aliens coming down and magically placing a railroad that goes from Chicago to like Santiago Chile, right? And being like, well, that was weird. Like, that doesn't make any sense at all.

Like, why is that? But it worked. Yeah. But it worked. Okay. Like, like, I, the grifty stuff is, is fundamentally, like, it is, it is, like, it is unseemly, right? Like, it's like, I'm not going to be like, oh, yeah, everyone should go do this or

buy the, like, it obviously has all these negatives that we know about. But I guess I'm just trying to be like, this feeling. It feels like a thing where, A, it's such a big change that any prediction I make is probably wrong. And I want to make predictions about the things I understand here, which is like technological shifts. And like people. This is like drunk looking under the streetlight for your keys, right? Like obviously the main thing that matters is that the president of the United States launched a meme coin and now his overwhelming majority of his net worth is in this fucking

meme coin, right? How does that distort American politics? How does that distort the perception of crypto? How does that distort what the next person who thought, wow, crypto is this neutral substrate that you can use as a global financial platform? Oh, no, it's not. It's a way to fleece retail. That's what crypto is.

To the extent that people thought it was speculative and crazy. Now the president is telling you, yes, you're exactly right. And I'm going to use it as best I can. The question for you. Imagine you're a world leader somewhere. And you saw this whole thing happen. What do you do? Like who's like equally, let's say.

I mean, if you are, if you are equally. Who is next? Who do you think is going to do it? Who do you think is going to do it? Who is equally amoral? All right. Next time on the shopping block, we see which world leader? I'm just curious.

Like, like what that's, for instance, that's a like much smaller prediction than trying to predict what the second. Yeah. I mean, look, the reality is that nobody has the kind of cult like following that Trump does, right? No world leader is anywhere close to Trump. Trump is the most famous man on earth. And now he's the most powerful man on earth. like there's there's really no comparison with anybody i can't think of anyone maybe she jing

ping but obviously you know crypto is illegal in china i don't think he's launching one yeah i don't think he's i don't think he's launching one at least not a pumpbell up but could i see modi launching one yes maybe modi maybe i don't know i'm telling you the second whoever whoever i think the geopolitics of the other people to me that's more interesting like what's going to There's a lot more normalization of corruption in other countries in the U.S. I mean, that's why it's so weird, right? Like, if you learned that Modi had launched a meme coin and not Trump, you would have been like, wow, okay, but I guess, I don't know, India's crazy, you know, why not?

The president of the United States launching a meme coin, oating 80% of the supply, unlocks in three months. They've already sold 500 million. I'm not disagreeing with you on these facts, right? And we all know if we've been in crypto long enough, that type of economics is bad. It's not going to end up. We were talking shit about like mother, you know? And that was like so tame compared to this.

Yeah, I remember I kept looking at the mother market cap and like the Delta over time over like during this weekend. I was like it's like 20. Is it up or down or? Oh, way down. Down, down, way down. Oh, yeah. Mother is, yeah, a relatively dead asset. Yeah.

So look, look, I agree with that. I just want to like, I want to, I want to just say that like, everything that looks bad underneath, there's some kernel of goodness. I'm just trying to unearth that. You guys, I know you want to go for the like, oh, everything sucks, whatever part of the world. I'm trying to. I mean, look, I take Robert's point that you don't know. And in retrospect, it may just be a blip. You know, it's like, oh, well, that really sucks.

And like, yeah, people think Trump is grifty. Whatever. A lot of people think Trump is grifty. They thought before the, you know, before this meme point, people also thought Trump was grifty. And so maybe I'm overreacting. We're kind of in the wake of this crazy thing. And there have been a lot of crazy weekends when RPCs went down. You know, like, I don't know, it happens once a year that there's some crazy event that RPCs go down.

So it may well be that we're too close to it right now. And the main, the overwhelming thing may be when we go, when we fast forward six months is that, okay, yeah, some retail is losing money on Trump going, whatever, who cares? There's always retail losing money on things that Trump tells them to buy. I'm not going to lose any sleep over people losing money on social. But the main thing, the main vector may just be the deregulation of crypto, banks coming into the space, stable coins growing, you know, stable coin legislation, all that stuff, which I think is likely to continue happening and potentially a strategic Bitcoin reserve. All of that may dwarf all this stuff.

And to be clear, I think that Bitcoin is largely going to be unperturbed by this, right? And you kind of saw that, actually. Bitcoin hit 100K as of yesterday. It went down a bit because Trump didn't say anything about crypto, but during the inauguration. But I think what's very clear is that the Bitcoin story is basically totally orthogonal to this story. I think it's tech crypto, which is most of what the four of us spend our time in, which is really, I think, potentially harmed by this, is that is crypto really a tech story or is it

Bitcoin plus a bunch of speculation? And I think that's the charge that we've been fighting as an industry, is that there's a lot more going on than just meme coins and people, you know, finding a way to fleece, you know, everyday mom and pops. But you're right. It may well be that in six months, we're back on, you know, we're back on trend line. And basically this thing was just a blip. I don't know, but my sense right now is that it's probably at least 30, 40 percent that this really hit a soft trend line. But I agree with you that there's a real possibility that I'm overreacting and that this thing is not going to matter as much as it feels like it does right now.

We shall see. So we shall see. By the way, before we sign off, none of the four of us predicted this in our predictions. So why should we be able to... I agree. That is very true. That is very true. Last question.

Last question. How many of us are sidelined on the Melania complex? What do you mean sideline? Do we own it or not? own any. Do you own any? Do you own any? Do you own any? Uh, I have some Trump. Yeah. Tarun owns some Trump. Okay. All right. So, you're the only one who actually owns it. You're the only one who's been positive about this whole thing. No, I think, Robert, you were, you were fairly positive. But I, I own like one sole because I was

basically using tracers to see how how well the RPCs. I was not buying like a lot. I was like basically like trying to see like latency of and stuff because people were, people were complaining about it. Perfect. That's so perfect. That's so perfect. You were buying Trump as a test transaction while sitting at the back of the train, helping the engineers show.

I just wanted to understand, I just wanted to understand like the performance things people are complaining about and whether they were like real. Perfect. It's perfect. Love it. So it's like, it's like it's not a lot.

It's just like, yeah. Okay. Nice. On that note, signing off. See, everybody. Yeah.