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cover of episode ROLLUP: Milei’s Memecoin Scandal | KAITO Airdrop | The Fed’s QT Pivot? | Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade

ROLLUP: Milei’s Memecoin Scandal | KAITO Airdrop | The Fed’s QT Pivot? | Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade

2025/2/21
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Bankless

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D
David
波士顿大学电气和计算机工程系教授,专注于澄清5G技术与COVID-19之间的误信息。
K
Kane Warwick
Topics
David: 本周的Rollup节目中,我们讨论了阿根廷总统Javier Millay的Libra meme币丑闻,以及其他一些加密货币领域的新闻。Libra代币发行后,估值在90分钟内从55亿美元暴跌至不到5亿美元。该事件存在诸多警告信号,例如82%的代币集中在少数钱包中,且未公开代币经济学。Javier Millay否认与Libra项目有任何关联。Hayden Davis(Kelsey Ventures)试图解释Libra事件,并归咎于狙击机器人。Hayden Davis接受Coffeezilla采访,承认Kelsey Ventures提前狙击了Libra代币。Dave Portnoy在Libra代币发行前获得了代币,并因内幕交易而退还了代币。Libra事件暴露了meme币发行的工业化过程,以及缺乏规则和监管的问题。 Kane Warwick: 我认为Javier Millay发布Libra meme币事件发生在我前往香港之前。我没有购买该币。Libra事件并非孤立事件,而是长期以来潜伏的问题的爆发。该事件揭示了幕后操纵者对事件的控制程度,并引发人们对更多被操纵事件的担忧。Hayden Davis的行为类似于SBF在FTX事件后的公关行为。Jupiter否认其员工参与Libra代币交易。Meteora与Hayden Davis存在关联,参与了多个meme币的发布。Hayden Davis通过联系Javier Millay的姐姐,获得了与Javier Millay的联系。 Kane Warwick: 我认为Anatoly关于DeFi夏季比meme币更糟糕的推文是荒谬的。meme币的规模比ICO小,因此可提取的资金有限。meme币的骗局大多发生在交易所上市之前。Solana链上的犯罪活动增加是因为其meme币活动增加。Solana需要改进其自我监管机制。Solana社区需要更好地识别和处理不良行为者。Javier Millay被弹劾的可能性较小。我对meme币领域的内在欺诈性感到担忧。加密货币市场存在周期性波动。meme币的关注度可能已经达到顶峰。ICO可能卷土重来。我认为ICO是一种优越的代币发行机制。meme币是投机的理想状态。ICO团队有时会卷款潜逃。我认为未来的空投将更加注重用户的行为。

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Chapters
This chapter details the tumultuous launch and subsequent crash of the Libra meme coin, tweeted by Argentine President Javier Milei. It explores the involvement of Hayden Davis, Kelsey Ventures, and the Meteora platform, highlighting the alleged manipulation and insider trading.
  • Javier Milei tweeted a Solana contract address for a meme coin called Libra.
  • The coin's valuation soared to $5 billion then plummeted within 90 minutes.
  • Hayden Davis and Kelsey Ventures were implicated in the scheme, admitting to front-running snipers.
  • The incident exposed the industrialization of meme coin launches and the lack of regulation in the space.

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
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Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up where we cover the weekly news, drama, and developments in the crypto space. This is the third week of February today on the show. I have the pleasure of being joined by Kane Warwick. Kane, how you doing, my man? Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Just got off a flight from Hong Kong, so it's gonna be fun. It was a messy week. Are you sure you are ready to go through the messy-ass week of news that I have for you? Always ready. Always ready.

Okay, Kane, where were you when Javier Millay dropped the Libra meme coin? It was just before I headed off to Hong Kong. Did you buy? I didn't buy it. You know, it's funny. Like, I had that whole thread about Trump and just being, like, washed on the trenches and not having, like, enough energy to deal with it. And I saw it and I was just like, I'm pissed.

Too tired. I can't handle this. Too many loops down the roller coaster. Okay, so I'm going to go through. There is a ton of things that happened as a result of the fallout of Javier Millay. I have like 20 links in front of me to go through it all. And so, can you maybe just sit back and relax while I run through some of the facts? And then we'll kind of debrief about all of it at the very end. So on Valentine's Day...

at 5.01 p.m. Eastern time, Javier Millet tweets out this tweet saying, uh, Argentina grows. Uh, this project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups. Drops a Solana contract address. The name of this project in quotes is called, uh, VivaLibreDadProject.com. Uh,

ticker Libra and then a Solana contract address. And so if you bought this on Valentine's Day, congratulations, you are a true crypto bro. The Libra token immediately launched at something like a two and a half billion dollar valuation, and then it jumped up to five billion dollars within 30 minutes. And

And then about from 90 minutes from launch, it was down to $30 million. So inside of 90 minutes from launch, it went up to $5.5 billion and then down to less than half a billion dollars.

Already people's just like warning signs were triggered with this Libra launch. 82% of the Libra token were held in one cluster of wallets that all spawned the Libra token. Also, no tokenomics were shared. Unlike the Trump token, no tokenomics were shared. Just the president of Argentina tweeting out this Solana contract address. And so people's like warning signs were all ready firing. But then I guess it doesn't really matter because

the thing had already dumped inside of 90 minutes. There was another tweet from Javier Malate saying, a few hours ago, I posted a tweet, like I have so many countless times, supporting a supposed private projects, which I obviously have no connection to. He has since deleted the tweet and finishes the tweet with, to the filthy rats of the political castle who want to take advantage of this situation to do harm, I want to say that every day they confirm how lowly politicians are, they increase our conviction to kick them out.

in the arse. Uh,

This is just day one. There is this individual that arises on this scene named Hayden Davis from something called Kelsey or Ventures, who I don't think anyone had ever heard of before. Kane, before this, have you heard of Kelsey or Ventures? No, it's weird. Like I I'm in a lot of chats and and, you know, there's different cabals that have been mentioned. But these guys never came up to the best of my knowledge.

Yeah. Yeah. And this individual Hayden Adams, not Hayden Adams, very strictly not Hayden Adams. I was about to say, you're using his full name. How much did Hayden Adams pay you to make sure to use his full name? This is the second Hayden that I've ever come across in crypto. First one, Hayden Adams of Uniswap. Good guy. Great guy. Hayden Davies, who is supposedly behind this Trump meme coin, along with Kelsey Ventures, puts out this statement.

about trying to explain what just happened. And it's kind of a mess of an explanation. He puts a lot of blame upon snipers, sniper bots that were going to come and snipe the supply. And then later, also, Hayden went on a CoffeeZilla interview. If you do not know who CoffeeZilla is, he is this YouTuber who kind of just exposes scams across the world and very frequently comes into the crypto space because we tend to produce a lot of scams. And so we invoked CoffeeZilla

Coffeezilla posted an hour and a half long interview with this Hayden individual where Hayden admitted that he sniped, Kelsey Ventures sniped the Libra supply ahead of two front run actual snipers. Maybe not the best tactical decision in this whole mess to go on Coffeezilla. Maybe not.

As well thought out as, you know, this criminal mastermind we thought he was. But here we are.

It does seem very much like an SBF post-FTX publicity tour. Just meltdown. The man just does not comprehend at all that he just might be in at least a little bit of legal trouble. He thinks he's good. Just crashing out. Completely crashing out. Completely crashing out. Yeah. It doesn't stop with Hayden, though, who somehow, we will reveal shortly here, got...

got Javier Millet to tweet out this tweet. So we'll talk about how he actually got that to happen. But there's also something that's worth talking about in this whole complex is Jupiter and Meteora. The Meow, who is the founder of Jupiter, it's not his actual name, had to put out the statement saying, hey, they're...

early employees of Jupiter were seen trading the Libra token, but Jupiter had nothing to do with the launch of this token. We had no employees that had any insider information. So he had to put out the statement that Jupiter and nobody in the Jupiter orbit really had any sort of insider knowledge. Meow, again, founder of Jupiter, had founded this thing called Meteora, which is kind of like a,

a more sophisticated AMM with a bunch of levers and gadgets and dials to really kind of be able to tweak a Dex on Solana. And Meteora does not have the same level of deniability. So there's Ben Chow from Meteora who has since stepped down, who also tried to distance himself from this Libra launch. But as it turns out, there is this association between Meteora and Hayden Davis,

that has been ongoing. So not just the Libra token, but also the M3M3 token, which I think stands for meme, which is related to the Meteora token. It is the meme coin that was launched on Meteora, as well as,

as we find out, the Melania token. So the Melania token, Hayden admits to, once again on the CoffeeZilla interview, that he was also a part of the Melania token launch. And so we have this one individual who is finding ways to reach out to people of influence and convince them that it's a great idea to launch a token. And then they get referred to Meteora as kind of this technical service provider

There's the idea out there that it's actually Meteora who's trying to snipe the supply ahead of Hayden Davies. And so it's actually Ben Chow or somebody in the Meteora orbit who's actually doing the sniping. And it's actually Hayden Davies and Meteora that's going head to head to try and snipe the supply of this meme coin that is being tweeted out by Javier Millay. Now, it's worth noting how...

this individual, Hayden Davies, who is a United States citizen, lives in LA, got access to Javier Millay. And it's reported that Hayden Davies found a way to reach out to Javier Millay's sister and wrote messages that have been turned into screenshots on Twitter that say that to the effect that he sends her money and that he...

that she is in her total control. And through Javier's sister, he is able to gain access to Javier, which is how a tweet coming out of the president of Argentina had a Solana contract address in it. This, I think, Cain, I have a take for you. This is not nearly as bad as FTX, but this is the worst thing in the crypto industry since FTX. How do you like that take?

It's the worst thing this year so far, I would say. It's February, bro. I know, right? I know. It's dark times. So I think the interesting thing about this is this is not a singular event or news story, right? Like this is something like FTX that was bubbling under the surface for a long time, right? Maybe not as long as FTX, but I think the thing about FTX was...

it really undermined your view of reality, right? Like, I had conversations with SPF, where I was like, where's, you know, on Twitter, like, where, like, where are you pulling this yield farming money from? And it was like, oh, it's Alameda. And so, you know, all of a sudden, you had to question your perception of like, all the things that had happened, right? And I think this is one of those things where a lot of people in space have been like, okay, it's a, you

you know, there's obviously these different cabals doing crimes and, you know, they're manipulating launches and they're bribing people to do, you know, token launches. But the idea that there was, you know, one puppet master in the background controlling this whole thing that no one had ever heard of is like so wild.

Mm-hmm. It's really, you know, and then all of a sudden you go, okay, well, who, if they're able to compromise this person, who else did they compromise? And so there's this kind of unwinding of a lot of stuff that's happened. And now you've got a singular thread that runs through it all. And I think that's been kind of the wildest part of the story is that there's just this

crackhead guy running around, you know, bribing and manipulating people and taking advantage of different platforms and teams. And, you know, it's insane that someone was able to get that much control and influence without anyone really knowing that this was going on.

Yeah, I would be curious to know, and I think we're going to find out because I'm going to go ahead and guess that there's already active investigations going on. The man, he resides in LA. He resides in Los Angeles. He's on shore. And people lost a lot of money with this. Dave Portnoy was paid tokens ahead of launch, was paid tokens, Libra tokens by Hayden Davis to promote the Libra project.

the Libra coin when it came out. Dave Portnoy returned those tokens saying that he, because Hayden requested Dave to not tell anyone that he was going to promote the Libra coin. And so Dave returned those 6 million coins, which I don't know what the total value was, but millions of dollars. But Dave had insider information. And so therefore he bought the token

thinking that he was going to buy early. And I think many people bought the token 5, 10, 15 minutes into the launch, and they all ended up down because there are these very early snipers that were trying to snipe the supply. And when the initial valuation of the thing comes out at $2.5 billion,

then everyone's going to lose. Dave Portnoy was refunded his money that he lost by Hayden Davis, the tune of $5 million. And now everyone is very upset that Dave Portnoy is getting a freebie return on his capital that he risked after calling the crypto trader bros a bunch of crybabies, which I think is quite ironic. And I do agree with you, Cain, that I think this was what we are really seeing here is

the exposing of the industrialization of the meme coin launch. And it was absolutely going to get worse every single time Hayden Davis and this structure of incentives between Meteora and other morally compromised individuals. If that was allowed to grow, it would have just gotten worse and worse and worse. It was just so happened that when the president of Argentina launched a coin and the incentives collapsed between Meteora and Hayden Davis, that everyone realizes the gig was up.

And so what started off as like a relatively fair, fun casino of meme coin launches, that was a reaction to the high FDV, low float meta actually turned into having something with like no rules, no regulations, no guardrails. And once again, the grifters come in, figure out how to game the system and blow it up for the rest of us. And this is a pattern that we've seen in crypto time and time again. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the most interesting thing to me, even, you know, being on this show today and seeing the process of kind of unwinding this and how many people are looking into it is like, if this had been going on and we had the level of, you know, kind of, you know,

of people and investigative, you know, process that's going on now. 2018 would have been a very different place, right? You know, 2018 ICOs, it was crime central. You had these guys in Singapore running ICO mills. You know, I met some of them like when I was in Singapore. So I was like, oh, you got to meet these guys. And I turned up to this office and I was like, you know,

What are you guys doing? They're like, oh, we've got a bunch of projects. And, you know, they basically would just find a team of like 20 year old kids and write a white paper for them, do their tokenomics, go and, you know, find a couple of syndicates to like start, you know, basically buying up the tokens in pre-sales. Then they would just flip them.

they would get a bunch of the supply 5 10 15 20 of the supply and just flip it and just dump it straight into into the market after they got listed on you know whatever exchange right so uh as you say this is the story that's very um you know uh very old in crypto right you know grifters will turn up and and exploit uh the permissionless and and you know low barriers to entry that we have in crypto to just extract value this

What is interesting to me is just how quickly it all happened.

You go from meme coins like 2023 through, this is basically a thing that happened in the space of a year. That this all became industrialized and a few players gained enough market share in grift launches to basically become monopolists.

What do you think about just like the level of inherent griftiness in the meme coin vertical as a whole? Because the ICOs, I was very pilled by ICOs because I was young and naive. And that's what happens when you come into crypto. And now I look back, I'm like, OK, that was actually just a bunch of just grift happening. Same thing concluded with even with DeFi summer where we end up with 10,000 percent APY pool twos. Same thing with NFTs.

Like the Azuki like elementals mint. I think everyone kind of felt like jumped the shark. This is how all of these metas end. And then there was like this interest of conversations of people talking on crypto Twitter about like, well, you know, let's let's rank all of these metas in terms of griftiness and talk about which which ones were best.

were better and i think this was a tweet that really uh rocketed around the twitter sphere from uh anatoly from solana who said defy summer was way worse leverage loops that create a nasty house of cards there's virtually no contagion in meme coins uh the ethereum community and i think the broader crypto community did not like this take but like what's your take on like how grifty meme coins are and and how you like think about these things so it's funny i mean like that tweet is one of the most retarded things i've ever seen right uh like it just is right um

And, you know, like I love Tully. He's a very smart guy. But the interesting thing about that tweet, and, you know, this is from a person who's tweeted some retarded stuff themselves, right? Like I'm not immune to this, right? That was coming from a place, and, you know, Tully said this later, he was triggered by the fact that

you had a bunch of DeFi people and eat the maxis pointing figures at, uh, at, you know, Solana saying it's a crime chain. And he's like, guys, like, no, this is not fair. Like you've just whitewashed history and pretended like this is all flowers and rainbows and deep by summer. And, and, you know, he didn't even go back to ICOs, right? Like ignore DeFi for a second. The ICOs were, were, you know, just as bad, if not worse than, than meme coins. Because the interesting thing about meme coins is okay.

you know, these guys pulled out a hundred mil, right? You know, this Hayden, Hayden Davis guy pulled out a hundred mil. You know, then you look at like Meteora and, you know, people added it up. Let's say it was like 3 billion. Like the EL size here was $4 billion. Hmm.

Right. Like, you know, there were there were so many 50, 100, 150 million dollar ICOs in 2018 that just like evaporated. Right. So, you know, in terms of the scale of money at that time in the industry as well, 150 million dollar ICO was like, you know, one percent of the market cap of Ethereum or something like that. Right. Like it's you know, we're talking an insane amount of money relative to everything else. And I think one of the reasons why meme coins are

were not as bad as they could have been is most of the rugs happened pre-exchange listing, right? The exchange actually did a pretty good job of vetting coins and, you know, as this accelerated and it was like,

90 minutes between launch and rug, right? You know, the liquidity that was actually in these pools was far lower, right? Like if you start an ICO, people put $150 million worth of ETH into the ICO and you walk away, that's $150 million gone, right? You can have a meme coin that has like $2 million worth of liquidity and a $2 billion market cap and you rug it, you only get $2 million. Right.

So there was a bit more of a constraint on the amount of money that could be extracted, but they were getting better. They were improving their techniques, right? And that's why I think it all kind of unwound. So, you know, at the end of the day, I get why Solana people are frustrated by the finger pointing from the ETH crowd of like, you know, you guys are running a crime chain. The fact is that Solana is the chain where there's the most activity.

There's the most stuff going on and grifters are going to go to where the liquidity is, right? They're going to go where the money is. And so it's not surprising that there's crime happening on Solana because that's where meme coins are happening. The same thing happened with NFT mints, same thing happened with ICOs, same thing that happened in DeFi summer to an extent. It's just this whole DeFi contagion thing is nonsense, unfortunately, for Tully.

- What do you think about just like the meme coin sector as a whole? I think if you look at the Solana meme coin market and just generally meme coins post this Liberty token launch, things are like down in the red pretty damn bad. Like meme coins have all retraced. The meme coin sector is like very, very burned. Somebody, one of these tweets is putting the measure of $6 billion of market cap has been erased from the meme coin market.

Solana the meme coins are dominantly on Solana this even makes it way into Bloomberg a Bloomberg Headline says Argentina scandal fuels sell-off on favorite meme coin platform, which is of course talking about Solana I think of course I don't really think anyone thinks meme coins are gonna go anywhere meme coins are just kind of a primitive primitive that we have in this industry But what do you think about like the health or longevity or vitality of the meme coin like vertical going forward?

I think, you know, the decoupling of crypto, right? Like the, you know, the correlation decoupling that happened in DeFi summer has just continued.

Right. We've seen cycles within cycles. So, you know, you had DeFi summer, you had this DeFi cycle, then you had an all tell one cycle that followed it plus NFTs. Um, you know, this was all following the ICO cycle. Then it transitioned into the low float cycle, you know, low float, high FDV cycle. That was a whole thing for a while. Um, a lot of people lost a lot of money on that. Uh,

and it's probably not even quantified. If you went and looked at all of the tokens, and let's not forget SPF was the one that created that meta, right? The SAM coins, right? 1% float, 200 bill, FDB, and then down only. A lot of people lost a lot of money on that, but it's harder to quantify, right? Because it's not a direct rug where you can look at the chart and go, okay, well, these people extracted that, right? And then meme coins,

So, you know, we've had cycles within cycles, but meme coins have been around for a long time. Same thing as NFTs. It's just that, you know, they went parabolic. So I think that there is a chance that this is the moment, the top for the attention of meme coins and, you know, if the market pivots to something else, especially because we have seen kind of the reemergence of ICOs.

Like this is maybe the opportunity for ICOs to make a comeback. And, you know, the interesting thing about ICOs is they have more utility in theory, right? You know, ICOs gave us Ethereum. They gave us Aave. They gave us a bunch of cool stuff last cycle. Even if 99% of it was dumb, the 1% that wasn't is amazing and it's a good trade.

So maybe ICOs come back, maybe something else new and weird emerges. It'll be interesting to see what happens for the rest of this cycle because I think we're still in a macro bull market. So something will emerge, something will capture attention.

Yeah, because there's always a demand to speculate. Meme coins do feel like a logical conclusion of sorts of the token speculation game. And a lot of this token speculation game has really had to route around regulation. Regulation has been very constraining around what kind of ways the crypto industry can play with tokens. And meme coins seem to be some sort of logical conclusion of just like, it's a pumped-up fun interface. You can spit out a token. All you need to do is upload a JPEG.

And you're done. That's it. To me, if we go back to ICOs, it actually kind of feels like we're going full circle, like we've reached the end of the road. And now we have to hop back to the very beginning where there is a formal sale. You put up capital at risk on the same terms as everyone else. And then we just kind of do this whole system all over again. I would like ICOs to return. I think ICOs are a superior distribution mechanism.

I don't know if you haven't taken that. The interesting thing about meme coins is it's the platonic ideal of speculation, right? You know, to just pop into existence. You know, it's a very PVP game, right? There's low liquidity versus, you know, they're low float, high FDB tokens.

Interestingly, right? Not in the sense of, you know, low token float, right? But like the actual liquidity that's available is very small, right? So it's a game of musical chairs where whoever gets out first, you know, wins, right? And so that I think is fine, except when someone is able to exploit information asymmetry, right? Or technical asymmetry to, you know,

Max extract. And the problem is the people who, you know, same thing with ICOs, right? A lot of teams raise money and just disappeared. And that money got pulled out of the ecosystem, right? They dumped their ETH, crushed the price of ETH, converted it into fiat, and then drove off into sunset in a Lambo. And so, you know, you see that same thing happen. It's one of the reasons why we, as the crypto community,

I think are getting better at having an immune system that protects against these things. But, you know, to go back to the Toli tweet, I think one of the challenges for Solana is they need to work out how to self-police, right? They need to work out how to identify bad actors in the system and not have, you

you know, platforms like Meteora get co-opted for extraction, right? And that's hard because as the underdog, there has been this mindset of like, if anyone says anything bad about Solana, kill them. Right. And so, you know, if someone says something bad about someone doing something in Solana, there's this immediate reaction of like,

like, you know, circle the wagons, defend, defend, protect the queen, right? And that's great when you're the underdog, but when you are the dominant platform that has the most activity, then...

that doesn't work because the grifters have shown up they're in your house right you're circling the wagons around the grifters exactly the grifters are like great they're just filling their pockets and then you know they're they uh they escape um and so you know you have to have a uh the ability to discern a good actor versus a bad actor um and and i think solana is discovering that uh capability in real time

Mm-hmm. Ken, I'm about to pull up in the Polymarket, which is going to show you the odds, Polymarket odds, of Javier Millet being impeached by the end of 2025. I thought it was going to be the odds of us having a rematch in Singapore. There is no market for that. I'm going to get that market. I'm going to get that market up. What do you think the odds are that Javier Millet is impeached by the end of this year? I think...

It's probably like 20% or something, 15, 20%. Wow, well done, 16%. Okay. 16%. That's not bad. I did do a stream with six Argentines kind of just to hear their reaction about what's going on in the streets. None of them really think Javier Millet is going anywhere. They think this is kind of like

a news cycle event that will move on. There is a hearing and there will be an impeachment trial, but this is, according to just the people that I know in Argentina, this is more opportunistic by Javier Millet's opposition. And there doesn't really seem to be much weight, mainly because the what

is Argentina's version of a Congress would actually have to vote Javier Malay out and the current Congress. Javier is Javier's party. Yeah, my heuristic on these things is like, you know, it's a lot of noise. They don't usually go anywhere. If you're going to depose someone, you know, usually they get their head cut off or something, right? So, yeah. Okay.

Okay, Cain, that was all that we're going to talk about Libra. Unless there's anything else that I haven't brought up about the whole Libra debacle or any last comments you have before we move on? No, I think we've covered it. All right, Bank of the Station, we're going to hear Cain's takes about the Bitcoin price, the ETH price. We're going to talk about just the markets as a whole. Michael Saylor is once again buying Bitcoin. So that's good news, which is why Bitcoin is back up to $98,000. But before we get there, we're going to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Starting with Uniswap, it's a browser wallet.

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And we're back. Bitcoin is up 2.5% on the week, coming in at $98,400. Ether is actually up a little bit more than Bitcoin on the week, 2,730. It's up 2.5% on the week. Maybe it's about the same, actually. The ETH-BTC ratio continues to look absolutely terrible. But I think the biggest thing of note is it was interesting that Michael Saylor last week put out a tweet saying,

MicroStrategy has purchased no new Bitcoins this week. We have purchased no Bitcoins. They put out an announcement of a non-purchase. This week, they are putting out a stress release and announcing the private offering of $2 billion of convertible senior notes. So MicroStrategy announcing that they're going to be buying $2 billion of Bitcoin coming in hot. And then also the total crypto market cap is at $3.3 trillion. Kane, just broad sentiment, broad strokes.

State of the market. How do we feel about where we are right now? You said we're in a larger, more macro bull market. I think this cycle has been confusing to many. How are you feeling? Bull market, relax. My favorite tagline. It, you know, again, it's,

The end of DeFi summer, right, when DeFi started falling off a cliff in May, if you were in the DeFi trenches, it felt real bad. But, you know, AltL1s, Bitcoin, ETH, everything kept ripping, right? You know, and so we had another six months of basically up only, right? And I think this is one of those things where cycles within cycles. We had this meme coin cycle before.

You know, it may it may kind of deflate now, but something will replace it. And, you know, we'll see we'll see a kind of continued strength with Bitcoin leading. And then eventually, you know, and this is this is happened in every single market. People get to a point where euphoria kicks in and they're looking to outperform Bitcoin.

A simple 3x is not enough, right? And they're looking for a 10x, 20x, whatever. And so that's when that rotation out of Bitcoin, you know, looking for the next 10x really starts to accelerate, you know, the things that are in the top 10x.

50 top 100, you know, really ripping. And so I think we will see that again, probably towards the end of the year. You are calling for business as usual, even though up to this point, I would say everyone is talking about how different and odd and weird this cycle is. Do you agree that it's weird? Or are you just saying that this is just what it looks like when you're inside of the inside of the cycle? This is what it looks like if you're not

in the right thing at the right moment and cycle, right? If you were in meme coins over the last six months, you've been having a good time, right? But remember, there are a lot of people that are sidelined for DeFi somewhere. They're like, this is dumb. You know, we don't like it. You know, especially Bitcoin maxis, right? And so I just think those people who are sidelined, if you go back and read the timeline in late 2020, there's a lot of cope.

There's a lot of hope. There's a lot of tears. There's a lot of people that are like, this is dumb. It's going to end badly or whatever. And so I think that it's not surprising. It's not surprising. And let's not forget, a lot of the people who were the dominant voices, influencers, KOLs or whatever, from last cycle were kind of sidelined in meme coins. You know, a lot of the groups I'm in, they didn't FOMO into meme coins until like the last couple of months.

Maybe even post-Trump, right? So they bought the top. They now wrecked. Of course, there's like, you know, turning into Bitcoiners. Yeah, exactly. So I think it's unsurprising. But, you know, the macro setup is still there. There's also one of the big themes of this market is

Call it the VC chains, but I don't know if that's totally fair. Things like BearChain, Story Protocol is on here because it's up 220% on the week. BearChain just launched. We have Monad incoming. I'm definitely forgetting a bunch. Say, Aptos, Sui. What do you think about the new cohort of chains? Is this...

same pattern that we've always seen before? Is there anything that like kind of stands out to you as an investing thing? I mean, again, like let's go back to last cycle, right? DeFi summer leads into NFT mania plus all tell one season, right? You know, like I think we're too stupid to not have an all tell one season.

I think it's just going to happen again. But the Alt L1 season last cycle happened because DeFi summer blew out and overflowed Ethereum's demand for block space. And Ethereum is like, I'm going to be decentralized and my block space is going to be really expensive. And that created the Alt Layer 1 mania because everyone realized Ethereum couldn't scale. I don't see the same catalyst for an Alt Layer 1 speculation game. It's already starting, my friend. It's already starting. Is it?

Interop, the Interop Wars, Fragmentation, you know, L2, like the FUD against L2s. Okay, fine, you've scaled, but, you know, you've broken the thing, right? Like the infighting has even started, right? Like Amin losing his mind on the timeline. You've got Martin, you know, you've got Martin calling for canonical L2s. I've been saying we need to shut down the L2 tokens. It's creating, you know, confusion, confusion.

amongst, you know, new entrants. Like, do I buy ETH? Do I buy ARB? Do I buy the base token? Oh, there's no base token. Now what do I do? You know, so this setup, this narrative of like,

ETH is broken from an investment standpoint because of the fragmentation of L2 tokens. It's already there. The setup's there. It's ready. I agree that the pattern is there of crypto Twitter discussing many of the things that we discussed during a bull market. But what is missing to me is the new capital and the actual bull market side of these things. I think we're all doing this like mock bull markets where the bull market is missing except for in Bitcoin, Sol, Bitcoin.

Dogecoin, and Ripple. The bull market is narrowly impacting those things, but not the crypto industry as a whole, I would say. Except meme coins. But meme coins didn't drive adoption, did they? I don't think the stats back up meme coins actually bringing in new people. I don't think DeFi Summer drove adoption. DeFi Summer was so PVP. Yeah. No new people turned up to yams.

Like it was onboarding existing crypto natives who were like, I guess I'm doing pool 200 billion percent APY farming now. I'm a farmer. Like it was all the same people. Of course, it brought some new people in, but the new people don't come until euphoria kicks in and we haven't had euphoria.

Hmm. Okay. But then it was NFTs that did bring people in. I'm just looking for the internal catalyst. Sure. And I don't think that that was meme coins and I don't know what that is. And of course, we won't really know what that is until after we're experiencing it. But I'm like always kind of dubious that because I'm not really seeing some sort of like internal catalyst phenomenon mechanism that we're building inside of crypto that outside world really, really thinks is cool.

I mean, there's, you know, Trump coin, we saw it with Moonshot, right? They onboarded, you know, two, three hundred thousand people in space of a week, right? So it wasn't nothing.

So there was a study on all of those addresses that got onboarded with Moonshot and less than 1% did anything else on-chain after buying the Trump coin. I mean, let's go and have a conversation about Coinbase Earn Maker deal where they gave Coinbase like $200 million for people to make $5 CDPs and people literally just like dump the thing and never went on-chain.

Like many such cases, like there's just, there's just a lot of examples of like, okay, fine. Only 1% of people are activated, but that's still 4,000 new trench warriors that we got in the space of a week. You can do a lot of damage with 4,000 trenches. That's, that's actually, that's not nothing.

We're going to talk about the Kaido Airdrop, which I think is definitely the talk of the town, at least today. Thankfully, there's something else to talk about post-Libra drama. But before we talk about the Kaido Airdrop, a message from our friends and sponsors over at Reserve. Reserve is a permissionless platform that allows anyone to create...

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to make a new standard of global internet currency, which I think is pretty cool. You can check them out at bankless.cc slash reserve. All right, something that happened in the markets this week was the Kaido airdrop, which is a very hyped airdrop. And I saw many, many threads about the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars that people are going to get from their YAPs. Turns out the...

like $100 per YAP estimation came down to something like 13 cents per YAP. So CryptoTwitter kind of really overextended how big of a payday they were going to get. Did you farm any YAPs, Cain? Were you a YAPer? I was a YAPer. I am a YAPer. We also have our own YAP leaderboard for Infinex. And so I think there was a little bit of hopium post hyperliquid.

where people saw a bunch of purpose traders, you know, get eight figure airdrops and they're like, what about me? I'm, you know, I'm a good guy. I talk on Twitter too. And so I think that there was a little bit of opium there that that was going to play out. I haven't done the math on it to figure out, you know, the 13 cent, 17 cent thing. Yeah.

But yeah, I mean, it's a couple of orders of magnitude off from expectations. So that's going to have some sad people running around today. So if you're just listening to this on podcast and you're not on Twitter, Kaido is this crypto analytics platform that uses AI to kind of like aggregate, analyze and like surface data for both like on-chain data and off-chain data. Like a lot of Twitter data and social media data goes into just like...

pointers towards where investors are allocating their attention. Like what narrative themes are capturing a lot of attention right now? And what we're looking at right now is the Infinex YAP board. So who is yapping and who's like tweeting or talking about Infinex.

And there's like whole entire sectors. It's like who's talking about DeFi, who's talking about AI, how sentiment. So it's kind of just like an aggregation, a data platform using sentiment analysis and some AI tools as well. And they released their token, Kaido, and they distributed it to people who were yapping, as in people who were talking about different sectors of the crypto market. You would have to, of course, go to Kaido, sign up.

And then you could start to accrue some yaps based off of how well your tweets performed. Bigger banger tweets got you more yaps. Kane, how does it feel to be fourth place on your own leaderboard? It's pretty dark, actually. I said this a few times during the... I was active in the Bearer chain leaderboard as well, right? And I would have these tweets talking about Bearer.

And then it would start to pump. It would have like, you know, two, three, 400 likes. And then I'd be like, oh, you idiot. You didn't even say Bearer Chain in there, right? Like, because you have to, you have to put the... You have to actually say it. You have to say it. Yeah. Like the AI is not smart enough to know you're talking about Bearer Chain if you make some dumb joke about it, right? And so, you know, I had a couple of good tweets that went, that pumped a little bit, but didn't actually have the hook. So yeah, I'm not a great yapper, it turns out.

I think the interesting thing about YAPs, right? Let's talk about market dynamics for a second. Mm-hmm.

There were people who sort of predicted this, and I was talking to a few people in Hong Kong. The difference or, you know, the delta between expectations of YAPS, right, and the reality on the ground, right, in terms of, like, people are being... People are talking their book even before they have a book, right? They're talking... Because they knew they were getting a book. So it's like...

You've given the most skillful people at pumping bags a free bag and they're going to pump it to the moon. So, of course, they're talking, you know, the delta between that and reality is probably as skewed as any other project in history. Right. Because you weaponized the biggest, you know, people to talk their book. There was, you know, Natsuki.

Like it's organic in one sense, but it's also like these people are it's like you got a bunch of actors, right, to like go and sit around at a party pretending to have fun. Right. And it's like, oh, that looks like the most fun party ever. And then 20 minutes later, they're like, where's my cash? And you're like, oh, it wasn't a party at all. It was just people pretending to have fun.

Once it was announced that Kaido had done the snapshot, so no more yaps were accruing to anyone, I did notice just a complete hollowing out of reply guys in my DL, like in my replies and everything. And Twitter just got like reshifted and everything. It's got a lot more normal very, very quickly. Yeah. I mean, the actors were, you know, we stopped paying the actors. The actors went home. Yeah. Yeah. The actors were like, all right, job done. See you later. Yeah.

There's 1 billion tokens that came in at a $1.30 valuation as people were claiming and selling them. It fell down to about 90 cents and it is currently resurging back up to $1.80, which gives Kaido a $1.8 billion valuation. Something that's different about Kaido, it's not a DeFi app. It is not a protocol. I don't think they have any plans on decentralizing their system. I don't think decentralization really makes sense in the Kaido stack.

So the unique thing here is this is a centralized company incorporated in Seattle, Washington. So inside the United States, issuing a token. There was no sale or anything. So I believe they're claiming that it doesn't pass the Howey test, but this is a...

Not a common activity by centralized companies to issue tokens. It does feel bullish. It feels like this is something that could not have happened in anything outside of the Trump era. Something that also I thought was pretty cool, this is a tweet from David Phelps who just basically tweeted out that Kaido used its own AI analytics to determine who is actually values aligned with Kaido. And so I think Kaido, as a function of the algorithm to determine who gets how many tokens,

try to like map out who is bullish or bearish on Kaido. And if you are a Kaido bear, then you got nerfed, your token supplies got nerfed, which makes so much sense. So like all of your bull posters are,

receive more Kaido tokens. And anyone who's like talking negatively about Kaido is like receiving less tokens. And the way that they did that was they used AI to actually kind of evaluate which yappers are more Kaido aligned. I thought that was pretty clever. We need this system for Ethereum.

We need to scale this out to the social layer of Ethereum, right? Look, I'm all for bear tiers, right? Like, you know, the more punishment bears take, the better. So I think this is a really cool approach. You know, we're going to see more kind of innovation in the airdrop meta, I think. Airdrops aren't going away. But

you know, trying to get alignment. It was interesting. We did our portion of the Pengu airdrop at Infinix last week. And it was about a month later because we had to, you know, so we got a carve out of Pengu from the original airdrop for Infinix users. And so we had to distribute that, but it took a little while. We had some issues. And so eventually we got the platform ready to go. We did the airdrop and we,

you know, a lot of times people who G'd an airdrop, they're like, well, it was going to be down only. I had to, you know, rush out the door or whatever. I mean, look at Kaido, right? You know, $1.40 to $0.90. All these people or whatever it was, $1, yeah, $1.40 down to $0.90. You know, people rushing out the door, right? That first wave of people. And then, you know, it starts to grind up, right? And so what was interesting to me, though, is a month later, Pengu is at $0.01.

It's not volatile. It's sitting there. There's no rush out the door. There's plenty of time, right? And yet we saw this activity where people just instantly cheated this airdrop when they got it. And I was kind of shocked by that. I was like, you know, the excuse of like, oh, you know, it was a race condition and you needed to get out was gone. And yet they still dumped. So what's interesting about that is we know who that was.

And, you know, we've got a whole bunch of other people turning up saying, we also want to do an airdrop. And I'm like, well, you know what? If you insta-gated it, we're probably going to nerf you. Like, you don't deserve an airdrop. Like, if some other project turns up and says, hey, we want an airdrop to you, maybe we'll give you 10% on the dollar of what you would have gotten. Because the whole point of an airdrop is to buy attention. And if you were just like,

I'm out of here instantly, right? Also, I hold on to Punchy Penguin, so I took it personally as well. So, you know, I think that we will see an evolution in this process because airdrops, as much as I think airdrops are a very inefficient way of getting attention, they're not going anywhere. People like them too much. We also saw on Infinex a 10x uplift in activity during this Penguins airdrop. Interesting.

So, you know, it's just a hard thing to wean ourselves off of. You know, the world loves airdrops, but we need to find better ways of distributing them.

Do you think future airdrops will take in data from past airdrops as it relates to wallets or Twitter accounts? Because if you wanted to collect your Cato airdrop, you needed to connect to your Twitter account. So now selling or holding behavior is linked to people's Twitter accounts. Do you think in the future, future airdrops will try and ingest this information to inform their distribution?

I think we've seen it before. People have tried to do like multi, you know, optimism did this, right? They did the, the, you know, three waves of airdrops and, uh, and you know, if you weren't aligned, um, which I guess is like communist speak for you cheated. Um, but, uh, but you know, if you're, if you're not aligned with the project, then you didn't get the next airdrop or you got a much lower number, right? Uh,

which I think is really good, right? And so I think we will see more innovation when it comes to airdrop distribution to figure out who's aligned. Because if I give you Pengu, you're supposed to hold it and you're supposed to, you know, then become aligned with the project. If you just instantly dump it for USDC, you're not even like you'd,

Like, get out of here. You're doing the opposite of what the whole list is doing. You're doing the opposite of what, you know, there's no advantage there. Exactly, exactly right.

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This is a tweet from Sazzle talking about the Pektra upgrade that's going to be coming early April is the estimation. So we have a couple testnet forks. Holski and Sipolia testnets will fork on the 24th and then the 5th of March.

And so we'll have two testnet forks before we're ready for the Ethereum mainnet fork, only under the conditions that the testnet forks go well, probably sometime in early April. Pektra is not the biggest upgrade, but it is the biggest in terms of the sheer number of EIPs, but it's nothing in comparison to the merger at Dancun.

We have, for the Ethereum nerds that are out there, we have a max effective balance that is incoming. And then also we have a blob limit increase. And so we're getting some more blobs and we're getting some max effective balance and then a few other tweaks as well. Unless you have any take specifically, Kane, about Pectra, what's your kind of take about the Ethereum balance?

broader discussions around like pace of development uh is it communist uh your theory is broad positioning inside of like the chain wars i was just thinking i missed the rinkaby uh test net as you're listing out those those test nets like all my og test nets are gone now it's a bit sad um but uh but in terms of pace of development like you know uh it's it's not an issue of

fundamentals, right? It's not an issue of like delivery. Ethereum, you know, from a research and delivery perspective, I think is better than it's ever been. You know, the core devs understand what they're doing. The prioritization is good. Yes, of course, these roadmaps are longer than we'd all like because we're impatient, you know, people sitting on the sideline, you know, shouting, come on, like, you know, let's go faster. But, yeah,

But I think it's still an issue of the overall comms. Like the comms and marketing side is what's missing, right? Really? You think it all boils down to comms and marketing? I think it's just not communicating what the benefits of these things are, right? And, you know, Susana does a great job. He does a great job. You know, he walks through everything on a daily basis and, you know, why it's important, whatever. But, like...

the narrative alignment, right, in the Ethereum community in terms of like constructing the right narratives to make sense. You know, I think it's good that it's decentralized, right? But it is a bit uncoordinated.

I think it's just too uncoordinated. So having some more coordination there would be, I think, beneficial. But we're not really seeing it. And I said the other day, like three weeks ago, four weeks ago now, that Vitalik Cook...

And we haven't seen much cooking, you know, from from that perspective, right, from the columns and marketing perspective. So. So, yeah, here we are. Let's you know, I'm cautiously optimistic, but but I do think it would be good to see a little bit more traction there.

I did see a tweet. I don't know if it came out of Ethereum.org specifically, but there is a job posting for a social media manager for the Ethereum account, which has 3.4, 3.7 million followers. So after all of this angst, we are getting potentially a new social media manager of the Ethereum account. Maybe we can get narrative coordination back. My genuine question is, did we have a social media manager of the account? I don't. I think the answer is firmly no, we did not. So like,

That in and of itself is just like giga retarded. Like, I'm sorry. Like, like what are we doing? Like it's all, it's all like we're replacing the underperforming social media manager or intern that we had. Right. We're like, Oh, this is a good idea. Like,

we figured like the rest of crypto figured this out like five years ago that you need someone running your social media account right um so you know uh baby steps i think broadly the ethereum community is asking like hey maybe we have put too many too much emphasis on credible neutrality uh maybe we should try and coordinate some sort of like centralized leadership team to point the

in a coherent direction and we can like shed some incredible neutrality points in order to meet those ends. And that has been, that decision is like very contentious. I don't think Vitalik likes that at all. No, no, I don't think so. But, you know, the interesting thing is that Vitalik

Ethereum, on some levels, is a victim of its own success, right? But it still has the underdog mentality, you know, that I was talking about with Solana, right? Where, you know, Bitcoin maxis are like, there's a pre-mine scam. It's all going to end poorly. Every time anything bad happens in Ethereum, you know, from the DAO hack to, you know, bridge hack, like just any bad thing, there's a bunch of people who are...

at least historically, were ready to just jump on Ethereum and be like, see, we told you, right? And run victory laps. And so, you know, the approach to that, I think, was just to not engage, right? Continue to deliver, deliver the roadmap, deliver the tech, deliver the research, do all that stuff, right? And, you know, that kind of worked against the Bitcoin maxis because there weren't many of them and they were fucking idiots. But like,

you know, it doesn't work when you're competing against a project like a team, you know, a team like sweet, uh, or, or, you know, um, uh, like even, uh,

And ignore Solana for a second here, right? But if this alt L1 thing pops up, right? Like even Monad, they do a really good job. They've created a cult bearer chain, right? They've created a cult. They've created this cult following that feels like the early days of Ethereum in a lot of ways, right? And so I just think that there's a level of competition now that especially Ethereum mainnet

because you also have arbitrum and optimism and base competing for mindshare against Ethereum mainnet. And if Ethereum mainnet doesn't maintain mindshare, that's net negative for all of the Ethereum ecosystem. And so having this credibly neutral, above the fray approach

It served us for a while, but, you know, one of the things about being a founder is you need to be able to adapt to the reality on the ground. Right. And I do think that Vitalik needs to adapt to the reality on the ground. We are in a different environment in 2025 to what we were in in 2015 or even 2020. Mm hmm.

Yeah, speaking of Monad, the Monad testnet is one of the things that was launched this week. It's kind of crazy how much there has been discussion around Monad and yet their testnet has just now gotten out the door, which I think it gives a huge plus one to the size of the cult because if there's no testnet,

not even a chain, there's no test net, then what's left? The answer is, well, there's the cult. That's the cult that's there. One thing I thought that was worth bringing up this week was the SEC has announced a cyber and emerging technologies unit to protect retail investors. I'm calling this the SEC's cyber police unit.

And so there's an organization being made, spearheaded by the SEC, but does different things, mainly going after fraud across the internet. So they are focusing on transactions in the following areas. Fraud committed using emerging technologies such as AI and machine learning.

Fraud on social media, the dark web, or false websites to perpetrate fraud. Hacking to obtain material non-public information. Takeovers of retail brokerages accounts. Fraud involving blockchain technology and crypto assets, which relates to much of the things that we discuss on the weekly roll-up. That is all of the fraud that we talked about at the beginning of this episode and many other scams and scandals.

And then a few other ways that the SEC's new organization, again, the Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit to protect retail investors. So I think we're getting some cyber police to come and actually crack down on, even though it's not securities transactions, fraud, which I think is just totally fine. What's your take?

Look, I'm not, you know, the unintended consequences of overregulation are so powerful that I'm never a cheerleader for this, right? Like, you know, it's great now, go after some AI guys and make them feel some pain, right? It sounds good. You know, go kill that guy. Don't bother me. And of course, we've been saying there's so much fraud around

go after the fraud and not Uniswap, right? They went after the wrong Hayden, it turns out. And, you know, so of course, like we want efficient markets and, you know, we want fraud to be weeded out. I just think that there is, there's a danger to, you know, being too reliant on regulatory agencies to fix the problems in any industry, right? You know.

So, Kane, we identified things like the ICO mania started fairly, started with things like Ethereum, started things like Aave. Mastercoin. Ended with fraud. Ended with fraud. DeFi summer started with Compound, started with Uniswap, ended with fraud. Ended with fraud. NFTs started legit, ended with fraud. Memes like Bonk started totally fine. Community bottom-up ecosystem ended with fraud.

And so yet when we weigh all of that on one side, you're still saying that the potential risk of overregulation is higher than the potential costs of having these metas that always end in fraud on the crypto side. Is that what you're saying? 100%. Wow. And my view is this, that like, you know, I think Matt Levine has a very good take on this, right? You know, if you're the compliance officer in a bank,

one of the most regulated industries in the world, right? You've got to dial. You've got to fraud dial, right? Now, if you ask someone where should they dial a fraud between zero and 100, right? A lot of people, the naive take is zero, right? But at zero, there's no bank. You don't get to have a bank.

You can't have zero. Zero is not an option. Zero is the like brainlet take, right? Of, well, obviously no fraud. Like, why would we want fraud? And it's like, if you have an organization of 50,000 people running around doing stuff, humans are dumb and bad and they do bad things, right? If you want zero fraud, shut the whole place down.

And that's the alternative, right? So, you know, should we have good fraud enforcement? Yes. Can we hope for a world of no fraud in a permissionless environment? No, we can't. It's not realistic, right? So it's about finding the right balance. And so if we throw our hands up and say, let's hope that this regulatory agency solves these problems for us, you know, it can go badly.

And, you know, those kinds of agencies can get co-opted so easily. Look at SPF. He co-opted so many different, you know, people in positions of power to facilitate that. So the unintended consequences of giving regulators too much power is very dangerous. It doesn't necessarily even stop the fraud and it can create far, far wider unintended consequences.

So the creation of this, call it a task force, is being complemented by the work of Hester Person acting chair Mark Ueda, who are both very crypto positive. Hester Person, we just had her on the podcast. So maybe what you're saying is like, just because we have these two crypto positive SEC chair and commissioners,

don't be naive because once these two individuals are gone, we're going to be left with Gary Gensler 2.0, Gary Gensler's cousin, Gary Gensler's son. And then, and now this tool is in the hands of them. And now it's going to come and choke us out. Is that kind of what you're saying? I,

That's the risk, right? That's the risk. And so that's why my view is always that we should look to market dynamics to solve these things, right? And, you know, when it comes to ICOs, we were starting to figure this out, but then regulation killed it, right? When it comes to, you know, meme coins, we've sort of figured this out as an industry a little bit, right? Like there's been this expose that's come internally, right? No one, you know,

to the best of my knowledge, the police didn't go and kick that guy's door down and, and, and arrest him. Right. I mean, they did kick Shane Copland's door down, right. Which is fucking ridiculous. Right. Um, you know, so like, this is, this is my point, right? Like we need to be able to self police, right. We need to be able to have the right structures and incentives, uh, to weed these things out. We can't rely on some external body. Uh,

It's not to say that an external body is bad or good or whatever. Let's just say it's neutral. It's not sufficient. We have a direct responsibility as an industry to sort our own shit out. Mm-hmm.

And I think maybe one of the things that we're building in this industry is structures that can't do fraud, can't be evil. And I would say that's something that you are building here at Infinex, Cain. Infinex is, call it a neobank on the internet that can't do evil because it's all governed by smart contracts and code. Talk to me a little bit about what's going on at Infinex. There's this new term that you guys are inventing called Swidge.

maybe download us on Swidge and everything else that's going on under the sign of Infinex. Yeah, so, you know, we've talked about fragmentation and chains and, you know, all of the stuff that, you know, comes from that, right? Like people needed to get Kydo on base, but there are Solana maxis. They got to set up, you know, Mert was talking about this, right? He didn't have, you know, he'd set up a base wallet, but, you know, a lot of people who are on Solana haven't got a base wallet or vice versa. People on base that don't have a Solana wallet.

So we are trying to build a platform that basically allows anyone to interact on any chain by having this universal swapping and bridge functionality called Switch, which means that if you get an airdrop on Solana, you can bridge it to Base or Optimism or Arbitrum or Bearer Chain. And you can deposit the airdrop onto some Boyko platform

yield farming scheme in bear chain and start earning yield without needing to go and understand how to, you know, what's the bear chain canonical bridge or, you know, how do I secure my seed phrase in a new phantom wallet for this, you know, this new chain, you know, Monad, for example, right? So the idea is to make it easy to do things on chain again. You know, we got to a point where there was so much fragmentation that it was hard to do things on chain.

When I was watching this demo of you switching, I was interested in the choice to actually show users this swap and bridge interface, where you can actually go through the steps in the process, not unlike Uniswap. But there's also a choice where you just abstract that completely in the background, and you don't even

show users their chains at all whatsoever. How does Infinex fit inside of the choice to actually show chains and tell users what chains they're on versus abstracting all chains totally? Yeah, so there's a very long-running debate internally in the design and product team about this. And we've got versions of this interface that are purely chainless, right? And I think that that is interesting

directionally where things will go. But at the moment, people still have a need because we're still we're talking about people that learned a bunch of dumb things. Right. We told them a bunch of dumb things and they're like, but I need to know that. Right. And so if you take it away, they feel like, oh, I'm missing something. Right. So it's going to be a slow reeducation process of like it doesn't matter what USDC, you know, is sitting on what chain USDC is sitting on. It just doesn't matter. Right. If you want USDC and Echo,

Okay, just tell us that you want to deposit in your echo account. Okay, press the button, press the USDC to echo button, right? And what if you don't have USDC, then push the dollars into echo button. We know that echo wants USDC, you have some yield bearing stable coin that you're sitting in, you shouldn't need to know that. I want the I want the stable coin that makes me money. And then I want to buy the echo thing. Just click the button.

We'll do the rest. Right. So it will it will eventually get there. But there's a slow reeducation process where if you take too much away, people start getting worried. They're like, what's happening? I don't you know, I need to know the chain that I'm on.

Like crypto natives have just tooled up and become so educated about how to use these things that we actually have to dumb ourselves down to use like more normie friendly apps. That's pretty funny. That's not a problem that I've ever been faced with yet in my crypto career until you building Infinex. If somebody is curious, is Infinex open? Can they just go and make an account? Yep, just make an account. What's their roadmap with Infinex?

make an account. You know, we are doing a bunch of work with airdrops, a bunch of work with new chains. We just added Unichain. As you mentioned, we just added Uniswap as well. So you can swap on Uniswap directly on Unichain. Go and buy some Uni on Unichain. And

Yeah, it's a game at the moment of rolling out more integrations, more chains, you know, more functionality so that people can feel comfortable putting their assets into Infinex instead of into Binance or Bybit or Upbit. Cain, it was certainly a doozy of a week. Thanks a lot, my man, for helping me go through all this news. I really appreciate it. Yeah, awesome. Thanks for having me.

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