ROLLUP: Milei’s Memecoin Scandal | KAITO Airdrop | The Fed’s QT Pivot? | Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade

This week’s Weekly Rollup, David and Kain Warwick dive into Argentine President Milei’s LIBRA fiasco and Strategy’s bold $2B Bitcoin play, while we check out the new Kaito airdrop making waves. We also explore Ethereum’s biggest upgrade yet—Pectra—plus Monad’s high‐speed L1 testnet launch. Finally, we dig into the SEC’s fresh “CETU” cyber unit and what the brand‐new Infinex platform means for DeFi. Tune in for all the drama and alpha happening in the third week of February! ------ 📣RESERVE | INVEST IN CRYPTO NARRATIVES https://bankless.cc/reserve ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo 🦋MORPHO | CRYPTO-BACKED LOANS https://bankless.cc/Morpho 🏦ONDO | INSTITUTIONAL GRADE FINANCE https://bankless.cc/Ondo ----- ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/38 ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro, Libra, Memecoins, & ICOs https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1890611964994363769 https://dexscreener.com/solana/bzzmnvfm7t6zsgfelxzermrxfkanldo4fszvsisxcszz https://x.com/bubblemaps/status/1890531084221182326 https://x.com/JMilei/status/1890606683291779195 https://x.com/KelsierVentures/status/1890914579493863532 https://x.com/MemeCoin_Track/status/1892324967196569675 https://x.com/JupiterExchange/status/1891181433588470052 https://x.com/hellochow/status/1891341548115149190 https://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1891285564713836830 https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1890611982320971992 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-18/argentina-scandal-fuels-selloff-on-favorite-memecoin-platform https://x.com/RunnerXBT/status/1891400277535703389 https://polymarket.com/event/milei-out-as-president-of-argentina-in-2025?tid=1740070784399 29:59 Markets https://www.strategy.com/press/strategy-announces-proposed-private-offering-of-2b-of-convertible-senior-notes_02-18-2025 38:51 Kaito Airdrop https://yaps.kaito.ai/ https://x.com/KaitoAI/status/1890379872280682548 https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/kaito https://x.com/divine_economy/status/1892597817434145113 https://x.com/smyyguy/status/1892585101873033380 53:16 Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1890534315148132521 1:00:21 Monad launched a public testnet https://x.com/monad_xyz/status/1892227817149997212 1:00:47 SEC Launches New Cyber Unit ‘CETU’ Aims to Protect From Bad Actors https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-42 1:06:52 Infinex https://x.com/infinex_app/status/1887028112099283198 1:11:29 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up where we cover the weekly news, drama, and developments in the crypto space. This is the third week of February today on the show. I have the pleasure of being joined by Kane Warwick. Kane, how you doing, my man?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Just got off a flight from Hong Kong, so it should be fun.

• 0:18David Hoffman?

  It was a messy week. Are you sure you are ready to go through the messy-ass week of news that I have for you?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Always ready. Always ready.

• 0:26David Hoffman?

  Okay, Kane, where were you when Javier Millay dropped the Libra meme coin?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  It was just before I headed off to Hong Kong, so...

• 0:38David Hoffman?

  Did you buy?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  I didn't buy it. You know, it's funny, like, I had that whole thread about Trump and just being, like, washed on the trenches and not having enough energy to deal with it. And I saw it and I was just like, I'm too tired. I can't handle this.

• 0:57David Hoffman?

  Too many loops down the roller coaster. Okay, so I'm gonna go through, there is a ton of things that happened as a result of the fallout of Javier Millay. I have like 20 links in front of me to go through it all. And so Kane, maybe just like, sit back and relax while I like run through some of the facts, and then we'll kind of debrief about all of it at the very end. So, on Valentine's Day, at 5:01 PM Eastern Time, Javier Millay tweets out this tweet saying, "Argentina grows. This project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups, drops a Solana contract address. The name of this project," in quotes, "is

• 1:37David Hoffman?

  called VivaLiberdadproject.com, ticker Libra, and then a Solana contract address." And so if you bought this on Valentine's Day, congratulations, you are a true crypto bro. The Libra token immediately launched at something like a $2.5 billion valuation, and then it jumped up to $5 billion within 30 minutes. And then about, from 90 minutes from launch, it was down to $30 million. So, inside of 90 minutes from launch, it went up to $5.5 billion. And then down to less than half a billion dollars. Already people's just like warning signs were triggered with this Libra launch.

• 2:19David Hoffman?

  Eighty-two percent of the Libra token were held in one cluster of wallets that spawned the Libra token. Also, no tokenomics were shared, unlike the Trump token, no tokenomics were shared, just the president of Argentina tweeting out this Solana contract address. And so people's people's like warning signs were all ready firing, but then I guess it doesn't really matter because the thing had already dumped inside of 90 minutes.

• 2:44David Hoffman?

  There was another tweet from Javier Malat saying, "A few hours ago, I posted a tweet, like I have so many countless times, supporting a supposed private projects, which I obviously have no connection to." He has since deleted the tweet and finishes the tweet with, "To the filthy rats of the political castle who want to take advantage of this situation to do harm. I want to say that every day they confirm how lowly politicians are, they increase our conviction to kick them out in the R's." This is just day one. There is this individual that arises on this scene named Hayden Davis from something called Kelsier Ventures, who I don't think anyone had ever heard of before. Kane, before this, have you heard of Kelsier Ventures?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  No, it's weird. Like I, I'm in a lot of chats and, and you know, there's different cabals that have been mentioned, but these guys never came up to the best of my knowledge.

• 3:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. And this individual Hayden, not Hayden Adams, very strictly not Hayden Adams.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I was about to say, you're, you're using his full name. How much did Hayden Adams pay you?

• 3:50David Hoffman?

  To use his full name. Second Hayden that I've ever come across in crypto. First one, Hayden Adams of Uniswap, great guy. Hayden Davies, who is supposedly behind this Trump meme coin, along with Kelsier Ventures, puts out this statement about trying to explain what just happened. And it's kind of a mess of an explanation. He puts a lot of blame upon snipers, sniper bots that were going to come and snipe the supply. And then later also Hayden went on a Coffeezilla interview. If you do not who know who Coffeezilla is, he is this YouTuber who kind of just exposes scams across the world and very frequently comes into the crypto space because we tend to produce a lot of scams.

• 4:31David Hoffman?

  Uh, and so we invoked Coffeezilla. Coffeezilla posted an hour and a half long interview with this Hayden individual where Hayden admitted that he sniped, Kelsey or Ventures sniped the Libra supply ahead of to get to front run actual snipers.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe not the best tactical decision, uh, in, in this whole, uh, mess to go on Coffeezilla. Maybe, maybe, maybe not as well thought out as, uh, as you know, this criminal mastermind, uh, uh, we thought he was, but here we are.

• 5:06David Hoffman?

  It does seem very much like an SBF post FTX, like publicity tour.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Just meltdown.

• 5:11David Hoffman?

  The, the man just does not comprehend at all that he just might be in at least a little bit of legal trouble.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:17David Hoffman?

  He thinks he's good.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Just crashing out, completely crashing out.

• 5:21David Hoffman?

  Completely crashing out. Yeah. Um, it doesn't stop with Hayden though, who somehow, uh, we will reveal shortly here, uh, got the, uh, got Javier Malay to tweet out this tweet. So we'll, we'll talk about how he actually got that to happen. But there's also something as we're talking about in this whole complex is Jupiter and Meteora. Um, the Meow, who is the founder of Jupiter, it's not his actual name, uh, had to put out the statement saying, hey, uh, their, uh, early employees of Jupiter were seen trading the, uh, Libra token, but Jupiter had nothing to do, uh, with, uh, the launch of this token. Uh, we had no employees that had any insider information. So he had to put out the statement that Jupiter and nobody in the Jupiter, uh, orbit really had any sort of insider knowledge.

• 6:05David Hoffman?

  Uh, Meow, again, founder of Jupiter, had founded this thing called Meteora, which is kind of like, um, uh, a more sophisticated AMM with a bunch of levers and gadgets and dials to really kind of be able to tweak, um, uh, a, a Dexon Solana. Uh, and Meteora does not have the same level of deniability. So there's Ben Chow from Meteora who has since stepped it down, who also. Tried to distance himself from this Libra launch. But as it turns out, there is this association between Meteora and Hayden Davies Davis that has been ongoing. So not just the Libra token, but also the M3 M3 token, which I think stands for meme, which is related to the Meteor token.

• 6:50David Hoffman?

  Is the meme coin that was launched on Meteora as well as, as we find out, the Melania token. So the Melania token Hayden admits to once again on the on the Coffeezilla interview that he was also a part of the Melania token launch. And so we have this one individual who is finding ways to reach out to people of influence and convince them that it's a great idea to launch a token. And then they get referred to Meteora as kind of this technical service provider. There's the idea out there that it's actually Meteora who's trying to snipe the supply ahead of Hayden Davies. And so it's actually Ben Chow or is somebody in the Meteor orbit

• 7:31David Hoffman?

  who's actually doing the sniping and is actually Hayden Davies and Meteora that's going head to head to try and snipe the supply of this meme coin that is being tweeted out by Javier Malay. Now, it's worth noting how this individual Hayden Davies, who is a United States citizen, lives in LA, got access to Javier Malay. And it's reported that Hayden Davies found a way to reach out to Javier Malay's sister and wrote messages that have been turned into screenshots on Twitter that say that to the to the effect that he sends her money and that he that she is in her total control. And through Javier's sister, he is able to gain access to Javier,

• 8:14David Hoffman?

  which is how a tweet coming out of the president of Argentina had a Solana contract address in it. This, I think, Kane, I have a take for you. This is not nearly as bad as FTX, but this is the worst thing in the crypto industry since FTX. How do you, how do you like that take?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  It's the worst thing this year so far, I would say.

• 8:37David Hoffman?

  It's February, bro.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  I know, right? I know. It's dark times. So I think the interesting thing about this is this is not a singular event or news story, right? Like, this is something like FTX that was bubbling under the surface for a long time, right? Maybe not as long as FTX, but I think the thing about FTX was it really undermined your view of reality, right? Like, I had conversations with SBF where I was like, where's, you know, on Twitter, like, where are you pulling this yield farming money from? And it was like, oh, it's Alameda. And so, you know, all of a sudden, you had to question your perception of all the things that had happened, right? And I think this is one of those things where a lot of people in

• 9:23Speaker 01

  the space have been like, okay, it's a, you know, there's obviously these different cabals doing crimes and, you know, they're manipulating launches and they're bribing people to do, you know, token launches. But the idea that there was, you know, one puppet monster in the background controlling this whole thing that no one had ever heard of is like so wild. It's really, you know, and then all of a sudden you go, okay, well, who, if they're able to compromise this person, who else did they compromise? And so there's this kind of unwinding of a lot of stuff that's happened. And now you've got a singular thread that runs through it all. And I think that's been kind of the wildest part of the story is that there's just this crackhead guy running around, you know, bribing and

• 10:07Speaker 01

  manipulating people and taking advantage of different platforms and teams and, you know, it's insane that someone was able to get that much control and influence without anyone really knowing that this was going on.

• 10:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I would be curious to know, and I think we're going to find out because I'm going to go ahead and guess that there's already active investigations going on to the man is a, is a, lives in, he resides in LA, he resides in Los Angeles, he's on shore. And people lost a lot of money with this. Dave Portnoy was paid tokens ahead of Launch was paid tokens, Libra tokens by Hayden Davis to promote the Libra, the Libra coin when it came out. Dave Portnoy returned those tokens, saying that he, because Hayden requested Dave to not tell anyone that he was going to promote the Libra coin. And so Dave returned those 6 million coins, which I don't know what the total value was, but millions of dollars.

• 11:05David Hoffman?

  But Dave had insider information and so therefore he bought the token thinking that he was going to buy early. And I think many people bought the token 5, 10, 15 minutes into the launch and they all ended up down. Because there are these very early snipers that were trying to snipe the supply. And when the initial valuation of the thing comes out at $2.5 billion, then everyone's going to lose. Dave Portnoy was refunded his money that he lost by Hayden Davis, the tune of $5 million. And now everyone is very upset that Dave Portnoy is getting a freebie return on his capital that he risked. After calling like the crypto trader bros, like a bunch of crybabies, which I think is quite ironic.

• 11:47David Hoffman?

  And I do agree with you Kane, that like, I think this was, what we are really seeing here is the exposing of the industrialization of the meme coin launch.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:57David Hoffman?

  And it was absolutely going to get worse every single time Hayden Davis and this structure of incentives between Meteora and other morally compromised individuals. If that was allowed to grow, it would have just gotten worse and worse and worse. It was just so happened that when the president of Argentina launched a coin and the incentives collapsed between Meteora and Hayden Davis, that everyone realizes the gig was up. And so what started off as like a relatively fair, fun casino of meme coin launches. That was a reaction to the high F D V, low float meta, actually turned into having something with like no rules, no regulations, no guardrails. And once again, the grifters come in, figure out how to game the system and blow it up for the rest of us.

• 12:41David Hoffman?

  And this is a pattern that we've seen in crypto time and time again.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the most interesting thing to me, even, you know, being on this show today and seeing the process of kind of unwinding this and how many people are looking into it is like, if this had been going on and we had the level of, you know, kind of.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  Vetting of people and investigative, you know, process that's going on now. 2018 would have been a very different place, right? You know, 2018 ICOs, it was crime central. You had these guys in Singapore running ICO mills. You know, I met some of them, like when I was in Singapore, someone was like, oh, you gotta meet these guys. And I turned up to this office and I was like, you know, what are you guys doing? And they're like, oh, we got a bunch of projects and, you know, they basically would just find a team of like 20 year old kids and write a white paper for them, do their tokenomics, go and, you know,

• 13:40Speaker 01

  find a couple of syndicates to like, start, you know, basically buying up the tokens in pre-sales. Then they would just flip them. They would get a bunch of the supply, five, 10, 15, 20% of the supply and just flip it and just dump it straight into into the market after they got listed on, you know, whatever exchange, right? So, as you say, this is the story that's very, you know, very old in crypto, right? You know, grifters will turn up and exploit the permissionless and, you know, low barriers to entry that we have in crypto to just extract value. This, what, what is interesting to me is just how quickly it all happened.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  You know, you go from meme coins, like 2023, you know, through like, this is basically a thing that happened in the space of a year. You know, that, that this all became industrialized and, and, you know, a few, a few players gained enough market share in, in grift launches, right? To basically become monopolists.

• 14:47David Hoffman?

  What, what do you think about just like the level of inherent griftiness in the meme coin vertical as a whole? Because the ICOs, I was very pilled by ICOs because I was young and naive and that's what happens when you come into crypto. And now I look back, I'm like, okay, that was actually just a bunch of just grift happening. Same thing concluded with even with DeFi summer where we end up with 10,000% APY. DeFi pool twos, same thing with NFTs, like the Azuki, like elementals mint, I think everyone kind of felt like jumped the shark. This is how all of these metas end. And then there was like this interest of conversations of people talking on crypto Twitter about like, well, you know, let's, let's rank all of these metas in terms of griftiness and talk about which, which ones were better.

• 15:31David Hoffman?

  And I think this was a tweet that really rocketed around the Twitter sphere from Anatoly from Solana, who said, "DeFi summer was way worse. Leveraged loops that created nasty house of cards. There's virtually no contagion in meme coins." The Ethereum community, and I think the broader crypto community did not like this take, but what like, what's your take on like how grifty meme coins are and how you like, think about these things?

• 15:51Speaker 01

  So it's funny. I mean, like that tweet is one of the most retarded things I've ever seen, right? Like it just is, right? And, you know, like I love Toly, he's, he's a very smart guy, but the, the interesting thing about that tweet, and you know, this is from a person who's tweeted some retarded stuff themselves, right? Like I'm, I'm not immune to this, right? That was coming from a place and, and you know, Toly said this later, he was triggered by the fact that you had a bunch of DeFi people and ETH maxies pointing fingers at, at, you know, Solana saying it's a crime chain. And he's like, guys, like, no, this is not fair. Like you've just whitewashed history and pretended like this is all flowers and rainbows and DeFi summer.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  And, and you know, he didn't even go back to ICOs, right? Like ignore DeFi for a second. The ICOs were, were, you know, just as bad, if not worse than, than meme coins. Because the interesting thing about meme coins is, okay, you know, these guys pulled out 100 mil, right? You know, this Hayden, Hayden Davis guy pulled out 100 mil. You know, then you look at like Meteora and, you know, people added it up. Let's say it was like 3 billion, like the EOS ICO was $4 billion. Right? Like, you know, there were, there were so many 50, 100, 150 million dollar ICOs in 2018 that just like evaporated, right? So, um, you know, in terms of the scale of money at that time in the industry as well, 150 million dollar ICO was like, you know,

• 17:15Speaker 01

  1% of the market cap of Ethereum or something like that, right? Like it's, you know, we're talking. An insane amount of money relative to everything else. And I think one of the reasons why meme coins were not as bad as they could have been is most of the rugs happened pre-exchange listing, right? The exchange actually did a pretty good job of vetting coins and, you know, as this accelerated and it was like 90 minutes between launch and rug, right? You know, the liquidity that was actually in these pools was far lower, right? Like if you, if you start an ICO, people put $150 million worth of ETH into the ICO

• 17:58Speaker 01

  and you walk away, that's $150 million gone, right? You could have a meme coin that has like $2 million with the liquidity and a $2 billion market cap and, you know, you rug it, you only get $2 million. So there was, there was a bit more of a constraint on the amount of money that could be extracted, but they were getting better. They were, they were improving their techniques, right? And that's why I think it all kind of unwound. So, you know, at the end of the day, I get why Solana people are frustrated by the finger pointing from the ETH crowd of like, you know, you guys are running a crime chain. The fact is that Solana is the chain where there's the most activity, there's the most stuff going on and grifters are going to go to where the liquidity is, right? They're going to go where the money is.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And so it's not surprising that there's crime happening on Solana because that's where meme coins are happening. The same thing happened with NFT mints, same thing happened with ICOs, same thing that happened, you know, in DeFi summer to an extent. It's just this whole DeFi contagion thing is nonsense, unfortunately, for Toly.

• 18:59David Hoffman?

  What do you think about just like the meme coin sector as, as a whole? I think if you look at the Solana meme coin market and just generally meme coins post this Liberty token launch, things are like down in the red, pretty damn bad. Like meme coins have all retraced, the meme coin sector is like very, very burned. The, what was somebody, one of these tweets is putting the, putting a measure of $6 billion of market cap has been erased from the meme coin market. Solana, the meme coins are dominantly on Solana. There's even Makes his way into Bloomberg. A Bloomberg headline says Argentina scandal fuels sell off on favorite meme coin platform, which is of course talking about Solana. I think, of course, I don't really think anyone thinks meme coins are gonna go anywhere.

• 19:42David Hoffman?

  Meme coins are just kind of a primitive primitive that we have in this industry. But what do you think about like the health or longevity or vitality of the meme coin like vertical going forward?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I think, you know, the decoupling of crypto, right? Like the, you know, the correlation decoupling that happened in DeFi summer has just continued, right? We've seen cycles within cycles. So, you know, you had DeFi summer, you had this DeFi cycle. Then you had an Alter One cycle that followed it, plus NFTs. You know, this is all following the ICO cycle. Then it transitioned into the low float cycle, you know, low float, high FDB cycle. That was a whole thing for a while. A lot of people lost a lot of money on that.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  You know, and, and it's, it's probably not even quantified. If you went and looked at all of the tokens, and let's not forget SPF was the one that created that meta, right? The Sam coins, right? You know, 1% float, 200 bill FDB, and then down only. A lot of people lost a lot of money on that, but it's harder to quantify, right? Because it's not a direct rug where you can look at the chart and go, okay, well, these people extracted that, right? And then meme coins. So, you know, we've had cycles within cycles, but meme coins have been around for a long time. Same thing as NFTs. It's just that, you know, they, they went parabolic. So I think that there is a chance that this is the moment, the top for the attention of meme coins.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, the market pivots to something else. Especially because we have seen kind of the reemergence of ICOs. Like this is, this is maybe the opportunity for ICOs to make a comeback. And, you know, the interesting thing about ICOs is they have more utility in theory, right? You know, ICOs gave us Ethereum, they gave us Ave, they get, you know, they gave us a bunch of, of cool stuff last cycle. Even if 99% of it was dumb, the 1% that wasn't is amazing and it's a good trade. So maybe ICOs come back, maybe something else new and weird emerges. It'll be interesting to see what happens for the rest of this cycle. Cause I think we're still in a macro bull market. So something will emerge, something will capture attention.

• 21:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah, because there's always a demand to speculate. Meme coins, meme coins do feel like a logical conclusion of sorts of the token speculation game. And a lot of this like token speculation game has really had to route around like regulation. Regulation has been very constraining around like what kind of ways the crypto industry can play with tokens. And meme coins seem to be some sort of like logical conclusion of just like it's a pumped up fun interface. You can spell out a token. All you need to do is upload a JPEG and you're done. That's it. To me, if we go back to ICOs, it actually kind of feels like we're going full circle. Like we've reached the end of the road and now we have to hop back to the very beginning where there is a formal sale. You put up capital at risk on the same terms as everyone else.

• 22:41David Hoffman?

  And then, then we just kind of do this whole like system all over again. I would like, I would like ICOs to return. I think ICOs are a superior distribution mechanism. I don't know if you have a take on that.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  The interesting thing about meme coins is it's the platonic ideal of speculation, right? You know, to just pop into existence, you know, it's very PvP game, right? There's, there's low liquidity versus, you know, they're low float, high FDB tokens. Interestingly, right? Not, not in the sense of, of, you know, low token float, right? But like the actual liquidity that's available is very small, right? So it's a game of musical chairs where whoever gets out first, you know, wins, right? And, and so that I think is fine, except when someone is able to exploit information asymmetry, right?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Or, or technical asymmetry to, to, you know, max extract. And the problem is the people who, you know, it's same thing with ICOs, right? A lot of teams raised money and just disappeared and that money got pulled out of the ecosystem, right? They dumped their ETH, crushed the price of ETH, converted it into fiat and then drove off into sunset in a Lambo. And, and so, you know, you see that same thing happen. It's one of the reasons why we, as the crypto community. I think are getting better at having an immune system that protects against these things. But you know, to go back to the the Toly tweet, I think one of the challenges

• 24:18Speaker 01

  for Solana is they need to work out how to self-police, right? They need to work out how to identify bad actors in the in the system and not have, you know, platforms like Meteor get co-opted for for extraction, right? And that's hard because as the underdog, there's been this mindset of like, if anyone says anything about about Solana, kill them.

• 24:40David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  And so, you know, if someone says something about about someone doing something in Solana, there's this immediate reaction of like, you know, circle the wagons, defend, defend, protect the queen, right? And and that's great when you're the underdog. But when you are the dominant platform that has the most activity, then that doesn't work because the grifters have shown up, they're in your house.

• 25:03David Hoffman?

  Right. You're circling the wagons around the grifters.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the grifters are like, great, this is amazing. They're just filling their pockets. And then, you know, they're they they escape. And so, you know, you have to have a the ability to discern a good actor versus a bad actor. And and I think Solana is discovering that capability in real time.

• 25:27David Hoffman?

  Okay, I'm about to pull up a polymarket, which is going to show you the odds, polymarket odds of Javier Malley being impeached by the end of 2025.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  I thought I thought it was going to be the odds of us having a rematch in Singapore.

• 25:41David Hoffman?

  There is no market for that.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I'm gonna get that market. I'm gonna get that market up.

• 25:46David Hoffman?

  What do you think the odds are that Javier Malley is impeached by the end of this year?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  I think it's probably like 20% or something, 15, 15, 20%.

• 25:56David Hoffman?

  Well done, 16%.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 25:59David Hoffman?

  16%.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  That's not bad.

• 26:01David Hoffman?

  I did do a stream with six Argentines, kind of to just to hear their reaction about what's going on in the streets. None of them really think Javier Malley is going anywhere. They think this is kind of like a news cycle event that will move on. There is a hearing. And there will be an impeachment trial, but this is according to just the people that I know in Argentina. This is more opportunistic by Javier Millay's opposition. And there doesn't really seem to be much weight, mainly because the, what is Argentina's version of a Congress? Would actually have to vote Javier Millay out and the current Congress.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:35David Hoffman?

  Javier is Javier's party.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, my heuristic on these things is like, you know, it's a lot of noise. They don't usually go anywhere. If you're going to depose someone, you know, usually they get their head cut off or something, right? So, yeah.

• 26:48David Hoffman?

  Okay, Kane, that was all that we're going to talk about, about Libra. Unless there's anything else that I haven't brought up about the whole Libra debacle or any last like comments you have before we move on.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  No, I think, I think we covered it.

• 26:58David Hoffman?

  All right, big station, we're going to hear Kane's takes about the Bitcoin price, the ETH price. We're going to talk about just the markets that whole Michael Saylor is once again buying Bitcoin. So that's good news, which is why Bitcoin's back up to $98,000. But before we get there, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Starting with Uniswap, it's a browser wallet. It's a mobile wallet. It's also the best place to do DeFi. It's a brand new chain that's recently been integrated into Infinix. Let's go here from Uniswap right now. Introducing UniChain. Built for DeFi, empowered by Uniswap, UniChain is the fast decentralized layer two, designed to tackle blockchain speed and cost challenges. With this mainnet now live, you can enjoy transactions at up to 95% cheaper than the ETH layer one, all while benefiting from an impressive one second block time that will be getting even faster very soon.

• 27:39David Hoffman?

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• 28:20David Hoffman?

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• 29:43David Hoffman?

  stake it and help shape Frax Nation's future. Ready to join the forefront of DeFi? Visit frax.com now to start earning with Frax USD and staked Frax USD. And for Bankless listeners, you can use frax.com/r/bankless when bridging to Fraxl for exclusive Fraxl perks and boosted rewards. And we're back. Bitcoin is up 2.5% on the week, coming in at $98,400. Ether is actually up a little bit more than Bitcoin on the week, $2,730. It's up 2.5% on the week, maybe it's about the same actually. The ETH-BTC ratio continues to look absolutely terrible. But I think the biggest thing of note is it was interesting that Michael Saylor last week put out a tweet saying, "MicroStrategy has purchased no new Bitcoins this week." "We have purchased no Bitcoins."

• 30:27David Hoffman?

  They put out an announcement of a non-purchase. This week, they are putting out a stress release and announcing the private offering of $2 billion of Convertible senior notes. So MicroStrategy announcing that they're going to be buying $2 billion of Bitcoin coming in hot. And then the current, also the total crypto market cap is at $3.3 trillion. Kane, just broad sentiment, broad strokes, state of the market. How do we feel about where we are right now? You said we're in a larger, more macro bull market. I think this cycle has been confusing to many. How are you feeling?

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Global market relax. My favorite tagline. It, you know, again, the end of DeFi summer, right? When, when DeFi started pulling off a cliff in May, if you were in the DeFi trenches, it felt real bad. But, you know, Alt-L ones, Bitcoin, everything kept ripping, right? You know, and so we had another six months of basically up only, right? And I think this is one of those things where cycles within cycles. We had this meme coin cycle, you know, it may, it may kind of deflate now.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  But something will replace it and, you know, we'll see, we'll see a kind of continued strength with Bitcoin leading. And then eventually, you know, and this is, this is happened in every single market. People get to a point where euphoria kicks in and they're looking to outperform Bitcoin. A simple 3X is not enough, right? And they're looking for a 10X, 20X, whatever. And so that's when that rotation out of Bitcoin, you know, looking for, for the next, the next 10X really starts to accelerate. You know, the things that are in the top 50, top 100, you know, really ripping. And so I think we will see that again, probably towards the end of the year.

• 32:22David Hoffman?

  You are calling for business as usual, even though up to this point, I would say everyone is talking about how different and odd and weird this cycle is. Do you agree that it's weird or are you just saying that this is just what it looks like when you're inside of the, inside of the cycle?

• 32:36Speaker 01

  This is what it looks like if you're not in the right thing at the right moment in cycle, right? If you were, if you were in meme coins over the last six months. You've been having a good time, right?

• 32:48David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  But remember, there are a lot of people that are sidelined for DeFi summer. They're like, this is dumb, you know, we don't like it. You know, especially Bitcoin maxies, right? And, and so I, I just think those people who are sidelined, if you go back and read the timeline in late 2020, there are a lot, there's a lot of cope. There's a lot of cope, there's a lot of tears. There's a lot of people that are like, this is dumb, it's gonna end badly or whatever. And so I think that, I think that's not surprising. It's not surprising. And let's not forget, a lot of the people who were the dominant voices, influencers, KOLs or whatever, from last cycle, were kind of sidelined in meme coins.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of the groups I'm in, they didn't FOMO into meme coins until like the last couple of months, maybe even post-Trump, right?

• 33:38David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  So they bought the top, they're now wrecked. Of course, there's like, you know.

• 33:43David Hoffman?

  Turning into Bitcoiners.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So, so I, I think it's, it's unsurprising, but you know, the macro setup is still there.

• 33:51David Hoffman?

  There's a, also, one of the big themes of this market is, call it the VC chains, but I don't know if that's totally fair, things like, uh, Bear Chain, Story Protocol is on here because it's up 220% on the week. Bear Chain just launched, we have Monad incoming. I'm definitely forgetting about, say, Aptos, Sui. What do you think about the new cohort of chains? Is this same pattern that we've always seen before? Or is there anything that like kind of stands out to you as an investing theme?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  I mean, again, like, let's go back to last cycle, right? DeFi summer leads into NFT mania plus alt layer one season, right? You know, like, I think we're too stupid to not have an alt layer one season. I think it's just gonna happen again.

• 34:34David Hoffman?

  But the alt layer one season last cycle happened because DeFi summer blew out and overflowed Ethereum's demand for block space and Ethereum is like, I'm gonna be decentralized and my block space is gonna be really expensive. And that created the alt layer one, like mania, because everyone realized Ethereum couldn't scale. I don't see the same catalyst for like an alt layer one speculation game.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  It's already starting, my friend. It's already starting. Interrupt, the interrupt wars, fragmentation, you know, L2, like the, the FUD against L2s. Okay, fine, you've scaled, but you know, you've broken the thing, right? Like the, the infighting has even started, right? Like Amin losing his mind on the timeline. You've got Martin, you know, you've got Martin calling for canonical L2s. I've been saying we need to shut down the, the L2 tokens. It's creating, uh, you know, confusion amongst, uh, you know, new entrants. Like, do I buy ETH? Do I buy arb? Do I buy the base token? Oh, there's no base token. Now what do I do?

• 35:33Speaker 01

  You know, so this setup, this narrative of like ETH is broken from an investment standpoint because of the fragmentation of, of L2 tokens. It's already there. The setup's there. It's ready.

• 35:45David Hoffman?

  I, I agree that the pattern is there of crypto Twitter discussing many of the things that we discussed during a bull market. But what is missing to me is the new capital and the actual bull market side of these things. I think we're all doing this like mock bull markets where the bull market is missing. Except, except for in Bitcoin, Sol, Dogecoin and Ripple. The bull market is generally impacting those things, but not the crypto industry as a whole, I would say.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Except meme coins. We had a, we had a-

• 36:16David Hoffman?

  But meme coins didn't, didn't drive adoption, did they? Like, I don't think this, that's back up meme coins actually bringing in new people.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  I don't think DeFi summer drove adoption. DeFi summer was so PvP.

• 36:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Like, no, no new people turned up to yams. Like, it was onboarding existing crypto natives who were like, I guess I'm doing pool to 100, you know, billion percent APY farming now. I'm a farmer. Like, it was all the same people. Of course, it brought some new people in, but the new people don't come until euphoria kicks in. We haven't had euphoria.

• 36:52David Hoffman?

  Hmm. Okay, but then it was NFTs that did bring people in. I'm just looking for the internal catalyst.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:58David Hoffman?

  And I don't think that that was meme coins and I don't know what that is. And of course, we won't really know what that is until after we're experiencing it. But I'm like always kind of dubious that because I'm not really seeing some sort of like internal catalyst phenomenon mechanism that we're building inside of crypto that outside world really, really thinks is cool.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  I mean, there's, there's, you know, Trump coin. We saw it with Moonshot, right? They onboarded, you know, to, to 300,000 people in the space of a week, right? So it wasn't nothing.

• 37:25David Hoffman?

  But the, uh, so there was a, a study on all of those addresses that got onboarded with Moonshot and less than 1% did anything else on chain after buying the Trump coin.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  I mean, let's go and have a conversation about Coinbase earn maker deal where they gave Coinbase like $200 million for people to make $5 CDPs. And people who literally just like dumped the thing and never went on chain. Like many such cases, like there's just, there's just a lot of examples of like, okay, fine, only 1% of people are activated, but that's still 4,000 new trench warriors that we got in the space of a week.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  You can do a lot of damage with 4,000 trenches. That's, that's actually, that's not nothing.

• 38:08David Hoffman?

  We're going to talk about the Kaito airdrop, which I think is definitely the, the talk of the town, at least today. Thankfully, there's something else to talk about post Libra drama. But before we talk about the Kaito airdrop, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Reserve. Reserve is a permissionless platform that allows anyone to create, own and govern on chain indices. So that's kind of like one end of their product. They have indices on the left and they have some indices of sectors of crypto that you'd be totally familiar with, the base index, meme coin indices. But then on their long-term goal, they want to use indices of indices to make a new standard of global internet currency, which I think is pretty cool. You can check them out at banklist.cc/reserve. All right.

• 38:51David Hoffman?

  Something that happened in the markets this week was the Kaito airdrop, which was a very hyped airdrop. And I saw many, many threads about the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars that people are going to get from their yaps. Turns out, uh, the like $100 per yap estimation came down to something like 13 cents per yap. So crypto Twitter kind of, uh, really overextended how much, how big of a payday they were going to get. Did you farm any yaps Kane? Were you a yapper?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  I was a yapper. I am a yapper. We also have our own yap leaderboard for Infinix. And so I think, I think there was a little bit of popium post, you know, hyper liquid, where people saw a bunch of perps traders, you know, get eight-figure airdrops. And they're like, what about me? I'm, you know, I'm a good guy. I talk on Twitter too. And, and so I think that there was a little bit of popium there that that was going to play out.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  I haven't done the math on it to figure out, you know, the 13 cent, 17 cent thing. But yeah, I mean, it's, it's a couple of orders of magnitude off from expectations. So that's, that's going to have some sad people running around today.

• 40:05David Hoffman?

  So if you're just listening to this on the podcast and you're not on Twitter, Kaito is this crypto analytics platform that uses AI to kind of like aggregate, analyze and like surface data for both, both like on-chain data and off-chain data. Like a lot of Twitter data and social media data goes into, just like, points, pointers towards where investors are allocating their attention. Like what narrative themes are capturing a lot of attention right now? And what we're looking at right now is the Infinix yap board. So who is yapping and who's like tweeting or talking about Infinix? And there's like whole entire sectors. It's like who's talking about DeFi? Who's talking about AI? How's sentiment? So it's kind of just like an aggregation, a data platform using sentiment analysis

• 40:49David Hoffman?

  and some AI tools as well. And they released their, their token, Kaito, and they distributed it to people who were yapping, as in people who were talking about different sectors of the crypto market. You would have to, of course, go to Kaito, sign up, and then you could start to accrue some yaps based off of how well your tweets performed. Bigger banger tweets got you more yaps. Kane, how does it feel to be fourth place on your own?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  My own leaderboard.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  It's pretty dark, actually. Like, you know, I said this a few times during the, I was, I was active in the Bara chain leaderboard as well, right? And I, I would like have these tweets talking about Bara. And then it would start to pump. It would have like, you know, two, three, 400 likes. And then I'd be like, oh, you idiot. You didn't even say Bara chain in there, right? Like, because you have to, you have to. You have to say it. Yeah. Like, the AI is not smart enough to know you're talking about Bara chain if you make some dumb joke about it, right? And so, uh, so, you know, I had a couple of good tweets that went, um, that, that pumped a little bit, uh, but didn't actually have the hook. So, yeah, I'm not a great yapper, it turns out. I, I think, I think the interesting thing about yaps, right? Let's, let's talk about market dynamics for a second.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  There were people who sort of predicted this and, and I, I was talking to a few people in Hong Kong. The difference or, you know, the delta between, uh, expectations of yaps, right? And the reality on the ground, right? In terms of like, people are being, uh, people are talking their book even before they have a book, right? They're, they're talking.

• 42:27David Hoffman?

  Because they knew they were getting a book.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  So, so it's like, you've given the most skillful people at pumping bags a free bag. And they're going to pump it to the moon. So of course they're talking, you know, the delta between that and reality is probably as, as skewed as any other project in history.

• 42:47David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Because you, you weaponized the biggest, you know, uh, people to, to talk their book. There was, you know, uh, like it's organic in one sense, but it's also like, these people are, it's like you got a bunch of actors, right? To like, go and sit around at a party pretending to have fun, right? And it's like, oh, that looks like the most fun party ever. Um, and then 20 minutes later, they're like, where's my cash? And you're like, oh, it wasn't a party at all. It was just people pretending to have fun.

• 43:15David Hoffman?

  Once it was announced that Kaito had done the snapshot, so no more yaps were accruing to anyone. I did notice just a complete hollowing out of reply guys in my, my DL, like in my, in my replies and everything. And this Twitter just got like reshifted and everything. It's got a lot more normal very, very quickly.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the actors were, you know, we stopped paying the actors to.

• 43:35David Hoffman?

  The actors went home. Yeah.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. The actors were like, all right, job done. See you later.

• 43:40David Hoffman?

  There's 1 billion tokens that came in at a $1.30 valuation as people were claiming and selling them. It fell down to about 90 cents and it is currently resurging back up to $1.80, which is gives Kaito a $1.8 billion valuation. Something that's different about Kaito, it's not a DeFi app, it is not a protocol. I don't think they have any plans on decentralizing their system. I don't think decentralization really makes sense in the Kaito stack. So the, the unique thing here is this is a centralized company incorporated in Seattle, Washington, so inside of the United States. Issuing a token, there was no, there's no sale or anything. So there was, I believe they're claiming that it doesn't pass the Howey test.

• 44:22David Hoffman?

  But this is a, not a common activity by centralized companies to issue tokens.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  It does feel bullish. It feels like this is something that could not have happened in anything out of, outside of the Trump, Trump era.

• 44:36David Hoffman?

  Something that also I thought was pretty cool, this is a tweet from David Phelps, who just basically tweeted out that Kaito used its own AI analytics to determine who is actually values aligned with Kaito. And so I think Kaito, as a function of the algorithm to determine who gets how many tokens, try to like map out who is bullish or bearish on Kaito. And if you are a Kaito bear, then you got D, you got nerfed. Your token supplies got nerfed, which makes so much sense. So like all of your bull posters receive more Kaito tokens. And anyone who's like talking negatively about Kaito is like receiving less tokens. And the way that they did that was they used AI to actually kind of evaluate who, which yappers are more Kaito aligned. I thought that was pretty clever.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  We need this system for Ethereum.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  We need to scale this out to the social layer of Ethereum, right? Look, I'm, I'm all for bear tiers, right? Like, you know, the more punishment bears take, the better. So I think this is a really cool, cool approach. You know, we're going to see more, more kind of innovation in the airdrop meta, I think. Airdrops aren't going away. But you know, trying to get alignment. It was interesting. We we did our portion of the Pangu airdrop at Infinix last week. And it was about a month later because we had to, you know, so so we got to carve out a Pangu from the original airdrop. For for Infinix users. And so we had to distribute that. But it took a little while. We had some issues.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  And so eventually we got the platform ready to go. We did the airdrop and. You know, a lot of times people who cheat an airdrop, they're like, well, it was going to be down only. I had to, you know, rush out the door or whatever. I mean, look at Kaito, right? You know, dollar forty to ninety cents, all these people, or whatever it was, dollar, dollar, yeah, dollar forty down to ninety cents. You know, people rushing out the door, right? That first wave of people. And then, you know, it starts to grind up, right? And so what was interesting to me, though, is a month later. Pangu is at one cent. It's not volatile. It's sitting there. There's no rush out the door. There's plenty of time, right? And yet, we saw this activity where people just instantly cheated this airdrop when they got it.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  And I was kind of shocked by that. I was like, you know, the the excuse of like, oh, you know, it was it was a race condition and you needed to to get out. Was gone, and yet they still dumped. So what's interesting about that is, we know who that was. And and, you know, we've got a whole bunch of other people turning up saying, we also want to do an airdrop. And I'm like, well, you know what? If you insta cheat it, we're probably going to nerf you. Like, you don't deserve an airdrop. Like, if some if some other project turns up and says, hey, we want to airdrop to you. Maybe we'll give you ten percent on the dollar of what you would have gotten. Because the whole point of an airdrop is to buy attention. And if you were just like, I'm out of here instantly, right?

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Also, I, you know, I hold on a punch penguin, so I took it personally as well, so.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  So, so, you know, I think that we will see an evolution in in in this process because airdrops, as much as I think airdrops are a very inefficient way of getting attention, they're not going anywhere. People like them too much. We also saw on InfineX a 10x uplift in activity during this Pengu airdrop. So, so, you know, it's just a, it's a hard thing to wean ourselves off of, you know, the world loves airdrops, but we need to find better ways of distributing them.

• 48:13David Hoffman?

  Do you think future airdrops will take in data from past airdrops as it relates to wallets or Twitter accounts? Because if you wanted to collect your Kaito airdrop, you needed to connect to your Twitter account. So now, selling or holding behavior is linked to people's Twitter accounts. Do you think in the future, future airdrops will like try and ingest this information to like, kind of inform their distribution?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  I think we've seen it before. People have tried to do like multi, you know, optimism did this, right? They did the, you know, three waves of airdrops and, and, you know, if you weren't aligned, which I guess is like communist speak for you cheated. But, but, you know, if you're, if you're not aligned with the project, then you didn't get the next airdrop or you got a much lower number, right? Which I think is, is really good, right? And so I think we will see more innovation when it comes to airdrop distribution to figure out who's aligned. Because if I give you Pengu, you're supposed to hold it and you're supposed to, you know, then become aligned with the project. If you just instantly

• 49:13Speaker 01

  dump it for USDC, you're not even like, you like, get, get out of here.

• 49:21David Hoffman?

  You're doing, you're doing the opposite of what

• 49:23Speaker 01

  You're doing the opposite of what, you know, there's, there's no advantage there. Exactly, exactly right.

• 49:28David Hoffman?

  The Kaito airdrop was dropped on Base, and this is a tweet from Dan Smith from Blockworks Research who says, "Base has been humming along nicely since the Kaito airdrop, topping out at 160 transactions per second for a median fee of 2 cents. Scaling efforts clearly paying off." With over $1.5 billion in TVL, the MEETH protocol is home to MEETH, the fourth-largest ETH liquid staking token, offering one of the highest APRs among the top 10 LSTs. And now, see MEETH. Takes things even further. This restaked version captures multiple yields across Kerak, Eigenlayer, Symbiotic, and many more, making CME the most efficient and most composable LRT solution on the market. Metamorphosis Season 1 dropped $7.7 million in Cook rewards to METH holders.

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• 51:35David Hoffman?

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• 52:20David Hoffman?

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• 53:16David Hoffman?

  This is a tweet from Sazil talking about the Pectra upgrade that's going to be coming. "Early April is the estimation." So we have a couple testnet forks, Holsky and Sepolia testnets will fork on the 24th and then the 5th of March. And so we'll have two testnet forks before we're ready for the Ethereum mainnet fork, only under the conditions that the testnet forks go well, probably sometime in early April. Pectra, it's not the biggest upgrade, but it is the biggest in terms of the sheer number of EIPs, but it's nothing in comparison to the merge with Dankun. We have, for the Ethereum nerds that are out there, we have a max effective balance that is incoming, and then also we have a blob limit increase. And so we're getting some more blobs and we're getting some max effective balance

• 54:01David Hoffman?

  and then a few other tweaks as well. Unless you have any take specifically, Kane, about Pectra, what's your kind of take about the Ethereum broader discussions around pace of development? Is it communist? Ethereum's broad positioning inside of the chain wars?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  I was just thinking, I missed the Rinkeby testnet as you're listing out those testnets. Like, all of my OG testnets are gone now, it's a bit sad. But in terms of pace of development, you know... It's it's not an issue of fundamentals, right? It's not an issue of like delivery. Ethereum, you know, from a research and delivery perspective, I think is better than it's ever been. You know, the the core devs understand what they're doing. The prioritization is is good. Yes, of course, these roadmaps are longer than we all like because we're impatient. You know, people sitting on the sideline, you know, shouting, come on, like, you know, let's go faster.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  But but I think it's still an issue of the overall comms. Like, the the comms and marketing side is what's missing, right?

• 55:12David Hoffman?

  Really? You think it's all boils down to comms and marketing?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  I think it's just not communicating what the benefits of these things are, right? And, you know, Sisano does a great job. He does a great job. You know, he he walks through everything on a daily basis and, you know, why it's important, whatever. But like, the the narrative alignment, right? In the Ethereum community, in terms of like constructing the right narratives to to make sense. You know, I think it's good. It's it's good that it's decentralized, right? But it is a bit uncoordinated. That that I think it's just too uncoordinated.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  It's, you know, so having some more coordination there would be would be, I think, beneficial. But, you know, we're not really seeing it. And and, you know, I said the other day, like, three weeks ago, four weeks ago now, you know, that Vitalik cook, and we haven't seen much cooking, you know, from from that perspective, right? From the comms and marketing perspective. So so, yeah, here we are.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Let's, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic, but, uh, but I do think it would be good to see a little bit more traction there.

• 56:32David Hoffman?

  I did see a tweet, I don't know if it came out of ethereum.org specifically, but, uh, there is a job posting for a social media manager for the Ethereum account, which has 3.4, 3.7 million followers. Uh, so after all of this angst, we are getting potentially a new social media manager of the Ethereum account. Maybe we can get the narrative coordination.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  My genuine question is, did we have a social media manager of the account?

• 56:56David Hoffman?

  I don't, I think the answer is firmly no, we did not.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  So like, that in and of itself is just like giga retarded. Like, I'm sorry, like, like, what are we doing? Like, it's all, it's all like we're replacing the underperforming social media manager or intern that we had, right? We're like, oh, this is a good idea. Like, we figured, like, the rest of crypto figured this out like five years ago, that you need someone running your social media account, right? Um, so, you know, uh, baby steps, I guess.

• 57:27David Hoffman?

  Broadly, the Ethereum community is asking like, hey, maybe we have put too many, too much emphasis on credible neutrality. Uh, maybe we should try and coordinate some sort of like centralized leadership team to point the ecosystem in a coherent direction. Uh, and we can like shed some credible neutrality points in order to, to meet those ends. And that has been, that, that decision is like very contentious. I don't think Vitalik likes that at all.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't think so. But, you know, the, the interesting thing is that, um,

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Ethereum on some levels is a victim of its own success, right? Um, but it still has the underdog mentality, um, you know, that I was talking about with Solana, right? Um, where, you know, Bitcoin Maxi is like, there's a pre-mind scam. Um, it's all going to end poorly. Every time anything bad happens in Ethereum, you know, from the DAO hack to, um, you know, uh, bridge hack, like, just any, any bad thing, there's a bunch of people who are, at least historically, were ready to just jump on Ethereum and be like, see? We told you, right? And run victory laps. And so, you know, the approach to that, I think, was just to not engage, right?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Continue to deliver, deliver the roadmap, deliver the tech, deliver the research, do all that stuff, right? And, you know, that kind of worked against the Bitcoin maxies because there weren't many of them and they're fucking idiots.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  And but like, you know, it doesn't work when you're competing against a project like a team. You know, a team like Sweet or, or, you know,

• 59:10Speaker 01

  like even

• 59:13Speaker 01

  and ignore Solana for a second here, right? But, you know, the if if this alt L one thing pops up, right? Like even Monad, like, you know, like they do a really good job. They've created a cult bearer chain, right? They've created a cult, they've created this cult following that feels like the early days of Ethereum in a lot of ways, right? And and so I just think that there's a level of competition now that especially Ethereum mainnet. Because you also have Arbitrum and Optimism and Base competing for mindshare against Ethereum mainnet. And if Ethereum mainnet doesn't maintain mindshare, that's net negative for all of the Ethereum ecosystem.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  And so, you know, having this, you know, credibly neutral, you know, above the fray approach. It it served us for a while, but, you know, one of the things about being a founder is you need to be able to adapt to the the reality on the ground, right? And I do think that Vitalik needs to adapt to the reality on the ground. We are in a different environment in 2025 to what we were in in 2015 or even 2020.

• 1:00:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, speaking of Monad, the Monad testnet is one of the things that was launched this week. It's kind of crazy how much there has been discussion around Monad. And yet there are testnet has just now gotten out the door, which I think it gives a huge just like plus one to the size of the cult. Because if there's no testnet, not even a chain, there's no testnet, then What's left? The answer is, well, there's the cult. That's the cult that's there. One thing I thought was that was worth bringing up this week is the SEC has announced a cyber and emerging technologies unit to protect retail investors. I'm calling this the SEC's cyber police. And so there's an organization being made spearheaded by the SEC, but does different things, mainly going after fraud across the internet.

• 1:01:09David Hoffman?

  So they are focusing on transactions in the following areas. Fraud committed using emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning. Fraud on social media, the dark web, or false websites to perpetrate fraud. Hacking to obtain material, non-public information. Takeovers of retail brokerages accounts. Fraud involving blockchain technology and crypto assets, which relates to much of the things that we discuss on the weekly roll up. That is all of the fraud that we talked about at the beginning of this episode and many other scams and scandals. And then a few other ways that the SEC's new organization, again, the cyber and emerging technologies unit to protect retail investors. So I think we're getting some cyber police to come and actually crack down on,

• 1:01:55David Hoffman?

  even though it's not securities transactions, fraud, which I think is just totally fine. What's your take?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Look, I'm not, you know, the unintended consequences of regulation are so powerful that I'm never a cheerleader for this, right? Like, you know, it's, it's great now, go after some AI guys and make them feel some pain, right? It sounds, sounds good, you know, go kill that guy. Don't, don't bother me. And, and of course, we, we've been saying, there's so much fraud. Go after the fraud and not Uniswap, right? They went after the wrong hate, and it turns out. And, and, you know, so, so of course, like, we want efficient markets and, you know, we want fraud to be weeded out. I just think that there is, there's a danger to, you know,

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  being too reliant on regulatory agencies to fix the problems in any industry, right? You know?

• 1:02:53David Hoffman?

  So Kane, we identified things like the ICO mania started fairly, started with things like Ethereum, started things like Aave.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Monstercoin.

• 1:03:04David Hoffman?

  Ended with fraud.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Ended with fraud.

• 1:03:07David Hoffman?

  DeFi summer started with Compound, started with Uniswap, ended with fraud. Ended with fraud. NFTs started legit, ended with fraud. Memes like Bonk started totally fine, community bottom-up ecosystem, ended with fraud. And so yet, when we weigh all of that on one side, you're still saying that the potential risk of overregulation is higher than the potential costs of having these metas that always end in fraud on the crypto side. Is that what you're saying?

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  100%.

• 1:03:37David Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  And my view is this, that like, you know, I think Matt Levine has a very good take on this, right? You know, if you're the compliance officer in a bank, one of the most regulated industries in the world, right? You've got to dial, you've got to fraud dial, right? Now, if you ask someone, where should they dial the fraud between 0 and 100, right? A lot of people, the naive take is 0, right? But at 0, there's no bank. You don't get to have a bank. You can't have 0. 0 is not an option. 0 is the like brainlet take, right? Well, obviously no fraud. Like, why would we want fraud? And it's like, if you have an organization of 50,000 people running around doing stuff, humans are dumb and bad and they do bad things, right?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  If you want 0 fraud, shut the whole place down. And that's the alternative, right? So, you know, should we have good fraud enforcement? Yes. Can we hope for a world of no fraud in a permissionless environment? No, we can't. It's not, it's not realistic, right? So it's about finding the right balance. And so if we throw our hands up and say, let's hope that this regulatory agency solves these problems for us, you know, it can go badly. And, you know, those kinds of agencies can get co-opted so easily. Look at SPF. He co-opted so many different, you know, people in positions of power to facilitate that.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  So the unintended consequences of giving regulators too much power is very dangerous. It doesn't necessarily even stop the fraud and it can create far, far wider unintended consequences.

• 1:05:15David Hoffman?

  So the creation of this, call it a task force, is being complemented by the work of Hessler Person, Acting Chair Mark Ueda, who are both very crypto-positive. Hessler Person, we just had her on the podcast. So maybe what you're saying is like, just because we have these two crypto-positive SEC Chair and Commissioners, David, don't be naive, because once these two individuals are gone, we're going to be left with Gary Gensler 2.0, Gary Gensler's cousin, Gary Gensler's son, and then, and now, this tool is in the hands of them, and now it's going to come and choke us out. Is that kind of what you're saying?

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  It's, that's the risk, right? That's the risk. And so that's why my, my view is always that we should look to market dynamics to solve these, these things, right? And, you know, when it comes to ICOs, we were starting to figure this out, but then, regulation killed it, right? When it comes to, you know, meme coins, we've sort of figured this out as an industry a little bit, right? Like, there's been this expose that's come internally, right? Like, no one, you know, to the best of my knowledge, the police didn't go and kick that guy's door down and, and arrest him, right? I mean, they did kick Shane Copeland's door down, right? Which is fucking ridiculous, right? You know, so, like, this is, this is

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  my point, right? Like, we need to be able to self-police, right? We need to be able to have the right structures and incentives to weed these things out. We can't rely on some external body. It's not to say that an external body is bad, or good, or, you know, whatever. It's, let's just say it's neutral. It's not sufficient. We have a, a direct responsibility as an industry to sort our own shit out.

• 1:06:51David Hoffman?

  And I think maybe one of the things that we're building in this industry is structures that can't do fraud, can't be evil. And I would say that's something that you are building here at Infinix, Kane. Infinix is, call it a neo-bank on the internet that can't do evil, because it's all governed by smart contracts and code. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on at Infinix. There's this new term that you guys are inventing called Swidge. Maybe download us on Swidge and, and everything else that's going on under the sign of Infinix.

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, we've talked about fragmentation and chains and you know, all of the stuff that you know, comes from that, right? Like people needing to get Kaito on base, but there are Solana maxis. They're going to set up, you know, Mert was talking about this, right? He didn't have, you know, he'd set up a base wallet. But you know, a lot of people who are on Solana haven't got a base wallet or vice versa. People on base that don't have a Solana wallet. So we are trying to build a platform that basically allows anyone to interact on any chain by having this universal swapping and bridge functionality called switch, which means that if you get an airdrop on Solana, you can bridge it to base or optimism or Arbitrum or Baruchain.

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  And you can deposit the airdrop onto some Boyko yield farming scheme in Baruchain and start earning yield without needing to go and understand how to, you know, what's the Baruchain canonical bridge or, you know, how do I secure my seed phrase in a new phantom wallet for this, you know, this new chain? You know, Monet, for example, right? So, so the idea is to make it easy to do things on chain again. You know, we got to a point where there's so much fragmentation that it was, it was hard to do things on chain.

• 1:08:39David Hoffman?

  When I was watching this demo of you switching, I was interested in the choice to actually show users like this swap and bridge interface where you can actually like kind of go through the steps in the process, not unlike Uniswap. But there's also a choice where you just abstract that completely in the background and you don't even show users their chains at all whatsoever. How does Infinix fit inside of the, like, the choice to actually like show chains and tell users what chains they're on versus abstracting all chains totally?

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's a, there's a very long running debate internally in the design and product team about this. And we've got versions of this interface that are purely chainless, right? And I think that that is directionally where things will go. But at the moment, people still have a need, because we're still, we're talking about people that learned a bunch of dumb things, right? We taught them a bunch of dumb things and they're like, but I need to know that, right? And so if you take it away, they feel like, oh, I'm missing something, right? So it's going to be a slow re-education process of like, it doesn't matter what USDC, you know, is sitting, what chain USDC is sitting on. It just doesn't matter, right?

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  If you want USDC and Echo, okay, just tell us that. You wanted to pause it in your Echo account? Okay, press the button. Press the USDC to Echo button, right? And what if you don't have USDC? Then push the dollars into Echo button. We know that Echo wants USDC. You have some yield-bearing stablecoin that you're sitting in. You shouldn't need to know that. I want the, I want the stablecoin that makes me money. And then I want to buy the Echo thing. Just click the button. We'll do the rest, right? So it will, it will eventually get there, but there's a slow re-education process where if you take too much away, people start getting worried. They're like, what's happening? I don't, I, you know, I need to know the chain that I'm on.

• 1:10:33David Hoffman?

  Like crypto natives have just tooled up and become so educated about how to use these things that we actually have to dumb ourselves down to use like more normie friendly apps. That's pretty funny. That's not a problem that I've ever been faced with yet in my crypto career, until you building InfineX. If somebody's curious, is InfineX open? Can they just go and make an account?

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Yep, just make an account.

• 1:10:53David Hoffman?

  What's the roadmap with InfineX?

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Make an account. You know, we are doing a bunch of work with Airdrops, a bunch of work with new chains. We just added UniChain. As you mentioned, we just added UniSwap as well. So you can, you can swap on UniSwap directly on UniChain. Go buy some Uni on UniChain. And yeah, it's, it's a, it's a game at the moment of rolling out more integrations, more chains, you know, more functionality, so that people can feel comfortable putting their assets into InfineX instead of into Binance or Bittbit or Upbit.

• 1:11:30David Hoffman?

  Kane, it was certainly a doozy of a week. Thanks a lot, my man, for helping me go through all this news. I really appreciate it.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me.

• 1:11:37David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky, can lose what you put in. We are headed west. This is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

• 1:13:39David Hoffman?

  The.

• 1:15:49David Hoffman?

  The.