Market Outlook, Tom Lee's Size, and the Launchpad Narrative Revival | Livestream

Transcript

What's up, guys? Just wanted to give a quick shout out to today's sponsor, Apptos. We'll hear more about how Bitcoin, DeFi, and Apptos is heating up later today. But for now, let's get into the episode. Nothing said on Xerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is forformational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Pocachio, Ryan, and our guests may hold positions in the company's, funds, or projects discussed. Welcome, welcome welcome welcome welcome welcome back Ox Research Live. It's Friday the 15th of August.

Uh, I'm joined by two esteemed guests today. Uh, and we should have, uh, assuming he does not completely rug me. Um, one more to join us later. But, Tolks, Ian, how are you gentlemen doing on this wonderful Friday morning? just begging Sailor to bid. But uh other than that, pretty good. Um some interesting PA today. Um >> but yeah, >> seems like Sailor's struggling to compete with uh Tom Lee's size. They're having a little bit of a size battle, huh?

>> Yeah. Going going band for band, but yeah, I mean you can even see it in the uh uh I'm sure Dan will talk about it, too, but just the volumes traded and then I mean the ETF flows, too. like it's been kind of uh it's been pretty wild how how ETH has has flipped BTC and kind of a a uh a sizable amount the past, you know, week, two weeks. Um it's been interesting. I don't think the market, especially Bitcoin is the biggest fan of it. Um but you kind of kind of deal with what you're dealt There he is. I was wondering I was like that's a nice new picture you got there today.

>> There's our gentleman. How are you doing Ian? >> I'm doing well. >> I just see your face. So happy to be here. >> You must be at an undisclosed location. This is not the typical uh >> It's not my typical shitty lighting apartment. >> Looks like Looks like downtown Ohio. >> It's It's close. It's close. >> Welcome to downtown Ohio, man. It's It's great out here. I'll tell you what. That's >> It certainly is. that's quietly become even though I think it's been uh too long and that was too small of a meme that's like become one of my favorite uh memes to toss out there now >> mostly because I think it flies over people's heads that uh what is being said there

>> that there's just a downtown Ohio there's no cities there's just one downtown >> as if there's only one >> entire state >> one downtown it's a it's a great reference yeah we all we all live in downtown Ohio if you don't live in downtown Ohio then you live you live out in the farms that's pretty much all there is to to Ohio. >> Downtown Ohio or the coastal those are your two options. >> Cornfields or or downtown. So, um it's good though. You can you know you can make a living honest honest work out here. Um before we get anywhere, I do want to say a quick thanks to Apptos for sponsoring today's stream. We'll hear about them more later as well as DS uh D London coming later this year in October. Uh reminder for folks out there that want to join us at DAS, hear from

uh different institutions and great speakers uh and people from Blockworks of course and you know Block Works adjacent uh you can get 100 pounds 100 I love saying getting 100 pounds off. It's hilarious. Get 100 pounds off tickets. Uh find links at the at the Dash site. Um use code 0x100 instead of 0x10 which it typically is for 10% it is 100 pounds. Um, so hopefully we'll see you there. >> Is that is that why prices are down? Because we're quoting things in pounds now. >> Yeah, we're uh we're doing all charts relative to to pounds now. No, no more USD. I think uh Fins Fain is going to struggle if we if we force him to do pounds on all the charts, though.

>> He's already beaten down. >> Yeah. To begin with. >> Awesome. Well, I guess we're uh I didn't mention him, but Dan Smith will be joining us a little bit later and then we'll get into some discussion. He's he's very amped up. I'll say he's been talking about Tom Lee's girth in the order book. I don't know why he's choosing that terminology, but you know, BMR, they've been doing crazy things. Uh buying a ton of ETH, selling a ton of BMR, um as they do. Uh outside of that, I guess I'd be curious to know because I don't usually get to ask this question.

What are you guys looking at? What are you interested in in the markets today? Are there any like new apps, new coins, old coins that are peing your interest? Like what are we what do we have our eye on right now? I think the obvious attention suck right now is just all of the dats, but I think outside of that, like when you look into like protocol specific things, um, anyone who has any sort of meaningful business model is now like looking at buybacks, which is cool because I mean obviously like the the second order effect of like the DATs is like the prices on some of these tokens running up pretty drastically like um, you know, ETH is quite close to like its all-time

high and then as a result you saw yesterday like uh the Lido founder kind of come on in on their community call um and talk about like buybacks and kind of like start giving some direction there um and then some other protocols over on Salana obviously like Cheeto they've been looking at buybacks pump is obviously doing buybacks they're very very aligned on those um so I think that's kind of the main thing right now is kind of getting a lot of the attention is uh stuff like that. Um obviously we've had like a couple more launchpads come to market like now light uh light is live. So um you know that's one um but yeah I think these are kind of

some of the obvious things that are getting a lot of the attention. Then Athena of course I think is another one. Um you know they're seeing new all-time highs in their stable coin supply. Um, and yeah, so I think that's kind of everything I'm seeing, but I'm kind of curious what you guys are looking at. >> Yeah, I think I think those are good points. Um, I mean, it's pretty refreshing to see that, you know, the buybacks and revenue are one of like the core focuses of the market. Um, we even saw Uni I mean I for as long as, you know, I've really been in like seriously in crypto. I can remember like you know uni fee switch coming in 6 months for the past you know half decade now um and I think that there's been some progress

on that front too. Um I didn't read the entirety of their their uh their foreign post in the Dow but it seems like that could be coming. Um and then Mantle the ETH2 that is works pretty closely with uh integrated pretty closely with Bybit. Um they had an announcement this morning too um that I don't have the details exactly on hand but uh the token was up um they alluded to to buybacks and you know more token utility. So just kind of that trend of you know I mean there's endless tokens out there and you have to do something to to stand out and and buybacks are are really you know all the revenue that can be made you know some of it distributed back to token like it's it's the core focus of the market

and I mean you see it with you know hype approached all-time highs again last night um down uh you know a little bit from there this morning um but you can see the market clearly rewards these these revenue producing tokens that uh put um a good chunk if not you know in Pump and and Hype's case like you know almost all of everything back into the token. Um so that's kind of the the core focus there. And then I'd say uh you know base is still pretty interesting too. There's still some uh some good action good coins on there. Um Arrows up I want to say you know like 50 60% this week um as Coinbase kind of rolled out the the initial launch of their the DEX integration natively in Coinbase. Um, so

trying to uh have some more focus there. But yeah, those those are kind of the main things. And then obviously, you know, the DATs, everybody's got got that frenzy. Um, kind of seems like the market is a little exhausted of it right now. Um, Bitcoin especially, especially after, you know, Sailor in the last earnings call announced that they wouldn't be selling any more MSTR to fund BTC buys. Um, so it' be interesting to see kind of what his the size of his buys going forward are. I think there's been some pretty good research out there that suggests that it'll be pretty significantly smaller than what it has been, you know, over the past uh three plus years. Um so I think that's kind of a large part of what the market is uh kind of digesting now.

>> Yeah, I like uh a lot of those comments on the sailor piece. Yeah, they made the specific uh outline for only selling or you know making more ATM offerings assuming their premium to MNAV is I think it was if it's above 2.5 >> if mistaken. So yeah, which they're >> in like three years. >> They've not been there in a long time. So it's it's kind of Yeah, you're basically assuming that they're turning off that spigot. It seems like the point like the purpose is to try to fund all future like cash for BTC purchases through like these other vehicles like the Stretch, Stride, Stark, etc. um that they've been running. And I and the

Stretch offering was pretty big. I don't know if that completed. I'd have to go and look at the specific details, but I know that they like upsized that total uh raise amount for stretch a few times um up into maybe like the four to six billion range. So um he is still attracting quite sizable amounts of capital like through these through these additional vehicles. But yeah, I guess there's a question mark there of if like they can replace the amount of uh cash that they were able to shore up through ATMs like via these other you know perpetual preferreds and like you know other different like kind of like yield focused offerings that he's playing around with. Um and and that's a question mark like if it's going to impact his his uh relentless BTC bid. So we'll have to kind of see how that plays

out. I do think the the mantle thing you brought up I was not I didn't look at this one until just now but um it seems interesting that like I don't know I feel like BBIT had maybe not really been doing anything with Mandal for a long time um that kind of was just like another one of those L2s um there wasn't really any reason to to do anything over there unless maybe you were anticipating some kind of like airdrop like maybe go farm some rewards this that or the other thing but it seems like maybe now this this current shift they're calling at chartering the Mantle 2.0 vision, new advisers, new frontiers, and what's next. Seems like they're going after like the Coinbase base um and kind of like Binance B&B chain play where uh you know, you promote assets and liquidity

and um applications from like the chain on the actual centralized exchange. Um which has, you know, it's worked out pretty well for Binance. It's worked out pretty well for Coinbase. Um, it could potentially work for BBET, though I imagine like, you know, the further we go down that list, like Kraken and Inc. is another one of these as well. Um, trying to get into that domain, it it it seems like it becomes like a tougher and tougher challenge, the you know, maybe the smaller you are um as an exchange and like you know, the kind of the sway that you have over customers and and their assets. Um, but I guess the big thing that they can do is like, you know, if it's holding their assets on the chain and then like offering up

different promotions and and activities to do there, um, that can drive some activity as we've seen with like if anyone followed Binance and Pancake Swap activity when they did the uh the alpha campaign for for trading volume. Um, that that sparked quite a bit of activity. We know it was directly incentivized, but still uh it pumped the numbers. So it maybe interesting though like I'd wonder if you guys have any thoughts on this like we know that um by bit is also exploring um like their decks on Salana. Um it almost seemed like they were like abandoning that chain chain vision with Mantle. So it seems interesting to like see that deployment and then see them

coming back and like try to re rest rerrengen and bolster back around Mantle. I don't know. I don't know if anyone's going to have thoughts here because I can't imagine where, you know, in the west we're probably not uh by bit users um and may not really be like the target customer here uh for like the mantle chain per se. >> Yeah. No, I mean I don't really have any any deep constructive thoughts on Mantle. It's been a while since I've uh toyed around over there. When I was playing that that Jordy Puff game, you know, Puff the Dragon and that token, that was a that was that was a good time. Um, but that's been it's been a while now. Um, so yeah, I mean, we'll see. They're I think they're they're doing the right things to potentially

acquire, you know, users and volume and get some activity there. But, um, anything kind of L2 wise outside of base really like I just want to remain marginally bearish and kind of just, you know, wait for it to kind of gain momentum and prove itself before trying to, you know, frontr run something there. Um, so yeah, that's that's kind of how I'm thinking about it. Yeah, I think that's fair. Go ahead, Ian. >> Yeah, more or less the same. Don't have too much else on on that. I guess like kind of related to those topics though, did you see uh what OKX did with their tokens that were in their treasury?

>> No, they burned about um >> was it like three billion billion? >> I think it was like 26 billion. Um well like uh in US dollar amount at least or something or maybe that's like the amount after the burn. I don't know if you if you just do the simple uh FC space oxp and check out that chart. I mean it's insane. Um >> that money that money was definitely real. >> Yeah. Willing to burn 20 million of it. It was definitely real.

>> I mean the the money that if if Yeah. I mean, if the Treasury money is fake, the real money is definitely more real now. >> His heart looks good, though, right? >> Yeah. I mean, how could you miss that one right? Yeah, it feels um I I feel like movements like that feel they remind me of like Crypto.com and the Crow token like they did um that was that was a while ago when they burned like 70% of the supply or something which you know they own so much of it that it's it's it's kind of like okay great you uh reduced so much of the supply that was

basically all of yours to begin with and then they later reissued it. Um, which is a bit hilarious. We I I feel like that's got to be the first like kind of high-profile case of that happening at least um in the crypto market so far. Um, the the OKB I mean it it smells kind of similar. I'm kind of outside the details here just hearing it secondhand. But um it's interesting to hear a big burn from that from like an exchange about their own token that they supply control. But >> like Krenos, the Krenos when they reissued that, I remember just laughing so hard like it's just it's the most crypto thing in the world to be like,

"Yeah, we're going to burn like, you know, a couple billion of this token and then six months a year later be like, well actually uh turns out we're going to reissue it." >> Yeah, it almost makes you think they didn't really think that that hard about it. Like if they needed the tokens for something, then they could have um I don't know, they you know, they've got the validators as well. they could have like upped their commission rate or something and then use the rewards uh use the rewards to fund stuff rather than like reissue 70% of supply. Um it feels a bit a bit silly, but regardless um maybe another you mentioned the launchpad Z and I think we should talk about those. Uh I want to get let's get some updated thoughts on Bonk and Pump.

But before we do so, uh I need to do a quick shout out for somebody for the sponsor of today's show, Aptos. Uh Bitcoin Defi is heating up on Aptos. With nearly 400 million in BTC assets on chain, Aptos users can now earn yield on their Bitcoin via Echo ABTC and OKXBTC without the typical bridge risks and high fees. Thanks again to Apptos for sponsoring today's stream. Let's get back to it. Um, what was I saying? Let's talk launchpads. Um, Ian, you mentioned it.

There's been excitement one around buybacks. Um, Pump has been doing they've they've upped their buybacks, right? They're doing basically 100%. They've had some maybe some weird outlier days where they did like 200%. seemingly, but broadly it seems like they've bumped up and they're just doing 100% of recent revenues have just been sh getting shoved into the token. And the other big thing, and I'll pull up some data, is that um we've seen a complete like re- rotation back from bonk launches and trading to pump. Like the bonk fund took over everything for like a month and gave it all back um pretty abruptly. So uh I don't know if you guys had any deeper thoughts here. Like we we

discussed this quite a bit of like I don't know thinking maybe there's some additional hidden incentives behind the scenes like they were getting paid out to creators to go launch on Bonk or just I don't know they were doing a good job of like you know pumping up the coins in the ecosystem. Um you guys have any thoughts here? Has it has it made you revise any of your thoughts or your thesis around pump and the pump token as of late? I think they kind of answered all the open things that people were asking. It's like, you know, are you actually doing buybacks? Be official about it. They made a dashboard. They made it public. I think they got way

better on comms. And I think that was kind of reflected back not only like their token price itself, but kind of all relevant metrics to the protocol as well. Um like it looks like there is the stone cold bottom on like uh tokens that were graduated or tokens that were graduating uh was hit uh and then like some other kind of unique KPIs for what they're looking for. Um and so it's like so why exactly did the the Bonk creators drop off like the Bonk users drop off? Who knows? I mean, obviously, I also think the uh the buybacks of like organic tokens uh on the on the pump phone community is

probably helping that probably getting people back over there. Um, but again, like I do think that there's like kind of a weird area of the memecoin supply chain, the sloppy industrial complex. Uh, which is just like kind of hard to pin down on exactly what's happening and why it's happening. Uh, and then it's just kind of reflected back in um the loudest ways possible on like crypto Twitter. And but like overall, I mean, the metrics have moved in the right direction, the price has moved in the right direction. Uh the I don't think we'll ever see another interview as bad as the uh Alon Fred Guy interview. I think that was the bottom for for Alon interviews.

Um so yeah, I think everything's looking much better than it was a couple weeks ago. >> Yeah. Tolks, you have thoughts? I know I know you had some positions in bon or in pump, not bonk. Um >> um yeah, I closed this out earlier this morning finally. Um, we got we got we got within uh we got within about 10% of break even. Um, but yeah, I uh I had the bright idea of like I think it was like Sunday evening. I was like, I'm just going to swap into some massive pump and hype longs and I did up until Wednesday night and then BTC went to new highs and I was like, this is incredible. These are going to rip. And then Thursday morning. Um, but yeah, we battled back today. Um, we took a we took a a decent

little loss, but it could have been much worse. But anyway, I mean, the thesis there was just, as Ian said, you know, the coms improve, they're putting 100% back into the token. Um, I think the comparisons to hype are good maybe narrative-wise, but as far as, you know, kind of the moat and um just I don't know, ability to to kind of stick around and maintain, I I heavily heavily favor um hype in that direction. But you can see that the comparisons are there. And I mean, obviously you can pull up the hype chart and look, you know, it's a little different because I don't know, it was like the immaculate launch. Um, but you can kind of see when they're putting 100% of, you know,

revenue in there and they're making, you know, one to two to three, sometimes four million a day. Like, you start annualizing that out and as long as, you know, BTC and the broad market plays along. Um, I think earlier this week, Pump was was kind of trading as one of the one of the strongest tokens on everything that we talked about finally flipping. Um, and it's kind of just at, you know, the the broad markets, you know, whatever BTC kind of wants to do now. It's kind of beholden to that. Um, but I do think the team has done the right things and moving in the right direction. Um, we'll see kind of where their volumes settle if we do kind of go into the sustained, you know, downward choppy trend for for a month or two. Um,

we'll see what those metrics look like and uh what the buybacks stay at. But I think as far as you know from launch to the bottom to that interview like everything has been cleaned up pretty well. So I'll be interested to see kind of how uh pump bounces whenever we we bottom in this you know kind of disgusting downward price action we have going on now as I'm watching watching some charts live. It's uh it's not looking great. Um but yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Um I mean hype has been really strong this week again up until this morning.

pump was was strong, you know, early this week and I think it was kind of a sign to to the market that um you know, they're moving in the right direction. You know, you can also say that, you know, the token was down 60 70% from launch. Like, you know, there's some type of meaner version that happens at some point, but I think they're doing everything kind of within their powers for the time being. So, it's uh it's good to see. >> Yeah, I think a lot of that makes sense. the um one the data point that or you know the chart that I want to pull up and just kind of look at is this these two very clean crosses of uh the top token creators across Launch Lab which includes Bonk Fun of course um it's built on top of Radium's Launch Lab and

then Pump Fun and the Meteor creators are on here as well but um smaller numbers for for those launchpads but um yeah there was just a very clean cross of activity of basically a bunch of the largest creators flipping from Pump to Bong Fun essentially like right at the beginning of July and they this looks like a massive runup but it basically just like encompassed the normal amount of tokens that were being created on pump fund were now being created on Bonk Fun. Um and then we saw that um grind down right here at the beginning of August now almost exactly a month later um and cross back the opposite direction and now um all that token creation is being done on pump again. Um it's it's interesting. I don't know. there's uh

don't have any like like we said don't there's no explicit details out there publicly around like if maybe these teams are working with some of like the mass like slop token creators um offering them like additional deals on top of just like what the platform kind of offers because obviously you know if you're a token creator you get some benefits already potentially right if you're sniping some of the supply and then maybe selling it and then also the there's rewards for the token creator in terms of like a percentage of the fees from the trading trading volume um on on both of these platforms as well as now um Ian mentioned you know Pump and Alon have said that they're going to you know buy some of the you know best most organic you know coins in the pump

ecosystem. So um that's potentially another like additional incentive there if you think as a creator you can maybe hit some of those coins and get some additional buyback and that fuels more volume and then that fuels like your profits in running this token creation operation. Um maybe that maybe that additionally fueled them to swap the other way. But I don't know. This seems like such a drastic change. It it kind of would make you think that um they're at least interacting with some of these mass creators to some extent um to see such a clean swap because it it it wouldn't necessarily make sense to me like with all these being open permissionless platforms that you wouldn't just like be launching coins wherever, whenever. um assuming the kind of profit incentive played out for you

as the as the token creator, token distributor. Um but yeah, I think to the pump point as well, uh I kind of want to talk about the buyback and the revenue piece. Um buybacks have become a really big thing. I mean, even in DATs, right? um launch a DAT and then buy back the coin, the underlying thing, and that gets people excited. But um while selling your shares in leasing crypto, um a revenue generating business that then buys back his own token has become like the exciting like most kind of uh supported I don't want to call it a narrative.

There's like I mean there's like actual value there, right? If you generate revenue and buy back the token, then then coin goes up and to the right. But um I guess the the interesting thing with pump is that it seemed like they did not want to allocate so much like I don't know if these were just like kind of hushed rumors but you know initially it was thought that like 25% would be for the buyback. Um when when we actually like rubber hit the road they kind of just like discretionarily like shoved you know several million into the coin just like in the open market. Um and then you know in the past couple of weeks they've kind of shifted that over to just doing like a seemingly pretty explicit like 100% recent revenue um is going straight into the token. I I

find that a very interesting shift. Obviously like it, you know, they really wanted to like get, you know, retake control of the narrative and like kind of get their brand power back to where it was um with Bonk maybe uh swamping them out a little bit. Um, it makes me wonder where things go from here, but given how much cash they've raised, I guess there's not too much risk in just shoving all of the ongoing revenue into the coin, right? I mean, when you've got a billion and some change from the recent raises, um, like they have plenty it's not like they necessarily need per se, you know, the the one or two million a day or whatever that they generate from platform revenue. um they've got plenty of cash

on hand to go and if it's M&A, if it's other deals, if it's expand the team, um it's not really a risk for them. But um longer term, I think it opens up a question mark of like do they are they committed to this like 100% forever? And do you have uh is there an event in the future where they ratchet that back down for some reason and then and then that becomes like a downside risk? >> Yeah, those are those are all good points. Um, one of the things I noticed like when they did initially announce that they were going to start using some funds to like buy creator tokens, there was like a pretty sharp sell-off right there. Um, just cuz I think like people were just starting to get comfortable with the idea of like all revenue going

back towards buybacks. Uh, like it recovered like it but it was just like kind of one of those things that like showed up in the chart like quite immediately. Um, so like you know whatever that's worth. But in general, I think people like buybacks because there's a lot of ways to kind of be like, hey, like we're really like, you know, focused on the project and all these things, but it's like I think the ultimate aligner across all all communities, uh, is the price going up and like showing full alignment of like, hey, like we're really putting all the revenue back into the chart. Um, is just kind of the way it's manifested for Pump at least. And so far, I think the reaction has been good there. I

think obviously like there are some analogies to be drawn to Hyperlquid as well, but uh these are both trading focused apps. So I think naturally they're going to attract a lot of like uh users that are really um okay with taking risk and want to see the team take a similar amount of risk with them if that makes sense. Um, and like I think that's why you see like a lot stronger pressure for apps like these to do buybacks as opposed to um apps that maybe are a little bit more on the infra side or anything else like that. Uh, just because it's like the the token holders, let's say, or the users um maybe aren't as

den is kind of like the simplest way of putting it, I guess. But yeah, that's what I think. Yeah, I I think it's fair. Um I think I think we covered most. I think what is interesting is kind of just how long they cuz they haven't as far as my knowledge they haven't outlined, you know, kind of the time frame that this is staying, right? It's just kind of like a, you know, this is what's happening now. Um, and even on their, you know, their fee website, it says they currently expect to use substantially all net revenue for strategic investments. And then they may modify or discontinue those plans at any time. The pump token does not represent a right to revenues or any other

distribution. Um, so I remember when that website first launched, like that was kind of I don't know, it's it's rational somewhat mostly for them. Um, but just kind of having it on there like I don't know, maybe that that hangs over them a little bit just cuz you know you can you can buy 90% 97% of the token for you know a couple weeks. Um, but eventually the market will start kind of demanding more clarity. Um, so I think it'll be interesting when when we get there or to, you know, see the the price reaction if there is a day, you know, whether it's this weekend or next week or a month from now where, you know, say they 20% of revenue just kind of out of the blue. Um, it'll be interesting to

see kind of what happens there. Uh, so like I said, I mean, they they've they've done the right things over the past few weeks. Um, and we'll see moving forward. >> Yeah. And I mean, they definitely have like I mean, this is the thing. they have the brand and the capital to um make a splash within the space like onchain or kind of like within crypto um a billion plus in capital like I don't know we've only seen like a small a very small acquisition to this point so if they've got more plans in that ballpark or like a massive expansion of like kind of the product offering um because maybe they can you know hire more people and have a you know a more stacked team uh to build

out some additional product um whatever it may be. You know, we'll have to kind of weigh the the you know upside from like maybe expanding the product or you know new potential revenue streams etc with kind of what they're doing and the clarity around the token and the buybacks and where that goes. Um because it's kind of TBD maybe along those lines. Something that I find interesting is that um Ian, I think you mentioned light, but like another launchpad enters the scene. Um Heavenex Light the token like they did an ICO um last week I want to say um for the light token. It was kind of a interesting one. I think we may may have covered it in the the ox

research newsletter. Um, but basically just like kind of an open-ended ICO and ICOs for some of these like onchain uh protocols and teams and like doing later rounds have kind of been coming back lately. So I I guess that wasn't too surprising in and of itself. But um what I do find interesting is that like I don't know we're at like the nth launch pad already. So it is interesting to kind of see this thing get off the ground. I haven't looked at the valuation, but I think it's in like the mid the mid 8 figures range at the moment, at least the kind of the the platform token is. Um, and again, they have committed to like a 100% buyback model as well. Um, what's interesting is

that like, you know, if you look back maybe a year ago, there were plenty of like attempted kind of like pump fun or just like launchpad copies but with buyback, revshare, etc. There were a bunch of these that tried to do that. Um, like GoFundMe. Uh, I'm sure you can think of like 10 more. There was like Flanche on uh, base I want to say. Um, that were all going after the same design and like basically none of them went anywhere. Um, but just the notes from heaven, like they launched the actual launchpad and like Dex itself the other day and did over 2500 launches, 30 million in volume um in that first day and I've already generated um at least from the the launch of the Launchpad

200,000 generated for the flywheel. um not to be an annualizer, but that would be a significant amount of revenue at their current market cap if you kind of were able to sustain that amount um you know on on a forward basis. Not saying you know maybe this is a flash in the pan, maybe it's not, but I guess it's it's just interesting to see like another launchpad pop out and um kind of do fairly well from a a price action and like an activity on the platform perspective so quickly when we've seen so many of them just kind of like be zeros. Um, and maybe it's just too early. Like I don't know, there was um like boop boop, was it boopf fun? I think that was like the kind of airdrop to konzi

farm design. Um, that one played out maybe as expected, right? Like a big spike and then kind of straight to >> the chart. Don't look at the chart. >> Yeah. But like this one at least, I mean, it's not an air drop to big Kos. Um, you had you had to buy into the ICO. So, um, I don't know. Do you guys have any strong thoughts here? Is it just like people are, you know, there's risk appetite in the markets and they're willing to like take a chance again? Um because I I feel like we saw this with believe maybe a couple months ago. Um it kind of went on a pretty good run when when it caught that like ICM narrative.

Um and now it seems like heaven I mean it's still pretty small. It's only been a few days but or I guess one day. We haven't really even seen much yet from the launchpad itself. Um, but it it's kind of like catching a little bit of a bid as another launchpad. >> Yeah, I think I think people, myself included, are pretty tired of all the launchpads. Um, I mean, I did participate in the in the lights, so that's kind of talking both sides of the sword there. Um, but yeah, I I don't know. I mean, I like to they kind of remind me of um remember, you know, before Hyperlid came out, every month there was kind of a new

perex that would that would launch and have a points program and incentivize liquidity and none of them ever gained any traction. It was kind of just, you know, a hop from one to the next to the next. Um, so this reminds me a lot of that. Um, as far as like the ICM thesis goes, you know, the internet capital markets and you know, kind of what the thesis was with Launchcoin and and believe app like like the theoretical vision of that like still makes all the sense in the world. Um, but I think the market at this point, you know, we're going on, you know, six to 9 to 12 months of kind of theorizing that. And I think the market is kind of just like, okay, there needs to be at least, you know, kind of one thing that's launched on one of these endless platforms that

actually kind of fits into this narrative and has some success and then I think the market will be kind of have more appetite towards um that narrative. But yeah, until that happens, like I think people are just kind of exhausted and tired of it. >> Totally fair. Uh I want to welcome real quick Dan Smith. Thank you for joining us, sir. Uh I know you're a very busy busy man, so we're glad to have you on. We were just wrapping up some conversation around launchpads and actually it might be a good one to loop you into here. We haven't talked about Zora at all, but um we're talking about the heaven heavens like ICO light sale and then kind of like launch here. Um Tolk saying people are, you know, maybe

exhausted of the nth launch pad. Um, but yet we're still seeing like, you know, popups of at least short-term success, right? Believe Launchcoin kind of like had a bit of a run. Uh, now Heaven does an ICO and raises a, you know, 20 $20 million or so. Um, and Zora kind of re retools their flywheel. Um, and is is running quite significantly. I'm curious if you have any thoughts like on the current launchpad setup or if it's Zora specifically or about light. Um where's your head at on launchpads right now?

>> Yeah. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here, gentlemen. Uh always always uh an honor to be with the family at the table. Um yeah, I didn't participate in Heaven's token launch or ICO uh because I'm just exhausted. It's just like not interesting to me anymore personally uh from the sake of just like the nth launch pad with like a marginally different system. Uh however, I did was curious. They're backed by Coliseum. They're interesting team. I mean there should be something there. It's just like all right, we're doing this again. It's kind of that was my first reaction.

Um, now I think the other thing is it's like, okay, you you brought up believe like that one's fascinating that we're still talking about it because volume is like you don't like when you look at Launchpad volume collectively, it's not even on the chart. Revenue not even on the chart, right? It's like two pixels big on the bottom of the screen. Um, but the the outsized attention from the rest of CT and like we love talking about that coin and there's a really easy answer why I actually think this ties into sort of the treasury companies, right? Is Pastor Nick puts himself on on the timeline all in the he definitely seems to subscribe to the belief that all PR is good PR. Uh, some days it definitely doesn't seem like

that's the case, but the man is on the timeline and I think that's why people still talk about it. Um because the product was pretty shitty. I think a lot of people were on to that really early, right? The view the first things that got like shown about that app were what uh you as the user see versus what they show disclaimer-wise to the projects actually launching tokens. Um so to me it was like all right away we already saw this was just like not going to be a thing. Um, and it's largely just a token launchpad, uh, rather than, you know, really fitting into the actual, you know, real ICM narrative, if you will.

Um, when it comes to Zora, Zora is actually interesting. They took the they actually ran a change on on the game. Whether or not it'll work, uh, TBD, I think the cat is very much still in the bag. uh if that's the case. But what they did was like tried to say all right let's abstract the like true crypto part of of this away from the user when you're like you don't have to pay gas for anything you do within the app. Uh they are not it's not called ETH they called it sparks. The UI is completely different for better or for worse. Uh it feels like a social application and not like a trading platform. Um and even they what they also did was make it a platform, right? So now the things like the base app or other social focused applications can plug into this

thing, use the actual coins protocol, which is a very interesting group of smart contracts. Um if you're into that sort of thing paired with the unis swap v4 hook uh and now, you know, they're able to generate revenue from somebody else leveraging their core technology. uh which I think is just an interesting play that uh again just kind of twisted the meta in a different way. Uh I think some of those things played into their favor, some of those things played against their favor. Um but yeah, to me it was interesting. It was like, okay, it's not just like the nth, you know, launchpad. They're actually trying a different angle here. So that's what personally roped me in. And then also what roped me in right off the bat was uh the adverse reaction that all of crypto Twitter had to Zora. I was like,

"All right, this is immediately interesting. If everyone hates it, I'm in." Um, of course my lovehate relationship with Zora has been pretty extreme, right? I loved it because everyone else hated it and then they launched the four fun token writees. I was in the height of like going through the token transparency framework work like the whole goal of this initiative is for tokens to not be for fun and to actually carry some meaningful uh value. Uh, so that like really pissed me off and I was like throw it in the trash can, I'm out. Um, and then it started like they they obviously didn't stop building and they introduced the flywheel piece which was likely this the case the whole time or the game plan the whole time. But um, yeah, I actually put some utility around it. I still don't like that personally. I I would like to

see um, you know, I don't you don't need value flying back token day one, but there's uh, equity entities behind the token which just causes an inherent problem in my view. Um, so yeah, I don't know. kind of went on a longwinded rant on all three of those topics, but net net I think it's time to to switch up switch up the game. I think this was sort of like the death of NFTTS in that regard and that the game stayed the same and just like slowly burned into exhaustion and there was definitely some ripples here and there, right? Launch of Blur really reignited things. Um, but then there was just like that was sort of the only change, right? we've kind of seen some iterations, but I think Zor is like the first meaningful uh you know switch ripple in the game wave in the

game, but we'll see if it's sticky. Yeah, I guess at least to the stickiness point. Um, what I find interesting in like the growth of usage on the platform is that ever since the base integration, the amount of posts and users from the base app have basically been up and to the right, whereas like activity from the native Zora platform has kind of, you know, it's waxed and waned a little bit. Um though obviously it's still up since prior to that event but um that roll out from base like I don't know if they if they have that kind of captive user audience and enough interested individuals to like push some activity through there that should be meaningful.

Um maybe the only downside is just that like the platform has seen a lot of growth in terms of users and like posts and content coins, but the like trading on those coins has not kept pace with the growth of the posts themselves. um which you you know you can extend that out like you know we've seen millions and millions of coins launch on Salana and obviously you know the trading volume hasn't always gone up and to the right but uh functionally I guess you you'd want to see some growth in in the trading activity as well alongside that to really see uh you know kind of continued growth and value of the platform if uh that's where like the fees and the and the value of the trading is generated. You know, the interesting thing on that is the so

there's like about a three-ish percent fee on trading Zoro coins. >> Yep. >> And so that probably deters a vast majority of bot volume, uh, which, you know, relative to basically every other token trading platform out there. You know, you have sub, you know, you have BIPS, you measure the fee in BIPS rather than full percentage points. Uh, and so that's one thing I was thinking about is like, you know, there's certainly a lot of bot volume in the the memecoin trenches. Absolutely no doubt about that. There's been plenty of great data to point to in that regard. Um but like I wonder so if you strip that out of it, you know, that definitely removes some runners that just definitely makes the the you know your terminal look a little different. Like I I'm just curious like

the impact of removing bot volume from high fees. Um maybe that's a lot of what you see. I don't know. >> Yeah, it's a good question. Um I I wonder I mean that is sort of just like the game as it is today. So it's like if you strip that out, you know, you just you're playing a different game at that point. Um maybe some I didn't even look at this chart until just now, but I find this interesting as well that um and it makes sense like I I think if you're thinking about this rationally. Um but most of the the volumes on the creator coin volume rather than the actual content coin volume, which makes a ton of sense, right? Because a creator can have a thousand content coins, but they only have one creator coin. And the way that the like the flywheel kind of feeds

on itself is that the content coins fuel the creator coins and then the creator coins fuel the Zorocoin to an extent. Um so that makes sense. But um I don't know for the platform does this like >> damn honestly I haven't looked at this short couple days and you know I was the way I checked it basically every day while I was traveling. Don't tell my wife. uh and in that span where it was always below 5 million volume and I was like damn like that needs to climb higher but over the last five to six days we actually have seen some of that and again you plot this against like any other memecoin platform you know you won't even see this volume but uh again because of the comparing within the ecosystem or with within the protocol

here last five days have it actually looked pretty good um now you've seen some natural trend in you know we hit a Bitcoin all-time high we got us basically as close as you possibly could to an ETH all-time high Tom Lee is smashing the bid. There's a lot of it like I don't know. It could just be a general trend following here. Uh but I don't know that's kind of that was my immediate reaction when you pulled this up is like damn last five days have looked good. Yeah, it I mean it's been looking good generally. Like I feel like the broader trend here has been has been solidly up. Um maybe just the bigger question for them is going to be like if I zoom this out. I don't know. we we've consistently seen these like these spikes on Zora around the big announcements that they've had um or at

least like the expectation. So like I think back in April that would have been like around airdrop kind of expectations before the token came out. Um there was a spike of activity I think even before that back in what was it February maybe when when Jesse and Bass started posting about Zora kind of relentlessly and they did the base uh I forget it was a really long ticker but they did the base content coin um that ran to 10 mill or whatever and got the timeline excited. Um, so we've consistently like seen these these spikes and I think the what would be exciting to see is, you know, this recent activity that you're excited about. Like if they could maintain this level of activity consistently rather than like for this to be another kind of of spike um as a platform, I think that would be great to see like a little bit

more proof of the kind of, you know, recurring usage of the platform and like recurring activity. >> Agreed. Can you pull up the market cap chart uh towards the bottom? >> Yeah, Aggracoin FTV. >> Yeah, I mean that looks pretty decent, too. And that's actually respectable size uh comparatively across the broader memecoin landscape. Um obviously nothing near the multi-billion dollars of pump fund tokens, but I would put that in a different echelon. Um the bonk tokens ran up to about eight or so, but they were kind of in that $200 million range for a while.

So that's that's actually pretty impressive. >> Yeah. And I guess if we've got um I don't know, we'll see. But this seems to be the common thing now, right? Everyone is committing to buying the tokens on their platforms. Um and we've seen I think what Bass or or Jesse there was a post about, you know, we're going to be supporting creators and and coins on Zora. Um, so maybe you see a little bit of like a a bid from for the ecosystem coins as well. I mean Alon is doing this. We we have it on I mean we know that some of the bonk big bonk accounts were doing this as well. It's just become like a pretty prominent thing. So um there could there could be some kind of push from from that activity as well.

>> Yeah, that's definitely becoming a meta now. And the first thing I thought of was like Avalanche wasn't wrong, man. They were just early. Yeah, very much gives 2021 like liquidity uh liquidity incentive like big ecosystem initiative. Avalanche rush I mean I think I want to say almost every chain like all of the AL1s back then basically did a a big ecosystem like incentive program back during 2021 and this at least for launchpads this kind of seems to be that moment for them.

>> The next big thing is uh creator subnets. Why have your own coin, man? >> Every creator will have their own chain. >> Exactly. >> You know, think about the flywheel. That'd be an insane launchpad platform. >> The flywheel could be very real. Um, one thing that's kind of been interesting to me about Zora is their lack of messaging, I guess, around like the flywheel part. I feel like that's like you have to do a bit of digging to find that. Like, um, am I wrong on that? Have they been pretty upfront about it? because I I heard about it through literally just like the the Telegram group.

>> They made a big post an announcement like when they changed the model. I don't know that it's gotten that much talk since then, but like they had a little they had a little circle diagram of like posts creators Zorocoin and like quite literally a circular diagram >> like a wheel. >> Yeah, >> Jacob the founder has been pretty vocal about it I will say. Um, but I mean if you aren't following him then you know it's up you're in the algo's hands at that point. >> Here it is. >> Fair enough.

>> So that's pin. You can see their their like little flywheel draw but like onboard onboard people more creators means more opportunities. Post fuel creators and then all of that fuels the circle which is the Zora icon. So Zora coin. Uh yeah, this is kind of like their diagram about it. You can find the details from their like original post. >> What's the uh what's the top creator coin market cap? Is it still it's like sub 10 mil, right? >> Uh >> do you know Dan? Is it that horsecoin >> around there?

>> Are you talking about content coin? Definitely below 10 mil. Uh creator is probably crawled higher. I think the easiest way honestly is just to look at the app. We have a few tagged if you go to that market top market cap chart and then uh toggle to top creators. >> Oh yes sir. >> But I mean it might not be the current top creators. Let me check. >> ZXBT. >> Yeah. Fake Taxi was up there for a while >> and Visualiz up there. >> Yeah.

>> Yeah. They I mean they were over 10. ZXPT was over 10 for a bit. Assuming that this is um it up to date on all them, the top content would be interesting as well. Yeah, that basis for everyone coin, which is the one I mentioned back from a few months ago. Um that basecoin is still that's actually kind of crazy that that is still consistently just the largest content coin on the platform. >> And horse has really been trying to get its way up there. >> It'll be interesting. I mean, I think I think Dan mentioned it, but eventually like you kind of want, you know, some more volume and and higher market caps there for the the flywheel to continue.

Um, so be interesting to see if those can can keep grinding higher. And I think it'll be interesting to see now that, you know, a little bit of weakness in ETH here. Um, I think Zora was kind of the clear-cut like highest beta play to ETH. Um, so I think that played a decent role in the run that that Zora had. um has obviously you know overextended any coin that goes kind of parabolic like that um kind of gets to that point but I mean the met metrics all all look good and I mean there is definitely something there. Um but it goes back to what we were talking about with you know the launch pads earlier like um I think Zora did a good job in differentiating themsel as much as they could you know with kind of again like the the nth launch pad type thing. Um,

but then that next step is, you know, taking a little a little further. And back to like, you know, the ICM thesis, like everybody's kind of waiting around for something to to actually take hold. Like, you know, the theory of it, the idea of it all makes sense. Um, but Zor is, you know, as of now, kind of sitting teetering on the edge of, you know, just kind of, in my opinion, being like another launchpad type thing that has good demand and, you know, is exciting for for a month or two. Um but having the sustainability of the users and you know the creator coins and kind of doing something new and unique with that um that's to be determined.

>> Yeah, I think that's a great point. And maybe something there's like a similarity here in when you look at ICM and when you look at like even these creator coins is that um with ICM there's like this hope that you know people will start using that as a a means to raise funds to like do their own do startups and other things. Um, but with the way that like the market is today, it's like if you actually have if you're actually a great founder and you have a great idea and like you can go out and get funding for it, like it really you don't have a need to go into the ICM world and like launch a coin.

Um, it's it's like unnecessary for you if you're like you're one of those killers and you can go out and, you know, go and raise 10 20 million and and get a startup off the ground. Like it's it it just doesn't really even make sense maybe from a reputation or risk standpoint. um whereas people who might struggle to do so um kind of have that as a potential option that they could that they could leverage. Um not saying that like everyone who's going to go and launch there is like a scammer per se, but more so just like I I I could see a very swift like mood change about like an ICM platform if like a very notable, you know, founder or startup launched a coin, right? like it would it would be unsurprising if you know one of these big accounts or names on like Twitter

that you know is raising 30 million from A16Z if instead they did a coin like that would get people riled up and I think in the same way like if a very massive creator you know made a Zoro account started posting content coins on there like it would get people riled up but it's it's very much like this chicken egg problem of like you you want someone like that to hop onto the platform because it would drive a ton of attention and excitement um but they're not they're not really like incentive to do it. You know, the um the returns from doing so don't really like make sense relative to the system today. So, you kind of need you need like a trends setter to go ahead and do that. Um and to your point, Tolks, it feels like that's what people would like to see and

they're kind of like waiting around to see if that happens. Um is the vibe that I get >> kind of Oh, go ahead. Sorry. >> No, no, no. I mean, I I just agree with all that. And I mean to that chicken and egg problem too like like you said I don't know that the incentives are are partially there and then they're partially not. And I mean we've seen you know kind of with like the memecoin space like people launching their own tokens like you know at some point like the broader market like things are kind of out of your hand on how token does and the amount of backlash you can get for you know doing stuff like this is is almost you know not worth the cost of doing it in the first place. Um, so I don't know. It'll be interesting to see

moving forward. >> Perhaps a hard pivot, but uh did you guys see that uh a borrowing on uh USDT and USDC has been ramping up again and driving home another spike in the uh withdrawal queue on ETH. >> Was it like 16% this morning on USDT? >> Yeah, it's uh it's at eight right now. I don't I'm sure it probably wicked higher at one point. Um I don't know if Justin's son got bored again and started withdrawing but >> Well, did you see I was >> I wanted to tweet this out and and float it as just an idea. Did you guys see it was like this within the same hour that

BTC hit new alltime highs that like Bloomberg report came out about like kind of like doxing his like or some article about his holdings and stuff and then it came out that he was suing them because of proprietary information and um that he didn't want like his financial holdings known. >> Is suing him about what was released or what is soon to be >> he about what is soon to be released. He's pushing back on a Bloomberg already they've been working with him since I think like February to get like an accounting of his like net worth to kind of just like like he kind of you know like signed up for this and kind of backed himself into a corner because he didn't think that it was going to be like made public and so he's suing them

about that now and it was just kind of I don't know maybe like a little tinfoil hat but like the price action we've had since I saw the first tweet about that. I'm like, I wonder if Justin I don't know. He just got his hands in, you know, kind of everything and if he has to share up some things because of, you know, stuff coming out. It was just kind of it it was kind of interesting and I hadn't seen really seen anybody mention it. Um, so I'm kind of just floating this out there as a as a wild conspiracy. >> Definitely tinfoil hack conspiracy, but I [ __ ] love it. I think something here. Uh, >> but it was just interesting timing. It was within the hours. Yeah, the first report I saw of it of him filing the suit was like within the hour of the the

highs. >> The timing is funny. I'm reading the article though and it seems like he was just being a bit silly in regards to how he approached like so I guess Bloomberg wanted to include him in their Bloomberg billionaires index and they like had detailed information about his particular holdings and I get maybe they had like a soft agreement to not disclose details of like what he actually owns but just like what the round number is at the top like you know 5 billion or six billion or whatever. But I guess they put together a profile that like broke down specifically like, oh, he owns this much crypto, this much whatever. Um, and he took issue with that. Uh, it seems a bit it seems a bit

softball if I'm being honest. Like he's just he's he's a bit upset about the particulars um rather than the actual like them filing data. >> That's what he wants you to think. >> Yeah, he's bringing down the market, man. This is uh Oh, what were we on before that? I just I just sidetracked us so bad. >> Sorry, Dan. Did you want to go somewhere? >> No, not really. I just uh it was checking Beacon Chain because that got hot. I don't know back in like July. It's like everyone freaking out. Oh, they're unstaking. Um but it was obviously tied to the A loop, right? You know, you're trying to just farm eats yield. You loop it aggressively and in that process you have to obviously be very cognizant of the cost to borrow.

Um, so I don't know. It's just really interesting when you see this happened about a month ago and it's happening again now. And again, to be clear, this is not like a risk to ETH thing. A lot of this already immediately gets rest. You're just capturing the ARB when staked ETH uh gets trades trades at a discount. Um, so I don't know. I mean, it's just kind of interesting to to follow along whenever this happens. Um, and it is also crazy that one man's uh actions can stem and like send this like shock wave through DeFi, which then hits the staking queue. Um, and it's like a multi, you know, we're at a 13-day almost two week uh window to to st to unstake and about a one one week lag on staking. Uh, so the the entry queue um

yeah, I don't know. It's just crazy how it does kind of make you wonder if it's like how what can be done to to strengthen that uh maybe make it a little bit more resilient or less open to market market dynamics. Obviously for the ETFs, they they deeply care if there's a huge lag where you have to take a haircut on on staking assets. Um but it does feel like we're also pretty close to seeing what the regulators think about that. The SEC has been very vocal that like liquid staking tokens aren't securities. Maybe they could be leveraged by some of these staking ETFs. Uh I think the Bloomberg Bloomberg guys have said they're they expect the Salana regular ETF to come before the staking ETFs. Uh and so they also peg that regular Salana ETF for October. So maybe

towards the back back end of last couple months of the year is when we'll see potential staking ETFs come online. I'm certainly not an expert there though, so I'm not sure. >> No, I think that Yeah, I think that sounds about right. Um, I mean, the the SEC's clarity on on all of this has just been amazing and Hester obviously continues to to be amazing. Um, but yeah, I mean, we'll see we'll see those ETFs. I think they did essentially all but confirm they will be in in October. Um, it'll be interesting to see the the staking ETFs after that. But yeah, I don't I mean all that stuff with the queue like you said it's not it's never anything to like necessarily worry about but it is interesting like you know I mean you're talking you know massive massive sums of money and it is always

kind of kind of funny like I mean even back in you know 2020 2021 really since DeFi started evolving it's kind of just been like oh you know Justin Sun and some other large entities too but like you know they want to they want to shift some portion of their portfolio and like the ripple effects it can have through through DeFi is always pretty fascinating to watch. >> Totally agree. Yeah, I think a lot of the unstaking right now though is um aren't isn't it like people that want to do like inkind contributions to DATs whether new or existing because like that's that's a that's a ton of ETH. Um, and then also in my Salana staking ETF up front, like, uh, that's an

interesting thing because like the one that is currently live, uh, which is like the Rex Osprey one. Uh, that's like a mixture of like staking and vanilla, if you want to call it vanilla. Um, I don't know, native soul. Um, but yeah, I think it's likely that we see probably a mixed bag of those. I I guess it's like what will the larger issuers be doing? like what's Fidelity going to be doing and then when Black Rockck eventually rolls around, what what are they going to be doing? Um I do think like there's always like advantages for them to use like LST is to you know have like especially on the Ethereum side where you're not having to wait like a three days uh for you know the withdrawals to actually

process and then obviously on Salon it's much quicker but also you can use like you know LSC's on that front. um >> on that point. Uh so there's about 3.1 billion uh it's about 700ishk of of ETH unstaking right now. It's about 3.1 billion and you're actually seeing a lot of it like just immediately get restaked. Uh if you like plot these two charts together, you see a good lag. Danny, I'll send this over to you. Maybe you want to share screen here. Um, but I'm I the well like with the exception of the Adam Back one for Bitcoin and the uh Jack Mueller's one XXI or 21. Um a lot of these things they do have in kind

contributions but the size is like on a relative basis the size is uh is is sort of trivial in some regard right like the one for example it's about 300 million about 100 million in in kind I believe it was like okay like 100 million is not a small number but then you see you know just in the last week sharp link has hit added another billion dollars of ETH um or Bitmine added $2 billion of ETH last week um so I'm just the sheer size basis uh the ink kind contributions are actually relatively small uh relative to just the spot buying going on. Once these things do kind of spin up the the flywheel of volume turns into dripping shares onto the market to raise cash

turning to buying more ETH turning to getting more attention for climbing up this leaderboard uh and selling more shares and so on. >> Yeah, I like that. Um, before we dive into this topic, because I think we're going to get deeper into the dats, deeper into the DATs here in a second, uh, let's go ahead one second. Uh, I want to do one last shout out for today's sponsors to the show, Aptos. With nearly 400 million in BTC assets on chain, supported by a secure, fast, and affordable MVM environment, Aptos has become the BTC growth chain. Apttos users can now earn yield on their Bitcoin via Ekko's ABTC and OKX's XBTC without the typical bridge risks and

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Let's get back to it. Um, then we were looking at Did you have more to say about >> No, I I I did not. I was literally just brow perusing the perusing the charts as I hopped on this morning. And uh >> something that was on my mind though before um we get fully into Tom Lee's massive size into into ETH is um I do wonder like do we feel that the ETFs play any role here in like the structuring around so like for example we we didn't really see ETH that DATs come to the forefront until post ETH ETFs kind of had already made their way way onto the market and started to see

some inflows. I don't know if that's really meaningful and obviously there already are some like you know smaller or decently sized soul dats but I do wonder if like the sort of like regulatory approval plus just like maybe connection to institutions in Wall Street around the asset like in a post ETF environment make the potential to like raise for a very large DAT more appealing. I'm curious your thoughts there. like do do we see like sole ETFs go live and then you give it a couple months see some inflows and then like maybe the the like picture on Wall Street looks a little bit more attractive and then and then at that point like you have a a Tom Lee of

Salana step into play and you you see a very big kind of DAT come to the forefront for Soul or even other assets right like this could be XRP this could be you know other tokens down the line um it almost feels like maybe that's like a kind of a big step in the direction of like gaining some favor uh with with maybe the larger institutions or just like institutional interest. >> Yeah, I mean it's definitely a step of legitimacy at the absolute bare minimum, right? Like that's just like all right, you know, we can trust you for if you if you've made it through that process. I think there's no doubt about that. Um but and there actually might be something deeper there though. So if you remember the Bitcoin driven rally uh at the end of Q4 last year was largely

during the time not largely was during the time when Sailor was pumping in a total of $20 billion of of net buys um through Micro Strategy of obviously acquiring more Bitcoin. And during that time the ETF inflows for Bitcoin were extremely hot, right? This was when everybody was posting them every single day. Um, actually I can pull this up here and and kind of highlight exactly what I mean by that. But I think it was very interesting that you know at that time uh let's see you share screen again. And you kind of had that two that two-wave effect of the uh uh sorry I'm really trying to multi here it's not working share screen window no chrome tab there we go okay if

you want to throw that up Danny but yeah it was just super interesting that at that time right we had um we had sailor accumulating and then we also had the ETFs ripping and I don't know if there's anything mechanical in the relationship between the two there but I do just find that interesting that while Sailor was bidding you also had these massive inflows of multi-billion dollar north of a billion multiple north of1 billion dollar days. Um and at that time right all the Bitcoin maxis were dunking all the ETH maxis because of the size comparisons and whatnot. Uh but then you fast forward to today uh and we kind of see that role flipping, right? We have now instead of Sailor massively bidding uh ETH or sorry Sailor massively bidding Bitcoin, we have Tom Lee and Joe Luben

massively bidding ETH and the ETFs are very interestingly following that. Um, so it does seem I don't again I don't know if there's anything like truly mechanical there like uh if like I I really don't know that that what would be causing that or if it's just the broader adop attention or adoption of like hey uh these guys are smashing by like why would I not go smash by through my brokerage account as well. Um that tough for me to say but again I just kind of thought the it was very interesting it goes one for one there. So to your point about like you know is there a relationship there? Maybe this is just, you know, correlation is not causation and there's nothing here. But, um, you know, looking at at the past moments for Bitcoin and ETH, there actually was a little bit of a

relationship between the DAT buying and the ETF accumulation. >> Yeah, it's interesting. It makes you wonder if I don't know. I mean, you wouldn't suspect like Sailor himself or these big companies to like to be buying into the ETFs via their exposure if they're getting committed like native tokens um or just purchasing like OTC in bulk from whoever on chain uh to build their holdings. But I don't know. I wonder with like maybe the PIPE deals and some of the other activity like maybe these guys, you know, they do those deals, but then they also like get exposure to the underlying, you know, through through the ETFs as

well. Um or it could just be very much like a following uh trade that's that's happening where whether it's retail or anybody else um is just piling into these vehicles after seeing the the big purchase statements come out from from Sailor and from Tom Lee. >> Yeah, I mean it's it's a fair question, but again just like another way to visualize that is um you know here's the start of October. uh we there was about $15 billion 15.5 billion uh in micro strategy was really was the only data at that time and then by the end of December that 15 billion became 43 or 44 billion uh and of course bitcoin

massively outperformed during this period of time markets ripped everyone was kind of in that euphoria heading into the election uh and then now you see a very similar story right uh we've seen you know north of6 billion dollars flow into. Yeah, this week has been insane. Obviously, we jumped from six to to 11 uh billion dollars of inflows. And then just today, Sharlink announced the another slug that they acrewed since the last update, which I believe was about 100. Yeah. So, they have 728. Uh and prior to this announcement, uh yeah, they had just about 600,000 ETH. So about another 100,000 ETH. Um so

they've been accumulating very aggressively as well. >> It's actually it's interesting as well that um I think the ETH spot ETFs went live basically like a year ago off of the start of some of those accumulations. Not that there's anything necessarily specific about one year and and you know Sailor's been buying Bitcoin for far longer than the the BTC ETF has been out there. But um it does make me wonder if there's just something there like potentially correlated there around you know the ETF goes live and then that it makes something more of a compelling story at least to sell the sell the the vision a little bit um to the street or to or to Main Street or whoever

>> on the product because we know that like you know Tom Lee and whoever else like I mean they're going on on finance talk shows and and espousing the vision uh which has been drumming up additional support outside of their own like you share selling and then ETH buying. >> Yeah, their stated goal of of Tom Lee is to hit 5% the alchemy of 5% maybe and he's just shy of 1% today. So, uh by the end of the by next Monday he'll release an announcement and we'll be north of 1% which is also crazy to think about. Uh you know that went from zero to 100 it felt like really in in July 7th we're at August 15th a month and a week absolutely insane growth.

It's nuts. It's It's actually like It's pretty ludicrous. Um yeah, I don't know. I mean, as for the correlations there, like I mean, one of the simplest explanations for a lot of things is like green candles, baguette, green candles, and you know, a lot of FOMO and and chasing. Um I do think between, you know, the ETFs and and the debt treasury companies. Um you know, with with the CME and and the futures basis, like there's a lot of kind of exotic ways to hedge there. So that might play a little bit of a role in kind of the growth once you have, you know, you have the ETFs, you have um a lot more easy accessible ways to to hedge out, you know, kind of things if you want to. Um so that might play play a role in that too. Just kind

of that institutional, you know, CME liquidity is just um I don't know, once it's there, it makes uh you know, the size that that you can have a lot better. But yeah, Tom Le, I mean, I don't know. This this size, this this is just uh it's pretty insane. Um it feels like we're kind of hitting that first uh that first kind of plateau where where everybody kind of looks at themselves and is kind of saying like this is pretty insane. Um but yeah, I mean there'll be a second wave in my opinion. Like I said, I think we're kind of at that that first level where everybody kind of looks around just like um this, you know, is not necessarily sustainable in any way. Um, but you know, I I think it'll kind of play out where, you know,

maybe we go we go down down down some more and then everybody's kind of like, "Oh, it was so easy to, you know, call the top in these treasury companies." And then they'll be kind of that that second wave of life is kind of how I'm thinking about it now. And how many waves of life that they have in them, we'll see. Um, I mean, a lot of it is is out of their hands. If, you know, Trady wants to go down, too, I'm sure that'll affect overall, you know, volatility and and volume and just kind of sentiment around things. and then they can't monetize the the stock as easily. Um, so that kind of is a feedback loop that that feeds on itself. Um, but for now, I mean, you know, the immediate future, like I, you know, they have no problem monetizing it as of now. We'll see, you

know, couple weeks, months from now. We'll see what that looks like. Um, but yeah, as of now, I mean, it's it's full steam ahead. >> Yeah, full steam ahead. I mean, so I you you mentioned the monetization aspect there, and I'm certainly not an expert in this. I spend all my time in crypto, but this has been a leading driver of crypto, so obviously I've been I've been diving in here. And if anyone listening to this is like, "Nope, dude, you're an idiot. Here's how it actually works." I am all ears. Please shoot me a message, a DM, uh, a reply, and call me an idiot publicly. It all works. But my understanding of how this works is you set up these ATM facilities where there basically a free permission or not free permission, you have to get approved by the board and the shareholders and

whatnot, but you have the ability to uh, issue authorized shares into the market. Uh and what that mechanically means is basically they will like they have a a provider that will work with the market makers making the book and you will literally drip new shares into the market to buyers, right? So if you go into buy instead of taking an order uh off the offer, you like quite literally purchase a new share into and that's how it releases them into circulation. Um, and so the way that you you sort of have to do this, you know, if you just like dumped a bunch of supply onto the market as we all know in crypto, uh, and especially in the trenches in the memecoin space, yeah, the you you make an impact on price. And so the I guess like the the recommended path forward is

something around like two and a half to 5% of daily volume you can basically replace with this new share issuance without totally dampening price. Um and you've seen these guys issue much more aggressively than that. So this the Sharplink team has put out some really detailed uh data for us. They've given us the weekly ATM number of issues shared uh number of shares issued and the net proceeds in dollars from from issuing those shares. And of course you can track the trading volume as well. And we've seen they've actually ranged at about an average of 6% um as low as two and a half percent some weeks and about as high as 10% on other weeks on how aggressively they've issued new shares onto the market. Uh BMR is not giving us this level of detail. Uh but

you can kind of back into it based on the amount of ETH they acquired over the last week in dollar terms. Uh and then of course again you can grab the trading volume and we've seen that ratio go as high about 11 or 12%. So, both of these guys are just absolutely hammering shares into all this volume that they've been getting, which again continues to go up and to the right. Last week was, you know, yet yet again a higher volume week. If we look at BitMine and SBED specifically, um kind of zoom in here, uh you'll notice that they've had insane volume pops and ATF ATNF as well. They kind of like just kind of getting off the ground. It's the ETHzilla one if you're familiar. They're trying to put basically do everything on chain which is interesting. Um but again when you

are running this type of this amount of volume you you the numbers that you can raise with this share dripping is is pretty ridiculous. I expect another multiund million dollar week from from uh Tom Lee and Bitmine uh this week, right? They've they've had a couple days where they likely raised over $400 million per day. Um, so yeah, I think we'll be north of the billion dollar purchase going into next week. So the question for me is like, yes, I completely agree with you, Tolk, right? If broader markets pull down, then I think you're going to that's of course going to start driving some issues here.

But, you know, as as long as they can keep driving attention around these these these stocks, um, it feels like they're going to continue to be able to drive volume and continue to be able to issue new shares, which means they're going to continue to be able to buy more ETH. Uh, and that's kind of like I think this is probably the most important number uh is the usage of these ATM facilities on a weekly basis and how aggressively they're being able to do this because once that does start to dry up, you know, that's a good indication we're going to be losing our strongest buyer in the market. And Sailor has already said, hey, if MNAT is below two and a half, we're not going to be tapping that facility. Uh, and right now they're at about like a 1.7 range. All right? So, they're not buying. Then if

we lose Tom Lee, we lose ESB, they're not buying. and it's like you start to wonder who's left. Um, so that's kind of the interesting thing I'm looking at. So yeah, if there's one number in the industry I'm tracking today, unfortunately it's an offchain number, but it's it's the usage of these ATM facilities uh and the trend at which they're issuing. I think that's basically going to tell us where we are in market. >> Yeah. No, I definitely agree with all that. And I think before you hopped on that was something that I mentioned about just kind of the overall price action that we've seen recently too. Um, I mean, obviously we had the the really aggressive run up to new highs. Um, but Sailor on on the earning calls like just, you know, making it clear that they're not tapping the the ATM for for

com stock anymore. Like that was something that, um, I think a lot of, you know, a lot of short people on CT kind of noted as, you know, kind of a sea change shift and kind of the market structure that that Bitcoin has been used to for, you know, years now. And like you said, I mean, we're talking, you know, the numbers of the size, you know, was it 20 billion last year? Like these are, you know, they're massive, massive, massive numbers. Um, so I agree that um, you know, the market right now paying attention to to those ATM offerings are are one of one of the key things, but you know, I mean, you can bid up kind of as much ETH as you want, but I'm kind of one of the things I've been thinking through a lot this week is

with Sailor out of the he's not out of the market, but the size that that we're used to, I think is is significantly less moving forward. And it's just kind of like where does, you know, the next marginal buyer for for BTC come from. Um, and again, you can shove as much money as you want into ETH over, you know, a month, two month, three months period, but eventually if BTC is is kind of, you know, just dragging along, you know, there's only there's only so high that that you can push ETH without Bitcoin climbing higher. Um, that's why, you know, kind of earlier this week, like seeing Bitcoin make new highs was incredible because I was kind of concerned about just the overall state of the market with BTC kind of stalling out at like 120 while alts and ETH BTC

just I mean on an absolute tear and I was kind of just like, you know, if BTC doesn't make the next leg, then, you know, this this might kind of be it. not necessarily, you know, not like, you know, the bare markets that we've that we've had of old necessarily, but just, you know, market cool down for for a while. Um, and then BTC made that leg and then instantly kind of puked. So, I'm kind of back to to that that stance right now, like, you know, you can raise all this money for for ETH and and other DATs, but you know, if BTC isn't playing along, like there's only there's only so much you can do.

>> Yeah, I think it's a good question. Something I saw that I kind of pondered a little bit um was I saw the question asked like how much at how much of the supply of these tokens does does like that ownership become almost like a risk. Um and not not that I'm saying that we need to talk about like 33% or 50% and like taking over the network or something along those lines, but more so just to the point of like you know if these guys are the big buyer or maybe like at some point they're kind of like the only buyer. Um, like where does that become like really apparent or like potentially a question mark? Like if Sailor had 10, 15, 20% of Bitcoin? Like I don't know. I think I feel like you'd

have to be throwing out some question marks there. Like if the if this guy's the only guy that's that's ever buying it um and he decides he doesn't want to buy, like who who am I going to sell to type of thing? Um I don't know. Do you guys have a thought there? Just kind of like a hypothetical thing. Are you saying you you sell your tokens? I thought we just I thought that just went out forever. >> Just hypothetically, like let's say Tom Lee acquired 25% of ETH. Like I I don't know. Is that like is it almost more of a risk than a positive at that point? Like are you are you still holding your ETH very excited that he's going to raise his ownership to 50%. like at some point you have to fulfill the like if they're going to just endlessly bid the

thing off of like monetizing the retail like purchasers of their stocks. Um naturally you would have to seek an exit at some point otherwise they're going to you know the only other exitor would be them. >> Yeah. I mean I think that's the major trade right now. I think it's like people are going to keep bidding until these folks can't and then when they can't we'll probably sell off and I think you see that in kind of smaller examples. But it just makes sense like it's just kind of you know there's a lot of momentum. I think a lot of people are going to get behind it. I also think a lot of the ETF flows are lag like either some are lagging and then some are

trying to frontr run some of these um like raises if that's what you want to call it. Um but yeah, I think it's like very likely that happens. Like kind of hard to see why that wouldn't be the case. Um and so yeah, I think like the game's going to keep getting played until that point. um side point of what you brought up Danny though like you know Tom and like the ETH dats or whatever like owning like 33% of the network um I wonder at what point the uh ETH concernors um really get you know stumped by that one because right now they've been

cheerleading these things pretty hard um seems that they might have left their you know values like to the side for now. Um because ultimately they're being aligned by the price going up. So >> they love him until he tips until he tips 33% then they hate him. >> Do we know how Bitmine is staking? Uh have they disclosed if they're using a single provider or what that looks like? >> I haven't seen that. I haven't seen any Arkham entities for them either. Like no single entity at least matches up for the exact size. So, I assume they're also probably using um some sort of custody solution right now.

There's like Coinbase custody or someone else. U but yeah, curious if anyone knows. >> Yeah, I don't know for them specifically, but I think that's definitely something that's worth caring about for the sake of this conversation, right? Because if 5% if they do hit 5% and then uh you know a single entity gets an additional 5% boost to your stake I think that's like definitely a thing to be discussing. Um you know what can you actually do with that is is sort of a knock-on question. But it's interesting because Sharplink is using liquid collective which is shout out to Mari Schmidt and that team.

That's literally what they built for this moment. And it's it's cool to actually see them land one of the two biggest um you know potential clients for for what they were going after. Uh that said, you know, they the way that system is set up is there's five entities that run the validators for that stake. Um so that one's like a little bit more diversified than a single operator, but all five of those entities already operate existing stake, right? So if you were trying to say all right what's like the true entity count uh within you know the top third top 33% of Ethereum stake um that would all be flowing back into entities that are already in that top 33% rather than spinning up a new one that has like an addition you're adding additional entity so it probably is you know from a purely

number standpoint uh increasing the concentration of stake but I think it's a little bit inevitable when you have buyers of that size right like how else are you realistically going to do it Um, but I think it kind of comes full circle back to the Lido thing of like rewind two years ago, they were like this evil entity. Uh, but at the end of the day, you know, they do have, you know, 40 or so operators behind their stake. Um, so yeah, it is kind of to see that. And then I guess the counterpoint of someone doing it uh in a very like uh ethaligned way, if you will, I think it's BTCS. Uh, they are using RocketPool validators.

Uh, so they're spinning up their uh I don't know exactly the process that they're doing. I don't know if they're spinning up their own validators through Rocket Pool or if they're just staking to existing validators, but um yeah, they're really trying to spread their stake out uh across a larger uh valer or entity count, which is which is pretty interesting to see. And now they're significantly smaller than Sharplink or Bitmine, but just interesting to see the kind of uh spread of different approaches there. >> Yeah, good points. I um I do I do like the comments like I don't know I do feel like your your typical ETH concern or probably is not they're not too concerned right now. Um asset price goes up that's always good. Um so you know

we'll take a little bit of asset concentration if it means number go up for the time being. Um I I mean and I can't imagine, you know, you can get to 3% in in short order, but to actually acquire like for for one of these or for like a combination of these companies to actually acquire like 30% of all of the tokens, I mean, Sailor's been doing this for years and um they only have >> 3% of supply. So yeah, I mean it would push it one it would almost likely the due to the way that their execution is and they literally like market by the token with like no regard for anything.

um every time they raise cash um they would be pushing the price like to astronomical levels to even do so. Um at that point you would be like questioning probably if you're a longtime ETH holder I don't know maybe you think it's going to 79 trillion or whatever the estimate is but >> that would be but like there's there's like I don't think you'd want to do that because you would be inviting those questions you know. >> Exactly. Yeah. for it for it to happen like so quickly that um it's just like actively pushing the price up like you know massive percentages like on a consistent basis to to achieve that amount of ownership like it it would be stupid to the extent that like you'd be the one left holding the bag and had

paid a big premium to hold it. Um which doesn't make any sense. So, uh, far more likely that we see like a little bit of a leveling off like Sailors has where, you know, he's still incrementally buying Bitcoin, but, you know, he obviously can't buy 1%, you know, every quarter anymore. Uh, it just becomes it becomes too much of a of an obstacle to move that far. Awesome. Um, I don't know any other big takeaways, guys. I'm I'm happy to cut it off short or I guess not really short. We went for a good amount of time here. Um, but it is a Friday and around down here in downtown Ohio, the weather is quite nice outside. Um, it'd be great to go and touch some grass. I don't know about you guys, but um, yeah, I guess we're studying Tom Le's girth. We're

keeping an eye on his size in the ETH marketplace. Um, that is the big story right now. How high will ETH go? How much will ETHATS purchase? Um, and a bunch of people seem to be along for the ride. Any other takeaways? >> No. No. How's uh how's things going with Cairo, Cian? What's the most interesting thing you guys are working on? >> Things are going well. Um you know, we've just been adding more networks. We're looking at Fogo as one.

>> G Fogo. >> Um G Fogo. >> Love Fogo. >> Fogo Friday. >> Fogo Friday. Yes, >> Fridays. >> Exactly. >> They should pay us for that. That would be crazy. Continue. Sorry. >> Hard to put a price on Fogo Friday. Um yeah, things are going well. Um a little tired right now. Um but yeah, things have been going well. >> It's late for you. You look like you're uh in an undisclosed like Mediterranean location >> or something along those lines.

Something like that. Yeah, >> somewhere with no AC. >> Oh, >> that's tough. >> That helps narrow it down. >> Yeah, only a little bit. All right, guys. We can uh we'll call it there. I'm feeling the fatigue from Ian right now. I'm feeling a little sweaty myself. Uh gonna have to go crank the AC another point, maybe. Uh, thank you for coming on chatting all things going on in the markets and thanks to all of you guys out there watching, listening. Uh, we will see you all again next time. Until then, peace out.

>> Pogo Fridays. Pogo Friday. >> Fridays. [Music]