Memecoins: Good or Evil with Ledger & Stephen Cesaro

Today on the show we have two guests debating the merits and costs of crypto memecoins. Ledger (Brian Krogsgard) from the UpOnly podcast thinks that memecoins are financial nihilism that creates room for bad actors and grifters. Stephen Cesaro, from the Alfalfa Podcast, thinks memecoins are something to appreciate and celebrate. Which side are you on? ------ 🥩PRIMESTAKED | MINT primeETH NOW https://bankless.cc/Origin-pod ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2 ⁠ 🔗CELO | CEL2 COMING SOON https://bankless.cc/Celo 🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT SOLUTION https://bankless.cc/toku 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 💸 CRYPTO TAX CALCULATOR | USE CODE BANK30 https://bankless.cc/CTC 🦄 UNISWAP | SWAP SMARTER https://bankless.cc/uniswap ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 8:35 Ledger’s Memecoin Arc 11:53 Stephen’s Memecoin Arc 13:20 $DOGE vs. $BTC 18:38 Tokenization of Memes 22:28 Memecoin Intent & Transparency 33:24 Memecoin Theory & Practice 44:30 Investing in Brands 51:55 Reframing Memecoins 56:27 Memecoins vs. Scams 1:09:01 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Ledger https://twitter.com/ledgerstatus Stephen https://twitter.com/0xmagiclines ------ See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

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

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Are meme coins better or worse than the attempts at legitimacy that scams or accidental frauds have been? Ledger, that's a question to you.

• 0:15David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bankless, we explore the frontier of meme coins? You can't seem to go anywhere in crypto these days without stepping in a meme coin. Whether you're on Twitter and you're seeing D's post about Book of Meme, or you're on Farcaster, hearing about DGen, or you're on literally any other chain trying to incubate its own meme coin ecosystem. Meme coins have dominated on-chain activity in the last month or so. Is this all the future of finance is good for? Are we destined to discover even more degenerate levels of financial speculation? Is the only thing that we can muster as an industry? New types of on-chain PvP in hopes of getting rich? Or is there something to celebrate in meme coins? Are meme coins just a bad name? And maybe we should call them culture coins instead?

• 0:59David Hoffman?

  Are they a big F you to the man, to VCs? And a logical reaction to the world of private sales and investor accreditation laws? Is there something to be celebrated in meme coin culture? Most importantly, are meme coins going to be the thing that brings back retail into crypto? So far, things look like they're heading that way. So what's next? Before we answer these questions and talk about who is on the episode today, a message from our friends and sponsors over at PrimeStaked. PrimeStaked is a liquid restaking token that provides liquidity for assets that have been deposited into Eigenlayer by converting Staked ETH into Prime ETH. Users can capture the Ethereum Protocol staking yield, Eigenlayer points, and the Prime ETH XP points, all while remaining liquid. So if you want to catch up on your Eigenlayer point farming,

• 1:42David Hoffman?

  you can get 156 bonus Eigenlayer points per ETH deposited into PrimeStaked. There is a link in the show notes to get started with PrimeStaked today. Today on the show, we have two guests debating the merits and costs of meme coins in crypto. Ledger from the Up Only Podcast thinks that meme coins are financial nihilism that creates room for bad actors and grifters. Steven Cesaro from the Alpha Alpha Podcast thinks that meme coins are something to appreciate and celebrate. I think there's something to both sides of the debate. I think both have valid points and both bring some solid Wisdom into the conversation and ultimately, in my opinion, how meme coins will be remembered will be determined by the types of people who create and shepherd them, which means I personally don't have very high hopes for the optics and conclusions of meme coin mania. But Bankless Nation, I'll let you draw your own conclusions after listening

• 2:25David Hoffman?

  to Steven and Ledger hash it out here on the podcast today. But first, I'm going to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, including my preferred place to trade meme coins for the one meme coin that I own. And that place, of course, is Kraken. If you do not have an account with Kraken, consider clicking the links in the show notes to getting started with Kraken today. If you want a crypto trading experience backed by world-class security and award-winning support teams, then head over to Kraken, one of the longest-standing and most secure crypto platforms in the world. Kraken is on a journey to build a more accessible, inclusive, and fair financial system, making it simple and secure for everyone, everywhere, to trade crypto. Kraken's intuitive trading tools are designed to grow with you, empowering you to make your first or your hundredth trade in just a few clicks. And there's an award-winning client

• 3:07David Hoffman?

  support team available 24/7 to help you along the way, along with a whole range of educational guides, articles, and videos. With products and features like Kraken Pro and Kraken NFT Marketplace and a seamless app to bring it all together, it's really the perfect place to get your complete crypto experience. So check out the simple, secure, and powerful way for everyone to trade crypto, whether you're a complete beginner or a seasoned pro. Go to kraken.com/bankless to see what crypto can be. Not investment advice, crypto trading involves risk of loss. It's everyone's favorite season in crypto, tax season. And crypto tax is always an absolute headache, especially for all you degens out there. But it doesn't have to be a nightmare. That's where Crypto Tax Calculator comes in, the software built for degens by degens. As Coinbase's

• 3:49David Hoffman?

  official global tax partner, Crypto Tax Calculator focuses on making complex transactions into easy ones, supporting over 300,000 currencies across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, as well as 1,000 other integrations as well. It's as simple as connecting your wallet, pulling in all your transactions, and following the automated suggestions to quickly and accurately calculate your tax obligations. Plus, for all the airdrop farmers out there, Crypto Tax Calculator has your back as they are consistently adding support for new and upcoming Layer 1s, Layer 2s, and all the airdrops that you're currently farming. 2024 is the year where the degens do their crypto taxes. With speed and confidence, make taxes this year easy and affordable with Crypto Tax Calculator. Sign up at cryptotaxcalculator.io and get a 30% discount with code BANK30. Click the link in the show notes for more information.

• 4:33David Hoffman?

  Uniswap is revolutionizing the DeFi space, not just by enabling swaps, but by empowering you to swap smarter with a comprehensive suite of products for faster, safer, and more informed swapping. Say goodbye to pop-up wallet extensions. The Uniswap extension is coming soon, and this extension is not a pop-up. It is a sidebar in your browser that persists no matter where you are on the web. This means you can swap, sign, or send and receive crypto anytime, anywhere, without obstructing your browser window. But that's not all. The Uniswap web app now features limit orders, so you can buy and sell any token at your price, on your terms, without having to watch the market. And the best part? Limit orders are built on Uniswap X, which means no gas fees. Also new to the web app is the data and insights pages with real-time candlestick charts,

• 5:15David Hoffman?

  price data, transaction logs, and detailed pool data, all integrated into the Uniswap web app. All of these new releases come together to create one platform to help you swap smarter every time, no matter where you are, on web, mobile, or on the extension. Click the link in the show notes to sign up for the extension waitlist and download the mobile app. Start swapping smarter with Uniswap. Bankless Nation, I'm excited to introduce you to Steven Cesaro from the Alfalfa Podcast. For those who aren't familiar with Steven, think of Vance Spencer, except replace VC with DGen, and that's about proximate to where Steven is. He's my personal favorite market DGen commentator, generally speaking, on the pro meme coin side. Steven, welcome to Bankless. Thanks for having me, David. Cheers. And of course, Brian Krogsgard, aka Ledger from Up Only fame, also Ledger Cast,

• 5:58David Hoffman?

  also his own project, flip.xyz, and also the only crypto person who lives in the state of Alabama. Ledger, welcome back to Bankless.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Hey, that's not true, actually. There's, there's a pretty strong crowd here.

• 6:10David Hoffman?

  Name three more.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  I'm not Doc's.

• 6:15David Hoffman?

  Doc's three more.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, uh, y'all remember Messi from, uh, he's, he's gone, he's gone private over the recent, over recent years, but he's in, he's in Alabama and, um, there's several more, but I'm not, I won't go any deeper.

• 6:31David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, we're gonna talk about meme coins today. Ledger, you were putting out some tweets, uh, the last couple of weeks, talking about how you just can't, can't get on board the meme coin train. I was listening to Steven here on his podcast, Alpha Alpha, talking about like the merits of meme coin. And I kinda wanna just like put these two conversations, uh, together on the same podcast. I've got a little preamble that I wanna run with to kinda start this thing out. Um, meme coins in crypto are nothing new. They've been a part of the inside crypto since they were incepted in Dogecoin in 2013. Uh, now in 2024, we have the members of the Dog with Hat community crowdsourcing $650,000 to put a dog with hat image on the Vegas sphere.

• 7:10David Hoffman?

  Uh, in 2014, we had Dogecoin funding the travel of the Jamaican bobsled team to go to Sochi, Russia to compete in the Olympic Games with the Dogecoin on the bobsled, of course. Uh, this was a very heartwarming, uh, story, I would say. The Jamaican two-man bobsled team faced financial hurdles in their quest to go to Sochi, Russia, uh, and which, uh, they've got overwhelming response from $184,000 from Dogecoin supporters in 2014. It was a pretty cool story. The best part of this Dogecoin story, I think, is the story of his founder, Jackson Palmer, who intended to satirize what he saw as the speculative degeneracy in the crypto space. So he abandoned the Dogecoin project, stating that he no longer wants to be associated with cryptocurrencies and having sold all of his Doge long before it ascended to what it is known today.

• 7:53David Hoffman?

  So we have a dog-themed crypto coin fundamentally that does nothing unique with a founder that abandoned it and a community that stepped in to support it for the lulz. And is now a top 10 crypto asset by market cap, $23.3 billion, crazily followed enough by Shib at a $17 billion market cap. And so this is kind of where I think meme coins as a whole got incepted into the crypto industry with Dogecoin. Dogecoin was the first thing in the crypto world. It's like, hey, we can, we can make financial assets that are also jokes. Uh, and also look at it, it's got like over 10, 20 billion dollar. Market cap. And so this has spawned many debates about what should we do in this crypto industry with this newfound power that we have,

• 8:35David Hoffman?

  which is the freedom to make financial assets for any reason whatsoever. And so I kind of want to just maybe start this conversation here, not really even talking about pros, cons, not even bringing beginning a debate or anything, but make maybe just bring in your own guys' perspective about like how you see the the role of meme coins in the crypto industry. And then maybe we can go into more aside specific conversations. But Ledger, I think you you've been in the industry longer than all of us, just kind of start this conversation off for us about your your long arc of relationship with meme coins, speculative coins, shit coins as it relates to the crypto industry and kind of just what you've been thinking about them over the arc of time.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess that, you know, crypto has been an experiment forever. And so, you know, the vast majority of coins do begin as some form of experiment. And sometimes with a degree of pointlessness. However, I think when we've seen the most success with coins, there's been quick like community gravitation towards like something slightly larger of an idea. But even if you take the Dogecoin example, like it's this general positivity around like the dog is cute.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And then like Jackson kind of codified it by abandoning it like kind of a Satoshi-esque moment by going away. It turned it into a truly kind of community driven thing. And I'm not against that. I'm against when you can't establish like any form of justification for existence beyond dumping on others in a PvP environment. And in 2013 and in 2023 and in 2024, 99 plus percent of these are for the purpose of dumping on others. And, you know, nobody's truly standing behind anything with some form of conviction. I'm not like anti-community by any means.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  I think, you know, and people will say like Bitcoin itself is a meme coin, and that's true, but it's got a mission statement and it's got there's an understanding. But it does build, I've said this forever, like Bitcoin's value is by network effects, you know, between the providence of time.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  And the the network effects, it's not different from a code perspective from Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin SV or, you know, what other, whatever, all the like thousands of Bitcoin forks from the 2010s, like, it's not different in that way. It's different because of network effects and because of its idea and because of the story of Satoshi and the early believers and the method of governance that it's taken over those years. And those are the things that you need. And yes, you do need to develop them. But there's been very little demand by, let's say, the customer base, the people that are willing to buy these, to shill these. There's been very little demand for any story, if they think there's any potential for number

• 11:36Speaker 01

  go up, for them to say, like, let's put it on our timeline. So that's really where my my beef comes from, is the very PvP nature and kind of this open nihilism, more than the idea of a meme coin. So I guess that's why I'm the bad guy today.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Steven, did that stoke any thoughts with you?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of thoughts. I mean, I feel like I used to be like Ledger, for sure. Like, when I first entered this space, maybe like 11 years ago now, I guess, as like an investor, you know, I thought my job was to be really smart, right? And like, oh, my God, there's going to be this stuff that will change the world. And if I just think about the stuff that's actually going to change the world and buy it before other people do, then I will enrich myself with my huge, big, beautiful brain. And then this this cycle, you know, continued for for one or two more cycles, where I kept trying to be like, smart and impose my own idea of what I thought was the market should be on

• 12:37Speaker 02

  the market and sort of ignoring what the market was was actually telling me. And now, here in cycle number four, I guess, like, I am really, really, you know, a self admitted, trying to hit myself over the head with a frying pan, lower my IQ, you know, like, traitor, you know, I'm trying to see at what the market is is telling me. And make money by following the market, not saying what the market should do. The market undeniably loves the memes, right? And I think Ledger probably wouldn't even disagree with that. I think his, uh, his, uh, the thing he takes exception with is the nihilism, the fact that there's not something

• 13:21Speaker 02

  deeper going on here, I guess, but I would say that even with like something like Doge,

• 13:28Speaker 02

  all the stuff you described about Bitcoin, it's not really that different from Doge, right? Like, it's not like Bitcoin has any specific utility or cash flows, right? It is literally, as you said yourself, an idea, a meme. And then you, but you're basically like, well, the purpose of this meme is better than, than the Doge meme, right? But that's just a very subjective sort of thought.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Now, not, not entirely. There's a scarcity element to Bitcoin, which is part of the idea. And so one element is it's a better idea and the market cap proves it. The capitalist environment proves it. When you look at one market cap versus the other, the forever supply or relatively forever supply of Dogecoin has been a limiter to some degree on Doge's potential to usurp Bitcoin over the last 10 year period, which it had an opportunity to do so for a decade. It's a long time to be able to make up that network effect and it couldn't. And that's because Bitcoin's idea was stronger.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  I would probably make the exact opposite argument, to be honest. I think one of the downsides of these sort of Bitcoin like scarcity thing. I mean, I object to this idea that scarcity just makes something inherently valuable anyway. But like, even assuming it does, what it does is it creates an incentive for like hoarding. Like people want to buy Bitcoin, bury it in the backyard, give it to their kids and then not share it with anybody, right? So one of the nice things about having a supply that does inflate a little bit more is that you, you, you have distribution. The coin gets into the hands of more people. People want to spend it, use it, use it as money, maybe buy a Tesla with it someday.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  So I, I think there are a lot of positives to getting the coins in people's hands. And the network effects of that, um, you know, go towards like a long-term. Value add, right?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  You just made the exact argument of a Fed inflationist for targeting 2% inflation or whatever, like some minimal inflation to encourage capital endeavors essentially to beat inflation. And I don't disagree with that, except for in this scenario, like there's not a significant market for Dogecoin or other like highly inflationary, you know, created assets to create those capitalistic environments, like to create the things on top. And there are some things that can do that. That's the whole point of the dollar, I guess, to like challenge, you know, challenging people through the inflation of the dollar

• 16:04Speaker 01

  and for the Fed's targets for how the dollar should work to do the same thing. Like if inflation's 2%, figure out a way to go earn 7% or 8% or 10%. Go do something with those dollars, because if you just hoard them, they'll become inherently less valuable over time. And Bitcoin and other deflationary hedges are, they're a counter to that. Now, they can be limited by that for sure. Like creating economic activity on top of something is good. That's why David and I, for example, like really like the Ethereum network, because you're creating economic activity, programmatic activity on top of a blockchain using the truthfulness of the chain. And in that scenario, thanks to the way ETH mechanics work, it both

• 16:49Speaker 01

  burns ETH and creates an environment for economic activity on top of it. So I think you can make those arguments, but like Doge, for example, is not exactly like going, going a route of do something on top. It's just inflating. So you just need more people to buy into the idea to outpace the inflation, which is fine, but I just don't think it's as powerful as Bitcoin's like certainty.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Of 21 million coins and which does and which does inspire hoarding. And that's why you'll never have just Bitcoin. You need the other side of the equation, right? You need the, you know, the not deflationary technically, but like the known, known level of inflation and limited, limited supply of Bitcoin. And then the other side of it is the other stuff. And that's why gambling and coin creation has been so popular for so long. And I'm not, I'm not trying to say it's like terrible. I'm just saying most of it's going to zero. You know, and people need to understand that, like, don't marry your bags, even your whiff bags.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Most of everything in this space is going to zero, right? Like if it's going to zero is a justification for like, why something is generally like a bad idea for you to invest in, then this, this whole space is going to fall apart.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, invest in trade.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  How many of the like, even, even the top 500 altcoins? Do you want to buy and then go into a coma for 15 years and then wake up with, you know, maybe half of your net worth in like, like two?

• 18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and that's, that's kind of my point. And, and that's, that's for things that have a productive component or things that don't like, but for things that clearly do not, they don't know what they stand for other than here's a funny thing that I thought of 15 minutes ago.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Wait, why is that not something that's great to stand for though? Like what, what is, what is better to stand for than memes are amazing. Sure, there are some things that are better to stand for than memes, but memes are a pretty good thing, like the, the internet fricking loves memes. There's an entire, like three generations now of people on planet earth who love memes and communicate memes and, and share memes and like memes are a sense of social currency to them, right? There is value in being the first person to sort of like find and spread a meme, right? You get cred amongst your peers, right? It's, it's, it's, it's an obvious like next step that we would sort of financialize that to, to some degree, because like there is like a, a, a market value there, even though

• 19:23Speaker 02

  it's not a value that the sort of traditional boomer world of finance can sort of put in some sort of, of box. It's, it's a new kind of thing, much like crypto is a new kind of thing, much like Bitcoin was a new kind of thing, and much like Ethereum especially was even like a new kind of thing within, within crypto. Does that resonate?

• 19:41David Hoffman?

  There was a line from Jacob from Zora that I resonated with, which was that meme coins will just be called memes in the future, which I think he's just kind of implying like the actual instantiation of a token, a financial asset that goes alongside an actual meme that we know of, like an internet JPEG. He's saying that these are actually just becoming the same things. And so the token itself is the meme. And so in the year 2024, in the year of the crypto age, memes are tokens is a take that he had.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  I think that's stupid. To say, here's token, now let's try to meme it. So our bag doesn't go to zero. Like, I'm okay with the idea of here's a meme that should be tokenized, like create a viral event, and then there's an economic value that can be associated to that. I think that's actually very interesting. And I think we will see that's kind of the tokenization of everything. But like, on the flip side of that, trying to create the everythingization of a token is stupid. Like, tokenize things that exist. Don't try to turn, like, create something to exist because you have a token. Like, it's just stupid. It's, you need, I think you need a baseline idea. You need a baseline

• 20:59Speaker 01

  concept that you're trying to establish economic value for, whether it's a meme, whether it's inflationary or deflationary, whether it's utility, have something, then tokenize. Don't say, here's token, let's create something. I think that's just the backwards way of doing it.

• 21:14David Hoffman?

  Okay, so wait, what you're saying is like, the Doge meme was already a meme on the internet, and then the Doge blockchain came about, and you're saying that that is a normal, expected?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was the tokenization of a thing versus, yeah.

• 21:29David Hoffman?

  What about Geo Boden, who Joe Biden already existed and was already having meme power in of itself. And now there's Geo Boden. Like, where does that land on your viability spectrum?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  It could be okay. And there is this, like, the survival of the fittest. You know, there might be a thousand memes based on Joe Biden and Donald Trump or the election, and only one survives because, you know, 999 die. And I understand that. And that's where a lot of this, like, everything goes to zero stuff comes from. But still, it's based on an idea, a mockery of our political system, right? And I can get down with that. That's not what I'm trying to be against. I'm just...

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the vast majority of people, they don't, they don't even care about any of that. Like, they're, they're just pretending the idea matters. All they want, all they want is the nihilistic idea of, "I'm gonna take Steven's money before he takes my money." And, um, I don't, I don't really like that idea.

• 22:29David Hoffman?

  So, uh, there's this concept out there that like, this idea that meme coins are more honest than actual real projects in crypto. Cause you can, you know, talk shit about all the meme coins that you want, but like, there is just a graveyard of attempted legitimate projects that the founders had every intent to rug at the end of the day. Uh, like Do Kwon, for example, made three failed, like two or three failed, uh, algo stablecoins before he made Terra Luna, right? Uh, and like maybe Terra Luna even was a legitimate attempt at something, but then it's still ending up in the same graveyard right next to all the scams with like less than, uh, desirable founders who were just coming into crypto, making an alt layer one just to get rich, right?

• 23:14David Hoffman?

  Like, look, look, I can, I can name so many names of like people in this graveyard. So like, the whole idea here is like memes, meme coins, don't pretend to do anything. And they're like actually democratizing in terms of just like how the retail little guy and their access to information can play in the arena that is crypto. Uh, and so like, we, we can just like, take off the, the emperor can just take off their clothes and we can just like deal with everything, just this totally naked and honest and transparent. Now, I, I have like, uh, qualms with that, uh, because I think that's fake transparency, or it can be fake transparency. Uh, but Steven, uh, maybe you can continue this like line of reasoning, this, this thought and like, what you see in that corner of the meme, meme world?

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this, this is my favorite thing about memes is that they sort of like rip the mask off and say like, "This is, this is what's happening," right? There, there's an authenticity about them. There's an honesty about them that's kind of refreshing in the space, you know? You know, first we created altcoins and they, they stole people's Bitcoin. And then we created ICOs and they stole people's ETH. And then we evolved coins with complex Ponzi-nomics and Layers of weird DeFi elements to lock up your money while people dumped on you and you couldn't understand what was happening. And then we created pictures and got people to burn thousands of dollars in gas just to mint them. And we raked them over the coals with like 10% royalty fees and all sorts of transaction fees only to completely rug them.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  When they discovered like the concept of liquidity and how it works in the opposite direction. When you're you're you're trying to get out. And then, of course, we have like the the new favorite scam now, which is like the the F D V scam. Where you just issue all of these tokens to early insiders, you control the float. And then you hire these market makers to brilliantly like inflate the price of your token during market euphoria and distribute it on unsuspecting retail. Only to have it crash 97% under the weight of all the unsustainable token inflation, right? Like, this is this is all nonsense, and I think memes are a reaction to that, like much in the same way that the

• 25:21Speaker 02

  young, like every younger generation rebels against some of the ways of the older generation's world, right? They they they try to impose this world on them, this set of rules, this is how you have to think, this is how you have to behave. And they go, no, we we don't want to do that. Now, oftentimes, like a large part of that rebellion is very misguided and it goes awry. But within that rebellion, there are these like amazing seeds that are planted that grow into something great. And I don't think memes are some panacea and they're all like awesome, but there's there's there's something good here, right? And I think one of the things people will come to realize is that what one of the scariest things in the in the world, right, i- is attention.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Like, having attention, I think, is more important than building a good product. I think it's actually way more important to to get attention first and then build the product. Like, a lot of people build products and they never get used, they never have intention, uh, worse, uh, uh, attention. Worst products gain traction in the world, it happens like all the time. So for now, these things are just these kind of weird little idiosyncrasies that we trade back and forth. But I think you're already seeing the seeds of how this can work in the opposite direction. Like, I I'm pretty sure this is what Jordy is planning with, like, have you heard of Puff? So I'm pretty sure Puff is like doing the kind of, this is going to be like a real project.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  We're actually going to start it with the meme and we're going to use the attention to funnel. The people into the real product, like we're going to use that attention for good. And I think we're going to see memes like evolve.

• 26:57David Hoffman?

  Puff is a meme coin on Mantle.

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:59David Hoffman?

  And it's being like bootstrapped by like the Mantle community, the Mantle thought leaders, people like Jordy, and then the idea is like that actually will turn into something with a team with good intentions with a with a North Star and they will build something. But there's just starting with the meme first is what you're saying.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think it's I think it's brilliance and I look forward to like more experimentation in that regard, like using these memes for for good.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is an impossible argument for me to win.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Because it's a really good one?

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Because your argument is really good? No, it's just like, there's obviously going to be, you know, good, like some good things that come out of it. But I don't think that that's a reason to celebrate the overall idea, right? Like, I think that I

• 27:53Speaker 01

  I I'm not going to celebrate like this idea that all is futile. So like, live now, dump on others, you know, you know, kind of this Sodom and Gomorrah lifestyle, like everything, everything is pointless. So screw it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna live for the now. That's just not my mindset, right? So like, yes, there is, there is, uh, there are things in there. They're like little bits of light amongst, you know, fire and and and darkness, you know, like there's a little, there's, there's good that can come out of it. But the overwhelming majority just sucks, right?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  And like, I think the intent of man to like live and do well should matter. And I'm not, I don't like a fair distribution is fine, like what you just talked about with that meme coin and what their purpose is. But for everyone, there's unsuspecting retail that like the same people that are behind the high F D V scams are like all also, I'm sure, creating and doing pump and dump meme coin stuff. And so like, you have the same victims, essentially, just different methods. And and even those are, they, they're, it's always people trying to figure out a way around whatever exists. And you talked earlier about people being upset, you know, you kind of have the revolution.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  And then something comes out of that. But like, there's also just the people in the revolution that just want to take advantage of the revolution, right? There was no con- there was no real idea. It was, again, that nihilism. And that's what I'm against. I've just, I believe that we live for something and we can choose to live for something. And I will parti- I will personally choose to participate in a way that I believe in. Like, and so I'm just not going to be the guy shilling $150,000 market cap piece of crap scam coin that just popped up because I bought it early and now I'm going to tell other people about it because that, you know, it's just unethical behavior in my perspective.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And so I think what we're doing is we're excusing, whether it's the high FTV scam that's got the suit on, or whether it's the one that comes out of like a telegram and you and your buddies, you know, Unibot sniped it. It's just unethical behavior. And I think if you fail to call that out, then you're going to burn the whole thing to the ground. And so I think that like, we need to set a standard for ourselves to live a little bit higher. That's all I'm asking for, is just live a little bit higher. Like, have a little bit of ethics in our, in our lifestyles and like, I think, will some people get really, really rich doing unethical things? Sure. But that's like, that's not all there is to life, I guess.

• 30:42David Hoffman?

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• 31:27David Hoffman?

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• 32:11David Hoffman?

  that can be done by Toku or integrated into any payroll EOR providers in any jurisdiction. Toku is a trusted provider of Protocol Labs, DYDX Foundation, Mina Protocol, and many more. Get started for free and make token compensation simple at toku.com/bankless. Cello is the mobile-first, EVM-compatible, carbon-negative blockchain built for the real world, driving real-world use cases like mobile payments and mobile DeFi. And with Opera MiniPay as one of the fastest-growing Web3 wallets, Cello is seeing a meteoric rise with over 300 million transactions and 1.5 million monthly active addresses. And now, Cello is looking to come home to Ethereum as a Layer 2. Optimism, Polygon, Matter Labs, and Arbitrum have all thrown their hats in the ring for the Cello Layer 2 to build upon their stacks. Why the competition?

• 32:56David Hoffman?

  The Cello Layer 2 will bring huge advantages like a decentralized sequencer, off-chain data availability secured by Ethereum validators, and one-block finality. What does that all mean for you? With Cello Layer 2, gas fees will stay low, and you can even pay for gas natively using ERC20 tokens, sending crypto to phone numbers across wallets using social connect. But Cello is a community-governed protocol. This means that Cello needs you to weigh in and make your voice heard. Join the conversation in the Cello forums. Follow Cello on Twitter and visit cello.org to shape the future of Ethereum. I think one way to kind of maybe like categorize this conversation is there's like meme coin theory and then there's meme coin in practice. And I think Doge, one of the reasons why we talk about Doge and why everyone talks about the potential of Doge is that meme coin

• 33:39David Hoffman?

  in theory turned into practice in this very pure holistic, heartwarming way. But as we've seen with every single cycle, like the cycles that Steven was talking about with the ICOs, like what was the first ICO? Oh, it was Ethereum. What was the second ICO? A legitimate project that the product itself didn't work out, but like no one really felt scammed about that because it was a good attempt. And then everyone realized that like, oh, you could do this ICO thing, you can attract a bunch of ETH. And then like the euthanasia roller coaster was kickstarted. And then we ended up in like the ICO shitcoin waterfall that was 2017. And you can repeat that for DeFi summer. Like who started DeFi summer? Compound, Robert Leschner. Great governance tokens. We needed all of that. Kicked off the governance revolution. How did it end?

• 34:24David Hoffman?

  Like 1,000 APY pool twos. And so like meme coins are taking kind of the same arc where like it may be meme coins are taking the same arc where we start with Dogecoin, but then we end with like this PvP, I just created a meme coin. Now everyone buy it and I'm going to sell it tomorrow.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  And the result has been the same in all of these pretty much where liquidity gets spread out, like way out to a point to where you kind of have this house of cards on the market that needs to correct and go back to the things that do carry something, like to carry some value. And yeah, maybe me, there are some memes that survive. And there's some, there's some, you know, suit coins that survive, but like, there's a lot of death as well. And I think you're just creating a perpetual cycle. You're just doing like a different version of the same crap where you're fracturing liquidity over and over again. And, you know, I don't, I just don't really buy

• 35:19Speaker 01

  into the idea that it's pure than before because you're just, you know, not pretending anymore. Because they're very, there's very real projects, but it's not the only thing you can get rich in. That's not my point. Like, and I'm all for people having

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Opportunity to elevate themselves in a capitalistic way.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I think there, even in that, there's different ways to do it. If you say, I'm gonna launch a meme coin and it's, I'm gonna like purposefully pump and dump this thing so I can make a buck. Because, you know, I live in this nihilistic environment and screw this guy. And, and all these other people, screw them. I'm gonna, I'm gonna collect mine. Like, that's just as bad, right? Like, but if, if there's an open market and you're not trying to personally manipulate that market and you're making a trade in that environment, then fine, whatever. Like, you're just one of the market participants. Like, I think, I think that's a truer expression of how to go about this in like honorable way, if you will. And I just refuse to live in a world where we have to throw all that aside and it's just the Wild West forever.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  And there are no morals or ethics or anything like I just, that's not my world. And that's my, that's my whole point about it. And I just see a lot of that as you see this escalation, if you will, of meme coin culture. In the same way that you saw it with ICOs and pre-sales and everything else, like and NFTs and all the, all the other, like as it goes further and further out, like it gets worse and worse to the degree that it just needs to explode and like have like a jubilee of the coins. Just, like, just make it all go away and start over again from, you know, the phoenix from the ashes type of the environment.

• 37:05Speaker 02

  I, I kind of object to this whole painting of everything is this is just financial nihilism. Right? Like, we have, we have a meme coin channel in our Discord. And nobody in there is nihilist. Everybody's like vibing and having like an amazingly fun time. And the idea that never before in human history did everybody get together with their friends and try to make a bunch of money and get rich quick. Like, that, that didn't exist and that's just a product of like a zoomer nihilism or something.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  I'm not saying it didn't exist. I'm just saying it's always fun while you're winning and then it's not.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Sure, of course. And like, I think there is a much higher sort of self-realization in the people trading memes that what they are doing is like a very zero-sum game. I think in previous cycles, people were buying these alt. They literally thought they were going to do something and make them money. It's very hard for anybody with an IQ above 60 to convince themselves that they're really going to buy Baudin and hold it for 10 years and become like a like a be worth like $30 million, right? So there's like a element of like self-awareness and honesty and what is happening. I would argue that like an element of the Bitcoin vision is kind of like a little more like nihilistic or like dystopian, right? Like this idea that crypto is going to succeed

• 38:23Speaker 02

  because we all just buy this coin and it just goes up as like the rest of the world buys. We don't even do anything with it. We just watch the number go up. Now we don't even buy it on chain. We buy it in like an ETF, right? I think it's less. I think it is dystopian, but it's not nihilist. Sure. All right. Cool. It's dystopian. You can choose your dystopia, right? I mean, I mean, David, you're a big advocate. You love crypto, right? You think crypto is going to be a thing and change the world. Do does crypto become a thing because a bunch of people buy Bitcoin and their Coinbase account and look at the number go up? Or does crypto become a thing because users are start using the chain and using the products? Like, what better way to bootstrap people into

• 39:07Speaker 02

  this ecosystem has there ever been than like this meme coin frenzy? Like, people can't go on Coinbase and like trade Popcat or whatever the meme of the day is, right? They have to be like, how do I? How do I use a wallet? How do I use Jupiter? How do I do all these things, right? And although, yes, a lot of these people are going to get burned in a particular way. I think that five years from now, 10 years from now, when crypto is like a big thing, right? And you talk to people, you talk to like the next Van Spencer, if you will, of like 20 years from now, right? Whatever. And you're like, how did you get involved in crypto? Everybody has the same story when they get involved in crypto.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  They heard about something, they thought it was cool, they bought something and then they got burned. But in the process, an idea went off in their head and they became hooked. And then they sort of climbed that wall and became like a user, an advocate and get everybody else in the space. Like, I think the same thing is going to happen here.

• 40:05David Hoffman?

  Yeah, and like when I got into crypto, I was very much illusioned by the ICO mania. I thought Substratum was going to change the face of the internet, right? Like, I thought basic attention token was going to meaningfully change our relationship with advertisers. And it really wasn't until like 2018, I was like, oh, I just like paid a very expensive lesson. But that's how I thought about it. It was like, I paid for a free lesson in like real markets and incentives and human behavior and all that kind of stuff. And maybe to Steven's point, to the meme point, meme coin point is like, you very much are aware of what you are doing when you buy like Dog with Hat, Dog with Hat. Like, you know exactly, like, you're like, I am not being disillusioned by the founder of Substratum who thinks he's going to like change the structure of the internet.

• 40:50David Hoffman?

  I'm literally buying a dog with a hat. So I can appreciate that. And but like, I think there's also inside of this debate between meme coins, good or bad, is also a timeframe difference. I saw this, this classic bell curve tweet, whereas like in the center, you have the middle of the curve and the guy's like, "No, you need fundamentals. You can't invest in dogs with hats. Like, you must, meme coins are too nihilistic, blah, blah, blah, blah." And then on the left and the right side, it's like, "I don't, I'm having fun and I'm getting rich." That's the two lines, like, "I'm having fun, getting rich." And those two sides of the left and right of the curve work when number goes up. But when number goes down, you really want fundamentals.

• 41:32David Hoffman?

  Like, this whole concept of like interest rates is like, is an anti-meme coin concept. Like, the higher interest rates are in the world, the less meme coins will exist. Because when interest rates are super high, you need systems that produce cash flows that can pay for the interest rates. And so like, a lot of this stuff, I think, was really contained inside of one cycle and it only... Works while people make money and as soon as people stop making money, as soon as like inflation picks up, as soon as we're thinking about like, okay, what is my like retirement plan? What is my 10 plus year time horizon thesis? Like as soon as people think in longer terms and what they need to start thinking about fundamentals and all of a sudden, the air goes out of the meme coin balloon.

• 42:17David Hoffman?

  And so like, I think that a lot of the debates is like, are meme coins are good or bad? Also kind of needs to be framed in like the timeframe, like meme coins are good in the short term. But can they be good in the long term? I think is where a ledger will say like, no, they literally cannot. It's structurally impossible for them to be good in the long term.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  For the most part, yeah, like when you take it holistically, there will be success stories, but like, I think it's a, maybe it's a more efficient lottery, right? Like, and I don't really like the lottery. I certainly don't like us, like the concept of a state run lottery. And let's send kids to college because we took money from poor people who had very little hope. So they just did this thing instead. Like, I'm just gonna go buy some scratch offs at the gas station with the last 20 bucks I got because I have no other hope. And so I'm just gonna do this and that sends somebody that makes like 200 grand a year to the University of Georgia full time. You know, like that's highly dystopian and I don't like that at all. And so a lot, a lot of times when people talk about like why they're opting in to just gambling on meme coins. It's the same kind of thing, like how else are we gonna make it, bro?

• 43:19Speaker 01

  You know, and, and, and I, and I get that it's maybe it's more efficient than that lottery and, I just, I just don't like it. Like I'm allowed to just not like something. And that's all I really said when I got trolled for this tweet is I just don't like it. I don't like the concept of that. I choose, I would rather believe in something, both that I'm investing in, trading, whatever else. Like I've always, I said this, David, I don't even know how many times I've talked to you personally about this. Like if I'm gonna hold something, I want it to be something I can sleep at night and realize like, I'm okay with this. And every now and then will I go participate in the trade, like the overwhelming like size of the wave that's crashing? Like, is it just one that I'll tack on to? Sure.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  But at the end of the day, like I would rather, hold something, invest in something where I have some fundamental belief about what that thing is and why I hold it and why I'm participating. And I think for a market to be functional, you need a reasonable number of people and a reasonable volume of dollars that are thinking that way, or else the whole thing's gonna look dumber than the tulip bulb mania of the 1600s that everybody makes fun of us for.

• 44:31Speaker 02

  Do you invest in art? Do you invest in NFTs? Do you believe those things are investment vehicles to a degree? Or at least like high probability speculative assets?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  High probability? No, I wouldn't say high probability, but...

• 44:49Speaker 02

  But fine art, you don't think is?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  If it's already been established, right? Like, that's the... But then your upside is lower. It's more of a traditional investment vehicle. Like, the difference between me buying a Picasso and buying a piece of, like, Class A real estate, like, might be pretty much the same type of returns.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  See, like, I don't think there's much of a difference at all between, like, buying Doge coin and buying, you know, fine NFTs. I don't think there's that much of a difference between buying Doge coin and, like, buying shares of, like, LVMH, right? Like, sure, LVMH makes widgets and people buy them, right? But, like, underneath all of that is just an idea. Like, the thing just has value because, like, it has been memed into value. Like, the population likes it.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I've talked about the network effects of a blockchain forever. Like, I'm not disagreeing with you on that.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  But if you think that it's like a legitimate investment to invest in brands, like brands like LVMH, for example, is investing in Doge not the same thing as investing in any brand? It's an idea that you think has traction that is growing and it is growing at a rate that will let you get a return on your capital?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  I've yet to say anything negative about Doge. You keep saying I'm, like, anti-Doge. I've never said anything negative about Doge.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Sure, but if you accept Doge and you accept the idea of brands, then you have to accept the idea that there won't just be one brand, there will be many downstream brands.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  No, that's like saying, "Well, if you believe in Nike, you should believe in Schmikey because I made it."

• 46:24Speaker 02

  No, it's not. It's like saying if you believe in Nike, when Nike made shoes, you had to believe in the idea that somebody would also create like Adidas shoes and then Converse shoes would be like, like, that's not the same at all.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  I think the vast majority of what's created looks a lot more like schmikey than Adidas. Like, I don't think very many of the, very many of the things that we see out there and that end up like, shilled by people with significant followings are truly a different take on a similar concept. And instead, they're just like a me too pump and dump.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Of course, that's true. But if what you were saying, if the opposite of what you were saying was true, that was like, oh yeah, I look in the meme space and I see all these really great brands that are the next Doge, then there wouldn't be any returns there because the market would already see that. Like, you can't have one without the other. And people acknowledge this. People acknowledge it's a high risk game.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  But there's also some, there's some purpose in establishing accountability in that ecosystem. Like, that is important. And when there's zero consequence for creating like a thousand schmikes, then that's, you're gonna self-destruct the thing that was good in the first place.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  But that's why I like crypto. We just like fast run all the stuff in the real world and just blow everything up. And we learn all the lessons ourselves and redo everything and like super, super compressed timeframes, right? And you're already seeing the market adapt to some of this. Like, we have like these token checkers now, for example, where now like even people who are like amateur crypto people know like, okay, there's a meme coin. I gotta run it through the token checker. I gotta see if there's like a whitelist. I gotta see if like the dev minted himself all the tokens. Is the liquidity locked, right? And this is gonna keep like evolving, right? Like, this is, this is just a crypto thing. There are no guardrails.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Do you think there should be any accountability, like, for the person who's creating all the, all the ones that are not like a real attempt at establishing meme value, like, or whatever, like?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  No, I think, I think if you fair deploy a token. With no attempts to like defraud people like we have, we have laws in the real world, right? Against certain financial crimes. Just because you commit that financial crime in crypto doesn't mean like you, you, you're not responsible for that financial crime, right? So like, I'm all for holding people in the crypto world responsible for committing like fraud or anything that could be perceived as fraud, right? But if everybody is just mass launching memes with like fair token distributions, right? I don't, I don't have a problem with that. Like, I don't have a problem with, with, with people playing that, that game. I, I, I don't.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  So if I created, if I created a coin and I called it, okay, grandma or whatever, like somebody's done these with.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  That's, that's already created now, by the way.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm sure. But like, but like, if I, if I create one, essentially memeing myself for being a fricking old boomer, like, let's call it the Bama boomer coin, okay? And so we got the Bama boomer coin. And I said, listen, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna create the Bama boomer coin. It's worthless. But if you guys want to make fun of me, just buy this coin at this contract address and, you know, off we go. Like, but I am disclosing naturally that I think it's valueless. But if you think the Bama boomer meme is valuable, you don't think that, like, there's a responsibility that I have to

• 49:48Speaker 01

  limit the way that I go about things and say things? Because I'm essentially establish, I'm creating the cliff for someone to jump off of, where I know they're gonna fall and break their bones, you know, like, that's all that's really happening there. Like, some clever people are gonna win off of it. And they probably will, just because I said that. Like, somebody's gonna go create it because they see this podcast. Somebody's gonna make a couple thousand bucks off of it or whatever. And there's gonna be somebody that's like, well, I guess I'm just gonna jump off this cliff. Maybe I'll make it because Bama boomer is a good coin. And this is a funny idea. And it's gonna be me. And then they break their legs. Like, am I responsible if I'm the creator of that for establishing that arena where that occurred? Like, I just don't think it, it doesn't carry real value.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  And please don't, somebody will make Bama boomer. Don't buy it. It's stupid. It's stupid.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so two things there. Like, one, no, of course you're not responsible. And then I, I don't know, like, people, sure, there are people in the world who want, like, they're the Elizabeth Warren types, and they think we should throw you in jail for that. Like, I'm not that person. Do it. If you're being transparent, and you're saying, like, here's a cliff, but like, don't jump off of it, and somebody jumps off the cliff, right? Like, that's, that's not your problem, right? The, the second part is, like, I, I just view memes as like a, in a fundamentally different way than you do. Like, you, you're like, there's no purpose, it has no value. But like, in my mind, these are, these are just speculative marketplaces for attention, right?

• 51:11Speaker 01

  I've, once again, not said memes don't have value.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  You said, well, you said Bama Boomer doesn't have any value.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  That has no value, it's not a meme.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  But it does have value, because you, as this, like,

• 51:21David Hoffman?

  You've said it four times now, actually.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  beloved grandma entity with like clout on crypto Twitter, you have attention. So stuff you put into the world, like, has attention. And when people are buying meme coins, they're buying a piece of that attention, or speculating on like, how much attention that will actually have. Like, that's what's actually kind of happening here, at like, a base level with meme coins. And I think it's more and more people realize that this is just sort of like a speculative, like, attention marketplace. Like, you can kind of view it through, uh, maybe a different lens. Because we all agree that attention is a very valuable thing in this, this crazy world we live in.

• 51:55David Hoffman?

  So, so, one of the reasons, like, fundamentals in a token, for example, like, MakerDAO has had some of the best fundamentals in crypto over the longest amount of time, and it's one of the most ignored, generally speaking, ignored coins, until finally, just like, the fundamentals became so strong, that like, even VCs had to like, pick up on it. And now, it's, it's revenue is its attention.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Even the VCs had to pick up on it. The, the slowest actors in this space. Always the last one to the party.

• 52:24David Hoffman?

  Well, on, on public markets, yeah.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:26David Hoffman?

  Like, the fundamentals were so attention grabbing, that all of a sudden, they showed up in the market price of MKR finally. Uh, and so, like, maybe, like, to kind of reframe what meme coins are, they're like, they're not equities, right? They're not trying to produce fundamentals, they're not trying to produce cash flows. They're commodities on attention in a particular flavor. In a particular arena. And so like, um, like Doge, Doge with hat is capturing the attention that whatever Doge with hat can produce. That was a little self recursive. There are other meme coins that are like running in parallel to like in real world, like non crypto stuff. And so like as the attention, like I'm just like Taylor Swift coin, for example, Taylor Swift

• 53:08David Hoffman?

  gets big, Taylor Swift coin would also get big because it is this like community supported unofficial commodity that is commoditizing the attention around Taylor Swift and commodities are inherently zero sum because like oil does not produce dividends. It is a, it is a commodity. It gets consumed once, right? And so there is no cash flows to oil. There is no cash flows to gold. And so like, maybe this is why we were talking about when we gold isn't like perhaps inherently nihilistic because you don't think that you can produce anything new out of it. And so maybe this is like reframing of meme coins as like pseudo attention commodities. Does that make you feel any better or worse, Fletcher?

• 53:47Speaker 01

  I guess I'm indifferent. I mean, I told you, like, this is going to be hard for me to win because it's mostly me saying what I'm not that very willing to participate in, because I don't value many of these segments of the attention market, if you will. And I do believe in the attention market. That's not, that's not my point at all. I don't, I don't believe in the gamblefication of that attention market. And there's just many things with regards to gambling and attention, I guess, that I don't, I choose not to participate in. It's not to say I think something should be illegal necessarily. I just, I, I wish that there was a little more market accountability for market accountability, meaning by participants' choices not to be there, right? Like, than there is. And

• 54:32Speaker 01

  I was thinking about this one, like, the, have you ever seen that article where it was something like this one guy sends like 15% of the world spam emails or something like that? And, and, and somehow he was like, somebody figured out how to block a lot of his stuff and he just, it stopped happening. And so An example is, I'm not saying email is bad. I'm not saying email marketing is bad. I'm saying, can we call this guy bad? Like, this douchebag that's sending the same spam to, you know, tens of millions of people every day? Like, that's not, that's, I just don't like that, you know? And there's, and what we're saying is for the, all the people that are creating that, we're not, we're not, we're not just willing to say that's stupid or that's bad.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Like, they were like, well, maybe he's gonna make a buck off of it. And I gotta receive, you know, 50,000 spam emails every, every month because of it. And like, I don't, I don't like that. That's, that's my point.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  I mean, if your point is that memes as a whole are, are actually really good, and just this segment of like meme coinery is bad, if you wanted to say like, uh, fraudster, profit maxi spammer, sure, I won't, I won't argue with you.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  And that's been my whole point, like, and that's, but there's a high ratio of that in this current meme coin iteration, right? Like, it's, it's because we're just like, YOLO, everything is fine. We're enabling so much more of that. And we're tolerating, for example, people that I think are making irresponsible decisions. Like, bro, Bama Boomers, the future, you know, you need to invest. I got a frickin' bag when it was cheap. I'm up 10X, I'm gonna be up 10X more after I shill it to 250,000 people. And a bunch of people that just want the Lotto tickets are chasing it. And the next thing you do is dump on their face. Like, that person is the one that needs to be held accountable. And it takes human beings to hold them accountable.

• 56:27David Hoffman?

  I, I think this is really kinda drilling down into the heart of this whole crux, which is, we talked about how like shady and terrible crypto has been in its history, the graveyards of scams that have come and gone and made very few people very rich to the cost of retail. Are meme coins better or worse than the attempts at legitimacy that scams or accidental frauds have been?

• 56:54David Hoffman?

  Ledger, that's a question to you.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  I think they're worse, but they're not that much worse than what we've been forced into with real projects because the government has been the one that has forced us into non-fair distributions of real projects. So I can get back to blaming the government about like their approach to regulation and crypto is what's the real culprit here. Because if we had a cleaner path towards equitable distribution of real projects and you had a real pathway for bringing real stuff to market, then you could bring real stuff to market to everyday people and that would be better. So this is the response. It's just the, it's like a rubber band response. It's the wrong one, in my opinion.

• 57:34David Hoffman?

  Steven, thoughts?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, my, my, my generalized thoughts on this is just that ideas are powerful. Ideas have value. We've been focused a lot on crypto as like building, you know, quote unquote, projects that, that do things, but, but ideas and things that have mind share undeniably have value, right? And you can envision an end state of this cycle where virtually every single zoomer who touches crypto has like dog with hat in their wallet, right? What, what does the world look like where there are just millions upon millions of people who have this coin? The coin is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, right?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Like, we already saw, like, yesterday, right? They raised $650,000 to put the hat on the sphere, right? What can a coin like that do when it has the attention of a thousand times as many people as it already has, as those people are like way wealthier than they are now, right? Like, there's like interesting stuff, I think, that could, could be done and come of that. And there's undeniably some value there. It's not valueless. Like every other thing in crypto, right? In the sort of phase one, we take an idea and we run way too far with it and we jump off the ledge and people fall down and break a leg and get hurt. And yeah, that's obviously going to happen here. Obviously. My position

• 58:57Speaker 02

  is it's a little more transparent, at least this, this time around. It's like when you have like a kid and, you know, he's like, wants to- Climb the tree and you you you know he's gonna climb the tree, but you're like, all right, well, you're gonna fall and hurt yourself, but you'll learn the hard way. That's that's a that's a better thing for me than like pretending there's something there that there's not, and then somebody gets hurt and then they feel like very disillusioned, like they were lied to in a way. And that kind of creates like lasting impact. So I think this is a it's the same thing we've done over and over again. It's a slightly better version of it, but like the previous experiments we ran, there was a really good nugget of of truth to them. And in later cycles, those things blossomed into to really, really good projects, really, really good ideas. Same thing's gonna happen.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Do you have a good example of one where it turned into something productive like? Because I think the end state of what you're saying here is I hope Dog with Hat is just like Doge coin again. Like, and same with Chiba Inu, but have we seen anything really of like with any real productivity? Or like anything of these creative ideas that blossomed with even with Doge like and I like and I like Doge. And I think if you if you own Doge because you like Doge, that's fine. But like, have we seen economic activity or like real stuff happen beyond, I think like? Or is the maxim of that Elon Musk brought extra attention to it so that on SNL or whatever?

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  Like people bought the top of it like, or like maybe that on boarded some people into crypto and like they went. They they went deeper down the rabbit hole in some capacity. Like what else? What else do you think has come of that when these things have gone to where you want them to previously? Like, we've had things worth tens of billions of dollars in and and what have they done so far?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think anything in crypto has really done much so far, right? Like, if you want to take a step back and think about it, right? So there's there's sort of like a benchmark, like, yes, we've created some cool products in Ethereum land. Like, yeah, Bitcoin could any like, but the main thing we started crypto for Bitcoin is still not doing anything it said it wanted to do like it was it was supposed to be a peer to peer cash thing, right? In the in the original white paper and and nobody really uses it for that. So Doge is kind of like. Similar to Bitcoin in that regard, like it's like this thing that people invest in as a speculative asset. Oh, by the way, it has NFTs, right?

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  But like, I, I, I think I can see a world in the not so distant future where Doge is transacted with in like a day to day currency and used to purchase goods more than Bitcoin is like, I can definitely see that world and it won't invalidate Bitcoin, but like I, I can for sure see that world on the, the not so distant horizon.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  That would be pretty funny. Um, but I, I guess I would like to see some evidence of it. There is a little tiresome in crypto to like, however, how long have I been seven, eight years or whatever, like in, in the space and you're just like, you're, you're, you're, you keep saying like, okay, when, when is some of this stuff going to come into fruition? And at some point, I think the industry, like you do need to shit or get off the pot a little bit and like do something. Or else this like nihilistic view of meme coins does end up being kind of like the final hurrah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  And, and crypto just kind of gets sent to a, a corner of the world where there's like not that much economic impact. I don't actually think that's true. I think there are things that are being created. There's real stuff happening. There's real things. And then as a result, you have this like massively long tail of, of speculative, you know, me too stuff and, and that's just part of it. But I would like to see some of these things make their way to the real world.

• 1:02:42Speaker 01

  For example, like I got interested, interested in NFTs, not because I love the dog pictures or what, you know, like monkey pics or whatever, like the, the, but I think that the inherent underlying technology of a non-fungible token has the opportunity to have incredible utility in the world. I think a lot of the things, we're going to put it all on the blockchain. They're, they are possible to put those things, real world things on the blockchain because they are singular, like they're identifiable versus like the interchangeable parts of your Doge and my Doge are the same Doge, right? Like they're all just, they're, they're, they're, you know, the ERC 20, the, the tradable token.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Versus the independent one of like, you know, this is my pudgy penguin or whatever. But not just this is my pudgy penguin, but this is how like title in real estate works. And let's put it on the blockchain. Like I'm ready for that, I guess, is my point. I'm kind of stubbornly waiting for like these real world applications. I think it's ridiculous that like we still do things the way we do in the, in the real world. And crypto helps solve those, but like, how do we get there? And I want to funnel some of these billions and billions of dollars that come into the ecosystem to like, let's finally make some of that happen. Like that's the better world kind of mentality that I would, I think we can, we can do, but it's not easy. It's way harder than buying dog with hat.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, much like in the early days of the internet, like the internet didn't become a thing because people invested in Shopify and PayPal. The internet became a thing because a lot of people started using it and they started using it in the early days for mostly, you know, I don't know, mostly, but very numerous like illicit purposes, right? And the same thing was with Bitcoin, like Satoshi created Bitcoin and then everyone was like, oh, cool. I could buy drugs with it now, right? So this is just like the, the natural adoption cycle of these things to an extent. To expect that it's going to be any different this time around is silly. And like, yeah, of course I want to get to that end state.

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  I actually think crypto is going significantly slower in its true adoption cycle than the internet did.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I, I agree with you. I, I, I agree with you.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  But truly the, the crypto adoption cycle has been very slow, in my opinion. And very fast on the speculative front in the same way that the internet was, but very slow. On the adoption side of things. And I think that's partly because it's really hard, right? Like, there's a financialization aspect that was less, less a part of the internet, where the internet was just computers.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think the internet ultimately gained a lot of adoption because people used it to entertain themselves. And I think in early crypto, like, you know, it was kind of hard to entertain yourselves. And then all coin speculators became entertainment. And now this is just like another form of further and further entertainment. And I think from all that entertainment bootstrapping, we will end up with tons of users. And then I think once you have tons of users, then people actually can look at this and go like, oh, there's actually like a network effect here. There's people who have wallets on their phone. There's the infrastructure laid out. And now I can come in and build stuff because the users are there. That's like the most important thing. Are the users there? Not are people investing in the infrastructure layer? That doesn't actually bootstrap all

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  of the future growth.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  I agree with that. And if, you know, people figure out ways to lose money all the time. But like, if that's what it costs to get, you know, hundreds of millions of people with crypto wallets on their phone, like, that's the core of the crypto experience that's missing. And it's really hard, by the way, like, get, like, talk about things that need addressing, you know, Apple and Google and the way that they treat crypto transactions and crypto apps, like, the monopolization of app stores, that's one that if the government wanted to focus on something, they could, they could focus on that. Like, Apple's monopoly on what you can do in an app and how the app store is

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  controlled in terms of purchasing and what can be done there, sucks. And, you know, the route for crypto apps has been like progressive web apps, which is really hard. It's a really hard user experience. And I think some of the regulation going on there, or some of the court battles going on in Europe right now, for example, are really interesting. But if the result of all of this is that somehow we have access, like, more people have access to crypto infrastructure through their phones, that would be a nice win. And I do think you can establish some real utility and like, some of the actual purposes of crypto can be exposed through that. And if their way to do it is to buy these, Safe Moon is a good example of one, like,

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Total scam brought onboard a lot of people to crypto, I guess. Like, and is that the cost? I guess, I guess if that, if your argument is that, you know, it's worth the cost, then that's, I guess that's one thing. I just, I'd rather do it with something other than Safe Moon or this cycle, whatever the, you know, whatever the memes of this cycle are. But like, nobody's talking about Safe Moon anymore, right?

• 1:07:59David Hoffman?

  Found them in jail, that's why.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  I mean, that was like an outright financial fraud. And I think important to distinguish from like the dog with that.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't even, like, was it not launched fairly? Or like, what was?

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  There was, like, Coffeezilla did a really great, like, six-hour breakdown on this. It is such a scam, like, literal throw people in jail scam, right? So, we should, we should put it off to the side for sure.

• 1:08:24David Hoffman?

  Not, not a meme coin.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Not a meme.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  It wasn't a meme.

• 1:08:28David Hoffman?

  It was a meme coin, that was also a fraud.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  And so that's my point, like, yeah, I, I think that's good then, like, they, you know, Safe and Moon, how could you go wrong?

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  But I feel like a lot of meme coins today, it's basically the same concept, right? Of like, the stupidity is so stupid. Um, I feel like I lose brand sales most of the time in, in crypto.

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  Good, keep, you keep that up and you're, you're gonna be very rich.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  I might make some winning trades. For once, I'll be profitable.

• 1:09:02David Hoffman?

  All right, guys, this has been a fantastic conversation. Really appreciate you guys both coming on here and, and sharing your thoughts and unpacking this. I think, um, the entire industry is more or less having this conversation, uh, with itself right now. And, uh, whatever, we can help facilitate that conversation. I think that'll be helpful. Steven, um, Brian, thanks for coming on the show.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I look forward to hearing in the comments how dumb I am, so.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  You're, you're a real champion, Ledger.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, good to see y'all.

• 1:09:28David Hoffman?

  All right, cheers, guys.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Thanks, David.

• 1:09:30David Hoffman?

  Bankless station, you know the deal. Crypto is risky, tokens are risky, meme coins, probably even more risky. You can lose what you put in. We are headed west, this is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.