Can PumpFun be Dethroned? ETH's Pectra Upgrade | Future of Bitcoin L2s | Jon, Bread, & Andy8052

In this episode of the Bankless Roundtable, hosts BreadGuy, John Charbonneau, and Andy8052 tackle pivotal issues in the crypto world. They explore the disconnect between institutional bullishness and community despair, with Bread highlighting the plight of altcoin holders amid Bitcoin's dominance. The conversation turns to a scandal involving a token loan, revealing manipulation that undermines trust in the industry. Later, they discuss the upcoming Ethereum Pectra upgrade, emphasizing its potential to improve functionality while cautioning about implementation challenges. The hosts also dive into the meme coin phenomenon, navigating the ethical dilemmas of this niche. As they wrap up, the team reflects on the challenges and hope within the crypto community, encouraging thoughtful engagement in this dynamic market. 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 🟠HEMI | BTC & ETH, ONE NETWORK https://bankless.cc/hemi --- TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Intro 03:40 Current Crypto Sentiment 9:20 Movement Market Making Scandal 26:10 Boop. Fun vs Pump. Fun 1:00:15 Ethereum's Pectra Upgrade 1:16:25 Bitcoin vs Ethereum 1:12:45 Closing Thoughts --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures%E2%81%A0

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 back to the roundtable. Here with me today is the man with gluttonous glutes, ZeroX Bread Guy. Good to see you.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Hey guys, back for another week.

• 0:12David Hoffman?

  And we've also got crypto's chief lowercase r researcher, John Shaver. Now, welcome back. Joe, how's it going? And last but not least, the world's most zen Dgen, Andy8052. It's good to see you.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:25David Hoffman?

  All right, so we got some drama to pack through this week. The movement drama that came out Friday of last week, we're going to talk about that. There's some boop.fun discourse, which we're going to unpack. Maybe something that's actually pretty big that people are under indexing is Apple's new iOS meta and its impact on the commerce economy in the App Store, which is inclusive of crypto. When this goes, when this podcast goes live tomorrow, Pectra, the Ethereum upgrade will be live. And so that's where we're going to talk about that as well. But overall, I was kind of just powwowing with bread as we got started here before we hit record about like, we started doing these episodes and then things on crypto Twitter just started to calm down right as we start doing these roundtables. Kind of, kind of unfortunate, but I think we're going to make the most of it. Bread, what you thinking about, my man?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I do a daily show too, right? So like, we have to talk about stuff pretty routinely, not daily. And had the same conversation earlier this week where it's like, there's a huge disconnect with like, the structural bullishness of the industry right now and like, just a general sentiment you have on like crypto Twitter. I know last week, John was even pointing out that, and I don't even know if it was on chat or in the actual conversation, it's just like, yeah, the alpha on CT hasn't really been there recently. So it was like, you know, kind of disconnected myself from it. He was saying that. But yeah, like, it's kind of felt that way. And even as someone that's like on the timeline, trying to engage, like maintain the conversation lately, it's just like, I haven't felt strongly about much of the stuff that has to the surface. So it was just like drama based, so I avoided, or it's just like, not really intellectually exciting.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  So I just like, you know, don't, don't speak on it mostly. So, yeah, I felt it too.

• 2:00David Hoffman?

  I do think the movement drama has kind of hit what might, there's probably going to be more drama, but it's really hit a nerve of people.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Crescendo.

• 2:08David Hoffman?

  Feeling despair about like, why are we continuing to get into this place? You said, Brad, structural bullishness, the mismatch between the structural bullishness of the industry with like the despair on the timeline. And that is what I see. I see a lot of people say like institutions have never been more bullish about crypto before. The amount of inbound from Wall Street is the highest that it's ever been. And then like the despair on the timeline is also the highest that it's ever been, which is like an interesting gap that we haven't really seen before in crypto.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Do you think it's because we see like, so we see that on the horizon and everyone's kind of like knife fighting to make sure that they're the ones that are positioned to get the structural bullishness? Cause like, I know there's like some self-consciousness right now going on with Ethereum, Solana, like what's the right direction and stuff. And, you know, we feel like we're there, like we're on the precipice of something, but like you're unsure if you're gonna, you're gonna be in the group that misses the, misses the wave. Yeah.

• 3:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, we all know that the music is about to be up and there's only so many chairs left. What's up, Andy?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I feel like a big part of it is just like Bitcoin dominance can explain a lot of it. Where it's just like, I mean, I would argue that probably everyone on crypto Twitter, myself included, is underexposed to Bitcoin compared to how much time we spend in the industry. And like as Bitcoin dominance goes up and up, it's like, oh, crypto's doing well, but I'm not actually making that much money. And like, you see stuff like movement and all these different things, and that's just like really disheartening. Or you see like, I saw images of like Starknet's token chart going around this morning, going from like $26 billion to $1 billion and all that. And I think a lot of it would go away and people would feel differently if Bitcoin dominance started going down.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  You know, there was a, yeah, John, get in there and then I have something to follow up on that.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's falling on that. I'd say that's like half of it, but it gets to the same point of the big split, which is why it makes sense, is all the institutional stuff like sounds great of yeah, you go talk to more institutional side. Everyone is, you know, peak of positive sentiment for the most part that you've had over the past few years. But the things that all the institutions are interested, one is Bitcoin, which like we said, is like CT is just chronically underexposed to. And then the other half of it is I would say like pointing at, you know, somewhat growing concern with a lot of people of like, okay, but what if the institutions come in and then basically none of our coins win? And this is basically, you know, like I've heard people say this a bunch of time, like Robin Hood is just going to show up and be like, hey, thanks, guys for building all this open source software. This is sick.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  We're going to copy all this. And yeah, exactly. And then like Coinbase, Robin Hood and JP Morgan end up winning. And like, thanks for building everything, guys. So I mean, like, there is like, there's definitely, I mean, there's definitely some truth behind that of, you know, a lot of those businesses are going to come in increasingly and they are going to start to squeeze and compete. I'd say a mix also is a lot of the stuff that people are super positive on right now with stable coins. And it's a similar bucket of everyone would love to own a piece of tether right now, but nobody on CT also owns a piece of tether. I mean, Circle is kind of underwhelming with their financials that they put out, even though they are going IPO. So a lot of the stuff that is going well is just like,

• 5:22Speaker 03

  it's not the stuff that CT and a lot of us are actually exposed to and spending time on the investment side. Bitcoin is the one that like everyone can, and it's the one that everyone just chooses not to own enough of all the time.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, there. So the revelation that I had or maybe just like coming to acceptance of was, you know, the bullish case for smart contract platforms for me over the last few years is just like, TradFi loves yield. They love yield. We're going to create all this new yield that they're going to want to come a part of. And then as like, as the ecosystem has matured the last year, it's less that we are creating our own useful yield and more that like, they just want exposure to the yield that they've always had exposure to, just in a more efficient form, which is like, stable coins and, you know, just a few treasuries that they're doing. Like, that's, that's nothing we do. That's, that doesn't plug into like, the DeFi the same way as like, we do. It doesn't do any DGEN games. It's just like, yeah, Bittlefund.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. Stablecoins get exposure to treasuries and therefore they're like, it's a really successful business model. But like, yeah, it's, it's not the games that we have played and not like, the, the like, euphoric future that I had envisioned, even as recently as like, two years ago. It's practical. It makes a ton of sense in retrospect, but it was not what I had foreseen.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Like I said, the tough part about generating yields means, very literally, we need to actually like, generate users paying fees to decentralized protocols. And at a high level, that, that, that is just currently lacking in the industry. And pointing again to that point of like, what CD actually has exposure to, even the most, you know, what is the thing that, you know, people in the trenches on-chain are using and paying for, is pump fun and is once again, a thing that no one has exposure to, which we'll also get into like, in our topic later. I'm talking about like, Boop and these other platforms. But it gets to that same point of like, yeah, I like, the reality is a lot of this, you know, decentralized protocol activity, people like actually paying fees to use these things. It's, it's still small to TradFi. The reality is like, most of the yield is, it's getting people to hold dollars and like, hey, we can clip the yield on like, treasuries on the backend, stuff like that.

• 7:18David Hoffman?

  The, the idea that the institutions are going to come and buy our bags has been this like, perpetual motivating force in the crypto industry. Like, we are so early, the institutions are going to come, we're going to get so rich because we own the rails, we own the tokens before the institutions do. And this, I, this was the dominant narrative in 2017, when some of the, looking back at the tokens that I own, based on that narrative, I was an insane person, like those, no institutions was going to come and buy those tokens. Those were just the temper- Yeah, you know, that's a coin, you know, Aon net, like iota, like these, these, you know, in hindsight, were just like casinos that people gambled on at the time, had a narrative of like, oh, yeah, these are the future rails of the internet. And I think right now, in

• 8:02David Hoffman?

  this moment of time, the reason why there's despair on the timeline is like multifold, right? There is the, the rails that institutions are actually using are not ownable, they are not ownable by us, or it's Bitcoin. And so that Bitcoin is not going to give us that like 100 X that we're looking for, or it's Tether, which is a private company. And then like the middle of the market, I think we've talked about this before, the middle of the market, where like, there's a lot of, you know, people's jobs, and the, the tokens that, you know, represented the speculative gamble that existed in 2020 and 2021, we are, people are now realizing that that's just not likely to be the infrastructure that supports the future of finance. And so we are creating this stablecoin Bitcoin barbell

• 8:46David Hoffman?

  with a meme, with a meme coin kicker, for those who wants to speculate on the meme coins, and then the things in the middle, which represents like, the livelihood of people who work in crypto, is just hollowed out. And so you add all those things together, I feel like that's how you get all the despair that we feel.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I totally agree. I think like, it just, it feels like we're kind of at a point where it's hard to see what's going to change that in the short term. And so it'll be interesting to see just how despair-y we can get.

• 9:18David Hoffman?

  Okay, so speaking of how despair-y we can get, you guys ready to dive into the movement drama? Because I've got a pretty robust set of notes, ChatGPT notes. So let me run through the facts of the details, and we can unpack it, unpack it together as a group. Okay, so November 27, 2024, is when Rentech, which is a shell entity, asked the Movement Foundation to loan it 5% of all move tokens. The General Council of Movement called these terms possibly the worst agreement I've ever seen. Later, a tweaked version of that agreement still lets Web3 port, a different entity via Rentech, borrow the 66 A million move tokens and also liquidate these tokens if and once the FTV of the move

• 10:03David Hoffman?

  token hits $5 billion FTV. The signing of this agreement happens one day before the token goes live. Then later, December 9th through 10th, move lists on Binance wallets connected to Web3 port, which is the market maker, unloads the full $66 million in under 24 hours, pocketing $38 million, crushing the price. And then Binance later banned this offending market maker, which is the news that kind of rippled around the industry that everyone's like, yo, that's not normal. Like, what's going on over there? They flagged, of course, a market maker misconduct. And now Movement starts an internal review in this March to understand like what's going on. As a result, with the $38 million that was confiscated by Binance handed back over to the Movement Foundation, they announced

• 10:44David Hoffman?

  a $38 million UST buyback to repurchase the dump tokens and they have cut ties with Web3 port, the market maker. So this is to sum up all of the reasons why people are calling this nefarious behavior. RENTech, this mysterious entity, appeared on both sides of the contract. So once as Web3 port's subsidiary and once again as Movement Foundation's agent. So they are basically on both sides of the contract. They are negotiating and they're also the client. So the same people get to dictate the terms, the lending terms and the trading strategy. So they said, okay, you lend us 5 million tokens and we get to dump them at a $5 billion FTV market cap. So the same entities setting the terms. The perverse incentives are already in there. The idea that you get to dump 50% of the

• 11:29David Hoffman?

  tokens if the token hits $5 billion is just a contractually obligated pump and dump scheme. There's no lockup. The $66 million tokens were immediately liquid. And despite the council's red flags, the deal still got passed through governance and was still somehow signed. So where do things stand now? There's an independent audit still in progress. Binance and reportedly US regulators are gathering info. The foundation is, like I said, buying back the move token on the open market to recover the $38 million, inject it back into the chart. And then also, Ruchi Manj, the CEO of Movement, has been suspended. And the board is considering additional governance reforms.

• 12:10David Hoffman?

  So I think this is really that some of this is, is like, we all as an industry knew that there were these boogeyman market maker deals out there. But no one had really ever seen it so explicitly and put into actual real contracts. And then those contracts were ended up being circulated. And there's extra weirdness about the relationship between the market maker and the foundation. That I think is like the unique thing that allowed this to kind of explode onto the scene. But overall, now people are understanding that like this has become, become productized and, and structure, structurally systemic across the industry. And we have seen this so many times, but now we have evidence of it. And now it's just got a little bit too real for people. And that's why people are reacting the way that they are reacting on Twitter. I'll just throw this to Brad.

• 12:54David Hoffman?

  Brad, what's your, what are your thoughts? What are your reflections? What are you thinking?

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I don't know if you saw it on the timeline, but there was some people from within the movement. Team, I think it was a DevRel person specifically, coming forward and giving like a gut wrenching, like, like. Post op of like, guys, I was blindsided by this too. It fucking sucks to have tried to build all this stuff, get the encouragement of builders and like build up this ecosystem. And then like, people are calling me dumb because I wasn't aware of it. So like, one omen of it is like the, yeah, feeling sympathetic for genuine people that are caught up in this stuff because they just weren't made aware of it. The other is there's a shit ton of hashes that were put on the timeline over the last like week of like things to be revealed later. That I'm excited to see several from like TorGill, who works at Fluent now. I think Kobe put out one on a movement post a couple, a couple of weeks ago.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  He revealed those. Did he? What was it? Yeah.

• 13:47David Hoffman?

  Can we talk about this mechanism? What does it mean to put a hash on a tweet or publish it on the internet? Like, why are people doing that and what's behind that hash?

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost like a predictive thing, right? So you can just go to like any Shaw 256 generator, put in any, any amount of text. That text will give you a hash string and you just post that string. And like the ability to like brute force, reverse engineer, what that actually represents in like readable text is basically impossible. So people are posting things to say like, I know something about this or I'm predicting something and I want to make, have proof that I can. Predict this, they post it on the timeline and then after the point where it's no longer impactful either to the markets or the prediction has come true or whatever. They will go back and say like this string of texts is what reveals or what that hash translates to. So. So they're just claiming that they know something. It's like a clout thing. It's like I'm claiming that I know something without actually revealing it because if I'm, if I'm, if it.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  If I'm right and it moves the market or if I'm wrong and it moves the market, then that has consequences. But if I just hide this for now. It doesn't move the market, but I get to claim clout at a future date. Is that kind of the idea? Yeah, basically. Yeah. So like maybe if you have further damning evidence, but you're not sure of it and like you want to claim it or. It will have market impacts that you just don't want to impose until after it's revealed by someone else. You don't want to be the person that says it. It just gives you that ability to do that and yeah, show that you had insider information and or were on to something before other people were. Okay. And then John, you said that Kobe revealed his hash. He revealed what it said. Maybe walk us through that.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  I don't remember the exact wording of it, but yeah, he posted a couple of weeks ago and then he revealed it in the last few days or so. It was just saying, I think that he, I think the prediction was that Rishi would be removed within the next 28 days for like fraud or misconduct or something like that. And he revealed it in the past week, which was, he was correct.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. I know the other main culprit was like, again, Torgo, we're going to affluent. He's like, he has gone publicly after. Movement a lot and they throw him out at each other and basically just said, I had a bunch of stuff in my DMs. I'm not willing to reveal. But he's just posting a bunch of hashes that, you know, maybe will be the reveal of whatever those DMs are. I'm not an investor myself. I don't have a lot of C deals anywhere, but like the, the general thing was that people recognize early on that there's maybe some of this going on, but they saw it as a money-making opportunity anyways. And they went forward for that reason. So, you know, it's just a lot of questions around, you know. How much is that worth to people? Right? Like, are they willing to jeopardize or give up on some other values if they think something is wrong? If it comes with a couple of dollars?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  You know, how prolific that was or like the amount invested under those pretenses? I don't know, but I have heard that. Just, you know, through the grapevine. So commentary on the space.

• 16:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you're the interpretation of like, or evolution of Rushi the character, I think is also super relevant here because like Rushi was one way at the very beginning and he grew into the Rushi that we know today or have seen on Twitter today. And that was a that was a character arc. There was a development arc that I think we all, everyone in the industry kind of watched in real time. And he's one of those like very, he attracts attention. He attracts a lot of attention. He does bold things, those bold things to attract more attention. And I think he kind of like leaned into those things over time to kind of create. I mean, in addition to all the things that the leadership things that he did behind the scenes, that was that was the like cult of personality that was Rushi on the timeline.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  One thing off of Brad's comment that I'll say, this is definitely not a rule for everyone, but I do think people do sometimes overestimate how much investors know on these kinds of things. I mean, we weren't investors in movement. We looked at it and we decided not to. But I mean, the reason that we decided not to and is what my sense is most investors like at most know on this kind of thing is like, ah, the vibe seemed off. Like, it didn't seem that serious. Investors, at least to my knowledge, none of them knew that like these were the explicit contracts that were going on. I mean, very literally, investors are also like trying to be dumped on in this case. Like, they were trying to use these high markups, for example, to like literally raise from investors at high FTVs after the fact. And like, they were literally selling like the investors, you know, the early VCs

• 17:47Speaker 03

  and whatever, like weren't cashing out at these prices. Like, they were locked up and they were trying to sell to other VCs on the premise that, you know, oh, this is a $10 billion token. You know, you're buying it at an 80% discount. What a great deal. But, you know, it's a fake price. So I like varying degrees of that. I mean, there certainly were some investors that like knew some stuff, at least based on what was tweeted out. But like, I do think that a lot of people do overestimate how much most of the investors in this probably knew. Like, most people did not see these agreements. Like, these are not normal market making agreements. Like, this is just crime. Like, people

• 18:23Speaker 02

  A lot of people who invest in something like this, like, especially if you're even funds, if you're not like leading around or something. And my experience on the other side of it, like, you write a check and every once in a while, you send a Telegram message and you're like, hey, how are things going? You want to do a 30 minute call? And you do it and then you move on like. It's pretty rare that these funds are like doing serious due diligence into the financials and things like that. I know that changes as you raise more and more money, but then even in those cases, like it kind of comes at like the goodwill of the founder in a lot of ways. And so even then you could very easily be lied to.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a different level of work and diligence expected of the lead funds and like most of the other people who are investing in this. And that's also something for people to realize is that it's fair to have a different view on those different parts for these different deals. But yeah, I mean, like most investors are like, you're not going through all the financials of the company and like figuring out all these details and asking for all the docs. Like you just can't do that, particularly as a smaller investor.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it also shows some funny stories around, like just some of the world of like investing when when you're not leading around and you're just like, oh, this XYZ company is leading the round. Like, sure, I'll throw in money. I don't really care.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, it has echoes of the eclipse fallout. I think it was whenever Neil was removed and everyone after the fact, the funds came forward like, hey, we knew about this. Hey, we didn't know about this. And I was like, well, if you knew about it, why the hell didn't you tell everyone about like these things going on in the background that were material to like the the actual effect of the project? So it's like, it'd be like, there is, there is impacts to the individual funds and like the trust that you build up and whether or not you do release some of the stuff because some of it is hearsay, some of it like you actually do have the actual understanding of. So without having that first first source, it's not coming from the source. Like you can't speak on a lot of these things, even if you are hearing rumors, because it can materially damage something.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  And if you're wrong and you're seen as someone doing that stuff and you got it wrong, like the fallout of that is almost as worse as the other side of it.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, broadly on that one, too. I would say the same thing. I would say just as a broad rule, most people over assume how much people do going into that. And especially for this movement one, I do have a lot of respect for people who publicly with a public profile were tweeting stuff out going into this. People like to rule who were like new or saw things that were off and were just like putting their name on it and saying like, yeah, this is a problem. Because yeah, I am not a fan of when people clout farm after the fact and say like, oh, yeah, of course I knew. But like, I decided not to tell anyone. Like, I'm just like, you know, now like, but I knew. That's like, that's not helping anyone.

• 21:06David Hoffman?

  I have seen Targor get like vicious about enough projects and then be proven right to the point of like, the next time Targor gets vicious about something, I'm like, oh, don't go there. Don't touch that. He has been a pretty consistent source of information, at least on stuff like this. I think one of the reasons why this just escalated to be as big as it was, was because like, movement was the only move-based layer two that I'm aware of. And so you have Aptos and one of the Sui, say, one of the other ones. There's a Sui. So Aptos, Sui, Move. It was those three. They were going after the Move programming language. Move was the only one doing it as a layer two. And so there was this, all

• 21:49David Hoffman?

  of this like free real estate that Rushi was able to capture, the movement ecosystem was able to capture. Like, okay, well, if we believe in layer twos, and if you believe in the Move programming language, like, that's the movement project. You don't have to think about it any further. That's, I think that's the only Move layer two that I know of. Are there anyone? John, you're the layer two expert. And do you know of any other Move layer twos? Is this now just an open field now?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Get me curious. I'm gonna go look now.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  I mean, is there, is there a ton of, you know, are there just like a bunch of devs chomping at the bit? Like, I really want to build on a Move-based platform, but it has to be secured by Ethereum. What we have now, right now, is just not good enough. I think the Venn diagram of those people, it's not a lot.

• 22:35David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah. It is pretty incredible that the Move FTV valuation is still at $1.6 billion valuation right now. I mean, it's coming down.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  There's no sellers, right? Like, who, who actually owns tokens that can sell them right now? That isn't like the Move Foundation. It's like, some guys on Twitter who airdrop-farmed and have like $50 worth of Move, and say like, G-move every morning. But otherwise, I don't think there's really any sellers on the open market.

• 23:03David Hoffman?

  Well, then where's all the volume coming from? Because there is volume.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  I mean, David, we just talked about their illegal market-making deals.

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• 26:07David Hoffman?

  discover ways to interact, participate in the leaderboard program, and be part of the community that's uniting Bitcoin and Ethereum. Okay, we ready to move on to Boop Fun, Boop dot fun? Andy, I think I need your, uh, your help on this one because I'm actually unaware of what was going on. Maybe you can walk us through the Boop dot fun drama?

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say that it really hasn't been a ton of drama. It's mostly just, I think, like, kind of interesting. Brett and I have actually been talking about it a good amount in DMs over the last week since it came out. But Boop is a Pump Fun competitor, a meme coin launchpad.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  They just have some, what I think are like, pretty interesting tokenomics. Whether or not they're perfect or, you know, are gonna work in the long run, who knows? But, um, essentially, like, probably the first part of it that was interesting and garnered a lot of conversation is they had like a really big airdrop for people based on their Kato, or is it Kaido or Kato?

• 27:03David Hoffman?

  Kaido.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Kaido. All right, Kaido. Based on their Kaido scores for like meme coin stuff. Uh, and in order to claim your airdrop, you had to launch a meme coin, like, linked to your Twitter on the platform. And so that, like-

• 27:18David Hoffman?

  You had to write a tweet or to tweet a tweet that linked to your meme coin.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  You didn't have to tweet about it.

• 27:23David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  But you had to, they basically had like two options of how you can launch. And one is on the platform and one is via tweet. But you had to create a meme coin that then like on the platform, it says, you know, Andy8052 made this meme coin. And so there was just a lot of conversation around that of like- This is kind of a pretty big airdrop. I don't want to make a meme coin. What should I do? And like, I think Brett could probably add more color here on this part than I can because I was just like, yeah, I'm gonna do it. Who cares? I'm just gonna make a meme coin that says.

• 27:55David Hoffman?

  I think your brand is very well suited for that.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, but Brett had a bit more of a.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I painted myself in the corner is what you're trying to say is I fucking, I, I posted on it. I was like, okay, so game theory, smart, right? So like, he said, the, the tokenomics or the airdrop itself targeted Kaido specifically because they worked with them. And it wasn't just like mindshare. So it was like, the higher you were with mindshare up to your, your tier that you were able to get into for an airdrop. Tier one, like people that were strong mindshare, but also tweeted specifically about meme coins and trading and stuff like those type of accounts. They were tier one. They were getting airdrops at present day value at like 200, $250,000, right? The thing is, it has to vest for 30 days. If you don't, if the coin that you launch does not do anything, right? You launch it, it has to bond, it has to hit five, 10, 15, and then 20 million dollar market cap in order to get like a fully unlocked.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  And like, so then that means you're actually capturing $250,000 ish. Tier two, tier three, whatever. I think Andy and I are both tier three. So our range was at present day value. Like, I was like 80, $90,000 roughly. So like decent airdrop, right?

• 29:00David Hoffman?

  It's pretty, pretty damn good.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw that, but like not know, like knowing like I'm not, I don't meme coin. I don't trench. It's like, I'm not going to tweet about this thing. It's like, the chance of me getting unlocked today is zero. The chance of me getting unlocked in 30 days, it's worth anything, just above zero, but still really close to zero. So I tweeted that out. I was like, yeah, you know what? I'm over it. I'm not going to post it. Right? Easy. But then I started breaking down the actual tokenomics of it. And, you know, we alluded earlier about getting ownership of these protocols. And you see the flywheel and send them to the game theory that the, the platform actually has. So it's led by Dingaling. Dingaling is kind of a prolific, he was prolific in the NFT space. Now, uh, we're starting to learn that he was actually founder of, or one of the founding teams of Pancake Swap

• 29:41Speaker 01

  and worked with CZ specifically on Binance. So like, he's, that's where he's sourced a lot of his funds from. Um, and we're learning. Explains a lot of his lore. So he was on the founding team and the tokenomics associated to it is if you have Boop, which is the platform token, and you were to stake Boop, you get lifetime 1% or pro rata, 1% of all trading fees, both pre-bond and post-bond of all the meme coins on the platform. Every time a token bonds and goes from the launchpad to just the open radium pool, it takes 5% of the supply and gives it again, pro rata to the people that have Boop staked on the platform. So if you have the platform token and you stake the platform token, you basically just get an index exposure on all tokens that

• 30:24Speaker 01

  are launched from the platform in perpetuity, right? And you can claim those separately and do a bunch of stuff. So I was like, looking at that stuff, I was like, okay, the flywheel's kind of here. Like, I can kind of see why people would want to accumulate this thing. There's a non-zero chance this thing's actually worth some money. I already tweeted, that's like, I'm not launching this fucking thing. It's like, I really want this. And do I want potentially, you know, five, five figures of exposure of the main token? I was like, I probably do. So I had to, I had to come back and do a mea culpa of like, all right, guys, I lied. I'm launching one of these things. Don't buy it. So I launched it the next day. And yeah, and then I actually, I saw like John had one on there, Danny had one. Like, it's like, okay, so I'm not the only one. But I fucked up because I posted about it beforehand instead of just like silently doing it in the background and just

• 31:08Speaker 01

  like accumulating tokens. But yeah, it's, it's interesting. Volume's still out there. I'm generally not bullish on teams encroaching on Pump Fun. It's just such an established platform, but the tokenomics itself had me interested enough that I, you know, I went over and launched one.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. Brad's a nice guy. He was hesitant. I had absolutely zero moral qualms. I immediately went and tried to launch on the only theories and it took me a few hours is because the website wasn't working.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  The president of the United States has launched a meme coin. I will.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I like, I had absolutely no problem with it. Like, I mean, to me genuinely though, like it was kind of funny. Like, I mean, I saw a bunch of people who were going through the same thought process that you were going through. The first one that I saw was, I don't remember the guy's name. It's like Bold Leonitis, whatever the one that Kobe replied to, who had like a gigantic one. And Kobe replied to him because the guy was saying like, oh, I'm not going to do it. And he was like, Kobe was replying to him like, what are you talking about? Just launch the thing and like, just say, hey, guys, like, I'm not going to talk about this thing ever again. Just like, assume it's going to go to zero. Like, you're literally going to lose your money. I'm just like clicking this button so that I can claim like a life-changing airdrop.

• 32:11David Hoffman?

  Well, that turned into copy pasta that people started to square around.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  That's literally what I put in my token. It's like I called it a scam and then I like copy pasted like Kobe's tweet into the thing and like put it in there of like, you're literally going to lose all your money. Like to me, it was funny that like people like would have a hesitation of that because like, what are you doing at this point is you're literally just launching a like fairly launched, you know, safe token that you're just openly telling to people like, hey, like there's no value to this thing, like whatever. Just like if you want to buy it, like go ahead, buy it. But like you literally should not buy it. Like you're literally just going to lose your money. At this point, this is like the most fairly launched, straightforward. Like you're just launching a token. Like this is just technology. Like there's nothing extractive or problematic about this. Like, you should be willing to launch this token with like absolutely no moral qualms in my mind, at least. Like I get why people are hesitant at first. Like you are like, you know, putting it next to your

• 32:59Speaker 03

  profile or whatever, but like you literally just say like, hey, like, don't buy this thing. Like I'm never going to talk about this thing.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  I realized it was like arms, arms reach from the coin it stuff that that Jesse was trying to do. Cause like, I, I was looking at this stuff and I think ERC 20 and like, it's just ERC 20. And I was imbuing a bunch of like negative sentiment from like this, the, the extractors who might be in the meme coin, who might do the pump and dump stuff into a neutral standard. Like it's literally just a token. It's just a whatever. And I, so I was seeing this and I, after sleeping on it the next morning and like, actually wanting to say, like, yeah, what, like, what am I doing? Like, why, why do I care so much? It's literally just like a thing. I did, I did friend tech. I was deep in the friend tech trenches. Same shit. Right? I was there. I was, I created a chat. I was, you know, people were buying my stuff and like, you know, you do the dance. And it's like, I had no moral qualms about that after the fact. Like I feel good.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Like knowing I participated in that in good faith. So as long as you're not like misleading people and like saying like, oh, this thing, I'm going to pump this thing to Valhalla. You're going to make a bunch of money off me. Keep buying my shit. And as long as you're not doing some of that, then yeah, man, just participate, participate.

• 34:00David Hoffman?

  I think the thing that we're all sensing from crypto Twitter is that crypto Twitter is hypersensitive to hypocrisy. And so like, if I had gone and launched that token, I think I would have been absolutely just like redded by the average, like trenchman of crypto Twitter. Just because like my past relationships. Relationship with meme coins, which like I like I've I've had this relationship with meme coins two years ago, one year ago, and that is not the same relationship that I have with meme coins today. And I would say that that there has been like a a more than marginal shift of just like once was complete rejection. And now it's been like, okay, it's rejecting meme coins is not the right strategy. I should be more accepting of meme coins. It's not the huge and it's not the biggest shift.

• 34:44David Hoffman?

  And even that shift has triggered so many people of like David is duplicitous. He's a hypocrite. He only likes meme coins when they're on Ethereum, like all this kind of stuff. And so like marginal changes in your stance becomes like just targets of crypto Twitter. Just you'll get shredded. You'll get shredded there. And so like Brad, yeah, you painted yourself into the corner. You said you were gonna do thing, something. But hey, you know, as soon as a $90,000 airdrop comes up, like all of a sudden, you're not gonna do that thing anymore. Like, that's not really no longer what you what you believe. And so I think it's really the hypocrisy that crypto Twitter will absolutely just like tear you apart for.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  That's why I had to post on it. Because like I I made that claim of like, I'm not doing this. And I was like, man, if people come and like, I even had someone like the second I did it before I had posted like, all right, fuck it, I gave in. Like, this is why I gave in, all this stuff. I had people coming back to my original post and just like laughing at it, like LOL, you gave in. I was like, yeah, I know. Mea culpa. Sorry, guys. Like, I'm an idiot. I'm diving back in. If I had I not done that, I just would have been in silence.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  I feel like part of that that's like frustrating for me with crypto Twitter is like, there's like a fine line between being a hypocrite and then like changing your mind with more information. And that nuance is basically always completely lost on crypto Twitter. And so it's like, if you ever change your mind about something, you're a coward. You have you have like, no backbone versus like, I feel like that's something that should actually be praised, that you like are able to have an opinion and then continue to evaluate that thing and change your mind. I think it's one of the more frustrating parts of crypto Twitter for me.

• 36:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, well, it's, it's, there's a lot of connotation there about like the motivations for why minds are changed and the context in which minds are changed. And so like, I became like more into the idea of meme coins downstream of Clanker, discovery of Clanker. And Clanker, I thought was cool because it was this bot that minted a token for you in this very easy UX of just you would, you would add it on Farcaster. And I thought that was interesting. And then downstream of that, a token would be created. And like, I guess that's a meme coin. But that was like my first public like foray into memery. And then like the Solana people, it's like, oh, as soon as meme coins are on base, like David's happy about it.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  More highbrow stuff?

• 36:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, it's more, more highbrow meme coins. Yeah. Rather than just like the, the 4chan aesthetic of Pump Fun versus the whatever the aesthetic is of Farcaster. I find the aesthetic of Farcaster more like palatable for me personally. That's more my speed. And so that's makes sense for me when I find meme coins on this platform more enticing and tweetable about. But then all the Solana people is like, no, David didn't change his mind. He just wants to pump his, his Ethereum bags. And so there's, there is like tribal relevancy to like the nature of how and why minds get changed.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  I did a mint on Twitter through Banker Bot this week. You could, similar setup just on Twitter. And so I was able to just tweet at something that minted some, some NFTs for me, which is pretty fun.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Morality part, or whatever we want to call it, or the Boop stuff side, should we hit on the business side of it a little bit?

• 37:41David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Because this one is an interesting one to me. I'm curious, Brad, because I think you've looked at the numbers a little bit more than me. But, but a lot of this, I mean, relates to, I would say like higher level even than Boop. It's like Pump Fun and like how strong is their moat and being able to disrupt that. Because I have been surprised, like if you look at the numbers, Pump Fun is still just printing money.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Ungodly, like 1,000 souls a day, I think?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have not fallen off nearly as much as you like would have expected for how much it feels like, oh, the meme coin hype is past. They're still running at like a $600 million plus annualized run rate right now. Um, most of that coming from their launch pad. I think it's about like 13% of it is coming from their uh, the AMM pump swap that they launched at the end of June to basically just compete and kind of kick out where radium was. Um, but right now, uh, like pump on is keeping all of that, obviously. Like that's just going to the company and they're just like sending just gigantic clips of soul over to Kraken, basically. And I, I assume that they are cashing that out. Um, like, good for them. They built a great product. They're making a bunch of money. And now it's time to like, okay, like, are people going to disrupt this? Like the analogy that I'd seen people drawing, which I think is like a reasonably representative one is like,

• 38:48Speaker 03

  and this would be kind of, I guess, the bare case for pump on, if you want to call it this, I guess, in hindsight of like, it looks a little bit like OpenSea. Of, you know, OpenSea had this just gigantic run for a while during NFT mania where, I mean, they were just absolutely printing money. They were keeping all of it. Valued at 10 billion or something at the top? I, I don't remember what the number was, but they were, I mean, probably like, like just tons of money that they were taking out.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  I think it was higher than 10 billion. Wow.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like there was a period where they were, I mean, they were just printing money. Um, and I mean, God, God knows how many millions they were making at the time. I don't remember what the exact numbers were. Um, but the same thing of like, they, they kept all of it. They didn't feel pressured into launching a token. And then over time, they lost their mo, the market fell away, competitors chipped away at them, Blur and all these other ones came in. And so Pump Fun is kind of like at this position now where they have a dominant market position. They're printing money on this big thing still. And this is where Boop is coming in of like, I mean, there's nothing like that innovative in my mind to what they're doing versus pump. The very simple pitch that they have to people is like, hey, we're gonna, like, we're gonna give you the money back. We have a token and, you know, you can get this token and this is gonna have a lot of fees going to it because it's one of the few things in crypto that like people actually pay for, um, to that conversation that we were having

• 39:56Speaker 03

  earlier. There's like, there's actually real money that'll go to the token. Um, and then we'll use this to incentivize people. Um, and this is what I saw some of your tweets were, were, I think, uh, to remember the exact numbers I had of like, uh, they give out like a million Boop a day. Uh, was it 10% goes to the graduating token launchers? 97, 90% goes to the graduating token holders. So, so they were explicitly saying it's like using the token to explicitly incentivize creators and holders in a way that like pump fun is not doing right now. Um, and so the question becomes like, like, is this the edge that like, you know, is able to push someone? Over the top and kind of like chip away into pump's lead like does pump feel the pressure on them now to you know do they need to launch a token that they need to start using incentives and stuff like that going forward.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Cause I mean, we've seen different analogies in this crypto. I mean, like a different one, but somewhat similar was like Uniswap, obviously like when sushi launched their token and they started to try to incentivize and pull away like you did came into the pressure, they launched a token. It's created a lot of problems in hindsight between equity and the token and all that lock and complexity, but like they they won the battle by doing so very handily, you know, they they won that market. And so that's the main thing I'm interested to see here is basically how how does pump respond to this stuff going forward? Do they feel like they need a token that they're going to need to incentivize people like do they see a real risk here going forward? Or did they just try to do some other form of like creator monetization sharing where like, oh yeah, a portion of new launches are going to go back to creators because they've sort of hinted at some of the stuff like this.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  So yeah, I I'm curious your guys take on this, especially bread, like having looked more at the numbers of this, kind of like what's going through it.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I actually put a post out trying to like, I've been trying to work with some people building Dune dashboards to try to track some of it because it's a little opaque right now. And whenever I did that, Dingling actually sent me a message that like, hey, some of your numbers are actually need to be refined because like they haven't released all the stuff. So we're just digging on change to figure it out. And the 24 hour stats that he showed me at the time was fees earned by bloop state by boop stakers. So this is 24 hour numbers was 11,500 soul, so 1.6 million, 1.7 million. Trading volume of all Colts created were was 356 million. There were 440 Colts graduated and 21,000 total Colts created over that time period.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  So that means if this was over 24 period, 24 hour period, 440 Colts, that means 1 million boop, which I think it was at times was between like 150 and $300,000, depending on the price of boop. Was going out to people daily split amongst those 440 Colts graduated. So that's 10% of that. What is that $35,000 across 440 different people. I know, but from talking to the ecosystem, there are people who are specifically trying to game this and like automatically launch and bond tokens so that they can eat up or saturate the bonded token market. And just eat up the portion of that 1 million boop. How successful it is, I think most of the people that I talked to just saw it wasn't a profitable endeavor. And I had talked to like several people who were working on this. So I don't think it's necessarily being farmed at least too heavily.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  But I agree with you. Imran, actually, Imran, the founder of Alliance DAO, which is where Pumpfund came out of, right? So you presume that he's an investor inside of Pumpfund. He had mentioned, kind of alluding to the sushi swap stuff after this had come out. He's like, hey, yeah, you know, whenever the pressure is felt, you know, and people start to have to launch tokens, all this stuff. So everyone's like, oh, Pumpfund token coming? Like, is this alluding to a future for us? So everyone's getting a little excited about that. But yeah, the, all of the incentives that you just pointed out, even like, if that's enough to get people incentive, incentivized to launch their token, to just simply move their token launch from Pumpf to, to Boop. Like, that's, that's what that, that marketing budget is for, right? That daily drop to try to get people over.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  I haven't seen it pulling a ton over, based on just like the dashboards and stuff that we're tracking. If 440 graduations in 24 hours, if that's actually the true 24 hour numbers, which I'm hoping it is, that's pretty good. But, you know, it's just, it's just a really sticky thing. I think we have to watch it for over a couple of weeks to see if any meaningful amount actually comes over. But I think the, the structure is there to incentivize people. It's just about educating the market and changing, changing behavioral patterns, which is always the tough part.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so interesting to me because like, unlike OpenSea, which we were kind of comparing it to, like, the life cycle of the time where, in which people use Pumpfund is like so minimal and it's so abstracted away. Like, as someone who trades meme coins and low cap meme coins, I don't ever go to Pumpfund's website. Like, where are you, whether you launch your meme coin on Boop or Pumpfund or Bonkfund, whatever? Like, I still see it on Axiom or any of these other tools that you trade with, regardless. And so it's like, you're not getting as a, you know,

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Meme coin creator, some structural advantage of publicity by launching on Pump Fun. And so like, it makes it even more confusing why people still do it when you're literally getting paid to do it elsewhere. And so that would be the one thing that I'm curious to see if over time people's, you know, patterns can change there. But I think the, the big thing too with it is just most of the meme coins that hit escape velocity or have like meaningful traction are significantly more premeditated than the average Pump Fun launch. And maybe there is more like tooling or like structural reasons as to why those are being launched on Pump Fun because of

• 45:29Speaker 02

  sniping and bundling tokens and all that kind of stuff.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's literally just industrial scale farming around and like a complex built around Pump Fun. It's like, it's been printing so much money for so long, like you have entire, entire teams operating around the specific mechanics that are Pump Fun. So it's just, you know, once you have that stuff in place, the, the cost to move is just not really worth it unless they actually have exposure to Boop. We saw the same thing with FriendTech, right? FriendTech was like, whenever it came around, it was expensive as shit. 10% fees both ways. Like it was gouging people who racked up $50 million in fees. And everyone spun up a copycat protocol. It's like, oh guys, come over here. It's cheaper fees. We have a token, like all this stuff. And no one moved because just like first mover has such a crazy advantage in this space or can. Whenever you're perceived as the clone, like there's just some psychological component to that that rarely plays out.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  It doesn't, like there are instances where it works out, but.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  I'd say no, no one moved in that circumstance, but I would say people moved and that FriendTech sort of just died and everyone left. Which is like, slightly skews the example. There wasn't like a market to take from. Versus with Pump here, like, like they clearly just still have a ton of users who have stuck around for an extended period of time. Like they have a ton of people who are still just like launching or trading tokens. So, so there is a large sustainable market, or at least somewhat more sustainable than FriendTech, that is around to be competed away at. Versus FriendTech, there, there wasn't just like a lot left to pull away.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I kind of feel like we'll need to see, like whatever would potentially unseat Pump Fun more seriously. I feel like it would need to be something that, you know, no disrespect to Boop, but I guess a little bit, even if I say that, like, is a little bit better. Like, like, I don't think something that is just as good as Pump Fun with like some novel token mechanics is going to be enough. Like, when I think about like the OpenSea and Blur kind of situation of things, if you were trading NFTs at the time, there were other platforms that came out that tried to unseat OpenSea as well and do similar things.

• 47:35David Hoffman?

  It was also launched by Dingle, yeah.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  And they just weren't good enough. And then you had Blur come around where it was. Like, it was actually better. It was a better platform to use. And so I think that that will really be the needle mover is if someone, and I don't know what better means here. If I was, if I did, I wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be building it. But I think that that'll really be what's required to seriously unseat Pump Fun.

• 48:02David Hoffman?

  Every single token launcher has come to the table marketing with, we return fees to the traders. We return fees to the token holders. And so, I mean, everyone has identified that that is like the attempt, but that has not worked. Like, Flanch has tried this. It had their week of success in the Ethereum community. Clanker was not like this and then pivoted to returning fees to users. Like, Boop is now doing this as well. Pump Fun has also moved in that direction too, as well. And so they have kind of like front run this and they have taken a reduced rake on when the tokens graduate. And so the fees, the take rate from Pump Fun has actually come down because I think that they are front running this. But I think, you know, the meme coin

• 48:46David Hoffman?

  vertical, the meme coin industry has proved to be completely sustainable. It's going to be, I think everyone understands that this is here, is a part of crypto. It's a part of what makes this industry. And so now, this is not like the OpenSea of 2021. This is now trying to compete with Coinbase in 2013. And so this is, I think we are just going to see continual evolution and attempts at dethroning Pump Fun, just because it has proven to be such a sustainable cash cow. And so I think you could, you could probably count on a meme coin Launchpad launching once a quarter from now into, you know, the end of time.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. And yeah, I think like, Like I'd be really interested to see someone try to come in and disrupt things in a way that's more like a complete trading experience or something that feels more like Axiom or these different things or like trying to come at it from a different angle than just like we also have a webpage where you can input a couple fields and press launch a token. Like I think that stuff around trying to not come at it from the one place that everyone has tried to of lower fees, give back to the community is probably going to be what's required for something like super interesting to come out.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And alongside that fear reduction, David, that you mentioned, which was like with the pump swap. I remember they did at that time to say that they tweeted out, which I don't believe anything is happening yet, but I expect at some point they said it was coming soon, a percentage of protocol revenue will be shared with coin creators. So they do feel the pressure, which I mean, at minimum, I think this is just good. I mean, we are just reducing the pressures of like a very large incumbent is printing a ton of money right now. Like this is a good force going forward at minimum of you're just going to be able to redistribute that value better and they're going to be squeezed a little bit more to give money back more to traders and creators, which I think is generally a good thing. On that point, Andy, of like, like you probably need more of a real just something that's totally different and better in some way as opposed to just, you know,

• 50:42Speaker 03

  we have a token with incentives, we give you money back. The other thing I've mentioned to you guys, I I'm guessing that I know your opinions on this, but I'm curious for Antifund that had, they came out a couple of days ago at some point I'd seen they're trying to go in this direction of doing something like actually different. I mean, the very TLDR of it for anyone who hasn't seen it was basically they batch execution of like all of the trades and the bids on these things over an epoch where a creator can set whatever epoch length. So you could say like, hey, I'm launching a token, epoch is one minute. So basically everyone who puts in a bid for that thing in that time, like all the back, the whole batch like clears at the same price. So you get rid of snipers who like, oh, no, no, the launch is coming and they put it in that millisecond and then they like to dump on you after you get rid of sandwich and stuff like

• 51:24Speaker 03

  that, which is good. And so this is a theoretically like much better mechanism. It gets rid of a lot of these problems. It was something that we talked a little bit about last week of like, but like, I don't know if that's like actually what users want. And I'd seen some tweets along this line with

• 51:39David Hoffman?

  Flunch had this, Flunch did this. Yeah, that you could, you could open up a 30 minute, one hour long window. Everyone could get in at the fair price. And it's, you know, there's no sniping. It's so much more fair. But then as we talked about, like, the, the marketing around that is just not nearly as viral as the incentive of like, oh, I am person number three to buy this. Let me share that link with my friend Andy. And then Andy passes it to his friend, I'm number four. Let me pass it to my friend Brad, who's number five. And so like, there's no, there's no, there's like, like positive feedback loop crescendo of marketing around the tokens and a fair launch just like yoinks that.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the most, the most cynical version of that, I would say is, it was a tweet from Joe Xerex Osprey for anyone who doesn't know on Twitter. He said, unpopular opinion, unpopular opinion that I'm willing to change my mind on meme coin launchpad tokens will be way less successful in aggregate without sniping by sophisticated actors slash cabals. Their incentive to propagate the meme is often a requirement for it to reach escape velocity, which is very cynical, but like unfortunately, probably meaningfully correct statement.

• 52:40David Hoffman?

  Game of incentives, baby. That's what this whole space is about.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  It's funny because I'm in a lot of, you know, Dgen trading chats and stuff. And there's kind of this like ongoing joke of like, oh, we can, you can, there's pretty good tooling and stuff to see if a coin is bundled and, you know, the supply is cornered and whatever. And it's just, when you see that, it's the question of like, is this a good supply control or bad supply control? And it's like, when the supply control is good, that's incredible. You want to be in the coins that are bundled, that are like bundled supply control cabals when they're not going to dump it on you.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  But when it's bad supply control and then it goes to, you know, half a million dollars and all of a sudden it's at zero, that, that is not quite as fun.

• 53:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:23David Hoffman?

  Yeah, that was the entire argument about the Brett coin on, on, uh, base. Cause like, everyone's like, what the fuck is this meme? No one uses this. No one talks about this, but it's like, it's at $2 billion and it's the number one meme going over there. And it's like, cause it was bundled out the gate. And then I put their good bundlers. So therefore they, they manipulated in the right direction and we love them.

• 53:41Speaker 03

  They manipulated it for us for posterity. Yeah. I was gonna say, this is that meme of like the two sides fighting. It's like our glorious supply control, like your wicked market manipulation.

• 53:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  But yeah, the anti-fun thing, it's all just like the mid curve take on, on what meme coins should be. I got it. That's, yeah. Unfortunately, it's just not gonna, not gonna be successful. We talked about it last week or whenever.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  I think that there is like an interesting version, like, I think it's interesting for particularly like, uh, event-based meme coins, where there's like a thing that happens and everyone wants to trade this thing that has now like captured attention. I feel like those have always kind of like existed in a weird kind of timeline next to more regular meme coins, like Fartcoin and things that aren't tied to an event or a thing, uh, because they're like, there is demand and you see it with coins being created and stuff for like, Trump just said this funny word, let's make a coin for it, um, which like, everyone who's buying that kind of knows that in a day or whatever, it'll be dead,

• 54:48Speaker 02

  but it's fun to, to play that game of chicken. And I think those actually have like a much better case for something like the anti-fun, where it's like, launch this thing, you have five minutes, anyone who can get in, because like, snipers are not going to be looking, like, actually not having snipers on like the Trump word thing could mean that that 24-hour trading of this coin is like way more fair and fun. And everyone kind of already knows that it's not going to a hundred billion dollars or whatever. There's like, that's just not really a part of the game. And so I could see it being more useful for things like that, that are maybe more ephemeral memes versus things that are like trying to be just like cults.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  I still like binary markets, like poly market, like, as a, as someone who rode the Boden wave, uh, I am, I am more into like, markets that actually have an outcome that I can make a decision on, uh, versus like trying to just like choose one of 75 coins that are loosely associated to the event that I'm trying to bet on, and then ultimately the market deciding to rug me, even though I was directionally correct in the thing that I was buying, like, that, so, you know, like, one of the, one of the, uh, apps that we're like, we've been incubating, that people are, are starting to play on the timeline, Noise, it's kind of trying to get closer to this, right? Because like, you're, what you're ultimately trying to bet on with something like that. Is you're you're trying to bet on this thing gaining mind share or having an outcome and like

• 56:09Speaker 01

  be getting attention, right? Like AI bots or whatever caught a huge wave. You could buy AI XPT. You could buy Zero Bro was kind of one. You had like 90,000 different like slot bots that came out and you could have bought one of 75 of these tokens that were kind of associated with this sector that you thought was cool. And then they give these be rugged like instantly because there's a lot of like countervailing forces in that the vehicle that is a meme coin, right? You have people that bundle it that just don't give a shit about the thing. They're trying to make money. And like, even though you're directionally correct in the thing that you want, even if it gains mind share, you can go to zero while everything goes up, goes to Valhalla, right? Because you just chose the wrong one of the thing. Kaido kind of is trying to get closer to this with their like their mind share thing because they they have an algorithm that kind of prunes some of the the noisiness of this stuff and allows you to bet that. And that's

• 56:54Speaker 01

  like what the the noise platform is trying to like build a perp protocol in the backend around of like, okay, if we can have this asset that actually does take the the cumulative conversation around this thing, and it can go up while everything else goes down. Like, that's that's appealing. And the market seems to be enjoying it. But it is a new asset. And like, whether or not you can have someone that takes the other side of that trade, which is a problem that Polly Market has with a lot of these things, is the is the next question.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Those are cool. And I like, I remember David, you had the poster on this, I think, like orderly attention markets is like the basic idea of what people are trying to get at. My main like hesitation with these kinds of things still is, I think all of them, again, they make sense. And then my concern is, are they somewhat of the slightly mid curve in the way that anti fun is of like, yeah, that like, they definitely make more sense for the thing that I'm trying to express. I haven't seen one that I'm like, fully confident, isn't just but like, it seems more fun if I just buy the meme coin, man. Right? And just like all of the virality and everything that goes along with that, as opposed to, hey, we have like this very structured derivatives market and like, you can express this directional thing that this view that you have. I'm like, that makes sense. But like,

• 58:00Speaker 03

  maybe I just want to buy the meme coin for the guy. And that, at least so far, I mean, that's what we've seen. It's like, I mean, those just have been bigger. But that that is the really difficult thing that I think people are trying to balance is like, you're trying to make this like very structured and specific things. So that you could, you know, express exactly this directional bet that you have without it just falling into very directly. Okay, you're just making a prediction market on an event or like a single oracle. That's just like it's just a prediction market at the end of the day. Like trying to balance those things of like the meme ability, the virality, the somewhat subjectivity of it. And having you express what you want like that. That is really difficult to do. So, yeah.

• 58:38David Hoffman?

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• 59:23David Hoffman?

  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. 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 benefit from gas savings on multi-hop swaps and ETH trading pairs, while liquidity providers can create new pools at 99% lower costs.

• 1:00:07David Hoffman?

  The best part, you don't have to do anything extra. Each trade is automatically routed through Uniswap X, V2, V3, and V4, so you get the most efficient swap without even thinking about it. Whether you're swapping, sending, on-ramping, off-ramping, or bridging, Uniswap's web app and wallet gives you the tools to unlock DeFi's full potential on Ethereum. Unichain and more. Use Uniswap's web app and wallet for a more efficient way to use DeFi. All right. I think we're gonna have to rename this podcast to the weekly meme coin discussion because I think meme coins have been present in all three of these, all three of these episodes. So let me pivot us out of meme coins into something on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, which is the Ethereum Pectra upgrade. That will go live for us, for everyone here on the, on the panel in about 12 hours.

• 1:00:50David Hoffman?

  So for listeners that will have already gone live, so Pectra is live in the morning of May 7. There's a bunch of new EIPs that are going to go live, too many to really list off. And of course, some of them are just long tail. But the three I'll drive of attention to is 7702, which means that all 0X wallets, all EOAs, to basically become smart contract enabled. They have smart contract wallet functionality. EIP 7691, that is expanding the blob capacity, doubling it from three to six as the target. And then the last one, 7251, is max effective balance validators can stake a range of ETH between 32 ETH to 2048 ETH,

• 1:01:30David Hoffman?

  rather than just a rigid 32 ETH. I think it's 7702, which is the, kind of the big upgrade here. It's a huge UX upgrade for all wallets. And so really what this enables is all 0X addresses can just run this like one-off contract code, execute that code, and then revert back to being a vanilla EOA. That's what happens in the background. And this is what enables account abstraction abilities for EOAs. The first like nice thing that comes with this is batch transactions. So we can remove the approve pop-up. Every, you can tie together a series of eight transactions, including the approve, and consolidate it into a one-click experience. And this also removes support area for failed transactions.

• 1:02:12David Hoffman?

  And then you can also have sponsored paid token-denominated gas. So that means that Layer 1 apps can pay for their users' gas fees. It means gas fees can be paid in tokens, mainly stable coins, but you know, any token, but most likely stable coins. And so these two things I think are just a huge UX upgrades for Layer 1 user usage of Ethereum. Removing that approve button, I think. No one really realized that the approve button was going to decimate billions of dollars of market cap from Ethereum. But I think we all kind of understand the how that happened. John, let me throw this one to you as the researcher of the group. What do you see when you, when you see Pectra?

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  I'll give the two sides of it. The first one is probably closer to my 60/40 honest take on it is Pectra took a really, really, really long time to ship. There's a lot of fighting over what was going to go in it. Most of the stuff you probably didn't need in hindsight and like some of it ends up being underwhelming. Like, I think that's like, this was not operationally the best fork that Ethereum has had. Like, it took a long time to get this together. It was a pretty messy, kept getting delayed. Lot of problems there. That's, I would say, the sort of pessimistic, hey, this is what we need to improve going forward. And I think that those lessons have been learned from there. And I would say, so pivoting into the positive side of it is one is I do think those lessons have been learned.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  And that is what you were seeing with EUF is dead for Fosoka effectively at this point. And it looks very likely that Fosoka is just going to be Pirdos. Or like, very possibly at minimum, that is like the, you know, that is the 99% focus of it. And they want to ship it faster. Like, there is at least an attempt to get it shipped later this year, not even next year. That would be a super aggressive, big change of, you know, hey, we realized in hindsight, like, man, like, Pectra took a really long time, bunch of shit got thrown in there, everyone fought, everyone went to go in there. But like, we all agree that Pirdos is the super important thing. We should just do that and just ship this thing as fast as possible. So, the lessons were learned, which I think is really good. And then the positive parts about Pectra are kind of what you said. And I would summarize it as, I think we, I think we talked about it last week, of basically,

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  you know, the, the best way to summarize now what Ethereum's goals are, is like the three-pronged, scale the L1, scale blobs, improve UX. Pectra has two out of three to a very meaningful degree there. This is going to scale blobs pretty meaningfully. And 7702 is going to be meaningfully important for UX, like, having to sign multiple times, like, for approve and then swap, like, all this, it's just annoying. So hopefully the wallets do really adopt this and improve the UX meaningfully. And this is, like, an actual improvement on more blobs. So, I think there's a little bit of both. Like, in hindsight, this was definitely not the best fork that you wanted. Like, you would do things very differently with the benefit of hindsight if we went back, you know, 18 months or whatever it was from the last fork. But there is some good stuff in here and there's a lot of lessons in here for the next work going forward. I don't remember the exact amount of months, but it was a long time. I can check exactly what it was.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  But yeah, it was a pretty long one.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  I'll say blobs get scaled meaningfully on a percentage term, but not on a raw term. Absolute, yeah. We get three more blobs.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like we're talking peanuts here. Like I've tweeted some of these numbers before. Like if you put these numbers next to like Celestio or EigenDA or any of these things. I mean, these are like many orders of magnitude apart. So 2X is great, but you're still like, you know, 1% of these other things.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Just for like reference for people who haven't seen the charts, like it's mostly like, what was it? Right now Ethereum is pushing, what was it, like 15 kilobytes or some ridiculous low number to megabytes that are being pushed on Celestia today. Celestia is like 1.33. Kilobytes a second to megabytes a second. Yeah, correct. Like you just view all this, it's bandwidth requirements, right? Like all these chains need to put their data somewhere. So you need to send data over the network and store it somewhere so someone can can make it available. That means you need something that can receive that information, store it cheaply or, you know, relatively cheaply, and then make it available so that you can actually like reconstruct the the state of the chain and like see if someone's lying or whatever, right? So like if you look at the raw numbers,

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  it's it's kilobytes to megabytes. And even, you know, if you look down the road with Pirdas and and full tank sharding, all this stuff, right? Like even then, like the Ethereum state is, I don't have it off the top of my head. I just know that like you're barely getting at what a lot of these UltiA platforms are doing today. And that's three years from now, right? So it's like, like they're going to continue to scale. They're going to be orders of magnitude higher. Like if you think this this industry is going to require more data, more throughput, more bandwidth, then Ethereum is just not going to be able to keep up, frankly. And like if it comes at the cost of all the storage on the nodes and then requires them to to like jeopardize how valuable their actual blocks, like the call data side of the block space are, like I don't think that's a good trade off. I don't like, especially when you see how.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  You see how at will the posting patterns are for a lot of these these chains that post to Ethereum, right? Like they just simply like they're never going to do it in a time of high fees because it doesn't impact their users. They can just avoid posting, wait, you know, I think Lenia told me that they straight up wait 30 minutes is the max allowed on subs right now to just like stop posting blobs because it doesn't impact their users. There's no real security concerns up until that 30 minute window. There's no social like repercussions to not posting blobs. They're just like, yeah, we just, you know, it saves us money. It saves our users money. It's a good business decision, which fair like it is. And I guess like I can, I will continue to expect these people to behave in this way because that is the rational thing to do as these actors. And I just, I don't see

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  it's a, as a great value accretive thing for Ethereum to fight on that, that vertical. One other thing, John, you may actually have numbers on this with the, the stake increase going from 32 to was it 20, 2052, something like that, right? I know there's some gossip overhead that actually comes with that, right? You reduction of having to maintain all these validators that have to communicate with each other. So like that is indirectly a performance increase of the network where it's a little leaner, right? With when you have all these, these large institutions that have to run a thousand of these, these validators as opposed to just like one box that holds all the ETH. Do we have any idea of like what that, that overhead reduction is?

• 1:08:15David Hoffman?

  That's why there is a blob count increase in the same hard fork. And so the max EB reduction turned translates into the doubling of the blobs in the same hard fork. That's where, that's where that resource bandwidth went.

• 1:08:27Speaker 01

  Well, sorry, resource bandwidth in the way of like, and the people implementing it or resource bandwidth as a, like the actual network itself?

• 1:08:33David Hoffman?

  So with max EB, we get to consolidate all the validators down to fewer boxes. So there's less gossip. So there's less bandwidth overhead. So we can take that bandwidth overhead and apply it to growing the blobs, which is why is that's happening in the same hard fork.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  They're comfortable making the change because it comes with that reduction. Okay. So you can roughly equate that, that size is what you're saying?

• 1:08:52David Hoffman?

  Uh, no, I don't. I'm not technical enough to be able to say that, but I know that like when I did this episode with Tim Baker, he was like, yeah, we were able to comfortably scale more blobs because we have a bandwidth reduction from max CB. I think, and they're likely being conservative here. So there's probably more blobs that they could introduce because they just don't know how much bandwidth overhead that they are saving and it's also not going to be instantaneous. And so it takes, there's a transition period for everyone to consolidate their validators. And so bandwidth is going to come down incrementally over the weeks and months and maybe, maybe there's a long tail. And so where there will be increasingly more bandwidth overhead unlocked as time goes on. So it's not immediately available day one, but they are making that trade off of like, okay, we feel safe.

• 1:09:32David Hoffman?

  Doubling blob bandwidth because we know we are saving bandwidth from, from max CB. But in terms of actual numbers, it's more of just like, we need this to actually like wait and see. Nice, nice.

• 1:09:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And part, and part of it comes down to, nobody really knows exactly where we're going to end up. I mean, you, you can make some reasonable assumptions, but after it goes live, we'll, we'll just have to see how many people consolidate, to what extent and over what time period. Because you're probably not going to see everyone just consolidate right away as much as they possibly can. Cause they either just don't need to or don't care.

• 1:10:02David Hoffman?

  Coinbase is not doing this on day one.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's just not gonna happen.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  So yeah, so, so we'll end up seeing where it goes. But yeah, to the point we were talking earlier on bread there, which I definitely agree on of like, yeah, when you put these number in context of like, compare these like, all right, the, the numbers that Ethereum is talking about doing three, four, five, whatever years down the road is like literally where other chains like Celestia are today. Like where EigenDA and these, Avail and these others, like you go ahead a few years. I mean, these other chains could be orders of magnitude ahead. A lot of what kind of colors is my view somewhat on the prioritization of like L1 scaling versus blob scaling and stuff like this. Is you need to ask yourself, if you, if you accept that as just a reasonable order of magnitude statement of fact, but hey, Ethereum is like never going to be this thing that is doing.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  A gazillion transactions, it's like everything, there's no place for alt DA. Or at minimum, this is not happening in the medium term. Like if this happens, this is like a decade away or whatever, where you figured out like your fancy cryptography, whatever, end game stuff, like it's not happening anytime soon. The thing that you kind of need to ask yourself then is like, all right, if we accepted that like Ethereum is never going to be the end game for all of this stuff, for like the, for the most part, like there's going to be a bunch of other providers that are just doing orders of magnitude more, more scale. What is the more valuable market for you that Ethereum can provide and own? Is it premium execution or is it premium DA? Like which of those is a more valuable market that Ethereum is better at? And I think it's definitely premium execution. It is like absolutely winning on that is a way more valuable market in general, and it's a much stickier market to keep on to those network effects.

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  So that, that's why when I'm like, I was thinking of like, do I prefer, like if you had to pick, like, do we scale the execution budget? Or add a few more blobs, you know, double the gas limit on the L1 versus double the blob limit? I actually think like most of the L1 scaling stuff of like reducing block times and increasing gas there actually gets you a lot more bang for your buck, just because that is just like a much more valuable use of that same commodity that you have.

• 1:11:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I think, I think the, even when I asked Dunkrod in the episode that we did with Dunkrod and Ansgar, I asked about like, can we, how can we like lower slot times? And even despite being very bullish on increasing the gas limit, lowering block time, Scott pushed back just for technical reasons.

• 1:12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's hard.

• 1:12:15David Hoffman?

  And yeah, it's hard and it's, it's hard with while preserving Ethereum's level of decentralization. But like, I think lowering block times is more important than raising block size because of all the benefits that come with trading. And, you know, despite all of the, the pushback I've given Solana over the years, the decentralized NASDAQ line looks really good when Wall Street is trying to come on chain. And Ethereum does have this very strong advantage of all of the MEV infrastructure, all the MEV, the very sophisticated MEV mitigation infrastructure that it has built in line with the layer one. So like, the, the Andy 8052s of the world don't matter, don't mind getting the, the 10% like MEV of the Solana blockchain because he's going.

• 1:12:59David Hoffman?

  For like a 1 million X on his meme coin token, but Wall Street definitely cares about like bips of extraction coming out from middleman in their execution. And that is Ethereum, that's something that Ethereum has invested in. And we should repurpose that and like turn that into our narrative for what Ethereum can bring to Wall Street and why assets should be minted on the Ethereum layer one. And in order to really maximize that Ethereum needs to lower block times, it needs to have faster blocks. So trading can happen faster because that's what, you know, decentralized NASDAQ needs. That's my hot take. I don't think that hot, actually.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, I'm constantly reiterating that it doesn't ever have to be the decentralized NASDAQ in the same way that Solana is trying to be, but like, you know, we mentioned the properties of like your M V mitigation, your decentralization, all those things, like those are hugely valuable things. So like, there's potentially a world that, you know, once you hit a certain threshold of value, you're like, okay, I want to put it in a place that is incredibly neutral, that is live, that like all of those things make sense to be done on, like you talked about the Biddle fund earlier, right? You'll put treasuries on chain, maybe it makes sense to put them in something that, that is, you know, has all of those properties as opposed to something that is just like, we'll settle, you know, five seconds faster or whatever, right? They mentioned that the actual movement of the BlackRock wallets is, you know, very infrequent, right? They're not on their degening with that stuff daily, right?

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not something that's highly active, but it's highly valuable, right? And like, that's, that's the key thing. And this kind of like, you know, I know all of us are basically on the same side when it comes to this conversation, but you know, we had the recent Solana upgrade that like everyone's having controversy around whether or not you draw those lines, you know, as it like being a determiner of whether it's centralized or not is a separate conversation, but you know, if people are doing it inside of Ethereum, maybe there's a few people outside of our ecosystem that would draw those same lines, you know, correctly or incorrectly, whatever. And if that line can be drawn, if that narrative can be a narrative, then like, you know, maybe people would draw their line and stand on the Ethereum side and use that as a reason to put all of their funds on Ethereum because of this one event, even if they don't agree with it or we don't agree with it.

• 1:15:04David Hoffman?

  As far as this, you know, what is the type of market that Ethereum can win even in the world where it's never going to be the fastest?

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  The kind of like implicit assumption in there is that you're assuming all of the activity doesn't naturally gravitate to that other place that's faster anyway, even though it doesn't strictly need it. Because the world where you can see that happening is, let's just make it really simple. It's just Ethereum and Solana and say that, okay, Solana is the faster one. So very naturally, all of the actual decentralized NASDAQ, like most of the, like, all of the stuff that really requires like low latency trading, whatever, everything goes over there. Everything naturally gravitates there. So if all the trading is there and all the users are progressively, a lot of users moving there over time, do you just naturally end up having this momentum of like, okay, all the lending stuff naturally like moves there too, because people trust it with the side value stuff and people are going there. My guess is that's at least directionally true. It's definitely

• 1:15:53Speaker 03

  net positive, but to what extent is that true? Does it pull everything? Like, what time horizon does that actually happen on leaves, like, in my mind, in general, just a very large market segment, if nothing else, that Ethereum like should be capitalizing on now, because it's definitely not the case now. And I don't think it's going to be happening anytime soon, that, you know, when the, you know, you're just putting treasuries on chain or whatever, like, oh, it has to go on Solana, because like they have better trading infrastructure than Ethereum L1, like, and better than everyone else. We're just not there. Like, there's clearly a big market edge, like, at minimum for you to grab there.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Understanding that all this stuff is permissionless, we're talking about like just the market structure of all this stuff. I saw Eric Wall made a post, because he's in the Bitcoin world, and Bitcoin is now starting their journey of like really digging into these L2 architectures, right, or these multi-chain architectures. He said, you know, what lessons learned should we take from what happened here? Like, how, if you were designing from scratch, how would you implement a multi-chain roadmap, understanding that it's all permissions, right? People are going to build however they want. It's, we're likely to, we're likely going to see some fractals over there of the exact same stuff that we saw here. People are going to say, I'm going to put, build a chain that is going to be the hub of a bunch of chains on top of the chain. And like, that's going to rerun itself. But how would you guys, what are the lessons learned of Ethereum

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  that you would implement in a Bitcoin multi-chain world?

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  Part of my concern is just in general over analogizing between the two because I do think that you have at least like pretty, and I mean, this was a lot of like what I'd written in like the Bitcoin L2 thesis posts that I'd written of like, I do think that at least some parts of this will end up playing out meaningfully different in Bitcoin L2s versus Ethereum L2s. Because I think that you have a fundamentally just different user base across the two of like, users are just looking for a different thing when I'm going to go use a Bitcoin L2 versus an Ethereum L2. Like Ethereum L2 is mostly like, I want to go do this thing faster and cheaper that I can kind of already do on the L1 and you're just like going for a different kind of use case there. Versus Bitcoin, like, most of this stuff is a pretty zero to one of like, hey, man, I can't do any trustless, basic DeFi stuff with my Bitcoin. If like, I want to swap or do lending or just basic, you know, deposit into a vault, whatever, like, I gotta go try

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  to block fire or whatever, go use the thing for the most part. So I'm somewhat hesitant to over analogize on these things because I do actually expect the market to play out a little bit differently. I do think that users do actually want to do different things. And then another part of it is also the constraints just technically are very different of like, Bitcoin is like way smaller block sizes even than Ethereum and it's way, it's way slower, it's got proof of work. You don't actually have ZK verification right now. So I'm hesitant to just overdraw like too many analogies on the way that like Ethereum has played out so far.

• 1:18:32David Hoffman?

  The notion of Bitcoin users always, I always, that throws a flag in my mind. It's like, there are no users of Bitcoin. There are holders of the Bitcoin asset, but users of the Bitcoin blockchain, I'm not sure that that is a cohort, a TAM.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  People who trade ordinals.

• 1:18:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, but those people are the same people who came over to Ethereum to trade NFTs and are happy to trade meme coins on Solana too. So I think the overlap between Bitcoin ordinals traders and like Pump. dot fun meme coin traders on Solana is actually pretty high. And then people always look at the market cap of Bitcoin like, man, there's so much like potential, there's so much potential here. There's so much like we could put into Bitcoin DeFi, but that implies like the existence of this like large Bitcoin user base that I don't think exists.

• 1:19:15David Hoffman?

  I still think desire is one to one. I'd go against you on that, John. I think like, because if you think about the overlap with Ethereum.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  It's not just desire, to be clear. It's what fundamentally can they do and already not do. Ethereum is already servicing a lot of the stuff that Bitcoin L2s will need to fundamentally service because Bitcoin can't do it. It's not just like user desire. I don't think BTC and ETH holders actually have that different of a desire across their holder bases. I think that Ethereum and Bitcoin provide very fundamentally different things, and so that changes what L2 should do in reflection. So it's not a user desire thing. It's like, I think that everything is downstream of what the L1 looked like, so the L2s need to provide a fundamentally different thing.

• 1:19:51David Hoffman?

  In addition to renaming this show The Meme Coin Show, I think this is also going to have to be renamed to The Bread vs. Drawn Bitcoin Layer 2 Show as well, because that is also a recurring theme on this episode. Brett, Andy, John, it's another week. Really appreciate you guys coming on and joining the roundtable, and I look forward to talking to you guys again in one more week.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us, man.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Until next week.

• 1:20:10David Hoffman?

  Banking Station, you guys know the deal. 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 are glad you're all with us on the Banking Station journey. Thanks a lot.