ROLLUP: Ethereum L1 Comeback | MegaETH Testnet | Base Token Chaos | OHM Crash | WalletConnect Token

This week, Bread joins David to unpack Ethereum’s surprising pivot back to Layer 1, as insiders push for a more pragmatic roadmap and faster block times. MegaETH’s 10ms testnet drops jaws and breaks dApps, while WalletConnect shocks the industry with a late-stage token launch. Meanwhile, Base stirs chaos with its “content coins,” OHM crashes $6B in hours, and Solana’s token wars heat up. Is Ethereum finally finding its focus — or just reacting to the noise? It’s a jam-packed Weekly Rollup you don’t want to miss. Bread: https://x.com/0xBreadguy MegaETH: https://x.com/megaeth_labs Modern Market: https://x.com/modernmarket_ ------ 📣 WALLET CONNECT | ONCHAIN UX ECOSYSTEM https://bankless.cc/WalletConnect ------ 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 1:20 Bread’s Arc 3:17 MegaETH & Testnet 8:46 Noise 13:31 Wen MegaETH Mainnet? 16:59 Ethereum Strategic Pivot? 39:25 Base Tokenized Content Drama 49:59 $OM Mantra Token Dump 59:28 Raydium’s LaunchLab 1:03:38 Bread’s Upcoming Excitement 1:04:31 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?

  Bangs Nation, welcome to the weekly roll up. Each week I'm bringing on a different co-host to help me go through the news. And this week is the last time that I do that, bringing up the rear, bringing up in the caboose. I have the pleasure of being joined by Brett. Brett is a crypto Twitter educator who's also working on MegaEthereum. Brett, happy Friday, happy to have you.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  It's kind of appropriate that you introduce me as the caboose, given some of my pictures on the timeline.

• 0:28David Hoffman?

  A pun not intended for those who know.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you don't know, sometimes I post pictures of my ass online.

• 0:35David Hoffman?

  And everyone likes it.

• 0:39David Hoffman?

  We were gonna have you on last week Brett, but the tariff news just continued to rock the world. And we swapped in Haseeb to talk about tariffs. But Haseeb also, I think, underhanded us with a lot of what we're gonna talk about today, which is the MegaEthereum testnet. Came out last week. It's been one of the most anticipated mainnet relaunches that's coming. Still may not here yet, but with the testnet, people can start to play around. And then the MegaEthereum project has really just done a very good job attracting unique apps, like not crypto's 200th perfect exchange, but some unique applications that are being found and being built on MegaEthereum. So you grew up your branding, educating on crypto Twitter,

• 1:23David Hoffman?

  and then decided to land a position at MegaEthereum. Maybe you could talk about just your arc for people that don't know you, and then talk about the decision to join MegaEthereum.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. That's actually a little bit of lore for everyone else listening is like, you know, you and I even talked about like potentially working together, trying to do something. Because you're right, I cut my teeth over the last like year and a half as like educator. This is how you introduced me. Like I come from a history of, and web 2, where I worked in actually the medical industry on the IT side. So like I traveled the world, basically talking about complex technical stuff to clinical people. So like no one knew any of the underlying stuff. So I got pretty good at just talking about complex topics in, you know, normal ways. And I enjoy it frankly, I like educating and it teaches me some of these deeper concepts. So yeah, over the last like year, trying to like really take this place on full time, I was...

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Spending a lot of time on the timeline, talking about things that I was interested in, which was the technical stuff and doing it in relatable terms. Trying to look for just basically opportunities to contribute to the industry. And whenever I saw Mega ETH come along back in, I think it was July, I just reached out. I was like, hey, I got time. I'm looking for a team that actually resonates with me because I didn't want to like, try to sell something I didn't believe in. I saw that, saw them, reached out, tried to contribute more heavily. Bing actually took the actual co-founder, she actually turned me down. She was like, oh yeah, join our Discord. Like we're not, we're not opening roles, but you can like hang out in our Discord. I was like, no, no chance.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  I'm not going back to the Discord dog days. Then I just kept doing my, my education stuff on the timeline. And eventually, actually in November of last year, they came back and like, yeah, we actually need someone that's forward on crypto Twitter that, you know, can represent us and actually talk about our technical concepts. And at that point, I joined the team and it's been fun ever since.

• 3:18David Hoffman?

  I think we are still in the hype phase of many of these blockchains, Mega ETH included, Monad, but there's a bunch of not life chains that everyone is very stoked about. And so people's imaginations are allowed to, you know, go, go pretty wild. The line that Haseeb gave us last week that I really liked was that this isn't just like a blockchain with very fast block times. This is so incredibly fast that it starts to really change the form factor for what even a blockchain looks like, because the block times are so fast, 10 millisecond block times, that it's a streaming blockchain. And so the chain of like, you know, discrete blocks doesn't, doesn't, it's not really the same because of how fast it goes. And maybe I can emphasize that for the listeners with one of your guys is Oracle's Redstone,

• 4:03David Hoffman?

  which is updating the price on chain on Mega ETH every 2.4 milliseconds. And so that's 416 transactions per second of just Oracle pricing updates. And so things are just going so fast in the Mega ETH world. The hype that everyone's getting excited about is that this does, it actually doesn't really fit the same form factor as a blockchain. Maybe you can share a little like behind the scenes peek of what that looks like on the team side of things, because I know you guys have had some additional challenges, because you know, Mega ETH is just building a blockchain that doesn't look like any other blockchain.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you alluded to it last week whenever you're talking for anyone that saw that. And it's just like, yeah, a lot of the things that we built into or have as like just standard stuff in our ecosystem just isn't ready to handle it. One is just like the little like logic and like low latency

• 4:52Speaker 01

  updates you have to do to your systems to make stuff work. But other stuff is like something as nuanced as we're used to a confirmation spinning wheel coming up, right? So like, if you think about your user flow in our space, someone comes, they click swap, a modal pops up, it gives you a message to read, it's got a little spinning dial. And then after, you know, half a second, a second, multiple seconds, if you're on Ethereum, it goes away, you can move on with your life. And with us, we're finding that the applications are building stuff out. And a lot of these flows just straight up, they don't work. Like it's just like you have no time to read a message in between your click and it being confirmed on chain. And we're only able to do that because we, you know, obviously we're in L2, so we can offload consensus down to Ethereum. And we're just really, really, really leaning into this, right? We're trying to shrink this, this, what would be time filled with consensus, which was a block time to basically zero. It's at 10 milliseconds now, we're aiming for one millisecond.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And you're right, like visualizing stuff just is very, very hard when you're at, you're operating at that level. So like, you know, we use demon as like the streaming blockchain, we're calling it the real time blockchain because it feels real time, it feels instantaneous. And it is just, yeah, it's a world that is, yeah, you're showing there some comparisons with like Discord messages, you know, Stripe payments and like Netflix, yeah, Netflix Seek. Like we talk about a lot of the stuff in like really esoteric terms within the blockchain world. So, you know, I made a point to, to write an article, it's like, okay, like, let's talk about something that you actually can relate to. An Instagram story, right? Like the time it takes for this stuff to swipe and show up on your screen. And whenever you start visualizing like the time it takes for us to process with things that you use day to day

• 6:19Speaker 01

  as opposed to like some random swap on another exchange that you've never actually used. It's more relatable and you kind of like understand contextually like what level we're operating on. And yeah, a lot of stuff breaks down at this level.

• 6:30David Hoffman?

  The news last week was that the Mega ETH testnet was out. What has that looked like? Maybe you can, again, show us a little bit behind the curtain. What's going on now that the testnet has been out for like 10 days or so? How has the community received it? What are they doing? What's happening?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're, I mean, we're just scaling it up, right? We're like, we're pointing out to a lot of stuff that's breaking down. A lot of infrastructure stuff that we realize is just not ready day one. So things like you mentioned, the oracle, we had the oracle drop out the other day. And it's like now people can actually build games. Like, one of the reasons this actually even came up is like we have, we have people who are trying to build games on chain. And they're like, oh, I can't even track the person because we need to, we need updates within these, this 10 minutes, like an interval. And it's just, you need to get stuff on par with your actual block so that we can do like, you know, motion tracking, all this kind of stuff. But yeah, we have a bunch of apps launching. A lot of them are novel because they are consumer forward because they are operating at the speeds that you're used to with your mobile phone. Like just like a normal phone, our app you download from the App Store.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  So a few that I'll call out is like, that I'm really excited about is Noise is one that popped up. That's one where we trade mindshare, right? So it's just, yeah, this one is all over the timeline. And so this is the only place you can get it because it's a consumer forward app. I like it's, it's instantaneous. They're replicating the EIP 7702. So it's like, there's no approved swap flow. It's just all right there inside the app, one click that everyone loves, that everyone thought brought down Ethereum.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  But it's really exciting. People are coming to it and playing. Another one that like, there's more consumer forward. If you go down, you can actually even see, like, yeah, it's like this is GTE. That is our normal text. You can see a little bit higher.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  You can see like the speed at which the approvals are actually happening right there. Yeah, you see, like, he's clicking right there on that screen. You can see the swaps are instantaneous. Each click is just, it's swapped, it's swapped, it's swapped, right? So like for them, the button coming up and showing like, are the modal coming up and showing approved and then swapped, confirming and swap? Doesn't make sense. Like, maybe you just change it to the button is just a color change because that's all the time you have to process anything. And then we have some other stuff like Guess Best and Euphoria is coming, which is a tap trading tool. But people are just like starting to ramp up, starting to find the cracks in what was like a traditional app inside of Web3 and seeing how they need to modify that to work with a real time blockchain.

• 8:46David Hoffman?

  Really, all of these questions are getting at the background of mega ETH, I think, was to really get to what is actually like the news of the week, which, like you alluded to, noise is just on the timeline. Everyone, not everyone, but like a good number of people are talking about noise, which is, again, a app, a mega ETH app that's on testnet. I think the construction of noise is pretty interesting. It ingests a Kaido oracle about mindshare of a particular subject or a project or, you know, something category. And then it creates a perpetual exchange around that oracle. And so the oracle is a single source of truth. And then people can go long or short on the movement of, you know, the growth or decline of mindshare. And so people are just like being able to bet on the mindshare of particular projects.

• 9:31David Hoffman?

  And so if they think this one thing is going to have more attention in the future, they can go long. If they think it's going to have less attention in the future, they can go short. And this is inside of the same category. We're going to talk about later, the base creator coin debacle. But this is actually in that same category of we, people are very interested in trading mindshare. And this is what Alon from Pump Fun likes to say is what Pump Fun is doing is actually culture coins, meme coins. They're actually like mindshare markets and people are trying to find more ways just beyond Pump Fun, like, you know, static meme coins to trade mindshare. And that's what I'm seeing happen with noise. And I think why a lot of people are making noise about noise.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, you're correct. And I'm personally not someone that gets in the trenches deeply, right? Like, I'm not in there playing a bunch of meme coins because I understand the probabilities of, of like being directionally correct, but picking the wrong coin, right? Like AI agents came along, you would be like, AI agents is going to be a thing. Like you can clearly tell everyone wants it, but there's a gajillion, gajillion coins. And it's like, I don't know which one to pick. Was it AI XBT? Is it, you know, I don't know. There's like a thousand of them, right? Fartcoin, like they're all like they're all have their own cut up stuff. And it's like, I would like to say that I believe this thing is going to be a trade, a trend, which is their tagline is trade trends. I wouldn't believe that this is going to be a trend and it will be something that people will be talking about. But I don't want to speak, I don't want to pick a specific.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Perfect coin. There was actually a tweet that we fired off around Ethereum where it's like, if you're in ETH, or if you're in hashtag ETH, pivot to hashtag ETH because ETH has been like the conversation for a very, very long time. And like mindshare for ETH is trending up, whereas like the price unfortunately has been trending down a little bit. So it's like that, that specific outcome kind of shows you what they're trying to go for. And to be honest, I was a little worried that this would be too easy, right? Like in something like this, you need people to lose frankly, right? Like you need people on the other side of a bet to make sure that you're actually like being able to fill up the order books. And I was like, it's too easy. You just pick trends and you're doing stuff. But I'm losing my ass on test that.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  So I am now happy to say that there might be a product here because like, yeah, it's not as easy as I thought. I'm getting blown out on a few trades.

• 11:47David Hoffman?

  But it's like test that money, right? It's not real money?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 11:51David Hoffman?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just like, you know, I picked the wrong trend. I thought it was going down for sure and it did not. At least according to kind of.

• 12:00David Hoffman?

  Right, yeah. There are a bunch of different constructions about these like mindshare trading applications that are cropping up. And even Zora is trying to position itself. Again, like I said, we're going to talk about the base token debacle. Anything else going on on mega ETH that we should know about before we move on?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so like a lot of the apps that we call in that, that article was just like about Omega is only on mega apps. A lot of those teams are born out of our incubator, our, I won't say accelerator, right? So we have a mega mafia program where it's like we've co-lived with, you know, upwards of 15 teams, 18 teams for 30 days at a time. We did Berlin and Chiang Mai before DevCon last time. And we literally helped them like do everything they need. They go through raising, they go through finding co-founders, they go through like PMF, like working on their product, you know, go to market, all this shit. And a lot of these, these applications were, actually all of these applications were born out of that outside of Guest Best. And we're, we're going to do another round of that. I think you should see an announcement here soon.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  And I think it's a very exciting. Opportunity for people to really come to us, understand our technology, work closely with our, our technical team, our engineers, actually like dictate some of the, the outcomes of the chain, like the, the current mafia team, because we meet weekly to, to go over stuff, help them do things. Like we've specifically implemented things on mega ETH because they've been requested by the teams that are building on mega ETH. Cause like, we want to be the best place for that. And we're going to open up another cohort here soon. And it's an exciting opportunity. So I would say look out for that.

• 13:32David Hoffman?

  I know you guys are just getting the preliminary data from the testnet, right? The testnet went live like 10 ish days ago. So you still have a lot of testnet left. But if you had to give a best guess about when mainnet would come, are we talking like, you know, this year, Q3, Q4, are we waiting to next year? What, what do we think?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Q3 is a, is probably comfy.

• 13:53David Hoffman?

  Cool.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. We're trying to be aggressive with it, like on balance. Like I think the, um, one of the, the mindsets we have, obviously we don't want to jeopardize anything like, but some of the, some of the things that have been, uh, seen as a downside in the past, right? Solana is going down because they've been too aggressive. They're scaling too fast. Like some of the stigma associated with being just like hyper fixated on performance and moving fast, breaking things, a little bit of that FFO energy. Like we're not afraid to, to maybe step into that realm. Obviously we want to avoid it if we can, but like, you know, we're trying to be aggressive.

• 14:23David Hoffman?

  All right. Let's pivot into, uh, let's go back down to just ETH, not mega ETH. We're going to talk about the, uh, strategic pivot going around in Ethereum. The slow strategic pivot is kind of what I'm calling it.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:34David Hoffman?

  Uh, there's going to be an episode that comes out with Dunk Rod and.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  I saw that. I'm so hyped for it.

• 14:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be good. And that's, that's where the words, I, I don't know how the words, uh, strategic pivot is going to land with the Ethereum community, but I, that's what I'm like, kind of like branding it as. It's a slow strategic pivot. Uh, we're going to get a lot of this conversation. Before we get into that conversation about, uh, all the tweets that went out about, uh, Ethereum slowly pivoting. First, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Wallet Connect. Uh, Wallet Connect, if you don't know what it is, it's a bridge for signing transactions and messages between apps and wallets used by over 255 million connections, 40 million unique users. Uh, they have recently introduced their last building block of the Wallet Connect stack. Of course, the. Wallet Connect token. After Wallet Connect has eight years of development, they're doing their token at the very last stage of the development.

• 15:23David Hoffman?

  I think it was pretty admirable that they waited until the very, very end. I recently had a conversation with Pedro Gomez on Twitter about this. Doing the token last, not first. It was pretty cool. If you are familiar with the Visa model or even the Swift model of messaging and ownership. This is not, this is starting to follow something similar like that where ownership over Wallet Connect is being passed around to people sending the messages. And Wallet Connect is finally ready to embed itself deeper into the internet and it needs to launch a token to do that, to make their nodes permissionless. So that just piqued you. Follow at Wallet Connect on Twitter. There's also bankless.cc/walletconnect to stay ahead of what's next. All right, let's go ahead and get into it.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  That one actually surprised me, by the way.

• 16:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Well, there's a specific token I saw and I was like, that doesn't make any sense. What's going on? But then I read into the documentation. I'm like, oh, okay. There's actually like full infrastructure that's going on behind the scenes. And it's like, okay, like they're actually trying to spin up some of this stuff. Like this surprisingly, like I see this. Okay, cool.

• 16:19David Hoffman?

  I think that was a lot of people's first reaction. That was my first reaction to the Wallet Connect token is like, this is a piece of very thin middleware. Why does this need a token? And then you, Pedro, again, like watched that, watched that video, gave a very coherent, very like rational pitch as to like, this is a going to be a like commonly owned share, like infrastructure shared by wallets and everyone. And and then now we get to actually embed it deeper into the internet by decentralizing it, allowing people to permissionlessly run nodes and be like stakeholders of the network. Which is exactly how Visa and Swift bootstrapped their network. It's actually kind of brilliant.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Kudos to them.

• 16:59David Hoffman?

  Yeah, big kudos to them. Yeah. Okay. So there is a bunch of tweets that went out outside of the Ethereum community. One from Tomasz, who is the incoming executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, which he had a delayed start. He signed, he agreed to sign the job, but then he has a bunch of

• 17:16David Hoffman?

  just, he has his role at Nethermind, which he, I think he needed to appropriately sunset or at least just, you know, put on the back burner. Justin Drake put out a tweet that talked about scaling the Ethereum Layer One by 1,000x, a very classic Justin Drake tweet, followed up by a tweet saying that The Ethereum Layer 1 will be for the top 0.1%, which did not sit well with people. The context matters, we'll talk about that. And overall, there's just been a growing rabbling of interest around the Ethereum project. So we'll start with this, Tomasz tweet. He tweeted out, "This week, I officially signed the contract with the Ethereum Foundation. I have been waiting with some of the communication until this happened." Then he talked about a delay on his side, but I'll skip through that.

• 17:59David Hoffman?

  He says, "Since the beginning of March, I have had around 150 calls and in-person meetings, listened to feedback, and constructed a very broad strategy document." I think that particular thing, the idea of a broad strategy document for the Ethereum ecosystem is something that has been missing. And I think this is being represented, the shift in strategy, the pivot in strategy from the Ethereum project, the Ethereum ecosystem, is like being, is symbolically represented here by this new executive director coming in, creating a strategy document. Any takes here, Brad?

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just good to see some opinion coming out of him, right? Like, that's kind of what a lot of people have had against the ecosystem broadly. It's kind of like, how do you define yourselves? What are your goals, right? Like, you even clobbed over the head with the IBRL of the Solana roadmap versus like the picture of the 10-year, 35,000-item, whatever, splurge, gudge, merge, dirge, like, stuff, right? So like, that doesn't resonate as quickly with people. So it's good to see, like, you know, there is some top-down, and remember, it's a decentralized protocol. So like, he can say all this shit, and it means nothing. I actually think I quote tweeted this one specifically, and I was just like, it's kind of wild that he's coming forward with a lot of these posts, because it's almost like you're in an all-hands meeting back in, like, if you're in the corporate world, right?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Like, it's, you would have these meetings where the boss comes down and says, "This is what we're aiming for. This is the direction of what we're doing. These are some of our steps. These are the people we're meeting." All this stuff. And what's going on with that is like, it's wild. He just shoots that off into the ether here with crypto Twitter because like, we're the people that he cares to like rah rah, right? Yeah, I got a lot of tweets going out these days.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  So we're the people he's trying to rah rah. And with that, like, and he still doesn't have the power to actually change anything, right? Because you need to convince all the client teams, you need to get social consensus, you need to do all this stuff. So it's just interesting to see someone that is serving as almost a CEO role within a decentralized ecosystem, doing his best to build up conviction in the direction that he, in the vision that he sees. So it's needed for sure.

• 20:07David Hoffman?

  The episode that I did with Osgar and Dankrad did illustrate that there is this coherent, again, strategic pivot in, like, I'll kind of identify, so I'm writing an article that'll come out on Monday. And so I'll identify like the five, maybe there were six articles, six points that I collapsed into five. But these, where this strategic pivot is being manifested. So doing, after this podcast with Osgar and Dankrad, they just helped identify that, something that I think the community has broadly known, which is at the core of Ethereum's issues, is a strategic misalignment between long-term ideals and short-term execution. I think everyone kind of generally understands that. But that problem has manifested in its

• 20:52David Hoffman?

  own way in different parts of the Ethereum, like eco, social, techno, stack, right? So there's the layer one under-investment, because we, the Ethereum project zoomed forward 30 years to do this like roll-up centric roadmap thing. Same thing, there's a product mindset deficiency, there's a leadership vacuum with organizational ambiguity, there's ivory tower culture, and then layer two fragmentation. And I think all of these are kind of downstream of this same exact issue, which is a strategic misalignment between long-term ideals and short-term execution. And I'm seeing, again, heavily informed by this podcast with Osgar and Dankrad, that these five things are being addressed one by one. Because again, it's the

• 21:35David Hoffman?

  same problem manifesting in five or six different arenas, but it's, they're being addressed one by one. And this one- What we're seeing from Tomasz is the leadership vacuum and organizational ambiguity. And this broad, broad strategic, like, what did he call this? He called it a very broad strategy document. I think it's helping align all these stakeholders to, first off, he's being a much more stronger executional force than I think I was. But then he's also creating this document for reference across the ecosystem that I think can remove some of that organizational ambiguity and kind of get everyone onto the same page. That's at least what I'm seeing.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm super excited to hear those two talk. It's like Dunkrod's been one that's been very vocal. Like, he's been the counterweight to Justin Drake, I would say, on the timeline for the last year, maybe a little longer. Like, he's been very vocal that, like, he does not believe in this, the virtuous, you know, 10-year vision. He's like, we need to deliver value to the mainnet. We need to make sure that value accrual is something that we're discussing. He's just, he's been very forward with that. And he's been open about it, too, which is, you know, refreshing. I followed him, put him on alerts a long time ago. And Ansgar is in that same boat. I remember in like a lot of the blob discussions, because that's actually where I earned a lot of attention within the Ethereum ecosystem. When I saw the blob stuff come or come to market, it's like, guys, this doesn't seem to make sense, like, broadly, like, how all these things behave, the misaligned incentives, all this shit.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  And Ansgar was someone from within the Ethereum Foundation that was just like, yeah, I actually see this, too. I think we can deliver in X, Y, and Z ways. Very pragmatic, very like, direct, but very like, not head in the sand with how he viewed everything. And then we talked on the stage with Sosil and Ansgar and DevCon, which is awesome, just to have that counterpoint. But yeah, I'm excited to hear them talk about stuff. And I think the directional stuff, again, it doesn't have to be very super specific. I'm glad he's saying broad. Like, as long as you have some directional stuff for the ecosystem to line around, I think it's a good news for everyone.

• 23:33David Hoffman?

  Do you remember what the thing was that didn't make sense with the blobs? Was it just simply that there's just not enough of them?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  For me?

• 23:41David Hoffman?

  Uh, yeah, the thing that when you were saying the, the thing that you cut your teeth on with getting attention from the Ethereum community when you're identifying the lack of like pragmatism, was it, was it just the, the lack of total supply of blob space or what? Do you remember what that was?

• 23:53Speaker 01

  For me, it was just like a lot of the misaligned incentives that, that injected into the, the model. Like I, I know, I come from the school of Bankless. Like I've been listening to you guys for years, right? So it was like, I was so fixated on ultrasound money and this stuff. And I was like, guys, this narrative, this narrative is going to blow up with this. Like it's, it's going to die because of like the, you know, a lot of it being, uh, non-obligatory posting to the L1, not even utilizing blobs. Like a lot of the incentives to like, just kind of shift away from them entirely to all DA. Like Meggy, we're, we're using all DA because Ethereum just is not big enough to handle the stuff that we're trying to do. Yeah. It's a, it's a pragmatic decision. And I think now on the, the performance competitive, uh, vertical, right?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  You have chains like us that come forward and the, everyone that's in the middle of the path, that's a true roll up is going to see us and go, well, the users don't give a shit, right? The users are going over here because it's a better experience. They don't care about the underlying. They don't do whatever. It's like now they're forced to compete and like, they have to make a decision between like, do I post, post down to Ethereum, pay a little bit more, cost my users more stuff. I'm slower. I can't, I literally can't be as performant as I want to be. That's what Pace is fighting with now. And like, now I'm in a position where I have to choose between like, quote unquote, alignment, maybe some underlying technical properties, or being the best chain I want to be to compete with people that are like, already made that decision, right? And like, I just saw a lot of that. And I was like, with all this stuff in line, like we're still not even, we're still not over 50% capacity with blobs. We're actually even going down a little bit these last few weeks.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  After a year, it's been a year since they've been released. Saturation isn't here and we're trying to blow it up even more. So it's just like, I don't, I didn't see it as something that would be a long-term value accretive thing for the, the token.

• 25:28David Hoffman?

  So this has resulted in a reconsideration of what the Ethereum layer one is doing inside of the Ethereum ecosystem like broadly. And previously there has been communications, uh, from the EF and then therefore us at Bankless because we, we saw the vision and we, we parroted it. But the idea of like getting off the layer one, like Justin Sit Drake's. Said this at least a couple of times on Bankless Podcast that we had him and it's like the layer one is not for users. Get off the layer one, the floor is lava. These are lines that we used to say. And now everyone is starting to like, okay, well, maybe actually the layer one is the place to be. And Justin Drake, after I asked, does anyone remember which episode Justin Drake said this? Cause we've had so many Justin Drake episodes, I couldn't remember. It turns out there was two of them.

• 26:13David Hoffman?

  He said, here's my updated stance. We can scale the canonical layer one EVM by 1,000x from 10,000 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second using ZK EVMs. This is something that like a lot of the Ethereum researchers are pretty stoked about is the idea of ZK EVMs.

• 26:34David Hoffman?

  While this seems like, you know, moon math and it kind of is, they're all, everyone is pretty excited about this not being a long-term thing and instead being a medium-term thing on the one to two-year time horizons. And he just does some, some basic explanation and talk about how like you can get to up to 10,000 transactions per second on the Ethereum layer one in like a two-year-ish time horizon. And then Storm from Paradigm says, ZK EVMs are very exciting. However, I still think you should explicitly disavow the stance that the layer one is not for users, even if you still believe that most activity will happen on the layer twos. Layer one quality is critical. Messaging the issue shift from a layer two centric roadmap

• 27:17David Hoffman?

  to a layer one and layer two roadmap, which I love that idea, a layer one and layer two roadmap. And then Justin Drake follows up and says on Twitter, again, I hereby disavow the stance that the layer one is not for users. And I read that and I'm like, that is great. And then he follows up with, he says, it's for the top 0.1%. Early adopters, rollups, whales, arbitrators, institutions, enterprises, nation states. Now I get what he's saying here. There's going to be infinity transactions in, across all types of blockchains. Eventually there will be infinite transactions, there will be more transactions that anyone can count. And so what he is saying here is that Ethereum, the layer one will represent the top 1% of the most valuable transactions, right?

• 27:58David Hoffman?

  DeFi, anything that has any meaningful amount of gas fees, like just the most valuable 1%, top 1%, 0.1%. That does not read well to anyone and it is what I will call extremely high dunkable surface area. And that's exactly what happened on crypto Twitter.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, like this is so bad because you're right, like you'd shown my my picture before, right? Of like, uh, you know, the current overlap is 100% within L1, L2s. And like, this is what it needs to be, right? And like, Vitalik put it in his blog as like, one of the directional things you can do. And like, he's saying the exact same thing, right? Like, he's saying the exact same thing. It's just whenever, you're never gonna find it, maybe you might.

• 28:38David Hoffman?

  No, it's recent, you hear this, I got it.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there you go. So like, so he's saying the exact same thing as this, except whenever you see this, everyone can insert themselves into this, the bottom picture of like, I'm the one that can stay on Ethereum main, and I'm the one that can do whatever. But whenever you say 0.1%, you immediately turn on, especially in like this new, like, uh, new political landscape where like, everyone's against the riches and everything. Everyone is like, oh, the 0.1%, the elitist, like, oh, you want to do it. So like, it invokes something that is deeper and rooted with everyone. But he's saying the same thing, which I totally agree with, I think, sounds like you do too. It's just that, like, yeah, man, like, you need users because users are, are, this all boils down to value accrual, right? That's, that's all this is. Because like, there, there's a future where Ethereum is, Ethereum, I'm gonna say with quotes,

• 29:25Speaker 01

  because this encompasses all the L2s and whatever rolls up in there, like, addresses the capacity of the world and can handle infinity transactions. And everything's great and everyone's on chain, everything's cool. But if that doesn't result in Ethereum, the token price going up, like, I don't know that everyone's gonna be happy, right? Because everyone has an underlying, like, I want to have a piece of this because I was here early. I want my thing to go up because I got in early. I want ETH to be valuable, ETH asset to be valuable. And this is a step towards like, trying to get that, right? You need users on the L1 because that is the one-to-one PSYOP correlation with fees accrued, right? You need usage, you need that dollar, 100% of that dollar to go to Ethereum as fees or whatever, so that people can do their discounted cash flows.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Even if you don't believe in that, you need people to like, be able to put that in their mental model as like, a conviction for the asset. Like, you need some of that element there. And by offloading 100% to the L2s, right? The actual fee accrual, you like, I saw some rollups today, we're getting like, 95% of every dollar, or 95 cents of every dollar was going to the L2 team. Like, that's just, it's just not a sexy picture and it gets fuzzy for people, so, yeah.

• 30:30David Hoffman?

  Yeah, downstream of this, you're seeing people like Kane, and Kane is just one of many people who are tweeting out the same sentiment where he says, "Literally spent the last six years of my life helping to meme Layer 2 into existence, only to land back on mainnet." Cannot make this out, perps before make mainnet defi grading. He's talking about synthetics. But there's just been this general shift towards the Ethereum community that like, "Oh, the Layer 1 is actually a fantastic place to be." Despite its flaws, despite its 12-second block times, it's actually got the richest DeFi ecosystem. It's got the most volume. It's got the most users, or maybe not the most users, but just the most activity, the most broad strokes activity. And so there's been this general

• 31:13David Hoffman?

  shift of like, "Oh, let's actually go back to the Layer 1. It was nice there. The campfire was warm. Let's go back."

• 31:19Speaker 01

  It feels great again with the gas down like under 1Gway. You're shooting transactions off like, "Yeah, the wait time is not awesome," but like, it doesn't have to be a Solana. Like, that's the thing. It doesn't have to be the most performant. It just has to be a little more inhabitable for apps. It has to be somewhat practical for a lot of this stuff. And so shorten the block times, shorten the finality window, increase the gas so you can have a little more capacity, so gas isn't going crazy with a lower amount. And yeah, man, that's all it has to do. As long as it preserves the properties that Ethereum is clearly number one at, right? It is the most, it's never gone down, right? Most of their finality issue before, but never gone down. It's censorship resistant. It survived a literal attack from the US government. Like, no other chains can claim that right now

• 32:03Speaker 01

  with the tornado cash stuff, right? It's got all of these properties that it needs to maintain as being the number one thing. As long as it can maintain those things and then like be as performant as possible while maintaining those things, it's undoubtedly going to be a top chain.

• 32:20David Hoffman?

  In response to Justin Drake's tweet where he talked about scaling the Layer 1 from 10 transactions per second to 10,000 transactions per second, you put out this tweet, which is like, you say, "This is how these posts always feel to me," and then you give the "draw the rest of the owl meme." So in step one, we have like two circles, which slowly will represent an owl. And then in step two, there's a whole beautiful, like, well-drawn owl. So the idea is like, "We're missing the middle stages." Can you elaborate on that? Because I actually wasn't totally sure what you mean.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you actually talked about it a little bit with the Tomas stuff, which is just like, you know, Ethereum is at a little bit of an inflection point right now and there's some people will be getting genuinely like disenfranchised or disillusioned with Ethereum, the asset, Ethereum, the ecosystem, Ethereum, even the broad strategy. So they're like, I don't see a vision in this stuff. I'm leaving. So for me, and this is builders too, right? People that are building apps on the chain, people that already have been building apps on the chain, chains, if you include L2s. And what's happening for me is like, okay, like he's, he's talking about this future. We're like, don't worry, guys. Like eventually we'll be able to handle 10 million TPS because he literally called out 10 million across all the L2s. And like, it's like, who, like you, the numbers don't go from 10 to 10 million, right?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  The numbers go from 10 to 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000. And so you need to have people who have conviction and want to build and want to contribute and want to grow for the duration of that, because if I build a chain today that does 10 million TPS, but no one gives a shit about it, I'm going to do 10 TPS, right? Like, so I was just saying, uh, which reiterates your Tomas stuff, which is like, we need someone to carry that middle ground to make people care about the today and improve the tomorrow so that they build for the next year, right? So like, you need the full journey. You can't just be like, don't worry, guys, it's coming 10 years from now. I actually think you and I had this exchange a long time ago too, with the economics of, um, of rollups where it's just like, I was like, guys, this isn't profitable. We're losing, like losing up the blobs, like ultrasound's going away.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  And then it's, you're like, well, don't worry, we'll have 10,000 L2s eventually. I'm like, yeah, but like, think about the journey going from five L2s where it's like a dominant, dominant two of the five, or we have 100 now. So dominant five of the 100 to like 10,000 L2s. Like if no one cares to like participate in the Ethereum ecosystem from that 100 to that 200 to that 800 to the 1,000, like we'll never get to the 10,000. So like you need to have the full lifecycle.

• 34:45David Hoffman?

  There's a line from John Charbonneau that has stuck with me, maybe a couple of lines, which was, "Path dependency matters and all timeframes are important." It's great to have this ivory tower, like, long-term roadmap. Like, the Ethereum community has a very strong conviction that it has cracked the nut of the idealized blockchain architecture that is like 100 years in the future. And it's trying to zoom straight forward for it, but path dependency matters and all timeframes also matter. And so ignoring the middle timeframe, ignoring the short term and the medium term, in order to just zoom towards the long term, will create a certain path for getting there that

• 35:26David Hoffman?

  will result in, I think, what we've seen in the last two years of crypto history, which has ignored all timeframes and just only focused on the longest of timeframes and has allowed people to take advantage of the fact that Ethereum is not looking at the near term or even the medium term and is only blindly looking at the long term.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the expectation versus reality bicycle map, right? Like, you have the expectation, it's like, "Oh, a straight line, we'll just keep growing, we'll just keep growing and we'll get to 10,000." But then the reality is like, "Oh, you rode a bike through like a crevasse and then you have to go on a tight rope and then you have to dive down into a canyon." And then, so like, it's, the journey is much, much, much harder than you would like to think whenever you're talking time horizons that are, yeah, from 1 to 10,000.

• 36:09David Hoffman?

  We've got a couple of tokens we're going to talk about. And there's a base has started coining some tokens on Zora, and then also there's the collapse of the mantra token. And so this has implications, it's not just about price action, but I think this has like community, cultural conversations about what we do about these things. And also the supply of total liquidity in crypto might be less than people thought. Before we get to these conversations, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Uniswap is your gateway to a more efficient DeFi experience. With Uniswap swapping and bridging across 13 chains, it's simple, fast, and cost-effective, helping you move value wherever, whenever. Thanks to deep liquidity on the Uniswap protocol, you'll enjoy a minimal price impact on every trade. And now, Uniswap V4 takes it even further. Swappers

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• 37:38David Hoffman?

  Now, there's no seed phrases in Infinix. This is just a one-click setup with biometric pass keys. 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 going to go Swidge my USDC that is on Base, and I'm going to buy Bara Chain, which is a completely different chain. So we're going to Swidge this. I'm going to press that button, and then Infinix is going to execute this order, this cross-chain order for me. And now it is done. But actually, I'm not really feeling bearish anymore, so I'm going to go from Bara to Penguins. I'm going to buy Penguin on Solana. So I'm going from the Bara 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.

• 38:23David Hoffman?

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• 39:04David Hoffman?

  Global community. Acquire F X S through frax.com or your go to Dex 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 slash R slash bankless when bridging to Fraxl for exclusive Fraxl perks and boosted rewards. Brad, let's get into the drama of the day. Base tweeted out a tweet yesterday. This is 18 hours from the time of recording. A tweet basis for everyone, which is just a screenshot of one of their marketing videos that came out. And then they followed up with that tweet, just saying coined it and then linked to a Zora link.

• 39:43David Hoffman?

  And Zora, if you're not familiar with Zora, Zora is a place to tokenize files, JPEG files, MP4 files, GIF files, or any kind of, any kind of file. And so they just released a coin of their marketing video, a screenshot of their marketing video and just yeeted it out there. Not really any context or any sort of plan, just said coined it and then released it. And then they, and then so that people started trading it and it instantly went up to something like a $15 million market cap. And everyone's like, did base really just release a coin? And this is a, this is an N F T that actually gets fractionalized into an ERC 20 token. So it being an ERC 20 token, you know, fits the form factor of a meme coin. It's a meme coin. It's a token with a picture.

• 40:28David Hoffman?

  And so, you know, the D Gen started going after it and it pumped to 15 or 18 million dollars. They followed up an hour later with another one saying, we coined our Farr Con poster Farr, that's a Farr Cast Convention poster on Zora. So they followed up with a second tokenized picture on Zora, which immediately caused the market cap of the first one to go to from, let's see, where was it? 18 million down to 2 million in a blink of an eye. So like erasing 15 million of gains, the gains, the $15 million did not exist. It then, then it did exist and then it went away again. And then everyone was like, did base just rug their community? And that was the line that got like chanted around crypto Twitter is like base just rugged their community.

• 41:13David Hoffman?

  I don't agree with that line, but that is the line that got like chanted around crypto Twitter. Brad, what was your thoughts when you watched this happen?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Man, this, this chart pattern is something that was not in the wilderness very often, but has been, and they're deeply, because you talked about the, the mantra one too. It's very similar candle there. So. I think this is a example of a horrible horrible execution for something that maybe isn't as malicious as people are trying to interpret it as. And Jesse has talked about it a lot, right? He's he's talking about he's trying to define now culture coin or no, no, as content coins instead of yeah, content coins instead of meme coins and I do this whole thing, which is like, you can't force this stuff to happen, man. Like, you just can't. You just kind of do your thing. And I think where they fucked up is they should have forecasted their plan ahead of time before doing it. And I think what he's trying to get to here, right?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  It's like the this chart pattern is a byproduct of this ecosystem not being saturated saturated, this stuff not being normalized, these things not being just like a, you know, something that everyone does and you can use them as collectibles. Because like, as a collectible, yeah, sure, it makes sense. If I want to buy this thing, ERC 20 is probably a little easier to buy it than a NFT, like at an open edition. So, you know, sure, I get it. But what they should have done is come to the table and said like, guys, we're going to post a bunch of this stuff and we're going to tokenize all of them. Be ready, right? Because then people aren't going to ape into the first one and do the second thing. I think what he's trying to get to on the other side of this is like, if you were to launch an NFT collection today in 2025, right? Like, if you would have done it back whenever they came out, because it wasn't like a normalized, just like saturated thing, like every chart was going crazy.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  You buy and you buy whatever's happening because it's the first one, second one, whatever. And you sell it like five minutes later for X amount of dollars. He's trying to get to the 2025 version of NFTs where it's just like, oh, it's an NFT. Like, I don't care. I don't want into it. Like, the speculators aren't speculating, it's just people buying it because they think it's kind of a cute picture and like, they don't mind it as much. Execution to get there has not been the the best, I think.

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. I agree, I agree with, I agree with you. I think there are two mistakes, one you just identified, which is, I'll actually kind of contest that content coins and meme coins are not different things. They are actually the same thing. And it's more aspirational to think that content coins are different from meme coins because they are, it's just a fungible token with a picture, man. And like, all of the

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you said it, fractionalized NFTs, right? Like, we've had these forever.

• 43:42David Hoffman?

  And so Jesse has this like picture of like the comparing a content coin to a meme coin, right? Like a content coin is no expect has no expectations versus a meme coin has high expectations, right? Content coin, you can create many content coins with meme coins. You should only create one coin. These are all opinions about how the market should behave. And that is not how the market works. And so I think that that was a an error. And then I agree with you as well. Like they should have like alluded informed the market that there will be many of these things. You could have actually, if you were paying attention to Base and Jesse's messaging, they said, we are going to make tokenized content on

• 44:23David Hoffman?

  Zora. We are going to do that. And so there was an attempt out there. It wasn't perfect. It wasn't clear. It should have been tagged along with that first initial coin. So I think there was a couple of mistakes here. I will also say, people took the opportunity to just twist the absolute F on the knife that the the the rabblers on crypto Twitter were trying to stab into Jesse. And so the the rabbling, in my opinion, did not match the event. People were like, oh, Jesse made a mistake. Let's take this opportunity to really just dogpile the absolute F out of Jesse and Base. I'm sure that that was very frustrating for Jesse. He didn't. I don't think he deserved it. He did. He did make

• 45:05David Hoffman?

  some mistakes. They did make some mistakes. I see what they're trying to do. They tested in prod. And but I do not think that the rabbling matched the actual event.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  I think the the worst part about all this stuff is because I think everyone like almost universally thinks Jesse is a good person. Like, I think he's a good guy, just trying to help.

• 45:23David Hoffman?

  One of the most beloved people.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  He believes in all this stuff. He's trying to do good. But like, yeah, this this tweet reads like, bro, you can't make fetch happen situation, right? Like, you're trying to make just don't force it. And then, you know, after the fact, again, with all the good intentions, he's trying to go on spaces to talk about stuff. And he hops into a space that's run by scammers, because scammers run their their spaces up. And that's like, but he was unaware, right? He's just an innocent dude walking into innocent sheep walking into a wolf's den. Because like, that's just what these people do. And it's just like, Yeah, I get it. It's unfortunate, but like, you know, you can't dictate the market like you said.

• 45:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I think I listened to that same space that you're alluding to. I listened to a clip of it. And there was this one guy who talked about how he was, he is and was building on base. And he, because of the complete stupidity of the base team, he now is not going to build on base anymore because of how dumb and stupid and bad Jesse was. And I was listening to this guy, like, just like, again, dogpile on Jesse. And I just felt like this was cringe virtue signaling to base haters. It was like base hating virtue signaling, which is how crypto Twitter works, which is so frustrating. Because like, he's just trying to do something good. The degens and traders and speculators turned the meme, turned the token into a meme coin chart.

• 46:42David Hoffman?

  And then the chart did meme coin things. And then everyone is like surprised. And like, yes, like, like we said, there were some mistakes made with the launch, but nonetheless, like, no crying in the casino.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Yeah, it's ruthless out there. And like, like you were pointing out to the, the way in which they addressed it. There's a ton of spaces that they could have gone on that are run daily by good people doing whatever. And they would have actually like talked about it and maybe just gave them like straight up like bro advice, where it's just like, guy, you're like, dude, you fucked up. Whereas, yeah, if the one that he targeted, because it was run by people who sensationalize everything, and they know sensationalizing stuff is gonna get even more people into their space and build their cloud and do their stuff so they can sell a coin, you know, three weeks from now. Like, that's what they optimized for. And yeah, they, they did it.

• 47:25David Hoffman?

  Yep. Yeah. I did really appreciate this taxonomy from Eddie Lazarin, who works at A16Z, Chief CTO of A16Z, really smart guy. We've had him on Bankless before. He tweets out, "It's true that not all tokens are created equal, but the right way to classify tokens is according to their technical, legal, and economic properties." And he gives out this taxonomy, which like is a pretty, like defines the different form factors for tokens out there. So there are security tokens, company-backed tokens, arcade tokens, network tokens, collectible tokens, asset-backed tokens. And this, the process that they came to for how they defined this. These six types of tokens is like a pretty, it's pretty like intellectually rigorous.

• 48:07David Hoffman?

  Like they have really worked through the idea of like, it's one of those like yes, no charts, right? So does the token have inherent value? If no, then it's a meme coin. If yes, then there's another question. Is the token's primary value primarily derived from a country, company controlled system? If no, then it goes in one way, if yes, in this way. So he defined this token from base as a collectible token. And so I think this taxonomy helps define the structure. And that is, so rather than like saying like, no, this is a content coin, not a meme coin. I think the, the correct thing is actually look at the token taxonomy, the form factor for the token and judge it based off of that. I enjoyed the take from Eddie.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  And this goes right back to your initial like deduction that this is like, this is just an NFT, like collectible fractionalized NFT. Right? That's, that's all this is. And but yeah, trying to, trying to recategorize or come up with a new category entirely is probably not the move. Had people just said like, it's an open edition, open edition ERC 20, or I don't know how the hell you were going to try to say it, but like, yeah, it was just framed improperly.

• 49:13David Hoffman?

  The funny thing is, um, after the token dumped from 15 million down to $2 million.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  It's back, baby.

• 49:18David Hoffman?

  It breached all time highs. So all the people that were like harping about how base rugged their community is objectively wrong because it, I don't know where it is right now. I tweeted this out a few moments ago. I mean, I can go look at it, but it dumped as, as starting at like $17 million. And now it's at like 18 or 19 million dollar market cap.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, my brain is so messed up that like, I saw this coin and my, my brain immediately went to like, ooh, I bet activities up. I want to look what the blobs did. So like I started looking at the blob breakdown to see what the burn was and like, who's, who's dodging posting blogs and all this shit.

• 49:54David Hoffman?

  All right. Well, the, the, the charts had $13 million, which I think is pretty funny. All right, let's get into the, the next chart that went down 90% in a very short amount of time. And this was a bit much, much bigger of a token. So by comparison, the token they were just talking about, the base token, that was a $15 million market cap token. The mantra token was something like $6 billion?

• 50:18David Hoffman?

  No, excuse me. It was like a $25 billion market cap, dropped 90% down to something like $5 or $6 billion. The details behind this, like how this happened, I think it took a while for people to figure out because people initially thought it was crime, which I think is a pretty like normal reflexive response by crypto.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  That looks like a crime candle.

• 50:39David Hoffman?

  It does look like a crime candle. Yeah. Let's see if I can pull up the candle. I'll pull it up in a second. Crash, the OM token crashed 92% in six hours from $6.40 down to $57.6 billion of market cap wiped out. There were reports of investors in the token sending tens to maybe $30 million of tokens to the exchange days prior, but nothing at all close to the actual drop of the token. What I think people have collapsed on in the theory of like how this happened was it was a perpetual exchange cascading liquidation. So it wasn't, it wasn't DeFi cascading liquidations. It was a very poor liquidity in perps,

• 51:24David Hoffman?

  which triggered just a cascading liquidation of just like one or $2 million getting liquidated. That translated into like seven or eight more million dollars getting liquidated, which took the price down from $6 down to $2.8, which is a big takeaway here is that OM had not enough liquidity to manage these cascading liquidations and maybe shouldn't have ever been as high as it was priced. That was my big takeaway. What were you thinking when you saw all this?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  So like I was just watching it in real time and trying to see everyone work through the actual crisis of it. Everyone being the team, right? Cause like the founder, Mullins, I forget JP Mullins, I think it is. He tweeted like three hours before, okay, I'm going on a plane. Like, don't have wifi. That's my biggest nightmare. LOL. And then he's, you know, away from wifi for 12 hours, going to seal. And then this happens. And so everyone's like, what? Like, did he rug? Did he do whatever? And then he gets there and immediately goes on a campaign tour of like trying to like address what's going on with the worst like. Handling of the situation, I guess I could say, he's going on coffee, coffeezilla, right? And like incriminating himself as like someone like, just like, yeah, you have this little clip here. And it's just like, talking about like pumping the price and like getting into definitions around that stuff.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  He went on a few podcasts and did this stuff and he just, he looks horrible. So.

• 52:39David Hoffman?

  He did the Hayden Adam, oh, not Hayden Adams. Yo, sorry. He did the Hayden Davis strategy.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Same thing. And but like, which is funny, because this is shortly after the Bybit stuff, right? Where the crisis management was like impeccable, right? Like it was a masterclass. And then now we have a, you know, six in a row of these events of people just like going on and saying the dumbest thing. So it was just fun to see in real time, frankly, as someone that's not impacted at all.

• 53:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So what was your, what's your takeaway? What's your learning lesson? I like OM is, OM, I don't even know if too many people are like familiar with OM. It's a layer one that is meant for real world assets. And so this is kind of just like, like a kind of away from people's general focus of attention.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  I learned there's some lore to this, right? Cause like, I'm not deep in the Polkadot ecosystem, but.

• 53:25David Hoffman?

  Oh, is this Polkadot? Talking?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, my friends who are said like, okay, uh, mantra is actually something that was launched back in the day. You may remember Poka Starter, which was like a launchpad way back in the day. They'd launch a bunch of things that were, uh, kind of used the branding, then like the brand name of Polkadot, even though they weren't affiliated at all. And a lot of those projects were just like not, uh, well received and or long for this world. A lot of them went down to zero. So this was a project that was launched through that, uh, and stayed in the Polkadot ecosystem. But even people within Polkadot, I have friends that are again, they're trench warriors inside of Polkadot. They're like, no one's heard of this thing. No one uses this thing. Like it's, it's just like, it's got like $4 million in total, uh, TVL on the chain. Like it was just not a very, uh, uh, aware, they were not very aware of the ecosystem.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  And then, so to see this, they were not surprised and they're just like, yeah, it's, it has a, a pretty illustrious, um, history.

• 54:18David Hoffman?

  Dude, this chart looks like crime, man.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:21David Hoffman?

  Look at this thing. So the token chart goes all the way back to September of 2020, where the price was-

• 54:28Speaker 01

  That candle is so, that candle is so stark. It looks like just the end of the graph. It looks like, oh, it didn't like register today. Like, so that's all that is. But no, that's the price.

• 54:40David Hoffman?

  It's crazy that token has five years of Lindy. Like, it's existed for five years. And for the vast majority of its time, it's been its lifespan between six cents, six cents and 20 cents. And then, you know, in January of 2024, it starts to actually break through. It goes from six cents to 75 cents in May, to a dollar and a half in October. And then, you know, in January of this year, up to $4. And then it gets up to $7 at the peak, $7, $8 at the peak. And then it goes to zero. And like, just the shape of that graph, to me, is highly suspect.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a lot of commentary around the market makers assigned to this. And you saw some of that on the other side of the actual fallout of this chart. We're like, okay, like if, I don't know if they're actually a US entity, but like the SEC is coming forward some guidelines on how these, these projects need to, or what they need to disclose. And like saying the market makers, saying like the agreements they have in place, all this shit, so that us as ecosystem participants can see, like, who's behind potentially creating this chart. Like, if we do see some suspected, suspect, repeat patterns like this, and like, we believe there is some manipulation, maybe if this is repeated across multiple projects, we can like, find patterns of like, maybe not the most genuine price action across projects.

• 55:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I did see a tweet, maybe yesterday, and it had six, or seven, or eight different tokens. And all the tokens had the same, I mean, the market has done very similar things to tokens between 20 and 200. But like, it's kind of unfortunate for us, all of us in the industry, that if you can go and you can pick out, you know, throw a dart, and you'll pick out a chart that looks like it has been going down for two years in a row. And even worse with like, doesn't even have a main net. I guess I don't really have a comment there, but a lot of, a lot of token charts look exactly the same right now.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  There was some news on that one, though, too, right? The, I thought, Rishi was at-

• 56:36David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I don't know what's going on with, with that news. Blockworks reported that Rishi has taken a leave of absence. Rishi, again, Rishi is the founder of Move. Rishi denied it, saying- He's totally with the team. There's like mixed reporting here. I don't really know what's going on.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, likewise. I had seen people saying rumors of like, oh, I had heard this before this actually happened. They were claiming they got internal messages from Slack, so it was like almost a coup of sorts. But he's like, I'm literally on a stage in APAC talking about AI and movement. So like, I don't know what you guys are talking about and showing pictures of his, he's still having an active email. So who knows? But it's never a dull day in crypto.

• 57:13David Hoffman?

  That's right. Yeah, the, um, Ruchi is definitely one of the subjects of crypto Twitter ire, I will say. Just because-

• 57:21Speaker 01

  He's polarizing.

• 57:22David Hoffman?

  He's very polarizing, yes. Very aggressive founder, very polarizing. We will wait to see what happens with all of that. I don't really have any, any extra info here. Imagine a world where your day-to-day banking runs on a blockchain. That's exactly what Mantle is building, powered by a $4 billion treasury and poised to become the largest sustainable on-chain financial hub. As part of their 2025 expansion, Mantle is introducing three new core innovation pillars that bridge traditional finance with decentralized technology. First is their enhanced indexed fund, aiming for $1 billion in AUM by Q1. It provides optimized exposure to Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, and USC, complete with built-in yield opportunities. Next, Mantle Banking promises to revolutionize global value transfer through seamless blockchain-powered banking services, bridging crypto into your daily life.

• 58:06David Hoffman?

  Finally, Mantle X blends AI with DeFi to deliver an intelligent, user-friendly experience for everyone. And the best part is that this is all in addition to their already-launched products like Mantle Network, ME, and FBTC. Ready to step into the future of finance? Follow Mantle on X at @mantleofficial and join the on-chain revolution today. Imagine verifying yourself without handing over personal data. No hacked databases, no unnecessary personal exposure for airdrops, and no AI bots ruining community governance. Meet SELF, the on-chain identity verification protocol built for privacy and control. SELF protocol uses zero knowledge proofs to confirm your identity safely. Users prove key details like age or citizenship without revealing sensitive personal information. SELF never stores your data. It only generates cryptographic proofs.

• 58:52David Hoffman?

  Here's how it works in three steps. First, register and verify. Use the SELF app to- Scan your biometric passport's RFID chip. SELF verifies authenticity with zero knowledge proofs. Each passport creates one unique identity. Second, you can share proofs privately. Third-party apps request identity proofs, like confirming you're over 18. You can also link proofs securely to public wallets for airdrops or governance participation. And then last, secure verification. Apps validate your proofs instantly on-chain, like on Cello, or off-chain. Audited by ZK Security, the SELF app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyz and follow SELF Protocol on X. One last big news of the week is that Radium has launched LaunchLab, which is a token launchpad.

• 59:34David Hoffman?

  So a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago, Pump Fun launched Pump Swap, which is their AMM, their Uniswap equivalent. It's a Radium competitor because it's all on Solana. And so Pump Fun, the token launchpad, is moving up the stack to create a DEX. And they are decoupling their need of Radium. So rather than graduating their tokens to Radium, they are graduating their tokens to their own DEX to get their own liquidity on their own protocols. Radium responds by creating LaunchLab, which is their own Uniswap, Pump Fun competitor. And so now they are going down the stack to create a token launchpad that would, of course, graduate tokens back to Radium. This is a natural response that we're seeing. So we're seeing this Pump Fun versus Radium war arms race continue.

• 1:00:19David Hoffman?

  I think general sentiment is that this token launchpad is not going to have nearly the same amount of traction that Pump Fun has just because Pump Fun's brand is just so big. That's where you go to launch tokens. That's where the liquidity is. Any thoughts on this, Brad?

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  I totally agree. I guess so. You're right in the directional moves of both teams. Pump Fun is going up the stack. Radium's going down. And one of those owns, those two things owns the user, right? Pump Fun is the one you mentioned. You've used the branding, right? But it's the same thing, right? They've, they've always maintained the relationship with the user. It goes, like, if you go and you launch a token, you're sitting on the Pump Fun website. And then once it goes to Radium, or previously when it went to Radium, you would go to Jupiter, right? Like, you never really interacted with Radium. It was just kind of this infrastructure in the backend. And so there's no like brand Lindy there, no loyalty, no whatever. And we've actually, this isn't the first iteration of Pump Fun having to stand up against someone who conceivably could be a good competitor, right?

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Dex Screener launched their own version of this, uh, I should, it's probably a year ago at this point, six months ago. Same thing, right? Dex Screener is somewhere where everyone goes to sit there and monitor tokens even after they've existed beyond Pump Fun. They launched their own, their own Launchpad, all this stuff. And it just, no one left Pump Fun because Pump Fun owned the user. They're the ones that, that sat there and had, now they have the capital to even build better products because they've earned what $600 million in fees over the last year, like just truly astounding. So now they have the brand and the funds to be able to basically clobber anyone over the head. So cool, novel, but I don't, somewhat novel. I don't see it being something long for this world when it comes to just like trying to stand up to Pump.

• 1:02:01David Hoffman?

  Yeah, at least you, you are seeing fees drop across the Sack. So when Pump Fun launched Pump Swap, they reduced a lot of the fees. And I think this is the same thing happening with Radium and their Launchpad, their fees are going down. There was this early, early crypto thought and thought in crypto design where if you have a fee, if you establish a fee inside of your permissionless protocol, people are just going to fork it and then remove the fee. That's not exactly how it played out because things have still maintained some amount of fees, but the fees do have very strong competitive pressures. And the moats around those fees are something like, you know, users and liquidity. And so we are still seeing that, that fee pressure still dropped to zero,

• 1:02:41David Hoffman?

  but it's being maintained by the strength of like user and liquidity moats is, is what I'm seeing here.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's something that's been around for a long time, right? UniSwap Labs just runs a front end and charges a fee on top of it. Whenever you have stuff like DeFi Lama doing Lama Swap, which is aggregates for free, right? Like, like we've always had access to these, these tools that allow us to, and that, like, that's the benefit of public protocols, right? Permissionless blockchains, all this shit is people can actually launch this stuff and be competitive and, and squeeze these things to zero and actually functionally turn them into just infrastructure, public infrastructure. To a degree, but having that stuff open and copyable, forkable, whatever allows us to do that. And yeah, so Uniswap Labs said, I don't, I think it'll be the same for Pump, where just like, there's gonna be a little bit of stickiness to brand and stickiness to the utilization and

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  comfort. Like, just, people use MetaMask today, even though I would say it's objectively not that great of a wallet. So like, yeah, there's just comments on that.

• 1:03:39David Hoffman?

  Brad, that wraps up all the news that I have for us to talk about. Anything top of mind for you that you're looking forward to in the short term, the weeks, the months coming up? Like, what's living rent free in your head these days?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  It's just shipping the chain, right? Like, so we're trying to iterate through testnet, trying to, now, we're gonna get ready to kick off this next cohort of people with our Mega Mafia 2.0, right? So we're gonna find another group of founders that wanna come and build on Mega ETH. And, again, we do the co-living thing, so we're gonna go to a couple of remote places for 30 to 30 days at a time, just to co-build, build camaraderie, like, try to really find PMF, help them go through raising, all that kind of stuff. So focusing on make sure we deliver the best product for that as we go towards mainnet. And then, if you wanna hear me talk more, you see the contributor to Modern Market, I do daily shows, Monday, Wednesday, Friday in the morning. Feel free to stop in 7:00 PM Eastern, or 7:00 AM Eastern, I should say.

• 1:04:31David Hoffman?

  All right, we will get all of those links in the show notes. You can follow Brad at Zero X Bread Guy. He is the profile picture that looks like a slice of bread with sunglasses. Brad, thank you so much for helping me go through the news this week, my man.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:04:46David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, this will be the last time we have a guest on the weekly roll-up. I won't say anything more, because you can put two and two together if you're paying attention. So we will see you guys all in a week. Bankless Nation, you guys know how it goes. Crypto is risky, you can lose what you put in, but nonetheless, we are headed west. This is Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.