0xResearch | Friday, May 30th

Transcript

[Music] Dip back.

[Music] [Music] This song is called Feeding the Ducks. [Music] [Music] [Music]

All right, welcome to our inaugural Zerox Research live stream. We've got some of the goats here. Picacio, the music is still going. I like I like the music. We should just keep it on low volume the whole stream. Funny. Yeah. Feeding the ducks vibing out 70s porno music, I guess. Um the chat loved it. I don't know if that's I don't know if that type of language is appropriate, but we'll run with it. Uh we got Boach, Mark Arjun, Dan Smith on. Uh excited to get into it today, guys.

Let's, you know, start out light-hearted. How are we feeling about the markets? How are we feeling today? Bako lied, people died, but they uh the prices look not so bueno. Um honestly, I don't know. I've been head I've been head down heads down this week, so I don't have any great commentary here. Bako, what's what's the hype price at, man? Um, it is it hit 30 yesterday. I was going to puke. Um, it is now at 32. I think I It's good. The hype price is good. I I don't have any additional comment. It's because everybody's been talking about hype the past two weeks now. Um, and

it's got increasingly more popular talk about it. I I don't want to jinx anything. I still think that it is one of the most attractive assets um in the market right now. Like especially if you're looking to allocate into something that is not like not based on speculation that is actually generating meaningful cash. So my my gambling platform is the best gambling platform. It's true. No, like at this point it is the best. Well, you have to admit you have to admit it's the best perpetualist platform in Devi that we've ever seen.

That's I don't I don't think I don't know what would be the contender there for for arguing otherwise. But yeah, I agree. It was funny. I tweeted out so Hype EVM uh is picking up in terms of at least rev or dollars spent to transact. Came in seventh uh on the trailing 7day as of yesterday. I should check see how today's numbers changed but um like it was above avalanche polygon and arbitum and then just behind base. It's a pretty interesting mix for strictly the EVM. So ignoring any of the trading activity I was really just trying to zoom in on how hype EVM is kind of picking up. It's interesting. It's doing about 4TPS but uh some transactions like a swap can cost between like 10 and 50 cents. Uh

but uh in good HL Maxi fan somebody responded REV more like HEV hyperlid economic value. I I mean I got to say the the community strong and they're an entertaining bunch. So I mean I'm feeling good. I mean I I feel like I always say this once every three months. Um this is the bearish I think people have been with Bitcoin price being this high. And then hype is also doing well. Like if like you zoom out from the price and you just look at hype's market share in terms of revenue fees like steadily growing every month.

So it seems like it's good in the bare market and it's good in the bull market. So I mean that's what I call fundamentals. Yeah, it's I mean they buy back like a mill a day, 0.001 yards a day. Um, it's it's pretty. No, because we've now like I already talked about Sunapod. I will bring it up again. It's one of my few talking points that I can bring up is like we're clearly seeing some assets get some form of price insensitive flow. Um, in the case of I'm going to respond to Z. I'm going to get very upset with him in a second, but um like in the case of BTC, there's obviously the ETFs. Same with E. With soul, there's going to be ETFs, but

we're also seeing like a bunch of definitely not risky um new ventures pop up where like buying soul and staking it or just like building a strategy around it. And on on the hype side, there's the assistance fund. So, we're going to see I guess more and more of these forms of um flows start happening going forward if these if the big boys like decide on doing it. Um, and without the big boys, the Hyperlquid Assistance Fund decided to do it. And we'll see if they'll have an ETF. I don't think I feel like it's way too young to have that, right? Mark, you're way more. You would know this way more. It's way too young. I know we have to wait a few years, but regardless of that, it is doing the same. Like, I think it might have more flows in than

the ETF net inflows. Do not me on that. How do you feel about the Hyper EVM? I'm gonna pull up Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z Z8's comment like this seems to be the the one contention point here is like why is it so not scaled, not optimized? Like what are they doing there? So I'm going to talk about somebody else brought this up the other day and I had to talk to them about it. Um the team is very clearly working I have to explain this to Ian from Chyros.

They're like if so there's two channels where you can get hyperlquid updates. is like the API channel and the announcements channel. Previously, both of these were primarily dominated by the hyper porn news. So it's like we're adding listings or like we're changing oracles whatever like specifically things that related to the purp. Now more recently it's been like we've put whatever EVM update on the test net which will go live later and this has been happening for the past two three months and that's it seems that the team's main focus is the EVM and from what I understand first of all this is the one horrible thing about hype is that they are very like their coms are not great but it must be by design I assume um I

think what so they only have 10 people So I, you know, yeah, that's true. Um, I think they're just going to go slowly increase it and we've seen that we've seen that um teams can do this like base. Um, Dan, you can like speak more on this, but they've it's like one gig of gas was their goal, right, for 2025? Uh, not qu that's like their long-term goal. Uh, I thought it was 125. I honestly I think it might be 150. It's somewhere between like one and 200 uh m gas so millions units of gas. Okay. So, and they're they're moving along nicely.

I think they're I mean Bass is making a very concerted effort. The one thing that on the hype side, I don't know. I haven't done any like digging here, but my assumption as to why the hype EVM is not very performant is one, it's not a priority, if you hear how Jeff talks about it, you know, he's like it's adds a a bit more functionality to the core service offering. so that you can really see where the priority lies and I think that's logical and makes sense but two um it's the same nodes running two chains and I'm not like a systems engineer here but you have if you have the same box running two chains you have to divert the resources between both of those two chains uh and so a more performant EVM means a less performant trading uh system or hyper core system

without expanding the resources of the box uh so that was kind that's that's been my historic assumption as to why it is the way it is I don't think that's how it works works. I think it's like think of two roads as opposed to just one road with more cars if that makes sense. They're two separate chains, right? But run by the same validator, which is the same machine presumably. I don't know. The code's not open source. I can chat to people about this, but I assume I'm curious. I don't know. the increase the the machine size because al well maybe not yet actually because the hypervium still so it doesn't have a lot of like it's not very demanding at

this point but I imagine they thought about that like the worst thing for hyperlid would be that the L1 gets the hyper core gets worse um I don't think that's what they would want to do but yeah I mean I can share a screen um base has been doing a pretty great job pumping the gas. So the the y- axis here is units of m gas, right? So they want this at about 100 at year end. They're about 35 now. Um so marching nicely. Uh it wasn't that long ago where this number was much lower, right? Like here's where they really started hiking it back in uh March or so of last year and it's been a pretty vertical line upwards at this point. So I I mean people are laying the bricks for them to scale DVM if it does become a priority

which I think is is great for them. Yeah, I love it. Any more thoughts on hype box or do we I wanna I wanted to pull something up. I pinged Max B. He has some data on the hyperlquid um test net. I'm not sure if it's the EVM or the core, but I wanted to see if you could send that over. So, because I'll just share it. I think this might be um I think this might be for the hyper core though and not for the other ones.

So, I'm not sure. I'm just going to let you guys continue and then if it happens it happens. Okay, we'll we'll move on from the hyperlquid stuff. The um I guess I kind of want to talk about some maybe current events that are interesting to say the least. Like there are some talks like on our last on our last round table we talked about like is a bubble forming some things along those lines. Bitcoin conference activities um you know companies copy copying the strategy playbook um raising raising debt and then buying crypto assets. Um there's some interesting things popping up on the timeline. So, I don't know if

everyone has seen already, but like Netflix wanting to do a show about SPF and FTX. Um, I'm going to pull this up just because I I've seen a funny result of this one, but um here, let me pull this up. I'm curious anyone's thoughts. Like fundamentally I I would imagine most people are a little like disappointed that there would be like a major show about this. Um I don't know. Does anyone have any just like broad thoughts on it? Like stupid bad on the SPF. The fact that there's a show about SPF and FTX sells so much. I wonder how much that

Michael Lewis book sold. Like I don't think that's a signal to be fair. I think that's just Netflix trying to make a billion dollars, which is fine. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, it's definitely an interesting story, too. The question is like, how do they tell it? Uh, it's called I think the title is like the altruist or something of that nature, which makes me pretty nervous that they'll tell it from the the light of the fact that these people are criminals. Uh, and more so from the light of like, well, look what they tried to do. Um, I don't know. Is James Win really Caroline Ellison? people are asking.

I think they just I mean obviously they're just doing it for the views but then that that conversation is it good? Is it bad? It kind of gets into all the other kind of things Netflix does like the Tindler Swindler. I don't know if you all heard of that one on Netflix. This dude just used to like trick women go around and then after after Netflix aired all the morally questionable things that he did he just got more popular from it. And then there was things like Baby Reindeer as well. Uh, it's just like inevitably people are going to learn something new, but it's going to also, I think, inspire a certain type of of of people as well.

So, it's mixed. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's fair. I I wanted to draw this takeaway. They posted some of the projected actors for the series. Um, they're putting me in. Kobe Kobe responded, "Is that a picture of Julia of Caroline? Can't tell." But, uh, maybe the the funnier takeaway I saw was that everyone's looking at it the wrong way. The actors are flip-flopped actually for Caroline and Sam. Uh, pretty funny AI rendering here. Uh, either way, I think I agree with some of the takeaways.

Mark, I think you have maybe one of the the something that resonates. Like there have been a lot of like true crime shows and like going into like past serial killers and it's weird but like some small subset of people like develop a weirder obsession with that than they should and maybe that leads to bad things but you know I feel like it's just another one of those things where you know there there's always there's always weird people in the world and you can't really like prevent them from doing what they're going to do sometimes. But yeah, I think the more top signaly thing that I felt in the last couple days is is obviously these public uh holding companies or these strategyesque companies like uh yeah, I

get it. They're they're using debt converts for most of this. Um it's like not an immediate risk. It's more of a five-year risk, but like man, it feels very strange. I think a bit tensor or a towel one launched today. Uh so it's like every asset is getting its own strategy built around it. Um, I don't know, man. I was look, this inspired me to go back and look at Michael Sailor's uh just his numbers that like he's put out some crazy stats. Last year, he bought about $25 billion of Bitcoin and about 20 of that came in Q4 alone. Like, that is mind-numbingly insane. Uh, and so to think that there's going to be like smaller clones of these going on and doing the same thing for other assets is interesting, but like

man, it's pretty impossible not to look at this and be like, "Oo, uh, I think we need like it's just it's just so it's almost so obvious and so many people are calling it out that it kind of like almost works in reverse psychological impact like okay, this is like too clear. This can't be the actual problem." I think at one point Michael Sailor was buying more Bitcoin and was being emitted every day for like 6 months or something on average. And I think maybe with these smaller assets that becomes a problem because if they have like a high inflation rate then it just becomes nearly impossible to keep track of. But if you say it's a fiveyear problem, right? Then if price goes up in five years, then is there really a problem?

Yeah, he mogged you there, Daniel. I'm not gonna lie. He I don't know. I mean, I I agree. I think it's it's super interesting. And the uh like maybe it makes sense for Bitcoin. Like, okay, if the US government is talking about it as a strategic reserve, that's one of the two most important economies in the world. Like, fine. Like, that's that's this elite money like status that no other asset has at the moment. But then if the everything else is like, okay, that's a bit crazy. Like you know, Tao, for example, is a very niche crypto asset uh that is trying to do something pretty different in my view than what Bitcoin is trying to do. Maybe some TA people would disagree with me, but uh I don't know.

It's like I feel like we're just taking it way too far. Um and it'll be interesting. I don't know. I kind of want to build out a dashboard that just tracks the risk metrics here for all of these things. Uh NAV, premium to nav. I'd love to know how much leverage each of these vehicles are taking. I think you can do some interesting work. So maybe we'll set down set off down that course uh and add that to our public dashboard similar to how we track like ETFs. Yeah, I mean it I agree with your point, Mark. It's just like you're hinging a lot of it on, you know, well, if it goes up, then it's fine, but um well, what if it's you, you know, lower uh in five years? Well, I was I was thinking

Bitcoin, not Tao. No offense to No, but okay. So, James Kristoff, shout out Zerx Research Telegram chat. If you're not in there, get in there. Uh, we talk [ __ ] every Wait, can we not show that everywhere? Because I want kind of an exclusive vibe to it. Yeah, you have to. Yeah, join the Xerox Research Foundation Telegram. Get in there. But look, look, James's point is it doesn't matter if he gets l if he's stop it's not about the problem being in five years of like what is the price at relative to NAV. It's that if he stops spying uh which is fair again 40 or sorry$20 billion dollars of Q4 of last year. I I'm going to pull up the numbers and do some quick math see what the Q1 uh numbers are even what we're trending in Q2. But like yeah it is a

fair question. What if this dude stops buying? Well that's the question we don't really want to answer Daniel. Like there's two it's like there's three four questions you don't want to answer. One is like what if Bitcoin stops going up? Don't want the answer. What if sailor stops buying? Don't want the answer. What is the assistance fund going to be used for eventually? Don't want the answer. You know, just let's ignore these. These are things we shouldn't waste our time. Let's focus on the positive. Lots of flow. Smart capital coming into strategy type plays for towel. Bit tensor dynamic towel is launching. Let's look forward to that. Let's not.

All right, I was I was gonna say we can skip over the hard questions. Uh maybe do you want to pull up some charts, Boach? Let's look at some assets. Look at BTC. The last time I pulled up a chart, the last time I pulled up this chart specifically, it started going down. No, I think I'd I would love to to go deeper on the uh the micro strategy and the other strategies uh when we get some folks on we'll get some folks on on another another episode and really dig into it. I'm sure James Kristoff would love to go deep on this.

Get James and Jamie arguing on this one, but uh eight and a half million in Q1 if like All right, let me this is my favorite chart in crypto. I show this to Ryan Garner at least once a week. I'm pretty sure he's on fire yet. Can we I still don't know how to do these things. Oh, I got it. There we go. Look at this. Anybody else like the chart? Yeah, I think it goes sideways from here. I think that's probably my base.

He's coping. Look at that, man. Clean. Clean. Oh, if I had to open thousandx long or short right here on the one second, what's the dude? Are we going up or down? You can't make this up. Look at this one day. Pico top, pico bottom. Come on. Let's um We have to talk about soul underperformance a bit though. Like this is relative to Bitcoin, bud. Look at this. Yeah, pull it up. I am. It's up.

All right. 8 and a half billion in Q1 from Sailor and already in Q2. I mean already we're twothirds of the way through it. Uh but four and a 4.8 billion and I'm just using 100K uh price just for sake of ease. But uh that's it's remarkable stuff. The man's cooking. Still on pace for his 20 uh maybe a little bit behind pace for his 2024 numbers. I mean there's four billion of buy pressure in Bitcoin in the last three weeks from ETFs alone. They had their first outflows yesterday. Well, in weeks yesterday, did you see it's like 350 mil USD of alphet outflows from the ETFs?

Yeah. No chance. He doesn't keep up. Wow. Mark people, since we have 1,000 viewers here, a lot of people are like, "Wow, Bach is retarded." I'm not. No. Yeah, you're right. 350 mil outflow yesterday. I'm not. I keep up with stuff all the time. Look at that. Wow. The lion does not concern himself with wrong data. That was crazy. The The other thing that I think that's interesting is like, yeah, there's the BTC treasury companies, but like we're getting into the silly assets now, right? like various other I mean there were already soul strategy companies there were there we're seeing ETH strategy companies we're seeing XRP

strategy companies like it's getting further down that list uh I mean that that can't end well who like who's going to do the SHIB strategy company and then it retraces 80% and they look like an absolute idiot. I saw this this this ETH company skip gamer I can't remember the name of it some gaming thing turn and just bought it went up like 600%. But then what do we think about like when GameStop buys it and then that stock price is down 10%. Right. Like is that more sustainable people using it as treasury assets? Is is that a better game? Is the is the is that the one that

consensus was involved with? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Um I don't know. I don't have super strong opinions on these to be honest. Like I think I'm middle mid-curving it just by being like look this is stupid and it's going to end poorly. But I I don't know. And then also if it's with these strategies if the first wave is the equity holders, right? like you're just they're going to print more shares to put it eloquently like and just dilute the shares in order to like backrop stop having them to sell their actual Bitcoin or tower soul or whatever it is they bought because you know if they can't pay their debts they have to sell and then the entire business model is dead.

So I feel like it's the equity holders who get hit first and not really the underlying assets, right? Which makes you ask the question, you know, who wants exposure through these vehicles rather than the underlying assets themselves. Like in a let's say the ETFs did not exist, then okay, that makes sense. Like that's how I could get, you know, my good proxy exposure. Maybe I acknowledge there's some leverage here, but I'm okay with that. Um, and I don't have to leave my brokerage account. Uh, and I or if I'm like a larger desk, then it's just already compliance approved. it's just a stock like okay that world that I I really see that story um and then you know when you zoom out beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum like okay perfect like now I can get that same exposure to these different assets but we still see them happening for

Bitcoin and Ethereum and there are ETFs so I don't think that's true um so I'm just like scratching my head I'm like why get exposure this way as opposed to like traditional leverage vehicles or um yeah just if you wanted the leverage side or just like holding spot uh is still a little bit unclear in my head. Yeah, I to I mean personally I don't understand it either. I wouldn't touch these assets. If I wanted leverage on Bitcoin, there's other ways to do it directly, futures, options, and also I think that's a big part of why this market feels a little bit bifocated.

It's just because everybody knew that there's correlations between these assets hugely. Well, let me say there's correlations with all these assets to Bitcoin generally speaking, right? maybe not day-to-day but you know zoomed out a little bit and if you wanted higher beta exposure then just leverage Bitcoin just use you know futures just use hyperlquid you know just like I feel like that's that's been a big part of the reason unspoken about why you know there's been this diversion yeah and I I can't speak to like the continued like ongoing purchases of these things but you know like some of the Salana strategy companies like Janer was one. I mean, I bought some shares

and then tried to sell them 50% higher because you just look at the charts of all these things and they rip, you know, multiex off the announcement and then retrace the move. So, naturally, just like with meme coins, like that's going to attract some retail to get in there. Um maybe they hold it all the way back down. Okay, maybe they hold it back down. You end up with some bag holders and they're like, "No, I'm never going to exit this thing or whatever." But um yeah, it does leave me scratching my head a little bit of like like where is that continuous sustain bid for when you know you're already paying a premium outside of like the sort of announcement kind of hype cycle of it because once that like FOMO action already happens like you know there's been enough of these to know

what the chart's going to look like right and to that point the same thing kind of has happened with mining stocks. mining stocks used to be seen as like a leverage play. They used to trade at crazy multiples to NAVA and then now if you look at like you know I don't know maybe the five to 10 biggest ones they're all like 1 point something XNAV right so they're all still slightly trading above their premium but I mean that's how they're trading now like there you like what how much leverage can your A6 get me how much leverage can your supply chain logistics get me through Bitcoin and so maybe you know after the initial hype that's how we see some of these strategy stocks end up looking Yeah, I think that's fair. And we'll

see. I mean, we'll see them, you know, sailor, they've been cooking up all the different types of instruments that they can come up with in the wheelhouse to convince people that it's worth getting in there. So, I'm sure we'll see more uh cooking in the lab, I guess, if you want to call it that. Uh let's let's jump to something else, though. I think Dan, I'm curious for your takes here. Like, do we want to dive into some thoughts and some data on Ellipsus Labs? Like I think this has been an interesting topic that is not super like on the front of the timeline, but I mean they're cooking on a lot of different fronts and we have some great data. Uh I'd love for you to walk through it. Uh some of that data, but I guess the big thing I'll I'll lead in a little intro on Ellipsis. They

built Phoenix Trade which was largely used for like stable swaps as like an order book on Salana uh Phoenix exchange. I don't I don't know the exact terminology. It was it was a failed product. No, Daniel, let's let's I'm Ellips is a great team, but Phoenix did not work out as it should have worked out, which I think is why they went to Soulfi, which makes a lot more sense. Yeah, I was getting there. I wasn't saying it was great, but they started with Phoenix and then they built Soulfi and they're working on Atlas and now Gavl. So, uh I'll leave it to you, Dan, if you want if you want to run us through it. Yeah, for sure. So, uh, big fan big fan of this team, just to be

clear. Uh, and I think, um, they did a lot. Yeah, their origin story is super cool, right? Set out to build on Salana. It was, you know, the where you were supposed to come build an order book. That was really what was getting pushed as a narrative. And they went out and said, "Fuck it. Let's do it." uh and they built a great exchange at Crankslist order uh order book decks and realized that getting market makers to on board and provide tight spreads here was quite a challenge and and it was a challenge largely out of their control because landing transactions on Salana at the time was a total impossible task and uh there's no prioritization of cancels right so market makers were getting picked off and they were taking more risk is effectively the net net there and because of that they had to

quote their spreads wider And that means worse pricing, less flow, and it does that doesn't really work as smoothly as you may hope. Um, and so because of that, they said, uh, you know, they're also building an L2 called Atlas. Um, or another chain called Atlas. Uh, construction's still largely under wraps, and we don't really know exactly what it's going to look like, but, uh, it does seem to be an L2. Uh, and they have also continued building on Salana during this time, which is super interesting. Uh, Salana obviously has a ton of activity on it. So when you're building financial products, it's a really interesting place to go build it.

Um, so they basically took their lessons from, okay, if we are struggling with prioritizing uh market makers to uh cancel their quotes or move their move their bids, um, why don't we reshape what this AMM actually looks like? And so now they're using a liquidity priced uh sorry an oracle priced AMM where basically all of the liquidity in the pool responds to a single change in an oracle price uh instead of having to have a transaction come through and push the price. Right? So you think of just like a basic UNIV v2 UNIV2 pool. The price only moves when trades move through the liquidity. Right? And this like basically opens the door to toxic flow being a thing. Um, right. So, you

can imagine if there's a discrepancy between the price onchain and the price on a centralized exchange, uh, arbitrageers will come in and pull those two prices together. So, the chain kind of benefits because you get like the real price, if you will, in the pool. Uh, but the LPs suffer because they paid the price of that price moving. Um, and so with an oracle b an oracle price AMM like soulfi that they they built, uh, you can basically avoid the toxic flow because you don't need a trade to come through the pool in order to update the price. uh which is really cool in in terms of like LP profitability uh and so they're doing a pretty great job of this and you can see that transition right so this uh let's call this orange the orange line here or the orange bar represents Phoenix and you can see once

SFI launched that's like where a lot of the liquid liquidity went where a lot of the attention went um in terms of the development team and and pushing market maker liquidity there and now you're seeing that really drive a lot of volumes and we start unpacking what these volumes look like they're largely driven by majors Uh so SoulUSD and stable coin swaps are sort of the the large pieces here. And if we scroll down here, we have a table of the largest pools uh on both of these two exchanges. And you'll notice soul stable coin uh so there are three wraps USD pools uh and then USDC USDT drive a pretty meaningful majority of the volume. And the only time you really see memes come through, meme memecoins as liquidity pairs, is when they've sort of like graduated into

this like upper echelon of memecoin status, right? Like Farcoin, massive massive name, tons of liquidity, listed on centralized exchanges. Same thing with Trump, Popcat, uh, and some other assets as well. And so, it's been really cool to basically say, all right, we set out to build this product. We took in a bunch of data about why this thing didn't work, and we took that data and built a V2 that looks like that's a different product. Um, super cool to see that happening in real time. And then we can get into Gavl as well, but I'll pause there. Just like I like everything you just said, Dan. What I want to see now is the Salana Dex activity chart. Let's I want to see them in the context of other dexes. And then the question that I have and I want to ask is like now that they're like eating up market

share of stuff. Are is like your Orca is your, you know, Radium, is your LFinity, are some of these guys like are they screwed? like soulfi is coming to eat up all of these markets. Yeah, super interesting question. So, um are they screwed? It depends. So, are you screwed for major assets? Probably, right? Like LP liquidity is going to move into these AMM style P uh gosh the oracle price AMM style pools because LPS have better profitability. Volume is a really interesting metric for just a quick highle scan, right? It's like a revenue of a business, right? Just boom, like give me one quick number. What does it look like? Awesome. And can you do this in percent? I can't I can't understand a thing like this, bud. Yeah. Yeah. I I'll get into it. Um but uh volume's not like

a perfect measure, right? Because you need not all volume is good volume, right? Toxic flow generates huge amounts of volume, but the LPS are losing money and eventually you'll lose the LPS. Uh so we see obviously the meteoric rise in salana activity, trading activity over the last two years. Uh but zooming into which dexes have driven that uh and then so Picachio can really see this, we'll flip it to a percentage view here. Uh you can see that Sulfi basically appeared in October of last year. Let's call that six or so months ago. Um and now it's doing a very meaningful amount of total volume right up to 13 14%. And what's really interesting about this in my mind is if you zoom this out on even a broader time horizon, oops, let's go

four years and look at the monthly here. You can see how the uh as of like the last six or so months largely with the rise of pump fund becoming a huge uh driver of activity and then soulfi being this like next innovation of dex technology you see this shift away from uh a very concentrated market to actually a pretty diverse market where market share is actually you're having more players in the space take market share which is sort of u an goes against the grain of what most people would think a lot of these markets turn out to be right everything we talk we basically call every market in this industry, winner take all. Um, and yeah, we're seeing like real-time counter examples of that. We're also missing Oric on this chart. We need to index that and pull it in. It's a [ __ ] ton of data, but we're

working on it. Uh, they do a ton of stable coin, stable coin volume, and uh, the same style as a Sulfi AMM here. I like that. One thing I'll point out as well is like it's interesting. I think Meteora is that that red bar as well. And like they've kind of just been like quietly there. I wrote about this recently when talking about launchpads and like you know Meteora was there for the Trump launch the Millennia token launch like they snagged some of those partnerships they're powering believe app yeah I mean snag whatever you want to call it but you know landed those partnerships and same with believe and there is another one recently that the

name is not coming to me but um they've been like snatching up some of these like you would have expected maybe a different platform like a radium launch lab or like pump on pre-existing like to have been the one on top of the ball here to grab like new launchpad oriented products and it's just been like the meteor guys shipping. Yeah. So totally agree and we can see that their market share has risen over the you know last two or so years from let's call it 1% to about 12% as of last month which is yeah I think a testament to what you say and I think it's really interesting to see how dexes are moving closer to the users right so there's basically two users if you're a DEX you need issuers and you need traders um and if you think about something like soulfi

there isn't even a front end right it is strictly just the only thing it wants to do is serve the best price uh and so it has very strong integration with uh Dex aggregators, right? Because that's where the users actually have the relationship. Um so if you're a DEX aggregator, you really want to own the the actual front end that the user touches, right? This is where Jupiter is sort of the king of the town, but we're seeing a ton of diversification in this space as well. Commino has a Dex aggregator. Titan has a DEX aggregator. The Titan team is really intelligent. Uh and I'm pretty excited about the product they're building. Uh launch builder Titan. Uh different Titan. Different Titan. That's still very smart. Yeah. So, it's pretty cool to see that way happening. And then this

kind of gets into Ellipsus' most recent product, Gavl, is their way of getting closer to the issuer. So, Gavl is pretty cool. The idea is to have like a, you know, everyone talks about like uh internet capital markets on Salon, right? Like that's the idea of trying to get real tokens to launch on the chain, but it's really hard if you were like, let's say I was gonna launch a token for some business I was operating. uh doing that through like pump fund today isn't really a great way to do it. Like I can't like raise capital and then actually like get that capital. You can do some like weird things with trading fees and that's sort of like what Believe app is doing and it kind of works but it's also a little weird and not really as direct as like actually raising capital in in exchange for the

token. So uh they the team built out this this you know sort of like this suite of products called Gavl where you do a pre-sale. It can have various various mechanisms, right? You can say I'm trying to raise x amount of dollars. Here's the flat rate, first come, first serve. Uh you could do a Dutch auction or you could just say, you know what, just deposit into this for a 24-h hour period and you know, we'll divide out the tokens and that'll determine the price. Basically, any type of pre-sale you wanted. That removes the uh rush to be first, which is often in the token launch world referred to as sniping. Has some negative externalities, of course.

Uh, and then you take that pre-sale price and you launch it into an AMM and have the the ending pre-sale price be the starting AMM price, right? So there's no like rush to be first into the AMM because you could have just deposited immediately when the um immediately when the pre-sale closed and then they also using a sandwich resistant AMM. So they built this awesome technology around making that come to reality which is cool to see. Uh, and so the core idea here is that AMMs are not efficient. Hence why they built this or these traditional AMMs are not efficient. So why don't we use that as the launching point get the token produced and and onto the market and then they have this like basically deprecating period where the liquidity is withdrawn from uh the AMM and the intent is like to effectively graduate

into a more uh efficient AMM such as Sulfi. So as you really start to see their products all come together where tight integrations with aggregators to uh get that flow because their decks they believe will obviously have the best price. Um and then on the issuer side you create a system to bring like really strong assets into the ecosystem and that's what soulfi can list. Um so yeah super cool to see their product suite come together like this. Yeah, I think maybe just to close that off a little bit or if anyone else has thoughts, but like the big the next big question there I think is you've built out that infra for that flow is who's going to launch a meaningful token on there, right? They did their time. Yeah, they did their test token. So like now it's you know get get a meaningful

launch there and like let's let's I think we kind of need to see what happens, right? A lot of people are playing in this space. um them you know radium has launch lab and then their AMM as well and pump fun etc etc right so let's let's see a big an interesting launch and then kind of see how it goes but yeah I agree Dan it's like it's exciting and I think it's really interesting to just see them like quietly ship stuff and just like eat a bunch of market share and nobody was really aware of it cool well Bach pulled in Tulks uh he really wants to talk about infoi which is all over the timeline today it's all over ka metrics today um loud loudio baby loudio, whatever you want to call it. Um, it's all over the feed. We love incentivizing slop content for airdrops and rewards

and whatnot. Uh, let's dive into it. I do think I'm going to pull up just some tweets from M team. I think he just had some like funny topical points here and then we can dive in and I'd love to get your takes to we can go deep in it. Um, just going to pull this on screen real quick. But there, if you've seen anything about Loud or Ldio, it's been all over the timeline. Um there's been screenshots of it like eating 70 80% of the like mind share. Um according to Kao on on CT uh MT made kind of like a little bit of a funny here about you know Infinex took a strategic bet here on incentivizing mind share and it really paid off. 6 million in rewards and they're like a little blip on this screen relative wise. Uh and then his

other one was introducing Sencio. So just a complete counter to the the Laudio idea. uh give money to people, bribe people to uh to get loud people to shut the hell up. So yeah, um I think a lot of people are like annoyed about this, upset about it. Toes, we got you on to talk about this. I want I want your thoughts to kick us off. What is up with InfoI? Oh man, where do I start? First of all, good to see you fellas. Thanks for having me on. Um, no. I mean, even like that that Kato measure you have there. Like I it's funny seeing that going around and like you look at the other top protocols and it's like loud. Okay.

Yeah, they're incentivizing essentially to talk about them, but look at the other protocols on there. like is that anything worth like it just goes to my entire like I've been tweeting about a lot recently and I'm more so upset about like just kind of the state of CT and like how we're just I mean bots and AI and slop is already a big enough problem on social media and then instead of you know trying to solve that problem we're just leaning directly into it and more protocols are like oh yeah we'll just give away some more of our float in our tokens to incentivize people to tweet about our product project and then you look at the top the top yappers the top people on Loud IO like look at their

average followers like look at what they're doing to get to the top of the leaderboards like it's it's like quasi like paid group ref link shilling like hey comment on this like boost this I'll give you 25% of my allocation like this is it's the furthest thing from solving any problem and it's actually making everything worse um but just back to to the point of like the KO mind share the top gainers like okay loud openc sahara aai nansen layer edge mirror I'm not even sure what that is novas I'm not even sure what that is bitcoin osmo and party icons do any of you guys have any constructive comments on what any of

those are other than openc and loud obviously nson too non does some good data work too but like that is just to me like the point of this entire meta whatever it is like okay I get it you have a chance of turning point 2 soul into optimistic scenarios you know 10k plus like okay but what is the longevity of this like the mind share that it has is just it's just incredibly frustrating to me in the sense that there's so much behind the scenes like you know stablecoin infrastructure bills like there's you know there's good teams working on awesome stuff and like this just dominates the conversation and it's just incredibly frustrating to me.

Preach. You know what's the funniest thing about this thing too? I have zero idea what Lou does. All I know is that they're paying people to talk about it. And so it's like they're talking about people to talk about it. Yeah. So they can launch a token, right? And so it's like, okay, if I'm like a project really trying to uh and like build a build a real thing and have people and and pay a marketing budget, that's reasonable. Um, but me sitting on the other end of this is like let's say Ldio is exactly that. I I don't know what it does. You're like, it didn't accomplish the goal, which I think is the the odd part. And I could obviously go look it up, but like I think it's just kind of ironic that Yeah, we're at where we're at and I have

literally no idea. Yeah. Um like Infinex, what M team brought up is that Infinex paid them six mil in USD or they're like distributing six mil USD in rewards and they have 6% mind share. Wait, before we move on, what do they do? Can I know? Can somebody tell me? They So when you got to put your hands up as a box to determine to describe what it's about to do, that should be the first red flag. So you can tweet and if you include loud and loudio it you earn points on it and then they're going to have an public offering for the token and then if

you're in the top 1,00 you can put 0.2 soul and potentially see that number go up way high. It's crazy. So that's like the problem they're trying to solve is that the founder did not have enough dollars in his bank account and he realized this is a problem that we have to solve this year and they fully pivoted towards sol to be fair like that ultra guy that is launching it he had some pretty cool stuff that he built for me. Um, yeah. I I would also say that like he's he seems like a sharp guy and like I get it. It's like an experiment, but like and there's, you know, trading trading volume fees that are generated each week like go to the top. Like that's what's supposed to be the flywheel of it, but like I don't know.

You you see how this goes. Like it's just Yeah. Yeah. It's a raw incentive. They're directly I was just going to say he like they're directly playing on the gamification of what Kaido mind share is and just saying like okay we're going to directly use Mind share from Kaido to do the pre-sale like allocations for this ICO of a token and so naturally it's like I mean you you get exactly what you expected. I want to pull up a chart from uh a couple of weeks ago that I think is basically the same idea in a slightly different lens was boop.f fun. Um, where the whole idea was like get big creators to launch a coin on the platform to draw in eyes and that was the only way they could claim their airdrop. It's like the exact same mechanism from like a mind share

and like drawing uh eyeballs in um just the slightly different way that they went about it with like having a launchpad and making people launch tokens. But I I would imagine that the chart of like whatever Laudio is going to look like it probably ends up looking like this too. Yeah. more of don't hate the player, hate the game. No, no, definitely. I I hate the players in the games. Like, and again, part of it is like, you know, like everything you guys do like I mean kind of do it like independently. Like I appreciate the, you know, the research, the data that like goes into legit things and like looking behind the scenes like all it and then like something like this comes out and it's just like come on.

But then the other aspect too is like I don't think people understand enough like how I said about just like a quas like reflank paid group thing. Like look at the followers and the content they have on the top yapper leaderboard and the loud eye leaderboard. Like it's not like some like democratizing money thing like benefiting the small guys. Like it's it's all of the kind of the people that you would expect and people that have the largest followings. It's just like what what could possibly be the benefit of anything here? And like that's what I constantly come back to.

And like I do think there is like like if you squint like you could see KO's initial like they were the start of all this. And like I think when they launched the idea behind them like it it was pretty novel. It was pretty good. But I just constantly in the past few days like been thinking of like Goodart's law like when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure. Like now you're just measuring mind share. Like it's just everything about it is just toast because it becomes gamified. And then you see articles on like you know on X and just threads about like how best to farm 100K on Kato, how best to do this, how best to optimize your audience. Like and it's just like what are we actually doing here? Like none of this [ __ ] is it could

have started out as like somewhat relevant and like a good thing to like build towards, but now it's just like you're just gamifying everything and incentivizing slop in an era where slop is already [ __ ] everywhere. Like we don't need to incentivize it. I promise you there's enough slop out there. One other thing is that like two two things. One is Twitter has already gone to [ __ ] Like everybody I know is just in private chats talking to each other. No, I feel like nobody meaningfully uses Twitter the way that they used to anymore. Um, the second thing is I can't imagine that this is good for Kaido because as you mentioned, it's like very clearly deviated from the original purpose and the purpose was to have like help with

marketing or identify social thought leaders which is already a bad thing but like and reward them. And now it's just something completely different, which I I I can't imagine that like a team will look at that and say, "Holy [ __ ] like this is a fantastic opportunity for us. We're going to put 15 million." In your guys opinion, it's going to get worse, right? Because there's other apps building on top of Kao. I mean, look at noise, right? The whole idea is to start a trade and, you know, bet on what's going to be the most, the trending stuff. And now you add that other financial layer on top of it, too. like it it's it's only going to get worse. Well, in your guys' opinion, it's only going to get worse.

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, the most frustrating part is like like Infinex like their initial like whatever like marketing budget, whatever you want to call it, marketing push, whatever on there, like it it was a pretty good idea. Like, you know, it maybe benefited them pretty marginally, but like I'm still it I'm still skeptical about how much it created long-term users. And it reminds me a little bit of like the daily active addresses that like people would cite for forever. Like these are when you incentivize people to talk about things like they're just in my mind like metrics that that don't matter. Like you it's the same thing with like a points program like and the only difference with a points program is that like you at least had to put up capital and take smart contract risk and there would be

some like linear distributions where like the small guys would end up close to like the big guys in a sense. like there was disproportional rewards in a good way and this is just the entire opposite. Um, so yeah. And I mean what you said Mark about like just the entire like it's only going to get worse. Like it just reminds me of every other meta we've had. Like it reminds me of the AI meta, you know, like initially like GOAT and AI6Z and yeah um whatever else. Like I said this in the Xerox Research chat the other day like it's just to me like any other shitcoin meta and that's going to weigh on KO because the more slop that uses it like the less valuable it becomes. Yep. I I agree. I so I and I actually think the AI agent cycle is actually very comparable here because

there was a day where that simply ended, right? And it was not a very long period of time. And I think everybody is looking at this through the same lens that we're discussing right now. Um yeah, you're muddying the public pool. Like our water cooler kind of sucks now because Twitter's largely unusable. If I get tagged in another like top like you just there just 10 names of people that are on a some random Yap leaderboard, it's like the most frustrating thing in the world. I block everybody instantly. I cannot stand it. And I it's a it's useless to block these people, but I do it anyways because it's my it's my way of fighting back against the establishment. It's so tiresome. Some tweets this week without [ __ ] on it.

And there were literally just replies like, "Hey man, I need one more smart follower for the KO level two." And I was just like, are you kidding me? Yeah. I saw uh Osprey, a good friend of mine, Xerox Osprey, he like had responded to somebody who did that. She's like, you're the reason why this app sucks. And then they deleted the tweet. I'm like, maybe that's the right approach. Uh, so I don't know. I I And I think if you're a CMO, right, at one of these protocols, dude, you have got to be looking at it. Like, yeah, sure, you got the big green box on Kaido, but everybody knows exactly what's happening. Like, what is this actually doing for you? Not super convinced that uh it's it's doing a lot. And I So, I think that'll be the the fixing function here.

Well, before we talks, before we have to let you go, can you give a thought on your mark? Can you give your thoughts on the market right now? I feel like we really brushed over that at the very beginning and you are actually relatively in tune with everything. Um, yeah, I'm I'm a little more cautious right here. Um, I mean, you see the 2020 fractals out there and I think that's a bit hyperbolic. Um, but I do think, you know, we're we're breaching new all-time highs, right at new all-time highs, and every possible bullish announcement in the world, every treasury company, the president's company announces a treasury, the um, and what happens, you

know, we go down 3%. Like, I don't know. I'm I'm a little more I should say there I haven't sold any spot yet. Um, I considered it last night. um you don't want to take one day as um you know some signal and maybe I should have but uh yeah I'm just I'm just very cautious like all these treasury companies like it it honestly like there are similarities between it and what we were just talking about with KO and all the slop [ __ ] like it can only go so far before the meta ends and there's bills that come due. Same thing with the AI agent meta. Like it's it's every shitcoin meta that we've ever seen in the trenches. Like there's Micro Strategy like that was, you know, the market leader and then all of these

derivatives start coming up. They start pulling mind share for Micro Strategy. Micro Strategy starts suffering as a result. And then the derivatives go to zero as they should. And then the leader that was the leader that was fine um ends up, you know, going down 25, 35, 45, 50%. Like I'm not saying Micro Strategy would do that. Um but to me there's just a ton of similarities between what we see in the trenches and every meta that appears to what is happening with the Treasury companies now. Um and so I'm I'm a I'm a smidge worried about that. That's more of a you know like three six month like year thing like um that aspect. But um outside of that like you know I mean the the hype rally has been good. Buck don't

smile at that. Um, I do think I do think the soul hype chart and soul underperformance recently is a little bit interesting. Um, I've been a pretty vocal soul bull since, you know, like 23 when it was sub $15, but I do think it is kind of interesting, especially with soul strategies like being very public about what they've announced and how they're acquiring soul and it's still kind of weak. Um and then I think ETHBTC like rallying in recent weeks is kind of significant in the sense that if we are towards the top which I don't want to necessarily like saying in fact like that is kind of the cycle that happens is BTC runs up all these treasury companies announce price doesn't move

any further then ETH BTC goes up each show strength alts go up and then what happens it's not good um so just I'm a little I'm a little cautious right now. Um I think you know in the area that we're at like we're not that far below all-time highs. Like you can just kind of relax and chill and if we reclaim them and go up then like yeah fullback risk on but until then like there's no reason to be forcing anything. Um and so yeah that's kind of how I'm looking at things right now. Love it. Thanks for hopping on folks. no reason to go full James Max win on the charts, which he was definitely forcing it a little too much and it didn't work out for him. So, I think that's probably

good advice. Anything final you want to say to the listeners before I abyss I put you into the abyss? No, no, not really. Uh, attention fight zero. Uh, I don't know. I'm looking I'm looking to short KO eventually. Um, and that's about all. That's very good talks. I appreciate you, fellas. Yeah, appreciate you. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, take care. Byebye. Okay, Tulsy, my favorite legit, you know, he comes on the pod every once in a while. He's supposed to come on more, but I think he's sold the top and he just won't answer my messages. Hey, I

come on the podcast like I can't. He has too many figs for fig, man. He doesn't really The lion doesn't really need to listen to the small dog. Definitely does. But he's one of those like I don't think I see him on Twitter anymore. And that's why I always bring up like people don't really go on Twitter like people who actively trade the market which I think Tulks does. Um they don't really they're not really on Twitter anymore which is partly because of Kaido. Let's not put all the blame on them but like it's always also been like that. Like Twitter's always been a hellscape where it's like this is how you can grow your portfolio from a thousand dollar to 100. I was gonna say the same thing at one point. Like it's always had a little bit of that that just feels way more pronounced now. Like

uh there's those consistent bot replies where it's like this is the smartest guy I've ever seen in my life and then it tags some random account. I'm like okay I cannot take this anymore. Yeah. Yeah, I will say the AI stuff like on the timeline has been a crazy change up to how things used to be. There's always been some amount of bots, but I think like obviously we had the AI meta and that like contributed to it. Lots of people made accounts to specifically do that. I mean AIXBT is still a decent sized account. Um, and they they definitely are like way more of a presence than they have ever been. It would be great to have a a Kaido metric of like percent of mind share that's bots because that I'm sure it's high.

Um Mark, did you want to talk about virtual since we're still mentioning AI or were you meing because I'd love some virtual stakes. I was kind of meing. Um Dan was saying that AI is basically, you know, it had its moment in the sun and now it's kind of dead and I just commented well except for virtuals. It just had this resurgence recently and I think it's just because they changed it did something with the tokconomics VE virtuals and like if you look at revenue or who's pulling it up? Somebody's pulling it up. If you look at revenue versus price in recent weeks, it's just a total mismatch. But again, it's just it's speculation because I think if you if you stake it and I will admit I did stake mine for like a week just to just

to see what's up. Wait, before Mark, one sec. He's just testing. Don, can we start adding price charts onto these because I just realized it would make so much sense if we just added a price chart. Yeah, it's probably a good good idea. Anything. Great idea. Sorry, Mark. Your point though, like I I love looking at historic revenue chart and it's like, oh, that's what it used to look like. And then you zoom way, you're like, okay. It's like 2K a day on pace for a little under a million a year. But like this is why I'm still interested, right? They have 14 15 million dollars of of Bitcoin chilling on.

Should we talk? It's almost like we're getting back to treasury strategies. So it's how many billion and it has how many million? So what's the virtuals? Am I buying it or not? I don't I I haven't I've never bought this coin. I'm not going to lie. When AI stuff was happening, I was exclusively buying stuff on Salana. Let me look. Oh, it looks pretty good, dude. I'm not going to lie. This crazy up 4x off the lows right now. That's pretty insane. Holy. No, man.

The only I'm not super versed here, but the only thing I saw was that their their new lot of red tokconomics stuff is like, you know, lock and max stake your stuff for four years to then be eligible for airdrops. But then you have to like that's that's the ideal way of can I say something? If you're if you're a protocol that's launching like a lock and stake mechanism, you want to make it like that because idiots will lock it. Like including me, people will lock it for four years. like, oh, at four years you get a 30x bonus. Fantastic. I'm going to lock it. Slide the lever up.

So, if you are that type of person, you could. It's the ultimate retail trap, which is why it tends to work pretty frequently. But I think the downside is when they lose their mo their mojo. Like, you have a very awful following couple of years ahead of you. Yeah. I mean, for the for the retail, it's horrible. Um, for the project that's fantastic because you for the unlockers it's great for the you know supply that's vesting. Yeah. Um, I see things like VE Pendle. You lock your Pendle but then they have like liquid versions of it to get around it anyway. And so I just wonder why doesn't that become more popular and then what's

the point of locking anything anymore? You take the liquidity risk, right? Like you still take a cut for doing it. I think you're like you're trading to the liquid version and you're probably taking some some shaving off the the Am I able to add Ryan to this, Danny? Just cuz he's in the stage. I'm worried he's getting more and more upset that we're not adding him. Yeah. Why is he Put your camera on, Ryan? Ryan, can I see your face? Thank you for adding me. I was getting more and more upset as I sat in backstage. Very good. I should What's going on?

Good. We're talking about tokens. Any buys from you these days? Wait, mine's great for the deck. We were just talking about AI, Ryan. AI crypto. What What are your thoughts right now? Like virtuals is up off the bottom, but like their numbers don't look great. What are what's your feeling on the category? And yes, you sound lovely. Yeah, we um when we did our analyst hours um maybe it was two analyst hours ago um I I did the AI section and we talked about how AI was going to go viral in both the enterprise and for the consumer like for the first time really like kind of bigger than the chat G GBT moment and I think that that's happening. So like as a

consequence of that, we thought like kind of the second order impacts would be like yeah um I beta crypto stuff is going to do well. Like I'm sure Zerbro is doing well right now, right? I'm sure it's multiples off the lows um because like so many people are short these things or just not exposed. But I think one of the only one of the few fundamental plays that exists in the market that like actually has some fundamental floor in crypto AI is grass which has done really really well uh lately and I don't know I wish Dan should but he's um he's kind of our expert on the fundies there and it's it's not trading at a unreasonable valuation. So I like grass.

I also like grass just I love that something I want to add on AI and I I shared this internally but um for the live streams actually playing around with getting some like little animations for the intro outros and I just messed around with Google Gemini's V3 model and it is surprisingly robust and quick. Um so let me pull this up. I'll just show some examples that I was playing around with, but I was asking it to come up with like some simple loopable animations for this live stream and I gave it some like basic concepts and like a graphic to work off of and it did a really good job like little scrolling monitor through a social feed starting soon. One with like

some static and then another one just the starting soon. Oh, that noise is awful, though. Yeah, it's pretty insane to see how far these have come along in such a short period of time. Uh, and like I don't know about you guys, but my crypto friends obviously super in tune with what's happening in AI. Uh, my non-crypto friends all working like, you know, intelligent people doing just different things adjacent to like finance or, you know, literally any other regular person, any other wage cook job. Uh but uh why the [ __ ] I couldn't help it. That kid in the little car doing his little uh Tik Tok

is just burned into my head. It's terrible. I know. 9 to5 9 to5 9 to5 9 to5 95 wagi. Exactly. No, I'm kidding. They're my good friends doing great things in the world. Um super unaware of like what's happening in in AI on a relative basis. Like yeah, that chat GPT thing like should I be like using that? I'm like, you're going to get out competed real quick by the rest of the world. It's insane. Can I say something true? Like I'm I Sorry, I'm seeing like I mean Chad Tribute with 450 million weeklys and I think Meta AI with a billion. Uh Sam even like I think he let it slip um in an interview that GBT might actually

have a billion monthlies. Like kind of everyone I know is using this thing now. like you know my wife listens to like like I don't know like like like very like uh female ccentric podcasting and they're all referring to it and they all call it chat like chat's becoming a verb like ask chat. Um so it seems to be having a consumer moment to me. So I don't know I I feel like the opposite is happening for me with my um with my for my wage cook friends. You can't spell my friends dumb. That's all I I think it's ubiquitous, but I don't know if I would agree entirely with the take, Ryan.

Like, I would almost question the user numbers like we question them in crypto. Like, are those actual front-end users or is that like API use from an app that gets businesses to click on it 50,000 times a day? Um, so I don't know what the front end user profile looks like, but I will say like at least for me out in the real world, like I hear plenty of people who are like, "No, I like my work is asking me to use chat GBT now and I don't want to." Like there are I think there are people with like an ideological, you know, stance against it. Like that's what I've been seeing is people who are like, "Holy [ __ ] this is like ruining the world. It's destroying our water sources. It's killing the beavers." Like there's a whole class of people who are completely against chat

GPT and AI in general more than anything else. It's like they had crypto first and then they were like [ __ ] NFDs and then now it's like holy [ __ ] AI is going to kill your baby, stop using it. Like that whole class has become more and more pronounced. Although that might be because I'm very online and I'm just seeing a lot more of that. oftentimes if I just talk to regular people, they're like, "Yeah, I'll like I I ask it questions if Google can't find it." And I feel like that's probably the the most like regular user now, but nobody's running the Daniel Smith deep research into the claw to figure out a prompt and then run through the APIs. Well, I think people in tech are right. Like if you're in tech, it's

come to a point where like companies are expecting this like the output required or just like you're doing it because it saves you so much time. Um, but yeah, like I don't know. I don't know if like your everyday McDonald's employee or like your office worker is is doing that quite yet. Just look in the app store. Chad Chai Chubt is the I believe it's the number one app in the app store today. Um, or actually perhaps it's number three. I think Tik Tok's number one, Instagram's number two, and then Chai Chubt is number three. Um, and that that's that's consumer right there, right? So I in terms of download. So it's pretty impressive. AL also how you use it too.

Sam Alman gave an interview I think maybe a couple of weeks ago talking about I'm paraphrasing here. He said that um boomers use it as Google, millennials use it for life advice and then Gen Z's use it as an operating system. Yeah. And and I think it you get more and more usage as you go down the line. And then I mean this the thing people I don't I'm I've never been I used to I think I watched a CGP Gray YouTube video about 11 years ago and I started to worry about AI and it never came and maybe I was too much into the weeds in it and then this fear about AI replacing jobs has been going on for the better part of a decade at least in my circles and I feel like AI doesn't replace jobs. People who use AI replace

people who don't use AI. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I I do think that there's definitely going to be some it's turned into an AI pod now, and I'm definitely not qualified to talk about demographic shifts. But in my mind, what would make sense is that the junior that we have right now, it gets limit like the junior entry level jobs, it gets limited from whatever, like we're hiring 100, it goes down to 50 because you still need to hire some to grow them. Um, but I think it'll end up opening up different jobs in different fields. So, it'll be fine. It'll just be like whatever the internet did. Um, minimum wage is known for the white collar jobs. Yeah, it's over. It's over for the wage hooks as Daniel Smith would love to say, the nineto-fs, man.

Yeah, I I just totally agree with Mark's point about how you use the how you use it is like just night and day, right? you just like replace Google for give me a recipe for chicken parm or whatever like okay that's fine but you didn't like change anything versus you can if you're like on the complete other end of the spectrum building your own agents on NAN like okay yeah you're gonna be able to do crazy things that you wouldn't have been able to do before and by consequence be a better like a more productive participant in society yeah bringing up Google's a great a great point like I I think we saw data Um, we we shared it in one of the groups where Google searches are down like 40.

Yeah. Year-over-year. Like that is a that is a chat GBT llm phenomenon. That's not um that's not organic. Like that that's just that's not data, right? That's that's market share right there. I made every time my friends say they're going to Google something, I've made fun of them enough calling them a boomer that now they just use AI. Yeah. Be the change you want in the world. It's it's integrated now. like you don't even need to think about it because I most like it's they've got the AI companion thing right there. You don't even have to like bother with going to the right front end. Yeah. I will say one thing the Google AI on the like if you Google something the AI that Google gives you is horrible. I don't think it's like the

top model Gemini or something because it's just bad. It always gives you the wrong answer. Um for speed, right? There's like a difference when in the models for what their utility is. And if I search something on Google, I I mentally have do not have the patience for an 03 style or Gemini 2.5 style load time there. Like that's not what I'm doing. Um I only use for every question. Like burn down. You're the one burning down the trees and actually every time you click run on an 03, it actually produces a plastic straw and drops it into the ocean.

No, he's burning $10,000 a day on his queries. Yeah. How to make chicken parm 03 deep research. Let's [ __ ] figure it out. I don't want anything not good. What What I think is crazy is like it I said this the other day too about the video models, but like what I find wild too is like I think it's going to we're getting near to the point where you can say, "How do I make chicken parm?" And like it's not going to give you the the list anymore. Like you're going to get the video model and it's going to make you the how-to video like on the fly that like you would have previously had to go to YouTube to find that some guy who like knows about a piece of equipment is like, "Okay, you open this

thing and then you flip these switches and then there you go." Like a model is going to be able to just do that for you, which is a crazy crazy thought. Yeah. the um the other kind of like second and third order consequences there is like on demand content. Um and um I I hate that one. I know exactly what you're going to say. I hate that one. Before you say it, I'm just going to say it right now. I hate this one. Please continue. Say more. No, because I know what you're going to say. You're going to say on demand slop. And I just like it it puts the fear of God in me that my children might have to be like show me funny. Like even Coco Malone I think is a step too far. No, he's what he's going to say is revealed

versus stated preference and then he's going to mo you in three years. Revealed versus stated preference. Box an idiot. It's all going to come down to But the thing is that that's the only thing that I'm like consistently worried about is people's brain functions going down and down and down. That's it. I'm terrified to be asking this, but what is Coco Malone? Dude, you have a kid. Yeah, I don't know what that is. Coco Coco Melon is a kids show. It's a kids show. It's like it's pure. There's a meme here. Here's the thing. There's a meme. If you literally look it up on TikTok and it's like people play this intro song and then their kid like runs across the room and they're like, "Oh my god, it's Coco

Melon time." Like it's a a well-known thing. That's full of Daniel Smith's. No, Daniel. Go back to the Coco Malone. All right. All right. All right. Ryan, I'm so sorry I cut you off. So, please. No, it's fine. I mean, this is um the only other point that I wanted to to make was um like you already kind of get on on demand slop. Like that's what Tik Tok is. And what what I think is really interesting is that they bought they they had a $2 billion order for GPUs from Nvidia. Uh perhaps it was 18 months ago.

That's probably fully filled by this point. Um, like you could see the creator kind of get disintermediated, right? Where like these, you know, Tik Tok, YouTube, uh, uh, and Meta all have massive creator funds at this point, hundreds of millions or even in the billions of dollars. Um, they don't want to pay that money. So to kind of disintermediate some of the creators and kind of generate their own content as they do with like generating their own ads like they've completely um they've completely, you know, automated the marketing stack where you don't even need a marketing team. You can just go straight to Meta. They'll run the ads and they'll do the optimizations for you and guarantee you an ROI. They're

probably going to do the same thing with the content on the platforms and and verties that content stack. So, um, and just a lot of really interesting changes in the market that I think are make me they get me really excited, even more excited about the mega caps going forward. With Ryan talking just now on Coco Malone video playing, I felt like I was watching one of those Tik Tok subway sofa videos. Yes, mission accomplished. We We're going to have to clip that and add it to the slop feed. Um, it's inevitable. That's where all content's going.

Yeah, I I will admit that I am being the lite here and kind of like the angry man yelling at the cloud. I am just I am just a man though. So if watching this and judging me, just know that I'm just a man who has fears as well. I think you make a good point though, Bach. like um actually Westy recommended me a book recently called Accelerando or Accelerando whatever you want to call it and it's the early chapters of this book go into a future where AI technology becomes very pervasive and people basically literally offload their brain power to agents that go and search and like think of things and then come back to them with answers.

Um so like some maybe hyper accelerated version of what we're doing already. Um, and it just like goes further and further along that path to where like the body, like the human bodies become meaningless because it's all just like offloaded to computing and people end up becoming like should I just upload my consciousness into a computer and just be a robot? Um, so you know there there's some future here where it's like if people are offloading literally everything about their lives and their thought patterns to uh something else then yeah I mean there's like a tangible concern there about you know what the hell are we doing?

I like it's very easy to be dystopian. I could point to most technological revolutions uh and they are and they're like very um very clearly net positive for society. Um you know even like with the um you know the you know the depression and teens or whatever that you're seeing today which is arguably due to either mobile or social or some combination of the two. um the benefits of uh the internet on on productivity, pro productivity and um and health and human human wellness and just like human connection I think far outweigh that. Um like because at the end of the day like humans want to like just live better

lives and that's just kind of their their optimization function. So like I'm like it's very easy to be dystopian but I I think everyone like for the last people very dystopian about the future have been just you know been very wrong. I'm not I'm not willing to bet against that trend like like what you're essentially talking about is the singularity and like you know you know fusing human brains with computer interface and like that is allowing people like like neural links like solving blindness and um allowing parapollegics to like control computers with their mind and and hopefully like solving uh neurological disabilities

like that's that's pretty optimistic to me. Yeah, I agree with you, Ryan. I'm uh I'm not a uh an anti- AI person by any means, but I think to your point, I mean, you brought up some of the negatives of like social media and the internet. Um, you know, I'm I think maybe we're I mean, Bach can speak for himself, but I think he's just coming from the like, you know, you get plenty of people who are just like, "Yep, AI, it's all 100% 10,000% good." Like, there's no problems. There never will be. Um I think he he's are he pushing back against that idea a little bit like you know there's going to be downsides.

I think it's it's reasonable to expect there some downsides. I think with in general with any new form I mean this is definitely not something that I should be speaking on just like my personal opinion could be very wrong but in general I think with any new technology or like new upgrade um what ends up happening is that there's a there's people who can't necessarily control themselves um either due to financial reasons or due to other reasons and they get like very ingrained and reliant on a certain piece of technology and it's you're essentially labbotomizing like a population, a certain percent of the population every time because you're like removing this skill that they have. Um, think of how many people can't do basic math in their

head and rely on calculators. Like it's I know it doesn't seem particularly important and it probably won't be like in the end if we have the singularity like Ryan said and everybody can just do whatever they want in their head. That's a completely different thing. If you're Have you guys read over that article that's like high schoolers um no senior English English majors in college can't read anymore for longer than like 30 pages. That kind of stuff is like because they're reliant on the internet or on chat GPT or everything and it's like you're losing basic functions that you don't want to allow people to lose if that makes sense. It's a stupid fear and it definitely shouldn't hold anybody

back from saying like AI is fantastic because it is. It's just like I think you have to think about people um in general as well and say, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't let everybody have access to this all the time." I think you're seeing this as well. They're not letting in like computers and exams anymore. I saw this thing about like pen and paper back in school. I think that's like pretty good way to fix that. Like you're forcing people to do things. Um, does that make sense? I'm not I think you're pointing out I think you're I think you're pointing out a reality that um human like humans have a you know a corrective nature, right? It doesn't just like descend into pure negativity like it like there there's like it for lack of Yeah. Humans have a

corrective nature where like if something's going wrong they'll eventually try to fix it. Um, so like just like education, like in the examples that you that you um cited, like education is changing to adapt and like I think you're seeing it right now with people tracking screen time and applications um targeted at minimizing screen time and um individuals who have experienced the downsides of social and mobile that they're they're now making concerted efforts to, you know, take some time away from these devices that may be hurting their attention. And perhaps it's taken a little too long than others would hope, but I think you're seeing it happen in real time.

You can even look at the the time spent on mobile actually. Um, and I didn't think that this was going to happen, but it actually peaked in 2023. So, people are actually like taking um, you know, the the necessary measures to to write these wrongs or the downsides of technology. And I think humans are pretty pretty good at saving themselves. That's shocking. I would have never guessed that. I I brought this counter. Sorry. I was I was gonna Yeah, I was gonna prop up Ryan just to say like there's been like a counter trend of like uh limited devices like no screen or just like one button on it or like it only runs one app type thing. Not that it's big, but I think it plays into what he's saying.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly nothing phone but but on the count end of it like in the UK they're starting schools with what they call AI enabled teaching where they want to have teacherless courses and I'm you know so in on the other end it seems like students might some students at least might be getting more of the screen time and we'll see how that goes. Well, I I I think that's what you want, right? Like there there's there's plenty of reproducible evidence across across countries and continents that shows that um one-on-one learning is is it can move test scores by like two standard deviations, which is huge, right? That that takes you that you know that that makes an average student become a well above average student. Um, so you could

really see um like large shifts in um learning patterns because children will finally get to have one-on-one tutoring, which is only which is really only possible for like the wealthiest people on the planet, right? Like I never experienced one-on-one tutoring and I think, you know, I I personally would have been much better off if I if I had a chance there. You're perfectly where you are, Ryan. That's what I was about to say. You're perfect, man. Don't worry. Um, no, but Ryan, I brought this up a few months ago and you gave me the revealed versus state of preference thing, but there is clearly a shift away. Like in my circles at least six months ago, eight months ago, there were people saying, "I've completely quit." Um, social media, I'm putting my phone down. I'm trying to

leave XY Z. Um, I think we'll just see more and more of this. Um, even our very own Jack Kubernet, he loves flexing it, but he goes around with his little flip phone. Hey guys, I have my flip phone. And he just pulls it up. I think he gave up social media a few years ago. So, it's definitely getting there. Corrective. Yes. Um, it's taking the issue there is like clearly companies want people to keep using their phone or their product or their app or whatever. So, they're going to want to push for it. This is I think the only place where I might be like we need a bit of regulation. Please don't kill me, Ryan. We we need a we need a crypto app that um you deposit crypto into. You earn yield so long as you're

not on your phone and you get slashed if you, you know, break whatever time function you put on it and then the rewards go to the people who stayed off their phone. I'll just use my second phone. Yeah, I've got to work on the cryptoeconomic game theory of it all. I might need some ZKTLS and uh some FHE and perhaps some game theory, but um but I think the idea is sound. You have to scan your eye, get your orb, get your orb scan done and then you can participate. Yeah, I scan. they need like your your uh I IP address like got to verify that that's like the only device you're on. It I think it would be

a little involved, but I like the idea because there's people playing around with like the similar idea with like fitness apps, right? Like put some pull some money together and if you like do your workouts, you get the payouts. Yeah, I perhaps you can um integrate some um yeah there it's interesting what you'll be able to do with fitness devices and and tokens I think because that's kind kind of like a proof of humanity right like a fitness device will be able to tell whether or not you're connected or not and yeah I don't know perhaps there's something there love it then um if nobody has any other big thoughts I think we can we can call it on AI. That was a pretty good I think

first successful live stream for Xerox Research. Glad you guys all made it on. Bach, you're going to say something. Yeah, let's do a permission list really quick because I know people are going to log off the moment that we said that. Guys, permission list is in Brooklyn June 24th to June 26th. Please come. I work on a commission basis and anybody who uses code 0x10, I get at least three to five soul per sign up. So, please use code 0x10 to come to Brooklyn permissionless June 24th to 26. I don't get commission. So, if you hate me, you can still buy the ticket. Um, come to permissionless 0x10 June 24th to 26. I I don't know if we're Can we Danny, can we pull up the Can we pull up the What? The

link, man. The link. They're gonna write books about that and and how to how to market yourself right there. That was a beautiful Bacio. I'm uh code dunk code dunk. Wow. Code dunk tank. Maybe not because I couldn't say it. No, we don't have that. Yeah. Now people are going to be confused. They're going to press dunk tank. Comments. Every other letter is lowercase, too. There we go. Code is at the bottom. Blockworks.coeventionless dash.

That's four in Roman. Ivy, come. It's going to be fantastic. I'm going to wrestle Daniel Smith. Um, on the main olive oil, it's going to be good. Oiled up. All right. They'll get on the mechanical bowl. We'll drop him in the dunk tank afterwards. It'll be a wild and wacky event. Yep. Definitely come out, see us there. We want to see you guys all there. Uh, thanks for coming on today, guys. Anything exciting before we close up? Anything wacky going on this weekend or no? Just going to be quiet, disconnect from devices like we all just said we are trying to do now. Probably be glued to the screens trading 100x leverage on Hyperlid. Yep. Hyperlid.

Also, Hyperlid doesn't offer 100x leverage. That's how I know you're not. That's how you know it's not true. That's how I know you're not a true believer. Um, they actually have to bring down leverage, just FYI, from 45x to 40x. Light work. Um, okay, awesome. Thanks for coming on, guys. Good up. We will uh try to do this again soon. Hopefully next week. We'll see. Make it a regular thing. I had We're We're working on it. I think it's going to be regular. Maybe Fridays, maybe not. Working it out.

I think this was a good run and uh yeah, we'll definitely make it. This is going to be a more regular thing and maybe even more cadence and more time. We'll see. All right. Awesome. Let's uh we'll call it there. Pull up end screen and uh we'll close out. Cheers. Can you play the music again though? Yeah, I'll do that. I'll do the music. No, you need the ducks, baby. Oh, [Music] Danny. Dude, more people are coming in now with the music.

Yeah, it's over, guys. Thanks for watching. We need to get I'm working on the updated graphics for this that are going to say thanks for watching soon. CTM, guys. Please start leaving so we can leave. I'm just I want that the show's over. I want that number to hit 130 0 and I like the song. It's good. [Music] Are these tunes AI generated? I have no idea.

It's an absolute eater, though. It's a a mega banger. All right, we're going to call it there. Thanks for watching, guys. We'll see you all next time. [Music]