Memecoins Are Stress-Testing The Future Of Tokenized Stocks | Weekly Roundup

0:00Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. Hard of a welcome back to Empire back. Santi, me, no Rob as it should be. Get out of here Rob. Which means ladies and gentlemen, we're not going to talk about regulation. We're not going to talk about Paulie Market and we're not going to talk about the Dragonfly Portfolio. I saw Rob. I was supposed to speak of that stable con event with Rob. Couldn't make it but Rob was looking dapper. I saw a picture of him. So, no doubt. Santi, what are you doing in town? It's electric. I'm here with the team. It's the best time to be in New York. The US Open is going on. Fashion week is going on. Neither part of neither. But it's like great time to be back. Great time to be back in the city. A lot to talk about man. What's going on in your world? Who do you see at the US Open? I saw Coco beat what's her name?

1:01I seen no or something. You didn't stay until 3 3 30 in the morning to see Akraath? No, no, no. So my flight got canceled twice. So I could make it in time. And I landed. It was a very just like incredible match. Did you see it? No, because it was you know started 11 p.m. and went until 3 a.m. I don't know what the US Open is doing this year. Yeah, it makes me. But I did, but you should watch. There's these extended highlights. If you go on YouTube, watch the like type in extended highlights, Alchora's, you know, Shelton. It is the most athletic game of tennis. I think I've ever seen in my life. It is unbelievable match. Yeah. I mean, we're not going to talk about the US Open, but two things that they're pretty impressive, like the age of these athletes, like they're 19, they're 18 like and and the athleticism and the amount of Americans that have gone far on both. Yeah, yeah, man and women. But yeah, some pretty pretty pretty good stuff. Good to see it. Okay, you don't want to talk about the Open. What do you want to talk about? tokenized stocks, Robin Hood? Been in the trenches. Been in the trenches. Okay, so you guys,

2:05okay, so I missed last week. I didn't and I didn't listen. I don't know what you guys actually talked about, but hopefully you guys were talking about. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm back in the trenches. You know, are you? Are you? So you're on FOMO? I download a FOMO like two weekends ago. And it was like an electric weekend because you had a huge run up. You had meme. You had the whole debate of like these public companies, CEOs like really being vocal and critical about these meme coin paired with tokenized stocks and then Vlad is getting involved. And so I saw the run up of meme to what basically zero to 100 million. And then obviously boner, which is a meme coin tie to hymns. Really interesting phenomenon. And then obviously the entire showdown now, there's a really interesting stuff happening in the trenches. Like we'll cover some of it here, but what things I find interesting, the sheer growth of Robin Hood and what it's doing to its business and these meme coins paired with tokenized stocks. And also Solana putting up a good fight,

3:10no, saying wait a minute, not so fast. We're not going to, we're not going to just sit idly. You have tolly and Raj and stocks and pump and these like chain wars are back, meme coins are back. It just feels like Solana with kind of moment, you know, it was like things are, and maybe like 2024. No, things are things feel like extremely alive right now. Do you remember when the, this was I'm going to take this from Mike because Mike and I were catching up about like what is this moment in time that we're in? Do you remember and Mike, this is, you know, I'm going to steal this from Mike, which you pointed out, he said, do you remember when the coin telegraph intern, this is the last cycle, coin telegraph intern tweeted out saying, I forget exactly what it was, but something about the Bitcoin ETFs and we had that 10% candle and everyone, I like it was just disbelief. I remember we recorded an episode right after that and people, I think no one could believe that we could even see a 10% candle again. We had been in the bear market for so long that this idea of a 10% candle was crazy. And I think that's what

4:10the last couple of weeks have been. And do you remember what happened right after that? So we got meme coins started moving. Yeah. meme coin. meme coin started moving. And you know, we had, you had far coin and you had like you had all the, and I know far coin came later, but you had Pepe, you had every, you know, you're right, you're right. So Pepe ran hard than you had. And there was disbelief. Like there was disbelief on the timeline that we could be in a bull market. There was so much of like, this was a, you know, short squeeze. We're going to go back. There's this was all, you know, so many reasons for why I could never be a bull market. And my take is, this is what the very beginning of a bull market feels like. I think actually the last couple of months, I tweeted out a couple of months ago, like 65K generational bottom that I had just started. And I, you know, I don't get many of these calls right, but I think that was a good call. And that's what, that's what I think we're in. We're in that we had the 10% disbelief candle. We're having a really fun run with memes. I'm totally not involved because I'm way too busy with block works, but like for people who are involved, we had, I mean, we had, we had a guy

5:11block works made, made three million bucks on one of these average, average, average crypto Joe, average show, right? I don't, I don't want to say who, who's doing it? Who did well? But, you know, we had an analyst, we have a couple of analysts who are just printing. There's a couple, couple of analysts. So the block works, maybe you guys started, has fun, but the block works analyst communities been, you know, every, every cycle people end up throwing, I know it's late cycle, when people start LPs start throwing money at us saying go launch a fund. So we're not there yet, but you're not there yet. There you go. Yeah, I had, I had this idea of like, you want to be buying when you want to puke, and you want to sell when you start sticking, taking screenshots of your portfolio. I don't think we're, and people ask me like, where are we now? It doesn't feel like we're in either. I'm, I'm seeing a lot of screenshots and FOMO, which is interesting because like, I think the FOMO guys, you had the episode people should go listen to it. They built a, they really nailed it across many things. I think they really finally got the social piece combined with, talk about like right time, timing can be everything, but you have to back it up with a great product. But the Robin Hood chain launch, the platform is super slick, cross mint, the ability to

6:14on ramp super fast, you're in the US and you use Apple Pay. The interesting stat obviously, because we can talk about some of the kind of concerns that people might have is, we should talk about tokenized stocks, because you know, we were having a discussion in the last pod, hey, it's actually positive or negative. I was of the opinion, it's super positive. No matter how you want to slice it, it will tokenize stocks are positive or mean coins are positive. Mean coin pairs back like this LP pulls of tokenized stocks and mean coins, I think are going to be very, they're going to be the mech and they're going to be the forcing function to get tokenized stocks, market structural liquidity, market makers, and eventually markets moving more 24, 7, 365. This will serve as the catalyst. It's super inefficient now. There's obviously issues around it, but I've always felt mean coins really, my point is mean coins really have stressed this the infrastructure more than any other technology in crypto. Like look at what it did to Solana,

7:18and yeah, for me, it feels like tokenized stocks took a slow kind of, have not really taken off, and this is the way they take off, because they're going to just trust us a lot. Yeah, you know what? So, coin bases in an interesting spot right here, because I think the Hunter Biden laptop coin just launched on base, I'm pretty sure. And you got, you know, Coinbase who wants to do things, so like real world things, you know, like bring creators on chain and it ends up just being like, if you just got this Hunter Biden thing, and then on the other side, you've got Robin Hood, who actually leaned really heavily into memes at the launch of the chain, and now you've got, they're leading for tokenized equities. Along with, I think it's Robin Hood chain, Solana, and BNB. BNB is also doing BNB. Here's a staff for you. Number of stablecoin holders, do you know the chain that's had the most stablecoin holders in the world? BNB? Tron, historically Tron. Tron, yes. Tron, well, BNB is about to, for the first time in history, pass Tron for a number of stablecoin

8:19holders. Go look at the block works data. So I think we should talk a little bit about this pairing of equities and meme coins, because I think if you're not in the trenches, it's, or you don't read block works, it's, yeah, you know, a little, a little tough to pay attention to. So do you want to give the overview of like, sure, boner and hymns? Yes. Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because we covered a little bit in the prior episode, but I promised people that it wasn't enough coverage if we would go in a more deeper, we have to, it's the most important narrative and it will likely be the most important narrative of this cycle. Basically, how it works is you have, you've had tokenized stocks for a long time. There's different flavors of tokenized stocks. Let's not get into that just yet. There's a lot of discussion online about how Robinhood's doing it, how the backpack is doing it, and let's get there, but puns, get there, but puns, let's get the pun. tokenized stocks, then incomes along meme coins. And the combination of the two is you have a meme coin like artificially new that is you deposit that in LP pool. So people should listen to like, do you know swap and defog it?

9:25You put that in LP pool with a version of a tokenized stock. In this case, artificially news backed by Nvidia, then you have boner coin backed by hymns, which is this company does medication for erectile dysfunction. Hence boner. You have then meme coin, which is tied to AMC, the cinema franchise, and so on and so forth. You have like memory move, which is backed by micron, which is a memory company. So you have many of these pools, and what it does is, and I'm going to get this part, the rough mechanism is you have a pool and so there is always some sort of imbalance right over the weekend. There's only so much inventory in a place like Robinhood that they have called 100 shares of a particular company. But if you have so much demand, this is happening here, especially on the weekends, you have so much a new demand coming in from places like FOMO, where you're buying more, more of the meme. And so there's an

10:28imbalance between the meme and the stock. And so that creates a imbalance in the pool. And for instance, when boner launched, there was so much influx of flows for that that the implied price of hymns over the weekend was three to four times the actual closing price of hymns on Friday. And so come Monday, of course, the authorized representatives, I think that Robinhood selects a couple of these called institutions that need to do this, have to refill right and go get more, basically refill get more versions that took nice sucks to balance this thing out. So that's the crude kind of explanation of how this thing works. It's an L people, it doesn't confer a lot of people, here's what I'll tell you maybe, a lot of people you'll hear say, it's backed. So if you buy this meme coin, it is backed by shares of whatever it is, and that's not true.

11:30Right. In no version of what is happening right now, you have a claim on unwrapping or getting a certain representation. The only thing I would say is there, that started happening two weeks ago. What is happening more recently is you've had this ZAI, for instance, which is a meme coin of like privacy anonymous cat, I think it's called. And what it is, it's like it's a pure meme coin, it's like a cat with a cardboard box or whatever sort of playing on privacy. And you get air dropped Z cash. So it's a flavor in a variation, it's pretty interesting actually, it's basically like you're getting a dividend on the underlying. Of course, it's got a lot of popularity because Z cash has ran up quite a bit, we should talk about it as well. But I'll sort of pause there because that was the the other interesting primitive I tweeted when I saw it and I was in foam, I'm like,

12:31I don't think I've seen and I saw the huge run up in DeFi summers, like I don't think I've seen an interesting of a primitive and it's DeFi summer. token 2049 is back October 7th and 8th bringing together 25,000 attendees 300 speakers and 500 exhibitors for the world's largest crypto event. token 2049 is happening alongside an in partnership with our own digital asset summit Asia. So you can experience both conferences in Singapore during the same week. Across token 2049 week, there'll be more than 1000 side events culminating with after 2049 and Formula One weekend and the speaker lineup is stacked, Shane Coplin of Polymarket, Jeff Yon of Hyper Liquid, Arthur Hayes, Nasdaq CEO, Adina Friedman and many more. Join us in Singapore October 7th and 8th for token 2049 and digital asset summit Asia.

13:32Avalanche summit is coming to New York City September 16th to 17th. Join the business and technology leaders building the next generation of financial products, enterprise systems and consumer applications on chain. Learn how blockchain is enabling faster settlement, more efficient markets and new business models at Avalanche Summit NYC register for Avalanche Summit and use promo code blockworks15 and ahead of the summit you can track Avalanche tokenized equities alongside tokenized treasuries and their growing footprint on Avalanche. See the data for yourself with blockworks researches Avalanche dashboard and don't forget to join us in New York City for Avalanche Summit. Yeah, I agree. Okay, let me try to go a little deeper and I'm going to pull a lot of this from just blockworks. I'm going to read some of this. So two assets. You have hymns, you have hymns and

14:32which is a stock that trades on the New York Stock Exchange, then you have boner, which is a meme coin that was launched August 20th. So what they did is they tokenized hymns. So tokenized hymns is Robin, a Robin Hood stock token on the Robin Hood chain. One token is supposed to track one hymns share, right? But it's and you are I think alluding to this. It's not actually one, it's a it's a Jersey debt security that is backed in theory as my understanding one to one by real shares at a custodian. It's not actually they're not taking nizy hymns and putting it into a vehicle. So you have no votes, no shareholder rights, you know, tiny float compared to the real company. Then you have boner, this meme coin, which is mainly this joke. So what they what people did is they took a you I think it's a uniswap. I think it's a uni a uni a mm like v3 v4 pool or something like that. You've got, you know, boner and hymns tokens and these are the these are the separate markets. So when you buy boner with hymns, you send I think I'll get this correct. You send hymns into the boner hymns pool. The pool sends you boner. Pool the pool the pool hymns reserve goes up because

15:40you just put hymns in there. The pool boner reserve goes down. So then boner becomes more expensive priced in hymns. I think I got that correct. So this does not in and of itself. I believe make tokenized hymns worth $130. It's locking, which I think it went to like $132 or something. It's locking hymns inside of the meme pool. So those tokens are no longer sitting in the hymns. The other pool, which is hymns USDC. I think it's actually hymns USDG where where the price discovery happens. So the reason that pumps it is the tokenized hymns supply is is only created by these authorized participants and it's only set in this set window, which is I think it's like Monday through Saturday or something. Maybe it's actually Monday through Friday. I'm not sure. So on a Saturday Sunday, nobody can mint these new wrappers. So the on-chain float is fixed. So you essentially had a squeeze, right? I think there's like 60,000 hymns tokens in existence. Over half of them were

16:48sitting in the boner hymns pool. So you essentially took half the supply off the market. And yeah, I think I think I got the sequence for the weekend. Yes, yes, yes. You're not creating a short squeeze as a la wall. Sorry, it's not a short squeeze. You're taking it. No, no, it's a short squeeze on the pool of the authorized representative that it has, which is a very, very small fraction of the total float of the stream. You essentially took so much of the free flow and put it into the meme pool that the price of hymns, excuse me, the price of boner in hymns, or maybe even getting that flipped, went to $232. Yeah, that's right. But of course, what's interesting is some hymns, price, and boners. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's what was interesting is seeing the CEOs of these public companies go on saying, wait a minute, one of them had a really good quote, he said, I woke up a loser, meaning he says, like, there's all this demand

17:49for this meme coin, but it's not necessarily like doing that much for one heat of participate in the $100 million dollar out of thin air value creation, if you will. But the question that I posing, what could be interesting is, are there going to be instances where like, imagine in a believe in something kind of thing, if there's some of these meme coins like Pepe and she sheva knew and what have you ran up to like 17 billion, 20 billion. So what happens in a world where, imagine if like, 100x more demand for these meme coins that are in these pools goes up, like, what does that do to Robin Hood? What does that do to market infrastructure? And what does that ultimately do to just have these LP pools and authorize participants basically start buying what effectively ends up happening, the downstream effect of all this is Robin Hood needs to go and find

18:50and source and have in their inventory more and more shares of whatever these meme coins are paired against, whether it's GoPro or Sandisk or Micron or Nvidia. And of course, company like Nvidia, M.O.S.Valable company in the world doesn't, doesn't move the needle. But if you have these like small caps, like GameStop, it may actually move the needle quite a lot, right? So it's, it's really interesting. We, it, you know, did you see the AMCCO? So Adam Aron, which a lot of backstory about this guy, you know, you can form a CEO of Starwood hotels, Norwegian Cruise Line, Vale Resorts, and Philadelphia, 76ers, controversial figure, I think, to say the least some people are not a huge fan. But he, he, so he's currently CEO of AMC. So there's two stocks that were like really memified. It was, and AMC's always been memified, I think by the, by the, even non-cryptocrow, the Reddit crowd,

19:54I'd say, the Wall Street best, right? Wall Street best, exactly. So he tweeted out, Robin Hood apparently is behind an effort related to tokenized real-world assets, including stock tokens for AMC. They're not registered under US securities laws. I find this practice to be contemptible, outrage is disgusting, detestable, inexcusable, and vile. How possibly can it be legal? We have no connection to this at all. We do not condone it. We immediately are going to have our outside securities counsel look into this. So it's just like, I'm a sky doesn't get how the game works. He just got, um, you know, I don't know how I'm going to find it. But there was a great, I think, the chief legal officer. Robin Hood. Uh, yes, the Robin Hood General Counselor, a chief legal officer said, I know a thing or two about securities laws. He used to work at the SEC. Exactly. And Vlad has been replying to some of, I think, senators or, right here, Vlad said, what's the concern? Yeah, what's the concern? But if you scroll up, it's, it's, oh yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, but there's a pretty epic reply from the Robin Hood chief legal counsel,

20:58uh, to one regulator and he said, we will not desist. Like we will not, uh, back down. Dan, Dan Gallagher, I believe. Dan go. Yeah. So look, Robin Hood is talk about an organization that is not going to step down. It's going to put up a fight, which by the way, Coinbase has fought the SEC many, many times over. And one, actually, most, if not all, all of the cases, um, Paul who now works at cognition, he put a really good fight. Um, yeah. Yeah. 100%. 100%. What, what's your read and all this stuff? Are you getting, like, what's a downstream effect? Are you getting folks calling in saying, hey, what's going on? We need research on this stuff. Like you have hedge funds interested in this. Is it even computing or the paying attention? Um, uh, people are 100% paying attention. So the, um, actually, many interesting calls in the last couple, uh, and meetings in New York in the last couple of days. One, so one is actually been loading up on hyperliquid said that the, this was, uh, semi separate from

21:59this conversation, but said the only reason that hyperliquid got on the radar was the pre IPO stuff. Remember the, um, pre IP, yeah. So that, uh, serverless, they said, they said, why is the, oh, they service and then space access? Why is this ever ever sending us this platform called hyperliquid? They didn't even know it was a place you could trade. They thought it was like a data site. And then they realized you could buy the, so anyways, that was a little insight. Here's a message I got from both I'd call it the New York crowd and the DC crowd, right? The institutions and the regulators are the number one thing that matters to us right now is on chain equities. On chain equities are the single most important thing we're trying to figure out. And, uh, yeah, I mean, block works is sprinting pretty rapidly to release some things to help figure out what's going on with on chain equities. I mean, if you look at how these things are set up, they're essentially debt instruments. So there's a, uh, I think, you know, if you look at what we did with the token transparency framework and tokens, I think there's a very similar need in the market to figure out these on chain equities. They're all custodyed out, you

23:00know, in different places. They all come with different rights. Some of them come with, some places are actually buying the one to one tokens. I think Matt Levine had a great piece on this, but, yeah, I think on chain equities are, are, are by far the single hottest thing in crypto today. Yeah. What do you think? How do you, no, I totally agree. I mean, this is, um, it's a convergence of the two most important things that are happening already combined. And so it's explosive because it draws in memes, whether you like them or not, love them or hate them. They are the most tried, they're, they are the first real, real product market fit, if you will, of like just, there's, there's a lot of interest in memes. And then you combine that with tokenized stocks and a man, a man can dream. And I tend to think that these things will pave the way for Nasdaq on the blockchain and all this stuff. And just this sheer volume, just kind of, it's like opening a massive fire hose to sorting this thing out. If the downstream implication of

24:03this is like pushing and paving the way for 24, 7365 markets, we were going to get there eventually. I think we just get faster because of what is happening now. Like who are the authorize participants? How do they compensate it? How does this mechanism work? I don't necessarily think we need to go into this discussion in this pod, but worth keeping in the back of our mind. Like what is the best way to tokenize a stock? Because there's different flavors. And I think we should have maybe a discussion on, on DAS and Asia, like backpack, Robin Hood and other folks that are doing it. Because I think that's going to be, I don't think we figured it out that model. So I think Malavine summarized it nicely, which is, I'm going to read from this Matt Levine piece from two days ago, he said, and then there's tokenization. I sell you a token on a crypto blockchain representing AMC stock. What is the token? We're still in the early stages of tokenization, but conceptually it could be one of four things. It could be effectively stock, right? Where AMC

25:08issues its own stock and tokenized forms. Its ledger is maintained on the blockchain. And someone buying an AMC stock token is just buying AMC directly on the blockchain. That doesn't really happen today, right? So that's like, that is the dream, but it doesn't happen today. It could affect it number two. It could be effectively an SPV. So I buy a thousand AMC shares. I put them in a pot, and I issue exactly a thousand tokens against that pot. So each token represents an AMC share in the pot. Some people are now starting to do that. Three, it could effectively be a swap. So I issue a thousand tokens each representing an AMC share. You buy them, Santi, and now I owe you the return on a thousand AMC shares, right? So that's the third. That's the swap. And it could effectively be nothing, which I think in many cases is the case. I issue a thousand tokens each representing one AMC share. You buy them. I don't actually owe you anything. So when, you know, you see all this tokenization, right? Robinhood is going around tokenizing a lot of stocks. What is the, what is the thing? Is it an underlying share held by a in the US? Is it held in the Caymans? What is it? Is it nothing?

26:12So I think that is the important thing to look at. And my take is that users do not care in the slightest when things are going well. When things are going well, users do not even think that this thing is an issue. And then in, you know, 24 months when something happens, as it always does in crypto, it will matter a whole lot. Yeah. Well, let's not forget when I think it was last summer, Robinhood announced tokenizing or Robinhood announced access to pre IPO, hot companies. And there's a fierce backlash by founders of these businesses saying, well, I don't approve this transfer. And we're going to deny if you're an investor in these effectively SBBs, like good luck. We're not going to honor them. I think in Thropic, Stripe, like a lot of open AI came out saying like, we have no knowledge of this. We didn't approve the transfer. So whoever you're sourcing the inventory from, good luck is we're not going to honor that.

27:13So you, it's sort of the last point that Matt was making. I don't think it's a, you're buying a tokenized very kind of a stock. You don't get nothing. I don't think you get governance rights. I don't think you have like, maybe you don't get the dividend, TBD. But let's not forget. I mean, there's, if you're in an SPV, okay, well, you're trusting Robinhood, you're trusting the mechanism of redemption or what have you. But you know, I don't see it as a, yeah, there's a vast majority of people that like, you're still taking some counterparty risk. You know what I mean? The question is, do you trust Robinhood? Do you trust their mechanism? But yeah, it could get contentious. We still haven't seen that yet. But yeah, I wonder what that might be. Like if it's a true short squeeze, if it's a community takeover of a super small microcap, and that happens on chain, we should probably have, you know, it would be interesting for this discussion. Like the Robinhood folks are money from backpack and like Rob Leschner from Superstate.

28:18Like that will be a banker panel to like talk about this stuff. Passage, baby. There we go. Passage, we got it. We got it. We got it teed up. Vlogs, soft, soft, a hard plug. If you're going to TVF like that. Yeah. All right. You know what else was interesting this week? What? What? Oh, is anything. Oh, okay. Tell me about tell me about what are you doing in FOMO? Well, you know me. Like people call me a plumber and uncle and what have you. But yeah, so I'm just like, I like to think of real rich guys. Once a DJ, so until loads up his FOMO account with just to be top of the leaderboard, he's not actually going to trade people. He just wants to be the CEO. I just listen, you know, how to be number one in the leaderboard just deposit a large sums of money and don't trade because there's obviously the stats of the stats. That's not me by the way ladies and gentlemen. The stats are, you know, like you would expect. Most traders are not making money. There's some interesting stats

29:22circling around. We can pull them up now or or share on the show notes, which we don't have a good track record of doing. But basically like 90% of people don't win. Like don't make money. It's only a handful make some. You have you have data. I don't look. I don't have the data. But we have, I remember working with one of the big brokerages and we would have to say 82% of their users in the disclosures, 82% of their users lose money. So I don't think it's just FOMO by the way. I think maybe it's FOMO like hyper liquid, what percentage of hyper liquid take out to hype users who sit on hype because they made a lot of them have made a lot of money from sitting on hype. But what percentage of hyper liquid traders who are trading by and coins. Yeah, yeah. Either way, pull up Bloomberg CNBC and you're going to see interactive brokers commercial at one point. Look at the fine print. It says exactly what you said. Consistent. Most users are not making money on these products. And it's a disclaimer that they make. It's it's important to put it in perspective because I think a lot of people say, Oh, this is this is bad. This is really really bad. I'm like, well,

30:23no, it's not. It's just a nature of markets. Like it's it's not evenly distributed. It is sort of power law. You look at venture, right? You know, the 1% of venture capitalists make like 90% of the returns to power a lot of distribution. There's a really good stat about that. And then the other 4% makes some everyone else loses money. So it's yeah, it's the the last thing to say two things. We have to talk about Hunter Biden's coin laptop launching on base is. Do we have to start We don't have to talk about it other than look at it hit 25 billion. It went all the way down. It's sitting at 600 million. Interesting choice launching on base. And I did get the only reason I bring it up is I got it caught a lot of attention. Like I got more people thinking me about that than anything else over last week. And about 100 Biden's token. The laptop thing. I didn't buy it. No, of course. No, no, no, I'm surprised people are paying you. I think there is just a group of people on in crypto who I'm so at this point. Did you see a chopping block

31:30portion show with like, um, Haseeb and stuff. They were talking about a FOMO and there was like, you know, people they were getting roasted because there's like, you know, a bunch of boomers talking some people were like, people were like, oh, these washed up crypto guys trying to describe what's happening on FOMO. Like that is how I feel when I see like Biden's laptop. I'm like, who in the right mind is buying this thing? Like, but there, but it makes me realize there's an entire section of crypto that I'm just in like, I'm so removed from it this point. And like, I'm going to also, yeah, the point I'm making is you want to understand crypto. And this is the mentality that we had to pair fine. And I was like, if you really want to understand what's happening in crypto, you have to be in the trenches. Like you have to be on defy like, you know, you have to be understanding you'll farming. You understand how you notice about works deposit, eath and see how the impermanent loss works. You want to see Oracle design get rugged when the Oracle malfunction happens. And that for me, it's always been, you know, you can use these things, 90% of the ventric VC guys don't use these things. And so it's like, how can you go and talk about

32:34what's happening on chain if you haven't, if you're not using these products, if you don't, you know, using the stable coin. So, yeah. So you're using, but you using FOMO was very interesting to me. No, no, very interesting because you have not, you have not been excited about crypto. And I would call it two years. That's right. And now you are downloading FOMO. And so does that mean something's changing? Yeah, 100%. I was like, look, I reserve, I can change my mind wherever the fuck I want. Whenever I want, and I can invest in whatever I want. And if tomorrow I decided to put all my networks in Hunter laptop, and if I do that, I can do it. And I've got, so there are certain times where someone has said, Hey, maybe this is not the wisest thing. And I said, polite, late fuck off. I can do whatever I want. This is why I don't run. That's so, so two or three weeks ago, I asked you if you were starting to allocate. And you said, I'm starting to get interested in things. And now I can see you're very interested. Like I know you well enough at this point,

33:35I've seen very interested your back. You're engaged. You were talking to founders, which we were texting about. You're talking to new founders, building new things. That's right. I just got to throw an an angel checker too. All right. I haven't seen this in a while. So how are you from an investment perspective? Are you starting to buy any tokens or not yet? Look, I'll say it again. I think the best way to play this cycle is go long Robin Hunter. Maybe maybe the L2s, I mean, full disclosure, I own both. I was an early investor in Arbitram. But take out the take out the early investor things, which you've got like a new capital net new capital. The exercise I always do is any day I'm not selling is a damn buying. And I'm constantly reundering my portfolio from scratch. It's like, if I how do I design my portfolio? I think go look at when you think about, okay, if the things we've talked about, the best way to be long, the growing tokenization stablecoins is Robinhood, in my opinion. It seems to have a lot of traction. I think it, the Robinhood chain

34:40similar to B&B is just this phenomenon of like the, you know, they're earning the guy from Milk Road, how to really get analysis. But, you know, it seems like they're going to continue to get more attention and users there. It's not going to be the only chain. But, you know, I don't, I don't like the L1s, like, I don't like Ethereum. So sorry guys, I still don't like ETH is a $300 billion dollar market cap token that the fees just don't make sense. I do think we're going to continue to talk about fees. And if that's like maybe some EIP 1559 discussion to restore some balance. But if I want to go long Ethereum, I buy Robinhood and I buy Arbitrum. Because that L2 is supporting Robinhood chain and they're making, you know, quite a bit of fees on the activity happening on Robinhood chain. So that to me is like a very clean way to play the cycle. You know, and I still have a small fraction of, you always need to have a YOLO bag, which is, you know, playing on FOMO and, you know, playing with these mechanisms to understand them and really understand if it's

35:42going to be real if Robinhood is going to continue to grow hype. It's interesting because what's happening with potentially bringing it back to the US or bringing it to the US. I don't know if you have an update there, but I think we, I don't really bought Rob's argument, just like it's capped, like it feels like it's capped and like, it was like no, like, perps are going to continue to be massive. I mean, hype is one of the only, I own five tokens that's hype. Oh really? What else are you on? I own right now Bitcoin, Salana hype Z cash and Morpho in that order. No, not in that order. I think, I mean, hype and Z cash have gone up a lot. I think hype and Z cash were the, I think Morpho is the fifth, Morpho is the lowest, but Morpho hasn't really moved since I bought it. Hyping Z cash were probably three and four, but they've gone up a ton. And then I think Bitcoin is number one and then probably sole or hype is number two, three.

36:43Yeah. What's your thesis on sole? I mean, because I think it's not gotten that much of love. People sort of in like a like they, they saw the activity in Rob and her and it's like, yeah, Rob and her it's like second year, but I do think like it's come like, yeah. What they have built is so in note, there are so much farther head of any blockchain other than Ethereum. Like, I think in other ways, Ethereum is uncompetable with in some areas like decentralization and stuff like that, but it's a lot of areas that I don't think users and builders care much about and that's why I I, but I think Solana has done, like, I mean, I feel like block works and gets a bunch of crap for being like biased Solana, but I think we were extremely right about it. So I'll just put that out there. We were right on this podcast. Yeah, I think, I don't know, I think Solana is still like miles ahead of so many other people like, yeah, Robinhood chain. But I'm also very long. Rob, I'm not, I didn't mention the stocks. I'm also very long. Rob and Hood. I'm also very long coin base. I know I just was ragged and coin. I'm also very long coin base, but yeah, I think Solana

37:44is like literally years ahead of many other chains. Like sure, Robinhood chain could handle like a little bit of volume over like a three day period. Yeah, but there was fees, the fees really, it got out of control out of control. Look, maybe like at this period in the market, retail users don't care that they're getting rinsed on fees. The maybe that's the answer, but like, I think Solana has, Solana has such has done so much stuff to be ready for this moment that I think I think they'll, I think Solana will have a phenomenal next couple of years as well. Fair about B&B or held it. Never held it. No, really interesting. B&B did extremely well off the bottom and you know the exchange tokens are the best performing exchange tokens are the best performing tokens in all of crypto. If you look, you look over time. My point there's like other than FTT, but for other reasons. But yeah, like I remember owning B&B early on and for

38:47me, it was like, I don't necessarily need to be right about the direction of travel. I just need to make sure that there's more travel happening and more volume. And I think when you think about it from that lens as probably the more simplistic way, it's like owning Robinhood, right? And it was, do you ever think Robinhood or Coinbase would launch their own token? No comment. I think no comment. That means you know something. That was interesting. The no comment means you know something and you don't want to say it, which means there is some probability that they have a token as my read. I would, I would guess I would guess they do. Yeah, I actually, I don't know anything. I would guess they do. What about Coinbase? I'm interested in your view there because well, you didn't mention Circle, but, um, by the way, Circle, Circle's another one. I think Circle is going to do incredibly well. Circle is one of people hate Circle. Do you know the network effects of like USDC? I've, so I have a couple friends

39:51now building new DeFi protocols. There is every other stablecoin is entirely worthless to them. The integrations, even with Tether, USDC is the only thing that moves the needle for them. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Having a million stablecoins doesn't make sense. Like look at, okay, Stripe Pop Bridge, right? Stripe, Stripe Pop Bridge. Bridge lets everyone launch their own stablecoin. What did Stripe just launch? The open standard. The open standard is a OUSD. It is one stablecoin. That is a validation in my opinion that the many stablecoin view has failed. Why? Why does Phantom need their own stablecoin? Phantom doesn't need their own stablecoin. What do you think? Yeah. Now, I, like I agree, I think we will see a proliferation of stablecoins, but that doesn't mean they're going to get real volume. We were talking about a lot in this podcast. Like, what does that mean for stablecoin issuers? I think it's a oligopoly monopoly. oligopoly. Like Tether's market share has really moved much. USDC's share hasn't really moved much.

40:53Where they are distributed, I think it's probably the cleanest signal for you to understand if there's going to be some displacement. Right. What you just mentioned, right? Tron, those are market share to Binance. To me, is there a read of rendering a bull market? Like more retail accounts and Binance. More stablecoins are held, typically, typically, a bullish indicator that people are looking to come on chain and bit stuff. Yeah. 100%. By the way, we haven't, we finally, we are a late mover in this, but we finally have really amazing stablecoin data. And this is so people can just go to our website. It's all free. Just go to analytics and then stablecoins. This is the chart. This is the chart that I was showing that I was talking up before. Like, this is Tron. Like a BNB about to pass them. Pretty unbelievable. What's, what's right? I mean, what am I saying to make sense? Like, I don't really, I hadn't paid attention to this, but this is just number of number of stablecoin, number of people in the world who hold their stablecoin based on the blockchain that it's on. So tether on Tron, tether on BNB, and then actually

42:02the green. Look at this one. Remember, cello. This is the tether on cello. Then it goes tether on base. And then, excuse me, then it goes tether on Ethereum and then it goes USDC on base, USDC on Solana, USDC on Ethereum. And then, and then there's a big drop off. Wow. Yeah. What else, man? I mean, we cover Biden. I am late. I got a final round interview. So I got to cut this short. Final round interview. Or are you interviewing? We're hiring sellers, baby. We're hiring sellers, sellers, sellers. That is, yeah, that is it. Okay. Well, two minute, we have to content of the week. One second. Go ahead. What do you got? You start. I am reading The Fastest Tortoise, one of the guys that partnered with the Retro Brainwater famous deal maker from the Bass family office. And then he started natural gas partners. Yeah, it's called The Fastest Tortoise.

43:04Really good book. Nice. I just read The Blog Post by Dwarke Hash, the rise and fall of agent civilizations, which is, I don't know how I feel about it yet. I feel like it's either like, it's like, either extremely, it's both very hyperbolic and like the world is, but also really cool to read and also an interesting story. So I'm not, I literally just finished it before jumping on. So not entirely sure how I feel about it, but yeah, I'd recommend going to read that. A lot of whistleblowers from Anthropic, you know, calling, calling with, you know, civilization. That I disagree with. That guy's been there for six weeks and he's a junior employee. So disagree. I agree. Oh, man. Go to your review. Good luck. See you folks.