Is ETH Back? Memecoins Here to Stay? HYPE's HyperLiquid EVM | Jon, Bread, & Andy8052

Jon Charbonneau, Bread, and Andy8052 join David to break down Ethereum’s bold pivot back to Layer 1 and what it means for the future of crypto. They also dive into the implications of scaling the L1 over rollups, the looming death of longtail L2s, and the shifting meta around value accrual, memecoins, and onchain activity. The crew also debates ETH’s monetary identity, HyperLiquid’s EVM ambitions, and whether Ethereum can reassert itself as crypto’s dominant tech and cultural platform. Jon Charbonneau: https://x.com/jon_charb Bread: https://x.com/0xBreadguy Andy8052: https://x.com/andy8052 ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🏦INFINEX | THE CRYPTO-EVERYTHING APP https://bankless.cc/Infinex ------ TIMESTAMPS & RESOURCES 0:00 Intro 1:58 Ethereum Pivot Has a Tagline https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1917052715911549399 https://x.com/0xngmi/status/1916910787936797005 18:49 Ethereum Value Accrual 30:29 Fun Chain Premium 34:00 Memecoin Meta These Days 50:17 HyperLiquid EVM 58:01 1 Gorilla vs 100 Men https://x.com/search?q=1%20Gorilla%20v%20100%20Men&src=typed_query 1:04:07 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?

  Welcome Bankless Nation to a differently styled podcast on the Bankless feed. I want to welcome three guests onto this podcast as we discuss, deliberate debate, and dissect the topics that we all find interesting. First up, some people are wary of society's trend towards gambling and financialization, but where some see moral hazard, this man sees opportunity. By day, he's on the couch scrolling crypto Twitter, and by night, well, he's still there. The only person on crypto Twitter actually having any fun. Andy8052, it's good to see you.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Also, sometimes on the day, I am playing golf. That is...

• 0:39David Hoffman?

  He sometimes plays golf. He sometimes plays golf. Bringing up the middle, if you haven't seen his ass, you're not in the right circles. The person that did the impossible, somehow not having a single hater on Twitter. The pink-coated educator with glutinous glutes, the mega ass of mega ETH, 0X bread guy. Welcome back.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. That intro, I actually thought you were gonna go to John, and I just had to miss his ass picture. So, you know, maybe sometime in the future.

• 1:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, you're the only one with an ass on Twitter right now. And then bringing up the rear, the crypto's chief lowercase r researcher, the man who will write a 90-page research paper over the weekend because it was fun. We've all read his long AF research papers, only to conclude that nothing's real and we shall buy Bitcoin. John Charbonneau, how you doing?

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Great to be back on. How's it going?

• 1:22David Hoffman?

  Pretty excited for this episode, guys. So, the topics that we've got lined up for this week. The Ethereum pivot has a tagline, but what about ETH? Is ETH coming along for that? We want to talk about the death of long-tail Layer 2s. We're gonna talk about a little bit of what Andy's doing in the trenches, and then we're gonna finish off with one gorilla versus 100 men. A crucial question to this era of crypto Twitter, and I think actually this is just going on to the internet broadly. First off, honored to have you guys here. I think everyone has been a podcaster in of their own right separately, so I'm bringing these three podcasts to the table just to kind of go through the weekly meta. So, let's start here. I'm gonna start sharing my screen to a tweet that Haseeb tweeted out, which coincidentally

• 2:05David Hoffman?

  was something that my partner Ryan Sean Adams also identified when we talked to the two recent... Executive Directors, co-EDs of the EF. This idea of the Ethereum Pivot's tagline, the tagline for the Ethereum Pivot. Scale the Layer 1, scale blobs, improve UX. Three easy to remember ideas. Seems like it lands a punch. And then Haseeb finishes off with his tweet here. If they can pull this off and buy back some credibility, this may be the beginning of the ETH revival. Let's see. Now, I think this topic was the subject between John and Brett and I last week. When Andy, you were a bit sick, missed you having you back then. So maybe we can just pick off where that episode left. John, I'll throw this one to you. How do you feel about this tagline for ETH? On the scale of possible taglines, how do you feel about this one?

• 2:51Speaker 03

  I love it. I mean, I'll give it a 10 out of 10. And I do agree with Haseeb's tweet there. Like, if they can pull this off and actually get back credibility on this, like, this would be a meaningful turn for me. But for Ethereum and for ETH, it's the asset, like, most likely to me. The one thing that I saw, like, as interesting on it, too, is, I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, but the ordering of it was, it was scale the L1 before scale blobs, which was just an interesting note. And that is a nuance that I'm sure a lot of people would fight over if that, like, actually is the listed priorities. That would actually be my preference, is actually to focus more on scale in the Layer 1. But that was one of the things that I picked off as, like, really liking in there. And then throwing in the improve UX is, yeah, like, obviously Ethereum should be doing more of that. It's great.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Some people miss the blobs entirely. Like, I saw OXNGMI, famously the creator of DeFi Llama. He's like, so this is rugging the rollup roadmap, right? Like, they missed that nuance of saying that. Yeah, that goes towards, like, no one on the L1 uses blobs, right? The blobs are stored in the consensus layer. You literally can't even submit a transaction that utilizes blobs on mainnet with a wallet, because the wallet doesn't support. So like, it's not an L1 user thing. It cannot be an L1 user thing today. So that is explicitly for rollups. I personally think it should be deprioritized, but I think it's good to have some directional stuff there for L2s. I don't, I just don't see it as, like, a great value-accretive thing. But it's good to have that signal there for everyone.

• 4:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and some people were responding to that tweet from 0xNGMI saying, "Look, Ethereum detractors, Ethereum haters will find a way to always just be negative about Ethereum." It's like, "Oh, like, we're gonna scale blobs, but even the Ethereum haters will find a way to say like, "Oh, now Ethereum is doing the thing that everyone asked it to, but now it's also rugging L2s." And so there's some frustration out of the Ethereum community saying like, "There's no way to win. There's no way to win here."

• 4:38Speaker 01

  There's never any way to win in crypto.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Isn't he an ETH guy? Like, he's got a 0x at the start of his name.

• 4:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, definitely. So does Mert, though.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  I feel like the DeFi Lama guys kind of, they fairly will talk shit about anything, which I respect.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're pretty neutral.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, I think it's worth talking about because, you know, you mentioned the long tail of L2s and how that might actually look, right? Like, that was the, when we say this move to scale to L1, like, that is kind of rugging the L2s because like, yeah, you're gonna take, you're gonna take users away from some L2s, right? You're gonna be the place to go to for high-value DeFi. You know, it's gonna be habitable for some applications. And we talked about that, and it's like, yeah, like, some of those L2s probably shouldn't exist, right? Like, that's actually gonna happen. If you weren't meaningfully different from mainnet, it's like, tough cookie, right? You're like, you're probably gonna die off. And Ethereum will accrue more value because of that, right? Because it actually has direct users interacting on the thing, accruing fees. You know, we don't like to value things based on fees, but like, you're gonna need that

• 5:46Speaker 02

  if you're gonna try to be a smart contract platform. I believe that, like, even for the Psyop component of it. So, yeah, like, this probably is going to lead to some L2s withering from the vine, but it's necessary. I actually did some numbers today and saw that there's several L2s, I think four right now, that are all actually at a net loss purely on on-chain profit. So like, the cost it takes to post down to L1 versus how much they're generating in fees from user activity, they're negative. Tyco's all the way down to 5 million in the negative, right? So it's like... That's a crazy figure, right? And it's like, some of these teams are gonna have to shut down at some point if they lose even more activity to a stronger mainnet.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, my feeling on it is like, if mainnet doing this means you have to shut down, you're gonna have to shut down anyways, and this is just like accelerating that process, like, probably your L2 is dead regardless. And so like, yeah, I guess it sucks, but it's not their fault.

• 6:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think as soon as there became like some media about launching layer twos, there became this like thing where like, oh, what do we do next? Let's launch a layer two. As soon as that like meta happened, this outcome was also destined to happen. Because if you're just launching a layer two because that's what is in the meta, that means you're not launching, you're not launching it for a real purpose. You're doing it just for to like pump the token. And so as soon as that meta set in, then there was ultimately going to be like a reckoning for layer twos because we just had too many layer twos hit the market.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  The thing that I haven't seen, have you guys seen this at all? Of has anyone from a major L2 that is undoubtedly successful? And like, you feel pretty good that they're gonna have a spot even with Eth L1 scaling? I haven't seen like anyone important from those types of places coming out and saying, hey, like, we really don't like this, that you're competing with us. Like, I haven't seen any of that. And that like, that's kind of the test to me is like, the people who should feel secure, they all seem fine with it. Like, yeah, if you're the last L2 and you can't get users, you like, should shut down probably.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Alex from ZK Sync has been pounding the drum. I saw my tweet that said like, yeah, if like, you were gonna die, you're gonna die anyways. Like, I got a like from Jesse on that. So he kind of, he kind of was signaling some of that. Yeah, I would say anyone that's firmly in the like, we're trying something new, novel, different camp has been in favor of it. The question is, like, I know, like, we had talked last week that, you know, the vision for Ethereum was like, okay, you're gonna have a thousand million jillion L2s. What, do you still see that future if Ethereum is trying to take a more dominant position within the ecosystem and actually own some use cases? Do you still think, hey, we're gonna get enough of these L2s that come out that actually will accrue value in the same way? Or we expect more direct value?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Because a portion of that, the long tail, is actually just gonna live on L1?

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  I know I asked this question to Andrew from Conduit and also Georgios about like, hey, how many L2s do you think that they are there? There will be in the future. And their answer was there will be an amount of layer twos that correlates to the demand for compute. And I think there is, and like the idea is that you could spin up an ephemeral layer two, a layer two that spins up and then goes away in a week if there's a momentary demand for compute from some, for some reason, some game existed, some game popped up, something.

• 9:00David Hoffman?

  But what's been happening like over the last two years during like the layer two mania where everyone was launching layer two is like they tried to front run future demand that actually ended up not being there. And so if there's going to be a million layer twos, it's going to be responsive to demand, or it's going to be a reaction to demand, not trying to like supply net new block space into the market. And John, what were you gonna say?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, yeah, I don't think that like ETH L1 doing any scaling is ever going to shift whatever the long run outcome is of like, how many chains are we going to need? Because I mean, today, I don't think that we actually need a lot of chains. It is just people with experimenting with different flavors of serving mostly the same kind of handful of use cases. The world where you end up with a lot of chains in the long run is where you like, you actually need them for different applications and you're spinning them up, you know, taking them down quickly. They're like very, very high scale. It's that's just a completely different thing than what Ethereum L1 is like actually trying to do here and is ever going to do. And so like, it's never going to encroach on that market if it ever exists. It's just that the practical reality today is the long tail of change today isn't serving these like unique, high scale use cases. They're, they're just like another

• 10:04Speaker 03

  EVM blockchain with like one second block times that does the same stuff. Like that's all the stuff that gets cannibalized. It's just that the long tail today isn't actually really justified. If you have a justifiable long tail of chains in the future, then like ETH L1 can't compete with that. Like it never will.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's like, we already have fast L1 chains that exist and that hasn't totally made every other L1 chain that could ever exist obsolete.

• 10:25David Hoffman?

  I think I'd love to be a fly on the wall inside of optimism. Because I've always thought the optimism business model as a chain, you know, building the superchain, building Introp inside of the superchain, taking a 10% rake of all of the fees of every superchain chain was, is actually the business model that a theory that people wanted Ethereum to be itself. And optimism in the superchain model was kind of just like running interception on like what Ethereum was trying to be, but it was using, you know, like more central coordination, more centralized coordination around the optimism superchain in order to achieve the Ethereum vision for itself inside of its more siloed gate. And so like while optimism, you know, the optimism mainnet has never been really elevated

• 11:10David Hoffman?

  and prioritized by the optimism product. They've always tried to be like the superchain and like, you know, base is part of the superchain. World chain is part of the superchain and these are literally the biggest layer twos out there. But I would like, it would be interesting to see like discussions from the optimism side of things because to me, they've built a microcosm of the larger Ethereum system and out of the weakness of the layer one is why like there was so much demand for that. And like even Arbitrum and ZK Sing are all, we're all trying to like race for that same vision of a unified network of chains that Ethereum couldn't produce because it didn't figure out Introp and it didn't have the layer one scale. John, what's your take on that?

• 11:49Speaker 03

  I still don't think this is going to change any of that. Like the services and level of tech that they need to build there are still a different gap from what Ethereum is going to be doing here. I mean, like part of it, particularly for optimism is literally like it's sheer governance and management of a bridge contract. I like, I mean, you can, you can argue that the native Rolob stuff will like eventually encroach on like some of that, but I think that's just like a better product than it's years away and it is sort of different. And then a lot of the more like opinionated, tactical Lindrop, I mean, if any of these chains do end up going into like some form of like shared heat balancing, share building, whatever, I mean, like Ethereum isn't going to be competing on that. It really is just trying to take back that, you know, hey, we should be able to service

• 12:32Speaker 03

  like general use cases here of like a typical good chain. And I don't view that as mostly encroaching on what they're kind of doing there.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  This was actually kind of my, I had a debate with Alex again, ZK Sync back in there. Cause like it's always, always the bickering on timeline is about value accrual, right? So it's like having that discussion with him is like, oh, cool. We can handle the compute of the entire world. It's like, yeah, cool, but does value go back to Ethereum, right? Like that's what anyone cares about. And then he, like, he would talk about, oh, how this actually drives value to the, the single token ZK Sync. It does stuff like, yeah, but like, where, how does that get back to Ethereum? How does Ethereum gain in that world? Which is kind of frustrating for me as someone that like, and maybe just everyone broadly. It's like, you see so much goodwill energy going into all of this stuff. And people are like, oh yeah, man, we're building, we're doing the mission, we're executing, we're creating this interoperable world that can, that can onboard the world to this quote unquote Ethereum stuff.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  But it's like, if it doesn't drive value back to ETH token, like you're just not going to have people that are excited, happy or okay with the outcome. Like, I'm sorry, like that, like, and I know like the last few weeks has been a lot of like, trying to make sure there's a clear delineation between ETH the asset and ETH the technology and the culture and the ethos and stuff. I think you, you really got to marry those two things. And those interop stacks, which have a central token at the hub of all of those things, right? That like, that's the countervailing forces. That's like, these people have incentive to drive value to their token, which kind of guides their decisions away from driving value directly to Ethereum, the asset.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  And that has always been the critique of going down this roadmap is you just insert a bunch of incentives between these teams, the man hours they're putting in, and then ETH the asset going up.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like death by a thousand cuts, kind of of small little tokens carving out a billion dollars of market cap over and over and over again. That could theoretically be accrual to ETH or, you know, speculation in ETH.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Which is why I can, I'm continuing to push that, like, if I'm, I'm joining John's camp here. It's like, we, we just need to accept that these are all separate chains. Like we need, I'm, I'm almost getting rid of, I'm going to try to get rid of the L1, L2 conversation. Because like, whenever you just view them all as separate chains with their own incentives, with their own motivations and like Ethereum, the, the team, the researchers, everyone, they can only defend as far as Ethereum, the actual chain goes, right? Like that's the, the end of their domain. You, like, you can only do so much to that point. And then from there, it's just like, people are going to do their own thing to drive value to their own pockets and do their, because like, on a long enough time horizon, that's just how this stuff tends to trend. So it's like, make sure that you're in a dominant position within your sphere. Try to provide some services and stuff if this is the long-term tail,

• 15:07Speaker 02

  but like, don't prioritize that stuff over giving yourself the value, again, to the properties that you have, like, center of resistance, liveliness, all that stuff.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. And I think like, even talking about why L2s became so popular and kind of that like, fad phase of like, oh, we're gonna launch an L2 is, you know, if it was as easy to launch a Layer 1 as it was to launch an L2 using some of these like, roll-up as a service things, they probably would have been L1s. They probably wouldn't have been L2s, but it was just like, the easiest way to do things and they had like, some amount of value alignment, you know, BS that they could say. And so like, I totally agree. They're just their own chain with their own incentives, trying to, you know, make their company or their token valuable. And the L2, just at the point in time where they launched it, was probably the path of least resistance.

• 15:55David Hoffman?

  You may have already heard about Infinix. Infinix has, in my opinion, the nicest cross-chain swap and bridge feature that you will find anywhere. It is called Swidge, swap and bridge, and we're gonna show you what it looks like. First, we're gonna log into my Infinix account with a passkey. Now, there's no seed phrases in Infinix. This is just a one-click setup with biometric passkeys. But in addition to that, my Infinix account is fully non-custodial. So bam, I just logged in. It was two clicks and I'm already into my Infinix account. So let's go make a Swidge. I'm gonna go Swidge my USDC that is on base and I'm gonna buy Barra Chain, which is a completely different chain. So we're gonna Swidge this. I'm gonna press that button and then Infinix is gonna execute this order, this cross-chain order for me, and now it is done.

• 16:37David Hoffman?

  But actually, I'm not really feeling Barish anymore, so I'm gonna go from Barra to Penguins. I'm gonna buy a Penguin on Solana, so I'm going from the Barra Chain to Solana. See, no transaction signing, no gas to worry about. You just Swidge across whatever chain that you want with Infinix. That was so easy. Go check out Infinix and try your first Swidge today. In the Wild West of DeFi, stability and innovation are everything, which is why you should check out Frax Finance. The protocol revolutionizing stablecoins, DeFi, and rollups. The core of Frax Finance is Frax USD, which is backed by BlackRock's institutional Biddle Fund. Frax designed Frax USD for best-in-class yields across DeFi, T-bills, and carry trade returns all in one. Just head to frax.com Then stake it to earn some of the best yields in DeFi. Want even more?

• 17:18David Hoffman?

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• 18:03David Hoffman?

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• 18:45David Hoffman?

  Follow Mantle on X at @mantleofficial and join the on-chain revolution today. When it comes to the conversation of ETH value accrual, I think anyone can kind of, it's a little bit of a Rorschach test. And I think we actually have three interesting, different perspectives here on the table today. Like John, I'll put in the like, technical rationalism camp. Andy, I'll put in the trader camp where if he's having fun and making money on a particular chain, he's bullish on that particular chain, doesn't really like, stay on the, on the left curve side of that bell curve, you don't have to think about it too hard. If having fun, then bullish on the Layer 1. Brett, I don't know exactly where Brett falls. On this, maybe somewhere a little bit closer to John.

• 19:27David Hoffman?

  But then there's also the camp that we've seen from Sam Casmanian and also Ryan Sean Adams of people just saying, hey, just talk about the asset in a reserve asset, global reserve asset context and like meme that into existence. And I'm seeing a little bit of those like the blind man feeling the elephant, like everyone's kind of seeing this one shape. And now, you know, depending on what your bias is, what your interpretation is, you have a different explanation as to like, why ETH is the way that it is and not the way that it's not. Brad, what do you think about this?

• 19:58Speaker 02

  I'm accepting. So I listened to Sam's podcast on the day is great. I agree that if you aim to achieve higher valuations, like in the realm of a Bitcoin or beyond, even with Ethereum today, you have to have people that buy into this like sovereign money, like ownership, digital oil, like you have to have that belief. But I do not think the path to get there is just to be like Bitcoins is much special snowflake. Like they've done it. They have the hard cap. They have this story that they can tell. A smart contract platform cannot do that. I think you need, you need fees to generate like the basal level of like bullishness for a chain. And then if you maintain the properties or display properties that are even more powerful than that, again, censorship resistance, maximum decentralization, all this stuff.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  You allow like a subset of the community to dream higher and tell the story of, oh, you guys are looking at fees, but look at all this other stuff we can do. Right? Like all nation states are willing to participate on this chain because we've shown that we've defended against tornado cash. Right? Like we've shown that this incredibly neutral for all of time and can stand up against other nation states, right? It's all this stuff. So you let, like, you need the basal level of activity and excitement and fees generated to like, get like, just like a, again, a basal level of valuation for the thing. And then you let others dream bigger by displaying the moniness properties, which is a byproduct of being useful. I don't think it is something you can just like straight up say, oh, we're money. Don't worry about it. And then like everyone's just going to come to, because you have rational people step in and go, what are you talking about? Like you guys were making a bunch of fees. You're not making a bunch of fees. And then like you get in the argument about that stuff.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  So I think, yeah, that's my general position. You need a blend of the two. I think path dependency is what matters.

• 21:32David Hoffman?

  So you think you're saying like a, we need Strong layer one with strong layer one fundamental value accrual, something that would appease the John Charbonneau's of the world. And then we can take that to the Ryan Sean Adams of the world and say, hey, here's the foundation that you have to leverage to turn this into what Ryan is calling like the blue money cult.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Basically, yeah. Because you like you, John, what was your point now? You can't do the DCF on these things and come to a rational valuation. You just can't, right? Like, yeah, so, but you need that to a degree for people like him to build some investor confidence. So people can actually do the DCF stuff, right? Oh, do, hey, there's yield coming. There's like all this stuff I can do. And like, you guys aren't seeing the bigger picture because it's, yes, this much on DCF. But also, did you know these properties? Do you see what's coming down the pipe with Russia wants to do an exchange with China? And they can only do it on Ethereum layer one because it's the only thing that's incredibly neutral. They're gonna buy this thing because they happen to do it here. So like, let these people tell the story on top of the, the actual DCF stuff. I just, I think you need the blend, yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  So I, I think you actually need to focus less on the economics if you want ETH to have a shot at the, like, winning as the sovereign money kind of thing. So I, like, I, I agreed with a lot of what Sam had talked about in there of that kind of, the focus on stuff like the burn over the past few years and the ultrasound money thing was the wrong focus. I mean, like, I have very openly said, like, I think that that was the wrong focus. But I mean, that was for a mix of reasons. I think that the burn is less important than, you know, just capturing the value in the first place. But, but then also, like, so, so much of the argument of why ETH is better money than Bitcoin, that most Ethereum people try to harp on is all economics based. And I think that fundamentally, you cannot win that argument.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  I, I do not think that, and like, I saw, I saw this in, like, Ryan's latest post too of like digital gold plus yield. Like, I, I think you can say these things if you want. I, I don't think that anything economic based can ever be the core pitch of like, why ETH is better money than Bitcoin. I think that is game that you will, you will just always lose. If you're going to have any shot at ETH. Like actually being able to flip Bitcoin or any or any other asset that like is actually trying to take this shot at non sovereign money. I think you need to win it in just a totally differentiated way. And what that very simply looks like to me is that you just are the winning tech platform. Like everything is built on Ethereum and naturally like you are the most like you are the obvious, just like censorship resistant programmable asset at the center of that

• 23:55Speaker 03

  ecosystem. And then you hope that that puts you in a good position because I don't think that like ETH will ever be able to like stand in an argument against Bitcoin and say like, you know, pitch black rock like, hey, because of these qualities, let's burn whatever we have economics like this is better than Bitcoin. They don't care like they just want the predictability. This digital gold like that's fine. That wins this bucket. The only shot that I think that you have at winning is being really, really differentiated of like, this is the usable programmable money and like everything is built on us. And then the other half of it is I think that it is still entirely Bitcoin's game to lose. Like if Bitcoin just manages to figure out roll up scaling and like manages to deal with just like the quantum risk in a few years as like in like some manageable way and like figures out the security budget.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  I honestly don't think there's anything that any chain can do to compete with Bitcoin. I think that like what you need to do if you're just going to best position yourself is like win at the tech platform, get everything built on you. Everyone is using your asset like you're kind of right in the middle of that. And then you kind of honestly just like hope that Bitcoin just like kind of drops the ball and then you're naturally the best positioned after that. And I think that also sets you up in the best kind of like fallback scenario anyway. I think that's naturally what will maximize your cash flows anyway. So I think it ends up looking very similar of like, what do you actually prioritize to do this is like, I think, I think that it is a lot of like L1 scaling stuff that's such just going to produce additional cash flows. It's just like, what is the pitch and the prioritization that I think is going to matter more in the long run to like, give you a shot at winning?

• 25:23Speaker 03

  I think it's less of like Ryan's article about like, we need to talk about ETH more. Cause that was the main thing I disagreed with him in there is like, he said in there like ETH isn't lagging because of tech. It's because the conviction is like all like chartered and mixed up. That, that I disagree with. I think it has lagged because the ecosystem itself has like fallen behind a bit on usage versus others. And so the like, the probability of, you know, how big is this Ethereum thing going to be like, has naturally shrunk. If I was like super convinced that Ethereum was actually going to win as you know, this is going to be the big smart contract platform, like all the roles are going to be built on here. Like I think ETH will go up because your probability of that happening, I think would have to go up pretty meaningfully.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're saying the same thing. Mine was not to like focus on the messaging being the technical stuff. I think you build for the tech platform, talk about the moneyness, right? I think that's like, that's what I have that frame in my head. You have to build for the usefulness, which brings the fees, which generates that stuff. But then you have to talk about why you're a better, better thing than Bitcoin, even though like, yeah, that's a hard battle to fight. But yeah.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  I think even in the what you talk about, you talk less about the economics than people do today. I think you even talk about that less too. I think you talk about how this is the best tech platform. And then we are the natural, like we are the programmable asset at the core of the winning tech platform. Like I think that is higher in the messaging than the economics are better. Like even when you're pitching Black Ark and why ETH is better money, I think the first bullet point is like, we win as the tech platform, like ETH is the decentralized asset at the middle of that. Like if ETH wins fundamentally, the only way you can use Bitcoin in this on-chain economy is like you're using CBTC, some bridge version, whatever, that's like super trusted. I think it's much easier to make that argument than the economics one, because I just don't think anyone's going

• 27:06Speaker 03

  to care. I don't think you're like just ever going to win that battle to anyone. It's always just going to be strictly worse. It's just like, it's a different, smaller thing. So like even in the investment pitch, I think it needs to be like, we're the winning tech platform. And that's like, that's, that's why we're the best money is because like, this is the platform that everything is built on top of. This is the only asset that can be the most decentralized, most secure asset in this economy. If this is the winning platform and the winning rails.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  So I think maybe John and you might agree and Brad too, that like maybe the price, the valuation that has deflated out of ETH over the last two to three years has run hand in hand with the decreasing Ethereum dominance as a smart contract platform. And so maybe the notion of ETH as money.

• 27:49David Hoffman?

  Just disappears when Ethereum dominance of the smart contract platform goes from like 90%, just even down to like 60%, whereas in 90%, you are the dominant smart contract platform. There is no second best, but at 60%, there actually is a second best. And maybe it's not really anything about Solana specifically, but the fact that there is a valid contender in a saturated market. And then after Solana, well, then why can't there be a third and fourth and fifth? And all of a sudden, the notion of a smart contract platform gets very commoditized. And so the difference between 60% dominant and 90% dominant is the difference in monetary premium versus being just a tech play with a DCF model. Andy, what's up?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I just think like, I think that's, that part of it to me is what's most interesting. Cause like, to be honest, I've never cared about the whole like ETH is money conversation. As someone who's been building on ETH for a very long time, I've always thought ETH was interesting and got into it because of the tech. And like, you know, it has, as someone who now makes most, the majority of my living being a DJ and on chain, like I have very heavily moved my transactions off of Ethereum mainnet and like even off of L2s for the most part, like the majority of my transactions for the last couple of years have been on Solana. And like, if you had told me that three years ago, I would have said, that's insane. Like, there's just no way that could ever possibly happen. And so kind of like you were saying, David, like the, the moment there is a second best

• 29:13Speaker 01

  and you see that Ethereum is continually not the fastest horse when it comes to upgrading the tech and like maintaining lead and just like being cutthroat and competitive. Then it's like, okay, we can extrapolate this out and there's a lot of money to be made here for no one to come and like really, really come for the king and try to be better. And then it just becomes like very, very reasonable to tell yourself a story of how it continues to fall off more and more.

• 29:38David Hoffman?

  What was the first thing that pulled you over? Was it activity?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, yeah, I guess this was like.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  I guess like pretty post FTX crash, like relatively close FTX crash. I just like bought a bunch of, I sold almost all of my Ethereum for Solana.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  And then because of that, like as pump fun and memes all moved over there, there just wasn't really anything happening on ETH. Like NFTs had died off for the most part at this point. And it's just like, what, I'm gonna sit in AVE and do nothing? So like, yeah, sure. Some of my stuff does that, but not, not nearly as much as it used to.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Gotcha. So you saw the black swan opportunity, figured that was probably a good buy. And then just came up with the activity after that.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just like, that was where things continued to happen. That's where the majority of opportunities have been over the last couple of years.

• 30:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, this just kind of goes back to this idea that there's a pretty large cohort of people who are just chain neutral. And they are just stoked about whatever layer one asset is giving them the opportunities to have fun casino games and, and potentially make money as well. And like, if that's Solana, if that's Ethereum, it doesn't really matter. But if the chain is fun, then there's some sort of like premium. I won't call it a monetary premium, but some sort of valuation premium that is associated with that, that layer one chain.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think that's moneyness.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I think that like, that actually is the money part. Like ETH is not money to me because I could theoretically buy a coffee with it. Like, I don't really care about that, but I use it to, you know, for a long time, every day I was sending hundreds of transactions on Ethereum where it was literally the money that I was paying to do things with. And like, that has just died off. And so then Solana has, for the most part, replaced it, or like USDC has replaced it in a lot of ways.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, that's always been my argument for, for these things, right? Or what, what L2s in the current paradigm, how they add value to Ethereum, right? Like you, you buy ETH on base because you want to ape 10K into a virtuals protocol, right? Like, that's that medium of exchange demand that comes from that something. It's the same thing with, with Solana, right? You go over to Solana and you're not holding on to 100 Solana because transactions are expensive, because it's pretty cheap, right? Fast and cheap. You buy 20 grand worth of Solana because you want to ape it into a shitter, right? Like, that's all buy pressure, right? Or if I don't, if I don't even want to do the shitter, I can buy. I, you know, the same amount thinking that Andy's gonna go over there and do that stuff because Andy like that, because I see it as a necessary asset to do the next cool thing, right?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  So you know, buy pressure is going to come in as a byproduct of that. So like, you didn't build for moneyness in that same way. They didn't build to be the medium of exchange, all this shit. They built for a useful tech platform for a pump fund. And because pump fund built there, now people need it as a medium of exchange. It's the thing next to the hot asset, right? The hot state. And therefore you, you get some asset appreciation out of that and then bullish narratives come out of it and everything else.

• 32:25David Hoffman?

  So if the meta is like, all right, we're all trading meme coins right now and somebody takes a hundred thousand dollars, deposits it into Coinbase because they want to buy a meme coin on Solana, a pump fund shitter. They take that hundred thousand dollars, they buy Sol. That turns into a hundred thousand dollars of buy pressure on Sol. Then they take that Sol over to pump fund and they dump a hundred thousand dollars into a meme coin. They sell Sol and they dump a hundred thousand dollars of, of Sol for this meme coin shitter. But that buy pressure is still showed up on Coinbase and I don't think selling it into a meme coin actually takes away from Solana USD liquidity and Solana USD demand, right? Like, I think that's true.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I don't think so. Yeah. Well, cause like, you know, I, I don't know what the numbers are, but there is like a lot of Solana locked up in dead radium pools of pump fund coins that have been totally abandoned. And so it's like the market cap of a completely abandoned coin on pump fund is still like mid five figures, five or six grand. And so that's a couple thousand dollars of Solana that's locked up literally forever and is never coming back out. And that probably has been more burn than like the ETH burn over the years if we did the math.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  It actually made it deflationary for a little bit, which is impressive, given, given Solana's inflation is actually higher than Ethereum.

• 33:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And like, we, we all know this pattern, right? Ether was like this reserve currency for the ICO media in 2017. It was the money that everyone used in DeFi for DeFi, the DeFi farms in 2020. And then it was the NFT money in 2021. And so, yeah, there's this kind of this, there's this speculative server and there is the denominator asset for that and whatever that is. And well, it's interesting that like right now, I don't know what the current meta is. Maybe Andy, you can kind of. Tell me what the traders are doing these days, what the kiddos are doing. But like, I don't know what the common denominator asset is because meme coins, meme coins are still alive, but they're not like where they were. Right now, the virtual's ecosystem is up bigly. That's back on on on base.

• 34:20David Hoffman?

  But that's actually with the virtual's unit of account, interestingly, but there is no kind of hot ball of money going around right now. So I don't really know where what happens next in that whole in the trader arc.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like Pump Fund is still doing pretty serious numbers as far as revenue and volume goes, not as much as, you know, peak mania, but I don't have it in front of me, but it's still a lot. I would say that's probably still the main kind of thing, but it does sort of feel like people, you know, in all my group chats and stuff are just like waiting for the next interesting thing. And kind of just like biding their time, trading meme coins. And if one goes to even like, you know, five or 10 million dollars, they're like, wow, this was incredible. Whereas previously, that's like table stakes. So that that part of it definitely has seemingly changed. But yeah, the virtual stuff that launched on base is cool. It's funny that they've gone back and forth like snip, snap, stiff, snap.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  But they're trying to like actually address some of the like sniping problems on, you know, these like fair launch tokens. And so they moved to a pre-sale model. It's been interesting to see all these different teams try to figure out ways to like launch a token that doesn't just get destroyed by like snipers and scammers.

• 35:31David Hoffman?

  I do think that the snipers is the number one problem about the sustainability of meme coins and token generation events. Like, it seems to be like the arc of meme coins ended when these snipers just started winning too hard because that was how the Libra debacle fell off. And so there's this like race to solve the sniper problem to like unlock the next like progression of meme coins.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  I'm still surprised that the value problem, like for all the faults that the typical L2 constructions have, right, with the sequencer building on the blocks. Like you do have the benefits of of a private men pool, right? So like you don't have to worry about people sandwich attacking you, right? Everyone is aware of it at the same time. It's hard to do same block buying that you're seeing with a lot of these launches on on Solana, where it's like, I think I heard Blockworks talk about the numbers and something like. Eighty percent of all Pump Fun launches have an initial buy in the exact same block in which the thing is launched. And then like 50% of those end in profit, sold five minutes later. So like, the grinder is just ridiculous over there right now. But like, that's possible because like, you know, that stuff's open, like it's been industrialized, right?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Because it's been around for a while. The value prop of doing something on an L2 right now is that, you know, that can't happen to the same degree because it's not all fully exposed block building.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm surprised by that as well. It's something that I kind of, at different points in time, thought that we would get with base and we got it to certain extents. But I really, like, as silly as it sounds, I kind of just feel like everyone who has a hot ball of DeGen money moved over to Solana and like, Phantom Wallet kind of won that world and Pump Fun won already. And it's just so hard to unseat them. Like, you really have to have some serious step level improvement. And seeming, I think a lot of these traders don't even know that that would be a step level improvement for them, that like, not be, like, they're sandwiching and stuff. They probably just don't even really know it exists. And where they're using GTO and they don't care.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  But yeah, I'm a little bit surprised we haven't seen more activity on L2s for that same reason.

• 37:35David Hoffman?

  Meme coins itself as a category has been so much more sticky than any other mania that's come before it. You know, NFTs came and went and, you know, ICOs came and went and like DeFi somewhere came and went, but meme coins came and they are still here. And it doesn't really seem like they are going away like anytime soon. And I think every ecosystem is trying to find its like Pump Fun, but nothing's really taking away anything from Pump Fun itself.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  For this virtual thing, so like, I haven't looked at it closely, if you guys have. So, I mean, the idea of this like new launch thing that they're doing is it's supposed to be like, you do a pre-sale basically of the token at like some fixed price, right? Yeah. The basic idea of it to launch. What is the reason for doing that as opposed to the, like, the other main idea that I've heard before that I don't think I've seen before with meme coins? Is like just running a like a Dutch auction or something before you launch it. And so you get like an actual market like floating that market sets the price as opposed to like some arbitrary fixed price here. I didn't really understand the mechanic of that as opposed to.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was funny, I remember talking to David about this at a party once while we were drinking wine. But I think really the the issue, because like I I agree theoretically that like a Dutch auction makes a ton of sense.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  Technically better.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I think Dop, what's the name of the, is it Doppler?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  From Moss and Adams, yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, like they're they're doing stuff like kind of in that vein. But the issue is that it doesn't feel like or scratch the itch of like, I want to turn one Solana into 10,000 Solana. And like, that is so much more the driving force than like, I need the absolute fair market entry price at the start of this thing. Yeah. And so I think it's just like, if you could find a way. And like, I'm honestly shocked that we haven't seen meme coins on like world chain become popular. Some like some way to like truly Sybil resistance meme coin launch where like you could have an actually fair, you know, $10 per human meme coin launch or something like I think it could potentially work.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  But it's just like, if you don't have that lottery ticket style potential, it's just not as compelling for a lot of people.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  What I'm hearing is it's a mid curve, a mid curve approach to meme coins is like, everyone's just like, bro, just give me the lottery ticket. I want maximum extraction, but also maximum upside. And then like, oh, but it's not fair. You don't realize you're getting taken advantage of, so they're like, what are you talking about? Give me my lottery ticket.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, I still want to do a 10 leg parlay NFL Sunday. I know it's not the right move, but I still want to do it. But I think David, quickly on what you were talking about of meme coins being sticky. I was talking about this with a couple of friends the other day. And my response was like casinos have had the same casino games for a very long time. And like, I kind of feel like we've just gotten to a bit of what the like logical conclusion of like on chain casino looks like. And I think it will continue to evolve and change for sure, but like. People are, people obviously like to risk money and gamble on the blockchain. And I don't see that stopping. And until there is a more efficient way than meme coins to do it for this like true PvP

• 40:49Speaker 01

  like system, I don't think it'll be replaced. And like the flavor of what it is might change, whether it's, you know, AI or animals or whatever, but it's still kind of the same thing.

• 40:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so it's still on-chain liquidity PvP-ing, which is what I think everyone is getting pulled into. Like when you and I were talking, Andy, I was like going down the flanche rabbit hole. And I think talking about like, oh yeah, there's like, what about like a 30-minute window? Where if you're interested, you can come in, you can buy the meme coin. It's just 30 minutes long. And then, then the people who get in inside of this 30 minutes, 30-minute window, they're the early ones and everyone else is like, it's only 30 minutes. But like, I think I still underestimated this, like, the power of this, like, human centipede of virality, where if you are number one, you are twice as early as number two. And if you are number two, you are twice as early as number four. And so the incentive to just like send some like pump fun shitter link to your friend and being like, hey, buy this.

• 41:44David Hoffman?

  And then your friend like repeats that down the line across Telegram. Like that, that, that's like, I think that's how like a railgun works. That, that railgun method of just like a viral meme coin is just so incredibly powerful that optimizing for like 20% better execution just does not hold a candle to that, whatever phenomenon that is.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Like, the, the problem I still have with all this, though, is how we're saying like, if this is reaching kind of the logical conclusion of like basically on-chain casino, is that, and I've heard people argue this before, of like, this is just strictly worse than a casino. Because like, the good thing about casinos, like, they have actually optimized basically all of the odds to extract just enough, such that you don't like screw off, like screw all of the customers over so that they all leave, they keep coming back. Versus that's the problem with these meme coins, like at least as currently constructed, if we don't move to any kind of like auction or whatever kind of different format is everyone who's individually launching a single token is just like incentivized to max extract. And so the market equilibrium ends up being you just extract like way more than the users

• 42:48Speaker 03

  are actually willing to take and then like keep playing over time. Like it just ends up looking like that roller coaster meme of like the like this, the circle just keeps getting like a little bit smaller every time and it feels like we're just going forward with that. Where I like, I don't think meme coins are obviously going away. They're never going to, I mean, the big ones are going to last forever. And I don't even think that the current iteration is going to go away of this like current pump fund meta. But I, I can't see that like as currently constructed that it would keep growing or even sustain what it's at. Like it feels like it has to just, just start like churning people out at like the kind of the current economics of it.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I think like the, the one thing though with that, cause I, I agree with you, but it's worse than a casino odds wise, but it's better than a casino marketing because no one knows the odds. And the average idiot online sees some 19 year old post a picture of his Ferrari and goes, I could do that. No one thinks that going to sit down at the blackjack table, but they think that when they put 10 Solana in their phantom wallet. And so that's the major difference right now. And so like, I think that's why it's been so cyclical, where there are these really long periods of lulls and periods of like total mania, because there is a ton of money that is leaving the system every single time. And you just like need time to refresh after that.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, I don't, let's not act like it's any different than just like crypto broadly, right? These people doing this stuff don't even know the difference between the value accrual methods and valuations of any of these things, like the layer one blockchains, layer two blockchains, DeFi protocols, meme coins, whatever, right? That's, that's a narrative that most of this stuff is meme coins. So for them, it's, it's the same thing. You see the upside from everyone else and then you get hurt and then you go, I'm ready to be hurt again after some period of time and then you go back in. The thing that's surprising to me is my guess is that more people than you'd expect understand how bad the odds are, just because of really high-profile blowups at this point of like, like the Trump coin chart is terrible. Like, that's just not a good chart. Like, most people who have bought that thing are down. And then you look at like the Malay

• 44:47Speaker 03

  chart, burned a ton of people, just like straight nuke. Like, those are the examples that most people have seen. I have been surprised at the level of meme coin volume that has continued after that of like, Pump Fun is filled with ripping. Like, they're just still making a ton of money every day. People are still using it a lot. I have been surprised that it didn't make more of a dent, having these really high-profile examples where everyone sees that like, yeah, you're probably, you're probably gonna lose money on this. Like, it's not gonna be a great outcome. I have been surprised at how sticky it has been, even with that happening.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I think it's just like a tale as old as time with gambling in general. I think it's like, still, just people who are doing this and, you know, think they have a chance, if they don't actually have an edge, are like, pretty irrational, whether they're sports betting, or at the blackjack table, or playing meme coins.

• 45:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I do think that post-Trump, post-Libra, there was a cleansing of the market where people without edge just either did get burned, or identified that they don't have edge, and they left. And the people who are left playing the meme coin game are sophisticated. They, they know the game. They, they are aware of the odds. They, like, are doing it for fun. They're doing it with their funny money. And so, the, the market that is left of doing that is, is the people who are doing it are not casuals. They are people who are, think about this day in, day out. And they are the ones who are responsible for like, this, you know, sustained high volumes here.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  I describe it as the, like, the Malay-Libra situation was the lights coming on at the club at 3 a.m. Like, everyone's like, what is going on? Like, I am disgusted with myself. Like, this is not what I want to be doing. I need to go home and shower, right? So, like, the average person left. And then, like, you know, the people that are, like, doing that every other night are, are still there playing the game.

• 46:37David Hoffman?

  Chronic partiers, yeah.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Chronic partiers, they're still doing that stuff. They're doing a line in the bathroom. Like, they're having a great time.

• 46:42David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  But the thing is, um, like, I, I saw some comments on the timeline of just people saying that it was a little, it was like trench warfare between different cults of meme coiners over the last few weeks, but it was starting to heal a little bit. So it was like, everyone had formed these little cabals of trying to launch these coins and make these games, whatever. There's actually a lot of dashboards for tracking wallets of like PK wells and shit. So like, a lot of that was going on pretty heavily for the last month or so. And then now it's starting like, okay, momentum's starting to pick back up and it's starting to be a little more PVE.

• 47:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I do wonder like, once, i- if this does really like actually get frothy again, there's more energy going back into this. If the equilibrium finds a more sustainable place where more people aren't just getting raked over and over and over again, it's actually a little bit more sustainable and it's, and it's, you know, the more casual people can actually play for a longer time without actually getting their, their shit handed to them. Uh, I would hope so, uh, obviously, but I don't really know if there's any sort of reasons why the rake just wouldn't get more, more rakey over time.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the, the one nice thing is like, generally in the history of crypto things, like fees have somewhat trended towards zero over time. And like, you know, there was a period of time where it seemed insane that like royalties would ever go away or these different things. And like, sure, there's still going to be extraction events and stuff. But these markets are like, you know, long enough time horizon, they can be pretty efficient. And like, I, I have to think that it will happen eventually. People will only, you know, lose money so much, but they still want to fuel their gambling addiction that will try to get better or they'll move to competitors who are trying to take less, but, uh, I doubt it'll be super soon.

• 48:26David Hoffman?

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• 49:53David Hoffman?

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• 50:17Speaker 02

  Redirecting a little bit. And have you played in a hyper liquid ecosystem at all?

• 50:22Speaker 01

  A little bit, not a ton recently, but yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  It's something I was told myself I was gonna do it this weekend. Didn't actually do it, but I'm starting to deploy my strategy because I want exposure to hype because, one, because of the fees it's generating. It's like this enshrined application setup that seems to be finding a little bit of PMF, right? Like they're routinely at the top of chain. Chain fees, but it's a little unfair again because they have an enshrined application, which is their perps platform. But they're, they have the EVM side that's opened up, which is this general programmable side, like sidecar that has some, I believe their opcodes are called builder codes that allow you to like actually inherit or take some information from the perps platform and then bring it into the EVM side, which is really slow. It's, it's not, it's programmable, but like it has some appeal there and there's like a little bit of a scene popping up.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  And I just think it'll probably continue to, to grow a little bit and I want to make sure I have some exposure, but I don't know if that'll be straight hype or if I want to actually like go a little bit deeper.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was actually tweeting with someone about that, that literally today. Funny enough, but I think the, the challenge with the EVM stuff is like, I mean, I think there's a couple of issues, but like one is just that people who own hype value hype so much as an asset that like they don't want to sell it. They don't want to use it as money. They want to hold it because they value it so much.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Ecosystem.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, why am I going to sell my hype for some random shitcoin on, you know, the launchpad that exists or AI agent or whatever. And so I think that's like a big part of it. And also, like you said, the experience on the hype perps X and the experience on like the hype EVM are just not the same. And I think that you use the two and you're like, I don't really want to use this EVM that there's like not that much to do. And so I think you kind of just need like one or two catalysts to really get the ball moving and get things to change and probably at, you know, odds are at some point that will happen and there will be a period of time where there's a lot of money to be made on the hype EVM. But yeah, right now it's, it's been weird.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  I'm a little, a little bit surprised at how little there has been because I was like actually pretty bearish about the EVM launch for a lot of these reasons. I just thought people really like hype and don't want to use it for that. But I'll be curious to see how it evolves.

• 52:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah. What is the integration, the like synergy between the hype EVM and the actual perps platform? Like, why, why is it, is it just the same currency? Or like, what, what's the deal?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, like Brett said, you, they have some codes that you can use, like, kind of enshrined opcodes to access data from the exchange. And also, I believe eventually the idea is that you can also, you know, like, buy and sell on the exchange through the EVM. I don't think that's live right now. But so theoretically, if there were applications that needed oracles or wanted to have like, you know, really deep liquidity for trading different things, you could like, build that in the EVM and be able to access data from the exchange at the same time. That's kind of, I think, a lot of what the core value prop is. They have some other stuff that they've changed as well. They

• 53:35Speaker 01

  have like a dual block architecture, which is interesting, where they have like smaller blocks that are cheaper and faster and bigger blocks that are more expensive. So like, you use the big blocks to deploy smart contracts for the most part and like do really complex batching or whatever. And you use the smaller blocks for regular transactions. But I think they're a little bit too small still to like 2 million gas. It's kind of easy to fill them up.

• 53:59David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  But

• 54:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay. The notion of an enshrined application actually does make sense. It has like all of this very rich data and trailing, trading volume and liquidity.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's like, what if, what if Binance had a EVM around it where you could build a bunch of other cool stuff on top of Binance?

• 54:14David Hoffman?

  Right. Yeah. What if, what if the Binance exchange and BNB were like more intimately connected with each other? Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. I want to hear John talk a little bit about like the, he was teasing a high capacity or high performance chain, little R, research paper, but he may never release it. So I'm gonna try and see if I can tease some of it out of it right now.

• 54:33David Hoffman?

  It's been a while.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Do you cover hyper liquid in that?

• 54:38Speaker 03

  I wrote like 90% of it and then I just haven't finished the last 10% of it. It's been sitting there for like a good month or two at this point. I need to actually finish it. Uh, yeah, no, I did it, but um, you know, I like, I, I think the pitch of it definitely makes sense of like, David, to your question of like, kind of like what, like what, why the integration? I mean, a lot of it, I think, is honestly similar to Slana's thesis, just like starting from a different point of, it's just beneficial to have all these things in the same place. I mean, the, the, the simple literal example is, all right, if this is just like the best, deepest liquid exchange that has all the users on it, like where would you want to launch your token in your application? You know, I'm going to launch my app, obviously, right there and then like, you know, my, my token will just get listed there right away. Like this is where all the users are.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  I like, I, I have a tough time with it though, um, seeing them build this out in practice because yeah, I mean, I mean, part of it is like, you could just like literally look at the numbers of this, obviously, um, it like, at least as of right now, we'll see where they take it. The hyper EVM is like not actually performant at all. It's like very on the low end of performance.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Just for relative numbers, I looked, I looked it up. It's like, it's like 1/30 of base to give you like relative performance. So like if they're, if that's their throughput relative to their hyper core side, which is the perps thing. It's just like, like Andy was saying, like you have this mental model of like hyper liquid, fast, go, awesome, cool, whatever thing. And then you get over there like, what, what the fuck's going on? Like it's, um, I mean, quicksand and I don't like it. And like, I, I just think that's the, uh, not a great move.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I, I think it's a, like, it's a really tough area to play in to just go build another EVM chain. And then one, to make it good and then to like have a meaningful differentiation then on top of that to get users to come use you. It's, it's just hard to start a general purpose chain right now as an EVM. I mean, like even for guys like MegaEthan, Monad, who were great and have been working at this longer. Uh, like Monad's been working on like literally this problem for years. I, I, it seems difficult to me that like a team is just going to show up and say like, oh yeah, we're, we're going to have the, the super optimized EVM and just slap it on top of this other thing and it's going to work perfectly. It's obviously like not how it's going to work. Um, and then building up a whole general purpose ecosystem. It's just gonna be really tough, particularly when you've taken away the obvious two

• 56:47Speaker 03

  applications that would be the thing, you know, the flagship thing that like most applications would build is it's perfect exchange and spot exchange. Like, that's already gone. So go build the other like stuff that people already care about a little bit less. And then, hey, by the way, this actually isn't optimized, it's difficult. So like, yeah, my, my general bias has been the same for the past few months. It's still super bullish on them as building a great purpose exchange, a really good exchange for people to use. But I, it's gonna be super tough to like, really, really drive adoption on having a meaningfully differentiated EVM right now, sitting that on there.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I agree. I think the one thing that they have that a lot of other EVMs don't have, and I've seen this mentioned a few times, is that they just have a massive war chest of hype that they can airdrop to people. And so, you know, as we saw with UniChain over the last couple of weeks, like incentives work. And it will get people to move funds. And so that's kind of, to me, the one unknown is, I know they just had on testnet the other day, a new like points page show up on their, on their UI. And so I could see them starting to roll out a much more aggressive incentive mechanism for using the hyper EVM. And that could be a pretty big ball mover.

• 58:02David Hoffman?

  Guys, this has been, I've loved this. I think this is great. There's one last conversation that I think we should touch on before we wrap this one up. This one actually spawned on TikTok, apparently. I don't know how or why, but there, going around the internet, there is a conversation around 100 men versus one gorilla. And I think it's worth having a conversation here. I think it's nice to see how everyone thinks about this, this question. Maybe Brett, actually, I think you were the one that suggested this. So maybe you could kind of like lay the, lay the foundation about this debate.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. So first, we gotta set up parameters. So everyone is aware of the conditions, right? So we're gonna say neutral playing field. This is in an arena. Everyone is told to go in and fight the other thing, the 100 men versus the gorilla. Same thing with the gorilla. Assume we can communicate with it. It says if you don't win, you're dead. Right? So like, there's a, there's a motivation there. For me, I think it's pretty clear. I do this on, on mass, right? So like, you do like the average weight of an American male, I think it was like 190 pounds. That's like 19,000, 2,000, 20,000 pounds roughly. And a, a average, a silverback gorilla is like 400 pounds. She had like 19,500 pounds mass difference there.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  So I, I just think logically, you have to go with the humans because the gorilla still has soft bits. It's, it's made for burst strength and energy, right? It's not an endurance athlete like the, like humans. There you go. Little, little disproportionate, like, that's what I, I think people just like, like, Jesus. People don't understand the size of a gorilla. It's not King Kong. It's like 400 pounds. So it's like, you know, a couple of humans. And I just think, yeah, you gotta go with the gorilla, or you gotta go with the humans in that, that instance.

• 59:38David Hoffman?

  I think the, the context of saying, you will die if you do not win, I think is important. Cause when I was first simulating this in my head, I didn't really have that, that prerequisite in the debate. Because I think like, I was thinking about this, okay, if I am one of these 100 people and I have to go up against these silverback gorilla, uh, which, uh, yeah, 300 to 430 pounds. Okay. So you're right about that. That, that thing is fucking scary, bro. And there's no way that I'm going first. And I think it, most, most dudes like me are also not, are also not planning on going first.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Standoffs, yeah.

• 1:00:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And so who the hell is going to go first? And if everyone is scared of going first, that silverback gorilla can just pick us off one by one. That was kinda like my hesitancy about picking humans here.

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. As long as you don't do the gladiator thing where like, he walks out and just like fights like nine other gladiators, one by one, and just works through it, then like, yeah, gorilla's gonna win everyone, every time. But like, 100 people, no way.

• 1:00:38David Hoffman?

  It really depends on how coordinated the humans are.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess one, are, are the humans allowed to plan before the fight starts?

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that really matters.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Five minutes as a group.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  I think that I think that'd be enough time. I think that's the other aspect of it. It's just like, humans are smarter than gorillas. And I think that, I think that with enough planning, you could figure it out. And the other thing that I was thinking about is like, could 10 humans beat Andre the Giant in a fight? How much would he weigh? Is a gorilla 10 times harder than Andre the Giant? Like, I don't know. So yeah, I mean, I agree with Brett. I think that it's like definitely the humans. Like, do you think that you could beat 100 rats in a fight? Like, probably not.

• 1:01:25David Hoffman?

  100 rats?

• 1:01:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:26David Hoffman?

  I think I could beat 100 rats.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  5,000 rats? Now we're, now it's getting weird.

• 1:01:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  If, so you think if 100 rats came at you right now, you have, you're standing there and 100 rats saw me, you think you would win in a fight?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Are they New York rats?

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Are they basically dogs?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  They just ate some Joe's Pizza and they're ready to go.

• 1:01:49David Hoffman?

  I'm just thinking that like, if it's rats, if it was 100 rats, I can run quickly. And all I need to do is while I am running, step on one rat at a time for a while. And if I can get them down to 50, then I'm golden.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Alright, fair enough. But yeah, I just think it's definitely humans.

• 1:02:08David Hoffman?

  John?

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  So I waited to go last because I cheated and I went back and forth with ChatGPT, asking what would happen here and went through different scenarios. So four, four attributes that matter most, if the humans are going to win or not, one, willingness to die. If you have a bunch of people who are suicidal, like, odds skyrocket.

• 1:02:25David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Two, two is coordination and strategy. Like, if, if you have, if you have a plan going in, so the five minutes is big. And then size and skill of the fighters. So if you take 100 average men with no plan and a normal will to live, gorilla wins easily because the reason why is panic. Most humans flee or hesitate when seeing friends being ripped apart.

• 1:02:44David Hoffman?

  I am fleeing.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Fear collapses.

• 1:02:46David Hoffman?

  I am running.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Guerrilla wins within minutes, but if you take about 100 NFL linemen who are coordinated and willing to die, there's a greater than 95% chance that they win and they will neutralize it fast in under 45 seconds with probably only 10 to 20 casualties.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  The greater question here?

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  And the coordinated plan, and this is part of why I don't even think it works if you have people coordinate before, is because you know who's going to die. Like, the people who go in the first wave, like, they're all dead. The first, like, two waves of people, they're all dead. But that is the optimal strategy, is you send them in coordinated waves, you take out the lower body first, and then you have, like, dedicated teams for each of the body parts. Like, if a vision crew take out the eyes, the neck.

• 1:03:28Speaker 02

  Poke the eyes out.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's what that's what it is.

• 1:03:30David Hoffman?

  Is that gonna be you, Brad? You're gonna go for the eyes?

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  I mean, look, man, if all my, if all my homies are on the line, my, the interesting question for me, now that John rattled some of that off, is, would you guys say that you have above or below the average will to live?

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  I have above the, I would say I have above average will to live.

• 1:03:50David Hoffman?

  I think the average person will say that they have above average will to live.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. This is like the, if you ask everyone, do you think you're a good or a bad driver, like, above average driver, the vast majority of people will tell you that they're an above average driver. I feel like this is the exact same thing.

• 1:04:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. All right. That was great. Guys, this has been fantastic. Uh, next week, we'll talk about whatever the, the weekly meta is. I think also something that I need to figure out, maybe you guys can help me, maybe the listeners of this podcast can help me. We need a name for this subject. I was thinking about Block Party. Uh, seems really fucking generic. You can tell I just chat, asked ChatGPT exactly what I should have called this. Uh, so if there's anyone out there with a possible name for whatever the show format is, uh, hit me with it. Uh, and then also just give us a feedback. If you like this episode, uh, what you want us to talk about, uh, if you're in the Bankless Discord, at me there. If you're on Twitter, at us there. Uh, Andy, John, Brad, really appreciate you guys coming on and just talking through the week with me and, uh, looking forward to doing it next week.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Later dudes. See ya. Fun. See.

• 1:04:49David Hoffman?

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