Unchained - The Chopping Block: Trump’s World Liberty Financial Unveiled, Memecoin Market Trends, and DeFi Developments - Ep. 699

Episode Date: September 5, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest news. In this episode, the boys tackle the buzz around World Liberty Financial, a controversial DeFi project linked to Donald Trump, and its ties to a previously hacked protocol. They explore the motivations behind the Trump family's involvement in crypto, questioning the legitimacy and future of the project. The conversation pivots to memecoins, with debates around the sustainability of the memecoin market and the growing influence of platforms like Pump.fun. We explore the thought-provoking discussion on the evolution of financial games in crypto, where both strategies and the game's rules can change dynamically. The squad also reflects on broader crypto market trends, touching on AI-driven markets, decentralized finance, and the shifting regulatory landscape. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Pandora, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 World Liberty Financial, a DeFi project allegedly linked to Donald Trump, sparks controversy with its origins in a hacked protocol.  🔹 Debate on the motivations behind Trump family involvement in crypto, questioning the legitimacy of World Liberty Financial. 🔹 Discussion around memecoins and their market cycles, with concerns about the sustainability and long-term viability of these tokens.  🔹 The concept of dynamically adjusting financial rules in crypto systems, contrasting it with traditional finance.  🔹 Pump.fun reaches $100M in revenue, marking it as a dominant memecoin platform, but also raising questions about the health of the memecoin ecosystem.  🔹 The innovation in memecoins, suggesting that dynamic mechanics could extend the life cycle of these tokens.  🔹 Broader reflections on the future of memecoins, potential market corrections, and how the crypto ecosystem will adapt.  🔹 Speculation on the continued rise of AI-driven markets and the evolving role of decentralized finance in a digital-first world. Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures Disclosures Links Coindesk article: “Inside the Trump Crypto Project Linked to a $2M DeFi Hack and Former Pick-Up Artist”  https://www.coindesk.com/business/2024/09/04/in-trump-backed-crypto-project-insiders-are-poised-for-unusually-big-paydays Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think one beautiful thing about crypto is you can actually have the game change at the same time as the players change the strategy. So it's like imagine playing chess. And like as you're playing chess somehow like you can remove one piece from the board. And now all of a sudden there's a hole in the board and you have to avoid that piece. And a lot of like financial applications are inherently like this, right? Like a lot of whenever there's a regime shift in finance, that's the same thing as like someone poking a hole in the chess board. and saying, oh, you can't use that spot anymore. 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. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved. D5.Eat is the ultimate pump. DFIPOTOC protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the shopping block. Every couple weeks, the three of us get together and give the industry insider's

perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, serves you got Tom, the DFI Maven, and Master of Memes. Hello, everyone. Fortunately, Robert could not make it today. He had a family emergency. So we've got Tarun, the Gigubrain, and Grand Pubot Conlet. I'm only here because of the emergency. Amazing.

I received the headhike man of Dragonfly. Tarun, you've got to be both the Gigabrain as well as the Cryptoanusur today. Okay, so we're going to need you to bring the thunder with respect to moon coins and NFTs. As we saw last week, I think the main thing is, you know, there's two things that will get me to kind of stare at the ceiling and that those two things are RWAs that aren't just government bonds or cash and regulation. Well, this is perfect. This is the regulation super episode when we talk about only regulation today.

I hope my ceiling has something interesting on it. Well, your mic is affixed to the ceiling, it looks like. So I think you're good shape. I can stare at the boom. All right. So we are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice. legal advice or even life advice, please see chopping block at XYZ for more disclosures.

So it's been a choppy couple weeks. Market seemed to be quite bored going sideways slash slightly down. There hasn't been a lot of energy in the markets except around one story, which is animating the crypto world right now, of a little protocol called World Liberty Financial. So World Liberty Financial is notable for being in some way associated with Donald Trump, the Republican nominee and former president, apparently it's his family who's involved, apparently Baron Trump, as well as Donald Trump Jr.,

who are involved in this project in ways that are not yet fully disclosed. But apparently, despite the fact that, or other than the fact that Donald Trump has retweeted World Liberty Financial, and there's been some general teasing of what the project does other than it's related to Defi and, of course,

the hashtag B Defiant, coin desk picked up a scoop about World Liberty Financial that involved a leaked white paper, apparently what we know so far is that the team behind World Liberty Financial is building something that is an Avefork based on a protocol called Doe Finance, D-O-U-G-H, dough as in bread dough. Now, Doe Finance apparently was originally hacked for $2 million, but the code for Doe Financial is one-for-one the same code as is in the leaked code base for World Liberty Financial, as well as parts of the same team.

So it seems that the Doe finance team is now partnering up with the family of Donald Trump. Apparently in the white paper, which has also been leaked, Baron Trump, who is the, I think, teenage son? Is he a teenager? It's 18. 18. Okay. So the 18-year-old son of Donald Trump is listed on the white paper as a D5 visionary. The governance token for World Liberty Financial will be non-transferable.

so you will not be able to sell this token. So it's really a pure governance token, actually. It's kind of very earnest of them to create a governance token. What would be hilarious is what would be hilarious is if it was only, it had some way of taking an Oracle that only allowed it to be transferable of Trump wins. So it's like Trottinger's security. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Nice. Interesting. So yeah, thoughts on World Liberty Financial. Also, have any of you guys gotten a pitch? I have heard this news actually from pretty, I would say, reputable or like investors that I think are good in crypto kind of before this news came out. So after the news came out, after the news came out, you don't think they're good. Yeah, yeah, no, no, they're done.

They're all under reputable. No, no, no. They were approached to be, you know, advisors or whatever. And I think they turned it down, which is probably wise. because, I mean, the details of it do not sound super compelling. I think even the front end, there's a league screenshot. It's the same thing as Doe Finance, but just they change the colors. So on the one hand, you know, it's good that they were trying to hit up people and get good people.

I think are advisors on the project. But, yeah, I don't really know what the sort of grand scheme or idea here is. Initially, there was a rumor that was going to be something real estate related. that doesn't seem likely now. I don't know. It's very confusing. I think there have probably been better ways to work with crypto. And I feel like Trump was on like a very good tear to the crypto community in terms of saying the right things and, you know, appealing to the things that people want in terms of policy.

This feels like a total left turn. I think it's kind of funny. It's like if we take Trump's crypto trajectory, it's like, Like three months ago, we heard Free Ross and Bitcoin policy. This month, we hear an Ave fork, like world finance. And, you know, what am I supposed to expect in three months? Like a Solana fork, a roll up. That sounds way too hard for the Trump family.

I know, but it's like, it's like funny because it's like speed running crypto over the last five years in like three months, right? to go. Again, I hear Tom, I have no, what's the end game of Doe finance? Or sorry,

of World Finance. Like, it feel, it just, we should all just call it Doe Finance. I feel like that's, it's a beautiful nickname. Honestly,

every time I say Doe Finance, I just think about all of those, um, uh, like basis forks that were actually made by Doe Kwan. Do you remember those? Like, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah. Basis cash, yeah. Yeah, but, um,

but yeah, there's just like some, something weird about this? What benefit does Trump get from doing? I mean, there's, I just don't really get the benefit to Trump, DJT or Barron. Because like,

what are they expecting this to be like selling another NFT and like this token will like be a low market cap shitter or something? You know, like it feels like it's like a meme coin with 10 more steps. You know what I mean? Like it doesn't like, you know, what unique assets can I?

borrow uses collateral and dope finance. Like the entire thing is kind of bizarre to me. So yeah, it's interesting you asked that question of like, okay, why, what is Trump's motivation for doing this? I asked the same question to myself about his NFT collection. And clearly, you know, I think if you're Trump, you're just out for any million incrementally that you can use to, like this has been a strategy for a very long time, right? He's a celebrity.

Celebrity say yes to brand deal. and they find ways to gradually monetize their name and likeness. And an NFT is just another mechanism by which to do that. So I think for Trump, for like for Trump personally, I think that's the way that he thinks about it, is that he's not thinking about crypto. But a meme coin would have been more effective. Well, the point that I'm going to make is that I think for,

for Baron or for Donald Trump Jr., I think the equation is very different, is that when you are the son or the child of a very, very wealthy person, what you are trying to do is not so much make money so much as buy legitimacy, right, or create legitimacy for yourself. And so I have to imagine that a lot of what has brought them here is not this idea of like, oh, I can make a quick, boom. Why is being like the 500th of a fork a form of legitimacy?

Well, I don't think they necessarily understand that. You know, it's more like, okay, I want to be a crypto entrepreneur. Crypto is cool and high status. And my dad is saying it's a big deal. And, you know, it's like a, it's one of these hot things everyone knows about. And there are these guys I met who can teach me how to make a protocol and I'll be a real entrepreneur and I'll create and defy sounds really cool. Like I don't know. I have to assume that for, you know, Barron that this sounds like starting a startup, you know, like with I have to imagine.

I mean, I feel like the name is really the thing they're selling to their dad or is like the idea that like look, look, look, we made a bank and it's called World Finance Institute or whatever like international. Yeah, because it sounds like an evil fake villain bank from the 1980s that like Pablo Escobar would like deposit illegal cash into, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It doesn't sound like a real thing. Like I feel like it's basically a meme coin with more steps and could get hacked again because Joe Finance was hacked. That's true. I think, I mean, it is in some ways similar to like the truth social SPAC thing, right? Where you get DJT, the ticker and it's trading at like billions of dollars for this, you know, that no one really uses, but it's kind of a mean stock. And so, you know, it's maybe profitable in that way. And I don't know. I think, I mean, it's also, you know, some person that you get a connection to, has your ear. And I mean, it's like the guys who made Doe Finance are the ones who are telling you it's a good idea.

It's not like they're listening to the consensus of crypto Twitter. And so, yeah, some guy tells you it's a good idea and he had something in the past. Yeah, let's roll it. I don't know. It just seemed very random. very random. I mean, the more time that I've spent over the last, you know, three, four years seeing a lot of these celebrities and how they interface with crypto, it feels very similar to this,

where they know a dude and it's always a dude. And that one dude, like, has some glancing connections in the crypto universe, but they're, they're pretty thin. And that dude is like, oh, you know, if you create an NFT, if you create a Metaverse drop, if you do a partnership with, you know, blah, blah, blah, token. It's like the new hot thing. You can get your whatever. And they generally are not plugged into like the sort of the inner ring of crypto.

It's always like some random person on the outer ring who ends up bringing, like, ushering them into crypto and giving them the idea of what to do, which is why you see so many of these celebrities have very hit or miss initial ideas about how to interface with crypto. And I have to imagine that it's probably very similar what happened here is that Barron just knew somebody who is connected to Delphine. and this Doe finance person was like, oh, you know, if I, I bet if I convince Barron to become part of this crypto project, you know, reboot of Doe Finance, then we'll really take off and we'll make him a co-founder and we'll put him on the white paper and get access to his dad.

So I don't know, this feels, this really smells like that to me, which is, I think a lot of people are trying to draw the agency from Trump. And I think that's probably a mistake. I think it's probably more somebody went in through Barron. and this is a lot more analogous to like, you know, I don't know, Katie Perry signing off to an NFT drop or some crypto protocol than thinking about, you know, Donald Trump deciding to be a party to some something in crypto. I agree, but it's also weird because he's like tweeting about it. And like I feel like the defy stuff is like the type of stuff Gensler wants to talk about and go after.

And it doesn't really make sense to me. Like, why not just go to the meme coin? It seems so much cleaner overall. I think that's a very crypto perception that like the meme coin is cleaner, right? From the outside, building a defyre protocol sounds like a real business, sounds like a job. It's like, oh, it's so good. Barron is like starting a company and he's, you know, writing code. He's got a white paper.

You know, it sounds in a way this is like reflective of the difference between the NFT, like previous cycles. You know, people talk about how this cycle feels kind of nihilistic or kind of barren because of the meme coin stuff and it's all very, you know, all this financial nihilism. This is part and parcel of that, right, is that it might be, you know, underneath all of the artifice. It might be just as much of a kind of shallow bullshit enterprise to create a, you know, an Ave fork from a hacked code base that's branded with Donald Trump's family. But it at least has the veneer of being a real thing. And in polite company, you can, you know, Barron can go around and be like, oh, no, I'm a founder. I started a company that does a blah, blah, blah. Agiazalia describes herself as a founder of mother.

You know, for all I know she is, we're not going to court that word. We're not going to mess with that bees nest. I'm just, I'm just saying, I am just saying. I don't think the meme coin is that different, especially when it's a fork of a protocol that was hacked very recently. not that long ago. And it's the 500th Ave fork. It doesn't have any unique assets and unique. Well, we don't know that yet.

Hey, we don't know that yet. We don't know that yet. It's true. It's not transferable. That's the first sign of innovation that we've seen in this space for a while. Okay. That's true.

You know, yeah. Let's wait and see. Give them, hey, the rule in venture, give founders the benefit of the doubt. I'm going to give Barron the benefit of the doubt here. All right. Well, you and me differ in our,

in our tolerance. That's funny. Usually you're the charitable one. I agree, but this just seems like a low effort rug pull. You know, like it just like reminds me if all of the BSC rugpole copy pasta lending forks of 2021, it just like it really just looks like that. So it's kind of like hard to say anything positive or feel anything positive about it. It is weird. Like in terms of being off meta that we didn't see any celebrity defy.

forks in 2020 or 2021. It was all NFTs. You know, there was not a Giazalia swap or something or anything that I can back to think of. Dude, Aesia swap, honestly, if she's listening to this, I actually think she should do that.

That would actually work for a mother. You know, because I'd be like, these were back. There have been a bunch of recent like, AMMs that like take extra fees that have come out. I'm trying to remember which, which, you know, kind of a little bit like the Frentec one.

The Frenzwan. Yeah. Yeah. Like like and I kind of feel like there's this like first party and I'm saying. And like because she has a brand that her meme coin is like reasonably well distributed, there's probably some way of actually taking advantage of the mother order flow that she kind of can uniquely drive. So I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. E. Azealia doing a defy lending protocol makes 500 times more sense than Barron. Fair enough. I think you do it. Don't forget. I said it here first. Okay. Nice. Speaking of extracting fees, another story that's been catalyzing a lot of discussion on Twitter

has been the story that Pump. Dot Fun has just passed $100 million in revenue in 217 days since its launch, making it the fastest crypto app to ever hit $100 million in revenue behind Athena, Convex, PancakeSwap, and Aeroom. So we've seen, although Pumptoffin has hit, So pumped off fun for those who don't know is a meme coin launchpad on Solana. It is by far the biggest. And it is galvanized a lot of the meme coin activity that is taking place on Solana these days. However, we've seen a pullback in the total amount of trading volume and activity on Solana.

So we've seen monthly non-vote transactions for Solana go from the month of July was the year-to-date high, which was $1.3 billion non-vote transactions. that's come down to about 480 million, so over 60% decrease in the total amount of transactions. We've also seen a decrease in the amount of meme coin trading volume happening on Solana, so it seems like might be a seasonal pullback, might be something broader about the market cycle. There was also some news that came out about an analysis

of how many folks are making money trading meme coins that are directly launched on Pump.Fund. And there was a great set of stats that show just the degree to which I think Twitter might give you a sort of bent or sort of distorted view of what's actually happening with respect to people trading meme coins. And so just to rattle off some of these stats, if you've made over a million dollars trading pump.com fund tokens, you are a top 70 trader, which is 0.2 basis points of all wallets. If you've made over $100,000, you're in the top 900 traders, which is top three basis points of all wallets. If you've made over $10,000, you're in

the top 12,000 wallets, which is 47 base points. And if you've made over $1,000, you're in the top 76,000, which is the top 3% of all wallets. So more than 60% of all wallets have lost money trading meme coins so far. So I want to stop there and just kind of get us to reflect a little bit. So we started talking about meme coins. It must have been like January or December last year that we started talking about the meme coin rally. And we've reflected at various times about how sustainable, we think the meme coin rally is. The interesting thing I have seen is that the memecoin sentiment on Twitter toward pump. Dot fund seems to have resoundingly turned negative, seemingly over the last month or so. Whereas I saw, you know, in March, April, it seemed like a lot

of the sentiment was really positive that Pump.comon was a good thing and we should have more things like this and that this is improving the crypto space. What do you guys' thoughts on Pump.comon, the memecoin cycle, and where we are in the overall life cycle of these things? I feel like Teroon's the expert here. I know about it. I know the expert. Well, you're the connoisseur of crypto today, so I feel like you got to wait a I don't know about expert, but I will say I didn't mention pumped out fun on this show

before anyone else in this show, even knew what it was. I think like this is kind of a natural cycle. Also like overall crypto volumes have been kind of weird. The market has just been overall weird, partially because I think like the equities market is also in this like bizarre rebalancing thing where like all the big. stocks are selling off and all the, you know, kind of Russell is rallying and stuff. So it sort of feels like,

A, there's not as much like new capital flow into crypto right now. Even though stable coins sort of hit an all time high, doesn't feel like there's new capital flow going into volatile assets. And yeah, I think like people are probably just like there's only so much, you know, a casino, again, you know, I think maybe I said this last time, but, you know, if you have a casino where like the players, win 10% of the time, they obviously eventually all leave. If you have a casino where players win, 25% of time, they always all leave.

But people learn this lesson and start like increasing the mechanism until you get to like 46 or whatever. There's like some kind of like empirical threshold at which people don't leave when the edge is like close enough to 50%. And I kind of think meme coins will evolve to something like that. Like in in inevitably, I think it will they'll kind of converge into like, casino territory. Now maybe because they have this sort of collectible community

aspect which maybe they can do it at like a lower vague like maybe 40% of people make money. Why do you think they will converge to that? I mean, people are going to keep trying the genius out of the bottle. People like this style of launch and

burning the keys and locking the LP and all you know like all of that stuff seems to be part of the mechanics like a video game almost, that people like that video game. So I think people are just going to improve that, and they're just going to change the payoff structure, and it's going to become closer to what sort of like the long run, equilibrium for pure speculation that people have observed.

Now, like I said, there could be some reason it deviates a bit from, you know, roulette or, you know, any of the casino games that are like far, from 50-50 or far from par and don't require skill. But my suspicion is like those games are that way because human nature has like tried games that are more sharky and less sharky. And then like we evolved to like, oh, the ones that survived like hundreds of years are these ones that are like right around that threshold for the non-skill. Like I'm not talking about poker.

I'm really talking about the pure non-skill gambling games. And it just seems like that that's been like an evolutionary thing to get to that number. Now, I'm not saying there's a theoretical justification that it's like exactly for, because it's really a behavioral psychology thing of like how much pain are people willing to tolerate on average over a large distribution of people. I think I disagree with this because meme coins, gambling on skill games is inherently unstable. Gambling on pure games of chance is very stable, right? I think you can just say, okay, you know, the odds are 46%, pull the slot machine, play

roulette, whatever it is, and you can kind of wino to that point of the laffer curve that maximizes revenue and maximize retention or whatever it is. But for games of skill, it's very difficult to control that because it's PVP, right? People are just kind of sharking each other and gobbling up each other. And you can't really stop the over-harvesting because of the fact that it's people, it's person on person and no single person is internalizing the health of the overall ecosystem. them. Only the house is doing that and the house is pumped out fun, but the house can't stop people from launching, you know, getting a new coin to launch, pumping it on social media and then dumping it

into the pot and like, and this is kind of the thing that people are pointing to, which is not that, I agree, but I sort of view it as like this type of thing where it's, it's a thing, a meme coin is like a game of skill, a game of skill in the beginning for the creator. And then it devolves into pure noise trading, right? I think that's only true if it hits escape velocity, right? But that's like Doge coin, that's Shiba. That's like some of these things that are so big. But that's not what we mean when we're talking about the, like the low-capshooters.

Yeah, exactly, low-cap shitters, right? So this is a very high-velocity game. It's one that benefits being an insider. And I think the skill set of this game has changed over time. But it's very reminiscent of what NFTs were like, where, you know, NFTs, there were new launches every single day. There were new mince every day. And in the early days, it was like really about curating taste and having some insight into, where fashion is going.

And then by the late cycle of NFTs, it was really about being an insider, knowing the whales, knowing the kind of group buying mechanics and stuff like that. But I think the difference for NFTs is just like the liquidity premium is much higher because of like the choice. It was a worse vehicle, right? Like all the things is a worse vehicle for us to play this game.

But the mechanics of the game feel very similar to me. Now that being I'm not a mean point trader or an NFT trader. But my point is I guess my point is I'm not saying that like the exact back same mechanic will continue forever. I'm saying like people will take this and like gradient descent on it. They'll like do add a little tiny different lockup schedule, different some extra lottery type of thing, some inflation curve that like goes to zero randomly.

Like there's all sorts of things you can do that turn it more into to like fairer, but like, oh, you have to lock up capital for longer type of things. And I feel like people just like, then it becomes closer to these like roll bit casino game type of. of things. And I don't world in which people don't experiment with that, it just seems like that's

a point of crypto is like, hey, I can actually make that game with 10 lines of code versus like, in the real world, it's actually annoying to actually struck that game in terms of like making a device or making a game that does that, right? I think the beauty

of crypto is that you can experiment and incrementally improve that. And I don't doubt that whether it's pumped out fund or whether it's someone else. Like people will find some new mechanic that brings a vague up so that like you don't have as much of a whatever mechanic you add leads to fewer losers and we get closer to the I'm not saying it will be the same like like again the casino phenomenology is like empirically well I'm comparing all these samples from casino games which are inherently in some ways less flexible right because I can't

like resell my roulette position but I can definitely resell my meme coin position right and so like imagine if you could play roulette and as it was turning, you suddenly got scared and you're like, I want to dump all my roulette position, right? Like, there is some nuance to the reason that it's a different, it's a different, different, different beast. But I think that there is some truth to this human nature thing. Like, if you lose too much, everyone leaves, right? Like, you do really have to get closer to fair for people to keep playing.

There's a good section in the new Nate Silver book about slot machine design. and they talk a little about this where, you know, basically people like it more in spin nefarious, but they play more on slot machines when that kind of, you know, brownie in motion plays out with more smaller payouts, even if the overall EV is the same. So instead of, hey, you know, the 1,000th person, you know, get some crazy payout, everyone else gets zero. It's like, well, you know, more frequently some doubled a percentage, you get a little bit of a payout. And most of the of zero. You got, you know, there's a single legit business and you get a little bit more. And so it's sort of like goads you into playing more. And so obviously there's a whole, you know, design

system around this. And right now, to your point around, around the VIG, it feels like sort of max extraction, it feels like you're just buying, you know, a lottery ticket. And there isn't really that sort of mini payout. So, you know, maybe there's something where it's like, oh, some of the, you know, these house winnings, this $100 million goes into occasionally, you know, buying some of the token or doing a drop or, you know, something. Or you can. Or you get inflation randomly given out. Yeah, yeah. My point is there will be, there are little mechanics you can add that can make this converge to that.

And I actually think a cool thing you can do in crypto and like, look, I'm not going to, I'm not here to try to be like, oh, like, this is revolutionizing humanity or some bullshit that some like AI startup would tell you. I'm just simply saying this is human nature. So someone will try this, which is I actually think the interesting thing about things like slot machine. machines is like they're fixed strategy, right? It's like a strategy ahead of time that the machine takes in how in its randomness and like what distribution of sampling and whatever. But you don't have to have fixed randomness in crypto, right? Like I can adjust the rules of the slot machine dynamically as people are and train a model

that's like is based on how people are interacting like, oh, I'm actually going to make the vague shrink and grow dynamically based on, you know, like, oh, we got to this market. so now do this other strategy. I think there'll be these like adaptive agent like slot machines, like meme coins will evolve to that. If the theory here is that, okay, meme coins are basically a fancy skin over a slot machine. And to the extent they diverge from slot machines

because they become these like PVP. Well, they're more dynamic. They're more group. They're like group slot machines, right? Like the group can influence the output probabilities. So it's like it is a little different. Yeah, but wouldn't that imply that like, okay, well, these things are kind of diverging because they're not stable and they result in

like this kind of over-harvesting behavior. And so really like they're kind of best when they divert back to a slot machine. You could imagine the slot machine. Yeah, but shouldn't the thesis be then like, okay, well, slot machines are already gradient dissented to be this like perfect apotheosis. No, no, there's their gradient descent to that under the assumption of static strategy. Like, it's burned into the machine. There's a fixed strategy. It's not dynamically adjusting based on multiple people interacting with it. The multi-agent nature and the fact that it has to have an upfront strategy that it can't change is different than the meme coin mechanics, where you could, you could add all of this stuff and it could dynamically adjust.

So let me take a step back. Let me take a step back because I'm not trying to get into the mechanics of how you optimally sort of harvest or don't over harvest people who are playing this game. The question I'm asking is more a phenomenological one, which is, okay, you're a user trading meme coins, right? Okay. What do you feel like you're doing? What makes it fun? What makes it attractive?

I think the answer is that you think you can make money. Memes are funny. It's just interesting to like find memes that you think you're spotting early that you're going to make money from. And my claim is that, okay, at a certain point, this game, this perception that people have, that they have alpha in this game, that they can make money in this game,

starts to degrade. And they no longer really believe that they can make money doing this, right? In the same way that people love trading stocks because, you know, you meet some random person who's a day trader and they think that like oh you know i know so i just i just think about apple and see their products and watch commercials and i'm going to trade based on that of my perception of how this thing is going to play out and of course people who do that just you know

they're just basically noise traders right they're just it's just completely random whether they're going up or down um now with meme coins it's not like that right with meme coins it's not just you're not just noise tell everyone who bought icon enterprises that for the dividend yeah okay fine I don't know if you know about the collapse of the ICON, the SEC going after him. So basically, ICON kind of ran what I would call something that looks like a meme coin, semi-ponzie scheme, which is he promised 15% dividend yield on his stock. Speaking of a crypto thing, very low-float, high FDV. I think the ratio was like 100 plus.

And he was obviously the largest owner, and he just kept borrowing against his stock. pay out the 15% dividend or like eventually that's what happened like for a while there they were cash flow generating companies but a bunch of them failed in the pandemic and so then he started doing this thing where you like borrow against the shares take the cash pay the float and then eventually that kind of thing eventually kind of blew up and you know people shorter to death and then now the SEC is going after him as of last week uh and i think like that's that's that's sort of the thing the thing here described so there's some adverse selection as well well in the stock market. I'm just saying I don't think it's for this free lunch. Like,

like, yes, there are things where, you know, there's a real dividend yield and it will continue forever or whatever. But just look at all these people having Nvidia earnings, a lunch parties and like, you know, like in Manhattan, which is like crazy. You know, like that feels a little bit like almost the meme coin thing. It's like I was there first. You know, I don't think that's like me. No, no, no. That is absolutely not like meme coins. That. Invidia are the most success. full meme asset in history. No, no, no, no. I think maybe something like Tesla is more of a meme asset

where it's like very, very heavily retail held. But Nvidia is enormous revenues. No, no, no, it's enormous. No, no, it does. It does have, it does have a huge revenue. But the way it's trading is like unreal. It looks for F or that size is unreal. I think today it lost three or four X what Solano's market cap is.

Yeah, it lost 10%. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right. It's a huge swing today. Coming back to my point, and I think let me just land a plane real quick, is I think the phenomenology of meme coins is that people think they're making money. If they no longer think they're making money, meme coins are not actually that fun as like just a slot machine with more, more, you know, stuff you have to do to pull the slot machine. And it's not as fast as the slot machine, right? Because the meme coins, they go up and down, but they don't go up and down nearly as fast as you can control yourself if you are controlling the slot machine. I think the point of the dynamic nature of the system is that people will be,

will play around with it and try to engineer it so that it has a longer half life, right? Like you add all these mechanics so that like it's fun for a longer time. It's almost like these like, in Asia, all these like game games. Who's going to do that? The question is, who's going to make that happen? Pumped out fun? Them, someone, one of those 50 teams fund, 50 other teams that they're trying to do this. A new entrepreneur.

Yeah. There's a million people doing it. this who are raising money too in case you haven't seen. Yeah, I'm just, I'm just skeptical that like when you have this group dynamic that anybody can play, like there's no single person who's the house. It's almost like making video games. It's like think about the Asian video games, especially that these like really popular games in China where like they'll get like 100 million users for three months. They'll have a huge amount of revenue and then they'll go to zero. It feels like that's a natural evolution of this type of thing. So, okay, take poker as an example,

So I was a poker player, so I understand this analogy very well. Meme coins are kind of like poker in that you have, it's PVP and the house is taking a rake, right? So, you know, Pump. Dot Fund makes money on every single shooter that launches. And, you know, right now they actually, the dex fees go to radium, but they could internalize those and have their own decks fee, right? So it really becomes kind of like a poker, a casino hosting poker games. So they make money no matter who wins. How exactly, so you can dynamically adjust the rake. You can say, okay, you know, when not a lot of people are playing, we're going to make the rake.

lower when a lot of people are playing and volatility is really high we're going to make the right higher but you can't stop the fact that like you know what you might want in a poker like the casino might want the best players at the table to go easy on the worst players at the table so the bad players the table stay for longer and they continue playing right but the casino can't can't stop the good players from doing that and you know how they can do that though as you know how they can do that is they can change like kicking out the game they can you can have to play different variations of poker based on the players that are playing you can play different games. And my point is the meme coins are moving in that direction where you're like,

you're kind of playing a different game based on who's showing up. And what's the different, what do you mean by a different game? What does a different game mean for me? The different game in this case is like, oh, like if you lock up or stake, you get some random reward or if you do this action, you know, like people are trying to add all these like half defy, half casino things to meme coins. And I'm telling you, this innovation is happening. There's no, the genies out of the bottle. Everyone is like, I see pop dot fun. No, but like a lot of a lot of there are a lot of people who just basically started by just being like we're making pumped off on clone on X, right? Like on ton or whatever, right? And those people are all promising all these new mechanics. And my point is I think someone will find a slightly different variant of this. And the same way that like there were there were sort of meme coin like things for many years in crypto that just never took off because like they didn't get the right lockup mechanic at launch. And, whatever, right? Like, I think there's going to be inevitably be innovation in this. Now, again,

I'm not going to try to be like any of these Silicon Valley asshole people who will be like, oh, yes, this is like great for humanity because we've made AI agents useful somehow. No, this is literally just to make the people play games longer. But it's not so different than optimization for like ads in some way, right? I'm like, what am I trying to do? I want retention for my users. And I think like the game mechanics that have the highest retention will be the ones that survive. But I think the difference between this in the casinos, you can change the mechanics dynamically based on how things are traded.

And that's the beauty of crypto, right? Like I can program those update rules in a way that like you can't really. I can't like change the poker rules and like still get the still get people showing up. If that makes it. That's where I think the analogy kind of breaks, right? It's not like I can dynamically update the rules of the game. Like I'm changing the game as well. Yeah, so I understand the concept and I reserve judgment that if somebody finds some of these mechanics that can dynamically, you know, change the extractiveness of a meme coin such that retail is better protected or sort of the fish are not over harvested to the same degree.

That's really interesting. And I'm curious to see how that plays out. You know, I think where we started this whole meme coin cycle, we had a conversation very similar to this. And at that time, I posited that I didn't think meme coins were a stable, like that. This meme coin carousel is not a stable equilibrium, right? And it has to eventually stop because of this PVP nature of it. In the same way, I think you see the same thing in poker is that poker is shrunk over time.

It's actually become smaller and smaller just because of the fact that poker players are getting better and better. Well, poker and solvers and all this other stuff. Yeah, but even before that, even before that, like the trend line was the same regardless before we had, you know, true game theory optimal solutions to poker, was just that people kept getting better and better. and the delta between the sophisticated players and the fish got bigger and bigger over time.

And it never reverses. Right. And a lot of what keeps the ecosystem going is the bad players attract the better players. And you sort of have this pyramid, this sort of food pyramid that defines. All I will tell you is when I was working in market making, that was literally all you talk about. Right. Like you're always trying to measure like who's a trader who like who has no edge so that you can like adjust your your order book placement so that like they face. average selection. I don't think that, I think that's like an inherent thing that will happen.

I think the question is how close to 50-50 do you get? How close, like, you know, if you can get, like, you know, the perfectly fair thing is 50-50, right? But in trading, right, the point is in trading in market-making, market-making is profitable even if there's no, you know, sort of, you don't need fish or like, you know, bad trading firms in order for marketing be profitable. You do need noise traders. You do need noise traders. Yes, you do need noise traders. There's too many market Well, what are the noise shares? Yes. Well, no, they're not fish.

They're not necessarily stupid. They can be fish, right? But they don't have to be fish. I mean, sure. Like, if it's a T-WOP algorithm that adds noise, that's still a fish. Like, you're scraping yield from them. Like, there is fundamentally some sense in which there has to be different. They're getting value on the other side, is my point.

Right. There's nobody who's, there's nobody who's net negative in terms of value. That doesn't have to be. But my point is, like, imagine if the meme coin has, some real dividend yield. It wasn't just like, you know. I think it's too early to say if meme coin trading is a game of skill or a game of chance, like, you know, we have a very small sample size of profitable traders. It's like saying these are the professional slot players. You know, we should, we should try to get

Nate Silver as a guest to ask him to grill him on where he puts meme coins on that spectrum. Well, we do know, I mean, we can tell very easily, just do a cohort analysis, look at the memecoin traders on a weekly basis and see how often they're up. Sure. But I guess like the question of whether it will evolve to that, right? Because like we're basically trying to ask this more epistemological question of like, can you even design this, does there exist a game that is sustainable but has like, you know, it doesn't have this kind of like pure, the win rate, the loss rate of like a meme coin. Right. And it's like, it seems kind of inevitable to me you'll find those in the same way that they're like all these dead casino games that like people don't play anymore because they were like two one sided.

How is that not going to happen here too? Right. Like someone's going to improve it. And the market knows there's a lot of money if you can improve it now. Right. Like there's been proof of concept. So there's going to be a ton of shots taken on goal on this. And there already are a lot of entrepreneurs doing this. Like it is. It is. Right. Well, we should also be clear. We should also be clear. I think it's worth reiterating this, that like the sort of, you know, the low liquidity shitters that people are trading on Solana is a relatively small part of the meme corn market, right? Most of the meme corn market is Doge and Shiba and, you know, bong and whiff and yeah, exactly. And most of these are traded on centralized exchanges. They're not traded on chain. And they do much more volume than what you see, you know, making $100 million over the course of a year for pumped out fund is nothing compared to what finance is making, right? Now, of course, most of finance is not meme coins, but still. So I want to

clarify that that part of the meme coin market is very real and very sustainable and doesn't have any of the problems that we're pointing to with respect to this, you know, meme coins showing up overnight. So what I'm not predicting is that meme coins will go away. I think that's definitely not true. But I think the velocity with which we're seeing meme coins and meme coin trading as a pastime. I think there will be some new mechanic will inevitably happen for launching these. And then you will have this. Whiff was once a low-cap shitter. You know, you don't know if the, yeah.

Yes. Yes. Yes, it was. It was. But the question is, like, what was happening with NFTs, right? I think it's pretty clear that what was happening with NFTs and what was happening with, what's happening now with meme coins isomorphic. It's just, you know, a different mechanism to trade the same thing.

Or to play the same game, but with a different mechanism, I should say. I agree with you that that underlying, the underlying shape is probably not going to change. the veneer that we put over it is probably going to change. But I think there is a, there's a natural life cycle to these games. And it feels like the meme coin trading game is getting later in the life cycle. I don't think it's near the end. I think it's going to be a while before we're like done done

in the way that we're now done with NFT minutes. But it feels like we're probably, let's say, three-fourths in to that game, would be my guess. Yeah. Look, I'm not trying to disagree. that there might be a half life for this current version of it. But I'm just saying I'm sure there will be another one. Like there's nothing, there's nothing more.

Yeah, I agree with that. I agree with that. Yeah. I agree with that. And I think the reason why there will be another one is that there will be a new set of people who get super rich who don't actually have a lot of skill. Like in the beginning, the people who end up buying dog coins super, super early are just people who like, ah, I like dog coins.

And they're not these extremely strategic, extremely smart, extremely capitalistic people who end up coming into the late cycle. We're now in the late part of the mean coin cycle. And the people who are making money now are just like these, you know, like the guy, Sahil who launched all these celebrity coins, right? It's those kinds of people who are overwhelmingly profiting in the late part of the cycle. And that's when you get all this discontent and you get all this malaise and you get all this sense that, you know, oh, now that pumped up fund has made $100 million instead of $50 million, and now it's extracted.

To your point earlier, just like I feel like you're drawing this dichotomy between like, docs and this as like not having these like credit cycles. But I think the meme coin and NFT thing just remind me of like classic credit bubble cycles where like whoever was the first one to get the most leverage and bet it all on one thing without much skill, but they they happen to grow that way is then able to like reinvest that 20 times. And then it causes all these other people to follow and then it becomes more sophisticated. But then oh, oops, there's not much liquidity. the story of the financial crisis is like a great version of this.

And I kind of feel like there's always these kind of cyclic bubbles. It's just that in crypto, they have this very short half-life. I agree. Yeah, so I agree. There are bubbles everywhere. The question is like, how foreseeable is it that this bubble will eventually blow up? And I think the... I think the second law of thermodynamics guarantees you that every bubble eventually blows up.

The question is this doesn't blow up in a human life. Yeah, yeah, okay, fine. Well, no, I mean, hey, yeah, economy. Could be longer. Could be much longer, you know. Exactly. So, okay, how foreseeable within some time span that this thing will blow it, right?

So, like, okay, the credit bubble and like the real estate bubble, one could have seen, like, maybe they will blow up at some point, but obviously a lot of people thought that, maybe this is a thought experiment for 20 years. Who's the person who you would say blew up or lost the most in NFTs? Like, they, like, put a ton of capital in a, And then like, I guess story night. I know there are a few ventral funds that bought loot. Yeah, Starry Night.

There were bunch of Venture funds that bought loot, if you guys remember that one. But, but like, I don't, all the ones that did that, it doesn't matter. Like, I'm just more like, the one. I'm talking about like the whole, yeah, yeah. Like, Starry Night is a potentially a good one. So then I have a similar question for you about meme coins. Who is going to be the person who is stuck holding the two mod, like they like over levered themselves and like they're kind of stuck.

That's the thing is I actually I don't. Here's part of the reason why I recoil so much from meme coins is that I think all those funds are going to see it coming. And I think they're going to get out of meme coins before the cycle really comes to a true close. Like I think for NFTs, I think a lot of the funds actually did end up holding like these I think a lot of them still have their fucking loot or whatever. But I think for meme coins, I think there's just a lot more. open eyes about what's really going on here and the extent to which this is a, you know, deep secular change in the overall financial firmament.

I don't know. There's a lot of, you know, VC thought leadership posts about how, you know, meme coins are building communities and it's like, you know, the new,

and a new form of capital formation. And I'm like, you're not reading FarkCaster. Yeah, but that was all three months ago. You're not reading Farkaster enough. Nobody's saying that now. You have a lot of haters on FarkCAP.

for your commentary on meme coins. And in particular, they are venture fund GPs. So, like, I highly recommend you check that out. But there are, no, no, there is, there are the, there are the apologists. And I would say that in the same way, I'm sure someone is sitting on a lot of something like DGN and is like, oops, I don't know. How's DGent doing? How's DGent doing?

Actually, I have no idea. It's a great question. I haven't even looked. Honestly, I stopped. My forecaster stopped getting spammed with all this like $5 million. and people being like... Are you still active on a podcast? I try to use it like a few times a week,

but it's not like Twitter. Yeah, I guess D-Gen from the peak, peak was like five cents. It's now like 0.3 cents, so... Point three. So it's down... What would that make it? 96?

Yeah. Okay. It's down 96%. Okay, so I don't know. It kind of sounds like I'm right about this at least. Although I know one confirmation got in very, very cheap. so maybe they're still in the money. Look, I'm just pointing out that like, hey, look, there's, there's kind of someone is holding

someone is holding a game coin back. This is not a good vindication for your point, but okay, I'll take that. No, no, I'm just saying that every credit bubble, there is a, you know, there is someone who is the, they kind of stuck with over leverage slash can't get out of assets, right? And like, I'm kind of curious who the meme coin equivalent will be. Because the meme coins are kind of funny. They had this very credit bubble like behavior, but they had no credit. There was no like direct leverage in them, right?

Like, okay, people might have been barring against Seoul and taking leverage on soul, but there wasn't like direct leverage. But the leverage came from the fact that the number of assets just grew faster than the amount of capital. And it sort of felt like there was like this money creation event that's a little bit like the money multiplier effect you get with leverage. And so I feel like that's an actually interesting. up thing that like people I own on it's like kind of a weird credit bubble whereas with nfts i feel

like people were actually taking real leverage like like genesis was lending against crypto punctures and shit right so it's like people were actually getting real leverage but the meme coin stuff didn't and interest rates were zero percent so yeah yeah but but also like lenders were taking NFCs as collateral left and right right all the way ironically like doge is better collateral than any nfts ever was right for sure for remarkably strong the thing the thing is, and this is something I remember someone was saying to me once, was like, there's some tax advantage to barring against NFT versus barring against liquid token in terms of like how you compute your basis. And I didn't really understand this, but like, of course, this person

blew up. So I think that's like kind of funny. Yes, yes. Okay, I understand why. Because if you buy an NFT early, you don't, you can't, you don't market to the floor price. That's like not a thing. You market to the last sale. And the last sale was like, you bought it super super, were early. Yeah, there's something very weird about the marking. But like, okay, well, clearly all those people who thought they're really smart doing that all blew up because like none of them could figure out to correctly make loans. But my point is the NFT thing had this leverage credit cycle, financial crisis bubble type thing. But the meme coin thing really didn't. So it's like whoever is the dead body, like had to have uniquely found a way to commit supuku. You know, it was like a unique

form of death. Right. Well, the thing also, about the NFT market, or sorry, the meme coin market is that there are so many more people playing the meme coin game with very small amounts of money. That was just not possible with the NFT market, right? The NFT market, the cost to play was just so high. A comparison that I haven't seen and would love to actually either see or do is like comparing the total number of NFT collections and mints to the total number of meme coins and like getting an idea of like like velocity, money velocity for both of them or like something. Because like I feel like in my intuition, which could be wrong, is that there actually were

way more meme coins than that. NFT collections. Oh, undoubtedly, because like it only requires a one thousand. But like how much, how much, how much more? How much more? You know, that's, I guess it's mine. But I mean, almost certainly many, many more traders for meme coins than NFTs. I think if you look at the stats on OpenC, what's it like a million total people who've

ever traded NFTs, something like that? I think it's rough order of magnitude. Whereas from Memecoin, it's almost certainly like more than 30 million, I would guess. And I mean, including centralized venues. I guess on chain probably on the order of 5 to 10 million, be my guess. I don't know. I'm just kind of throwing a number in the air. I think isn't Dosecoin like the second most profitable currency on Robin Hood for their crypto product?

Yeah, so it's like, yeah. Yeah. So, okay, we're running up on time. I took some questions from Twitter to see what people want to talk about. And I think having... We're going to do rapid fire? Rapid fire. No, no, no, no.

I just want to do one because I think it's apropos of us spending a lot of time talking about Pump.combe. Because I think Pump.comte's in general, they give people kind of fatigue about the cycle and about the kind of cynicism and lack of morale that we're seeing. I don't think ever... I think there's a spectrum of opinions, but I do think the loudest voices on crypto Twitter are like that. Yes.

And so one of the questions we got actually from intern at Monad was, what is something that you're looking forward to in crypto over the next couple of years? And I think it's also important on the show that we try to also give the other side of what's happening in crypto, which is that it's not all this kind of nihilistic, short-termist gambling, but there's a lot of important stuff happening in the space.

So I want to end the show on that note, and we'll go around real quick, something you're looking forward to in the next couple of years, Tom, we'll start with you. I'm going to try to pick something that isn't obvious because I feel like that people always say stable coins or something when they're going to say this. I've been really piled on ZKTLS over the past few months. I've been playing around with like TLS notary and stuff. And it's super cool. I think in part because it fits this ZKTLS lets you verify components of a web response, which uses TLS, and then take that proof on chain. So for example, there's a product.

ZKP to P, which lets you prove that you paid someone on Venmo to do sort of this decentralized on ramping, off ramping kind of thing. Super cool. The thing here that I like is, I think right now when you talk about applications in crypto, vis-a-vis web 2, it's always, well, Web2 company is going to do everything on chain or they're going to move everything in the chain. I'm like, I don't think that's going to happen. That seems very unrealistic. Or two, we're going to build Airbnb on chain. I also think that's very unrealistic. I think these models, ZK. K-TLS allows you to busy bridge the two of allowing crypto to interact with the web in some way, but doing it in a way that is sort of bootstrapping or sort of glomming on to this stuff that's already happening on the internet.

And so I think that's super cool and it's obviously still in development, but I've been really excited about some of the applications that are building in that space. Cool. Turin, what's yours? I think mine probably is a kind of expansion on the theme I was saying earlier, which is like, despite, you know, that application being for meme coins, although I think that for all the people who have raised money for doing all this agent stuff in crypto, like that is actually a viable business versus, you know, whatever highfalutin thing, 90% of people say. But I do actually think this idea of like, crypto systems provide you, A, a common substrate, B, I can verify, everyone can verify some subset of facts is the same. And C, you can kind of have dynamic rules that can get updated by the collective interacting with it.

And so the idea of these systems where in the normal world, especially the normal financial world, the rules of the game are static, but the players can have dynamic strategies. I think one beautiful thing about crypto is you can actually have the game change at the same time as the players change the strategy. So it's like imagine playing chess and like as you're playing chess somehow like, you can remove one piece from the board and now all of a sudden there's a hole in the board and you have to avoid that piece. And a lot of like financial applications are inherently like this, right?

like a lot of whenever there's a regime shift in finance, that's the same thing as like someone poking a hole in the chessboard and saying, oh, you can't use that spot anymore. But I kind of think that they're the idea that the contracts themselves are smarter and can kind of like adjust the rules dynamically. You know, we're starting to get there. And some of it is, you know, ZKAT co-processing type of stuff. Some of it is things like restaking where there's like,

you can do off-chain stuff and prove it correctly, which is sort of a way of doing that. But this general idea of these dynamic games where not only are the players changing their strategies, but the board is changing, is actually really interesting to me. And I feel like you can't really do that in other parts of society very well. The idea of the rules changing due to how the players are interacting

in the centralized setting, no centralized ND would ever really let you do that. They want to choose the rules for their game, right? And, you know, it's a very abstract answer, but the reason I kind of bring it up is a lot of these things that actually grow in terms of usage in crypto have this structure. And so like really like whether it's meme coins, whether it's NFTs, whether it's sort of like, sort of some of the kind of like

how certain L1 ecosystems are able to bootstrap themselves. That's sort of again, this like kind of multiplayer game where like the rules are changing based on what contracts enter the ecosystem. There's sort of this, if you take that lens of viewing the world, there's clearly a lot of cooperation problems that can be solved if you can automate that part of like the rules changing.

Right now we're in the part of crypto that's like I write the smart contract and that's like a fixed strategy. It's like the slot machine that like doesn't change its rules. And, and you know, of course you can have oracles and stuff that give you input that let you change the rules a little bit. But I think with like a lot of the advanced cryptography, a lot of things like resaking, you can now have the rules change and be very confident in the safety of that. And that is a very new set of interactions that you can have.

Okay. Well, my answer to this question, I think is a little more basic than, for both of you. I'm reminded of this something that I can't remember who there's some physicists who said in the early 20th century that quantum physics

was a 21st century science that fell by accident into the 20th century. And in a way, it was sort of too early for the ideas of quantum mechanics to be fully understood and incorporated into physics. And I feel in some way

the same is kind of true of blockchains is that, you know, Blockchain was invented in 2008, but in a way, 2008 was too early for all the things that needed to come together for blockchains to get fully integrated into society. And part of it, of course, is, I think, the rise of the changing attitudes towards governments and toward and geopolitics. Part of it is also the fact that digital natives are now becoming more and more a part of the part of the sort of seats of power within society and the spenders in the world.

the world is becoming more interconnected. And of course, we just saw, you know, very recently, you know, Coinbase kind of demonstrate this thing about AIs paying other AIs using crypto. We're going to move increasingly over the next couple decades toward a world that's intermediate more and more by AIs and less by human beings and, you know, paper currency is going to become kind of outdated and irrelevant to the way that most economic... Hey, the U.S. is talking about getting rid of the penny, which is a big deal. Yes, yes, that's right. That's right.

And of course, you know, India has completely... moved away from cash. So I think the, in a way, like, the thing that makes me bullish and the thing that I'm most excited about is not any particular technology. I think almost everything in crypto, you know, the meme coins aside, I've been kind of bearish on new coins. But almost everything in crypto, I'm by and large bullish on, and I do think is going to happen in one form or another.

But I think the biggest thing that makes it all happen is just time. It's just like people who are old and resistant to the ideas behind crypto and who grew up in a very different kind of world than the world in which crypto matters, just kind of aging out and losing relevance and losing the ability to veto this stuff. And the people who are younger and are gaining in power,

for them, crypto just being kind of obvious or something that they have much more curiosity and openness about. And those people, the longer you wait, the more and more they're going to sit in the centers of power, and they're going to be able to make the decisions that, you know, okay, yes,

Black Rock says yes, and Goldman Sachs says yes, but Vanguard says no. And eventually someone's going to step into the helmet vanguard and say, actually, yeah, of course. Of course crypto should be part of this financial platform. And the same with JP Morgan. And the same with more and more of the centers of power are going to, in almost a very boring kind of way, just dutifully step aside and say, ah, yes, of course, crypto should be incorporated into the overall economy. And that's one of the reasons why

I think as a venture capitalist less than as a trader. As a trader, you've got to know when that's going to happen. And I can see why there's a lot of anxiety about, oh, well, you know, is it going to happen this year, is it going to happen tomorrow? Is it going to happen this month? But as a venture capitalist, the question I have to answer is, is that going to happen over the next five to 10 years? And I think the answer that we've seen this year is like very obviously, yes. We're seeing it happen right in front of us with regulation and, you know, the political attitudes in the U.S. and, you know, whatever you think about, you know, Trump versus Kamala, it's very clear that both sides have moved closer to the crypto side over the last year. So how many, how many candidates who

were funded by Fair Shake were, it was like some very high number, right? Like of like the number of candidates that won their primaries or whatever. Who were funded by Fairshake? Yeah. I don't know what that. I saw, I saw some number today that was like in the 30s out of 42 or something like that. So it's like it was like at least like 70, 75%. So like I feel like that, you know, that's definitely a lot of work. That's yeah. Yeah. And Keep up the good work. Everybody who's, you know, Coinbase, Ripple,

everybody who's donating to Freshick Pack, A6 and Z. Goodos to you guys for helping, you know, push all this forward. Anyway, all right, we're up on time. We've got to wrap, but we'll be back next week.

Hopefully, I think actually next week we'll be doing a show, or no, week after next, we'll be doing shows live from Token 2049. So for those of you who are in Singapore,

please come join us. Or if you're not planning to come to Singapore, it should come out. It's going to be a lot of fun. Until then. Thank you.