Ryan Returns! What He Missed & What Happens Next?

Transcript

welcome Bankless Nation to the Bankless Weekly Rollup where we cover everything that's been going on in the wild west of crypto today I'm joined once again by the one and only Ryan Sean Adams ryan welcome back to Banks oh my god what did I miss did I miss anything you missed nothing dude nothing happened don't worry about it okay so my big question going to this episode I was like trying to figure out after coming back so for for people who like don't know I've been on hiatus for 90 there's probably for 90 days I've been out okay so my big question coming back to this episode and just like getting back into crypto because I've been on a complete like disconnect from almost internet detox yeah and I can talk more about

that but my big question David is like okay are we still in a bull market like what is going on here because there's some like I I just don't even know this has broken the cycle in my mind so like what's the consensus around uh around crypto i don't think that there is consensus and I think that is actually a very big signal about what crypto is now uh dispersion uh differentiation there's different sectors of crypto crypto is large there's different corners and there is no global consensus there is no one single thing about what crypto is uh and I think my opinion is that the four-year cycle is broken uh and so are we in a

bull market or are we in a bare market well you can look in different sectors of crypto and have different answers to that uh so there is no one clear answer okay so like traditionally when we say bull market or bare market we're talking about those four-ear cycles like as you said and now it seems like the consensus is sounds like it's your opinion you share this is it broadly the consensus in crypto that okay we don't get those anymore there's no four-ear cycles we've kind of we're at the adoption curve where just like stuff just happens it's like the regular market in that way and we're not going to have a repeat of like Bitcoin goes up you know like u all all the alts kind of go up and you know this you know it's either a bull cycle or or like bare market and we just get that i

don't know if it's consensus but I think that that is right all right because it's hard to have consensus when there is dispersion like people's voices are all over the place all right well it's interesting um the changing of it's a phase change of crypto there has been a phase change i will say that there's a lot more I want to get caught up with you about because I I think I missed a whole bunch of things so I hope would you just indulge me a little bit in this episode i hope bankless listeners indulge me is like give me some highlights from the last 90 days as we get into this and like get me up to speed because I feel like there's some major things I may have missed i wasn't in the action at those times yeah and I and maybe it's also worth providing the

context about like how like I'm sure you heard about the Trump memecoin yeah uh but like you have been on a media content detox and so it's worth I think laying down the impression of No Ryan has been unplugged maybe you could share how unplugged have you been very so I like the Trump memecoin right that's something I would have like heard probably within seconds yeah right in my you know uh I caught wind of that a week later from an in real life friend a week after it launched and he asked my opinion on it because he like know knows I'm in crypto what's your opinion I was like oh that happened okay like I I don't usually shooting from the hip on an opinion on that but um I do have an opinion on that actually but like I

didn't that's how disconnected I was the president seven days late to the Trump memecoin is incredibly disconnected that's my latency right now so yeah there's a few things you're going to have to get me up to feed on also like uh some things as I'm getting plugged back in on the week there's some Zora drama these content coins um Bitcoin is decoupling like gold is on a tear that's all interesting and also Vitalic had a execution layer plan for the EVM he's talking about u maybe replacing the EVM with uh risk zero so I definitely want to talk about that with you too yeah that's definitely the the tip of the chain uh so we're going to go through I I have the four biggest things that happened in the last 90 days and we're

going to go through those all right uh and then we'll also get to the tip of the chain which is like some of the events that you just talked about before Bank list Nation we get to all of those things a message from our friends and sponsors over at Wall Connect has been used by over 255 million connections from 40 million unique users all across the internet who are simply just connecting their wallet to the applications that they want to use and Wallet Connect is entering their final form of decentralizing and protocolizing Wallet Connect uh and of course in order to do that they are releasing the last piece of the puzzle the wallet connect token ryan if you're familiar with like you know you know the story of Visa or Swift messaging networks and how they came to be and how like it's not they

they weren't like startup companies uh how would you explain the creation of those two things visa Visa was like a consortium right of all of these different kind of like uh financial like you know payment you like providers and banks and all of these things and so they're they're almost like a collection a consortium that that sort of came together together and they coordinated this consensus layer and they sort of like just formed that way yeah exactly okay so that is exactly what's happening to the wallet connect infrastructure which I thought was pretty compelling i had a conversation with Pedro Gomez uh that that's available on Twitter so we can link that uh that's exactly what's happening to the wallet connect token and how the wallet connect token and infrastructure is being spun out so if that has you peaked banklist nation banklist.cc/walletconnect tc/walletconnect to stay ahead of what's

next uh I think the first news of the week is this article Ryan that you posted uh called How a Rub reboot fixed my burnout and upgraded my mind this is also your welcome back post to Twitter so welcome back to Twitter yeah sorry to have you back uh on that particular medium of the internet um but again like go and like lay us down on the last like 90 days of Ryan Sean Adams and what you've been thinking about and why you needed to take the break and what it feels like to be back yeah so I guess like firstly in the welcome back to Twitter like I'm going to do things differently this time I think with respect to how I engage with uh an app like Twitter and uh I can kind of get into that but I just posted this it's a

sort of a short post and I think it might resonate with people it's like nothing to do with crypto well it kind of is actually but it is to do with like life and um modern living I would say and doing uh I think it's a post for what I called like grind addicted overachievers which was like I think I don't know you tell me David we've worked together for like 5 years now it's like um that feels like my personality type like I can get in these grind cycles of just like I do the same thing and I can like like bear the pain to like just get through it and then I also have this problem in in that like the thing that I'm doing I'm not quite satisfied like I get to the place I'm

like "Oh but there's another place further out." And like I I higher peak there's always a higher peak for me and so I all of this compounding over time um in January it I I would say it like kind of snuck up on me but like I kind of knew it was happening but I I just hit a moment in January it was after um Do do you remember our uh like the one Salana token I go like Yeah and uh it was Salana um and there was a whole like public pitchforking u you know actually we did sort of make a mistake on that but but the pitchforking was absolutely crazy and

this was like the I don't know the 10th time it had happened and all of this combined I just I didn't have the the skin thick enough to get through it and something in my mental operating system just crashed like I I just felt done i felt exhausted i felt burnt out it was this question of like when I wake up in the morning why am I doing this like why am I doing this and I think if you're listening and you're asking yourself that question about whatever you're doing in life whether it's like a relationship a job like just anything in life and there's this repeated uh question of like why am I still doing this in your mind then that might be a sign you're like in burnout territory you've lost track of yourself and you need to do what I did which was take a

reboot so um this was really hard for me David cuz like and you were the first person I I talked to about it but um it was really hard for me to come to the realization that I needed to completely disconnect from everything like kill all my commitments like all the pod we we plan podcasts like you know 6 weeks out right cancel all of those at least for me uh you know have you my business partner like take on the mantle of like carrying all of the load of bank list where where I did nothing for 90 days like no meetings no work nothing um all opportunities that like things we could do possibilities just let those evaporate um that that was the reboot and that was

the uh decision I had to make to to come to you talk to you talk to the team and just be like hey I'm going for like 90 days and by the way I can't tell you confidently if I'm going to be back or not all right and I wish I could say that was like um I rationally came to that conclusion like this is all part of you know a process of just like upgrading and just like figuring my [ __ ] out but it wasn't like that it was it was like capitulation you know it was like I I compared it to being margin called liquidated you like it wasn't on my terms you called it an emotional margin call it was an emotional margin call and I think that that can happen if you're a you know grinding a high achiever that sort of thing can happen

to you it's better i I would just say it's better for it to happen on your own terms and not be marginal called but regardless I was margin called i needed to kind of disconnect and go figure stuff out go answer my question of like why am I doing this mhm yeah i think it's yeah worth emphasizing that there was a moment and it lasted for a while actually maybe even a couple months where you did not know if you were going to come back to crypto yeah to crypto like to bank list i just like I really didn't know and so I set this time aside for myself to go figure it out and um like once I once I disconnected once I cleared everything I really had just the space to diagnose what was wrong right and so this is

where like you reboot and you upgrade right this is the cycle and and I think for for my cycle you know life life happens in these cycles of progress right and um what I needed to do I didn't know I needed to do it but what I needed to do was sort of like end one cycle in order to begin the next and that's what the the reboot did but now the question is like what's the next cycle for me mhm and there were a few problems I had with the way I was doing things previously in like crypto media investing this crazy world like one was just and some of this is pretty simple it's like not it's not rocket science but um you like that that that's the beauty of it anyone can kind of do these things and and apply them but for me

number one I was way too online i was I couldn't go 15 minutes without checking something dude so whether it was like socials whether it was like price chart whether it was Discord whether it was Telegram it was dopamine dripped right into like my veins mhm and I didn't even realize it i think you've told me before when you've gone on like mountain expeditions and stuff like when you completely disconnect from screens you realize how addicted you actually like were to it mhm um and so like I would find myself just kind of like when I disconnected from these things like I'm talking deleting apps everything like just complete cold turkey I would find myself like reaching for my phone i'd reach more for my phone dude i'd

pick it up and I look at my like home screen there's like nothing fun on it anymore and I'd be like I put it down i'd be like why did I even do that right uh-huh why did I pick up my phone yeah yeah why did I pick up my phone uhhuh so um that was clearly a problem um I just I got rid of that by just treating myself like a child so I went into the you know settings my phone app screen uh restrictions screen time limitations again like deleting things and it it totally it felt like detoxing from something um how long was that process like were you were you irritable how long did that last like what did that feel like week I felt like jittery i mean it wasn't super irritable but I felt jittery um like a little bit like

trying to get off caffeine and that's only like hard substance like you know I've lived a pretty clean life David so it's you know social media and caffeine for me are your are your vices yeah yeah it's it's pretty it was kind of like that but um it probably felt it took like a week and I got the first round of just like clarity just quiet in the mind and then after 30 days like a lot more of that started to return and I found like I could focus focus i could be present i combined some of this with like you know just like some daily just quiet time like meditation type stuff um and I could think again so that was the first thing I did um the second thing I did was I felt lost like I felt like I

didn't again answering that question of like why am I doing this again uh you know like the reason you and I both got into crypto and started on this bankless journey was like the word freedom we keep returning to that right like freedom like we want to use crypto technology as an escape from all the systems that try to control us right like the banks or um you like the um the the centralized tech companies but somewhere along the road like I found myself a slave to like prices okay i you know crypto prices crypto prices but just kind of the the the concept of um like wealth do you know

what I mean like okay so this is goes back to the goalpost moving we've talked about crypto wealth so many different times on bank list over the years what I had never done before never in my history is actually defined what like enough was mhm like what's the number where like that's enough for everything I want to do in life and my family like wants to do and where I can provide for those that I love and I don't have to look at the scoreboard anymore mhm and maybe to emphasize this is not coming from a place of of greed or greediness this is coming from a place of you love the game you love the game of like

growing a business and playing that particular game investing in the right ways because totally what are you what are you going to do with your life it's a fun game it's an enjoyable game and you love the game yeah so I'm not the type of person like to do sort of the flashy status symbol thing of like you know buying the Lambo and whatever like that's not Yeah you bought you bought a used Toyota Highlander like four years ago yeah yeah and like so that but it wasn't that for me but it was very much like the high score like the arcade game of like just like um it it was just kind of this endless cycle of you know and crypto prices rise and fall you you you never know like you know some something that starts at like one could turn into a 100 and like you just extrapolate that

forward anyway I'd not taken the time to actually define with those in my life my spouse like what is enough okay so that that was a big piece of it the other piece I was missing was my um definition of wealth was way too narrow it was like when I thought about wealth mostly I thought about like uh net worth right which is definitely a key part of wealth but that's also the part that society um it imposes on us like we're sort of taught like what is success it's net worth it's kind of number go up um a key book for me was uh Sahil Bloom's book which is kind of ironic because we actually had Sahill I think he was like booked yeah we had him we had him booked for a for just a podcast yeah just talk

about it anyway I I received the book in the mail you know because he had uh sent that book as pre-ereading material for the podcast i was like "Okay this is interesting well I'm not doing anything else i may as well read this." It was fantastic it's called the right book at the right time right book at the right time it's called the five types of wealth and it just expanded my framework so he talks about like yeah financial wealth is one type of wealth but there's also like time wealth uh relationships social wealth uh mental wealth physical wealth and I looked at that and I was like "Oh my god I'm completely overallocated in sort of the the financial side of things." And I'm not like taking care of the other four types of wealth right like I was time poor i

was relationship light i was like mentally scattered i was physically like I hadn't worked out in probably a couple of years like at least not consistently so I just felt physically like just soft mhm and I was just focusing on one type of wealth i was missing all of the other types you know you see yes just like questions about your relationship wealth and your social like who are the people that are going to be at the front row of your funeral right are you investing in those relationships and how are you investing are you dollar cost averaging into them and so that was another key piece for me in sort of finding my new map is creating a wealth plan that was more than just stacking you know Ether

Bitcoin like crypto wealth right and that was broader and it was using money you know Naval often says this money is a tool right and so it's like using as money as a tool to also allocate to those other types of wealth and so like I'm I'm working out now i'm like eating far more nutritiously i'm like uh taking time for that i'm investing in my relationships both like my family immediate family relationships and then um just like friendships that I'd sort of let um atrophy and um I created a whole plan of around this so it's like one thing to read the book but like what was uh pivotal for me was creating like a dashboard goals habits systems you like feedback loops you know how I work

to just like grind it into a discipline right yeah you turned the other four types of wealth into processes for yourself yeah yeah which Ryan loves process let me tell you oh my god yeah yeah well it's I feel like I just need reminders right and so this is like when you have processes and systems when you drift you can just get back on course so that was the second thing and the third thing uh was I felt in everything I was doing I was being I was stretched too thin like I was doing too many things you know when you have too many browser windows open and Chrome's like that's too much i'm eating all of your system resources crash you know uh you just had too many browser windows you know and so I needed to like it was a result of saying yes to all of these things oh

that looks interesting that look I could do that i could do that i could do that and what I needed to do was like correct uh the overachiever's delusion which like for me was like three things it was like I'm the only one who could do this that's what I thought if I don't do it it won't get done and being busy is good m those three things were like delusions basically I was feeding into myself and it turned out and this really impressed upon me like 30 days in uh everything was working still I just peaked in I had a meeting with you and and Rachel on our team I peaked in our COO I was looking at the the podcast feed all the episode shipped thank you very much David I appreciate it was not missed rollup wasn't missed we still never miss a

rollup at bank list yeah like um ETH price wasn't great but like our control great it's out of our control um like Bankless Ventures was backing deals like everything was happening the team was kind of covering the gap and so I I look at the like what I used to believe and like cuz I thought maybe I thought subconsciously that if I left I don't know the world would burn like I don't know what would happen right things would crumble yeah and this was uh hard evidence that showed me otherwise so now I'm doing this thing where I'm just like operating on energy accounting mhm which is like if a task drains more than it pays right it's delegated it's automated or it's deleted and I'm deleting a lot of things right

now for my life and I'm just focusing on core areas of competence right the zone of genius as people call it storytelling so that means doing this podcast with you telling stories about the frontier of crypto ai is something I've been rabbit holeing recently like all that stuff and allocating capital so that is the upgrade so there was the reboot uh the system was down had some downtime you know just like Salana sorry uh had some downtime uh no Salana's doing great it's really great to see i can't wait to talk to you more about that and then also I just upgraded the software so that's what RSA 2 is um and um yeah I I don't know i I don't often share personal things like

in general like I'm pretty not that way but um I thought this might be helpful for some people so that's why I published the article yeah no and it's also it's also just good to hear the story um and good to good to see that you have invested in the other side of your life uh I was very happy to see that you followed through on not a single tweet for nine months and like the the gray icon 90 Yeah 90 days excuse me uh and then also the gray icon next to your name you know on just gray for for 90 days and it was good it was good i I've always perceived that you've been way like better balanced than me is that like Yes uh so you you talked about how um you said uh you now operate on energy accounting if a task drains me more than

it pays it's delegated automated or deleted i have operated on that i think maybe maybe as a um not like an admiral quality of me but just like if it drains me more than it pays I ignore it which is which is something I personally have to deal with because like ignoring something is not always the best solution but it has allowed me to be more sustainable like I it's a little bit more innate in me of like if this is not fun then I'm just not doing this and I'm going to pivot into something that I do find fun and I'm going to apply my my energies that way now again like I said that has cost me um 2021 taxes let me tell you but uh but this has also made like just

my being a little bit more sustainable naturally i'm not saying it's the optimum strategy uh but this is why I think uh stuff like this like the Twitter mobbings don't get me in the same way that they get you yeah i I I think you are much more bomb-proof than me it's like just more endurance runner type quality when when you're that way and I do think that that's the ying and the yang you know sometimes you know sometimes you need a little bit of the grind and the over like what could we do like the overachieving and sometimes you just need the you know like balance uh you know finding energy actually like loving what you're doing and focusing on those things so um yeah that's uh good stuff now you have had some thoughts I think about just like bank lists you know I read uh your tweet earlier

this week as I was logging back in about um your thoughts and on like what to really focus on tell me about that yeah well so maybe this comes down on the back of like your big realization you said you know 30 days powered down proved that you know the the bankless media company would keep on shipping podcasts bankless ventures would keep on going and you know to be clear the shoes of Ryan Shawn Adams are very large and there is no there's no truly filling those shoes but yet you know the with the void that that was left that was created you know the myelial network did fill that in like we learned to like route around the the the void like that did get filled in it's not perfect but things did keep on going and we learned

to fill that gap but also that like we also learned about how to like with that gap there was an opportunity for everyone to kind of like step up and put on the new hats that uh needed to be uh dawned on uh and there's been it's been generative I would say on on the back side of the company uh and especially me because I'm the person who who has had to fill that void the most and it was also a moment for the company to ask like do we need to do this thing like what what are we doing that we actually might not need to do we have to do things this way uh and so downstream of that has been some choices I put this out uh this tweet uh saying there are four things that um we're going to do at

bank list and this is like actually maybe just uh not completely relevant to what I was just saying of filling in the void but you know choices that I think we ought to make moving forward um one during your last the last 90 days AI has just you know been as as amazing as crypto was in 2021 in terms of hype and attention and I am AIDL i think you have mentioned that you are AI pilled uh we have a uh team member who is AI pled and then also a Jaws who is crypto and AI pilled and so we have actually have found solid podcasting talent that is AI pilled and we actually have a lot of podcasting talent that's AI pled and not just AI pled but frontier techp uh and we have been making more AI content which I think many people have enjoyed

and some people have caused like elevated frustration that like oh my crypto podcast is now an AI podcast or a frontier tech podcast and I understand that so we are creating a new podcast uh a Frontier Tech focused podcast uh that we are going to incubate you're still going to see those podcasts episodes on this feed but we're also going to incubate this new podcast we're calling it um Limitless so we have Bankless Bankless for Crypto Crypto Markets and then Limitless for Frontier Tech uh and so we're going to spin up that podcast vertical so you'll see that as well all the Frontier Texas stuff is going to go over there also uh the next thing renewed Ethereum focus and the reason why I think this this again has nothing to do with your departure and actually has everything to do with Ethereum to me

becoming interesting again whereas the last two years of Ethereum have been often a direction that hasn't felt aligned with what the universe wants or what the universe expects out of and and I and I see Ethereum in the last six months realigning itself to a new future and you know Bankos has always had Ethereum in our DNA there's no there's no ripping Ethereum out of bankless DNA that just doesn't make sense it's our first love it always will be uh and I think we there's an opportunity now where bankless can actually support Ethereum because I don't think there wasn't supporting much to support about Ethereum in like 2023 it was it needed to al re like how you needed to go and and like realign yourself ethereum

Ethereum also needed a reboot why and we are I think we are slowly watching Ethereum reboot in a way that we I think we can support and so now that that opportunity exists once again uh I think I I want to take it i think we should take it love it um thumbnails this seems small but our thumbnails also need a reboot um and thumbnails like seem like such a small thing um but people judge podcasters YouTubers by what their thumbnails look like um no more stupid openmouth face like kind of YouTuber face we were always pushing against it but the the incentives pointed there and so we're trying to figure out how to keep on optimizing for click-through rate you know which is what you do when you optimize for thumbnails while also

um kind of like restoring uh legitimacy which you know we once had and like the podcast feed does have but we I want to go back into just optimizing for legitimacy and I think this relates to what you are thinking about with like your energy level and how to not deplete your energy level and this means like we're going to optimize for what we feel is legitimacy and legitimate conversations and like uh things that we find interesting uh rather than than like the dopamine of of click-through rate and then of course the last one is Ryan Tron Adams returns back this week so it's all those things i I think that's really awesome i think that um the two most exciting technologies in my lifetime aside from the internet was just like growing up whatever crypto

2010s into now right that's the story and now AI 2020s and so like to be exploring both of those frontiers is like a pretty rare opportunity if you ever need a guest host on Limitless okay i'm kind I'm kind of I dabble okay i've been using you know the tools on a daily basis uh learning about Transformers and just like the way all these systems are are structured uh so that'll be really fun i think you will be uh you've been listening to the Josh episodes on Frontier Tech and also the the AI rollups with Jaws and Josh uh Josh and Josh I'm very bullish on as podcasters and when I've stepped in into that role with the AI rollup Josh and David it's

actually I'm just I just feel like the Jason Kalcanis and I say that in a negative way cuz I and I'll leave that there uh but Josh and Jaws are uh very smart uh and I I am very bullish on them as podcasters uh and I think you will definitely enjoy being a part of that conversation cuz I walk away from those podcasts very bullish on AI and very interested in what happens next which is how I felt about crypto in like 2019 well uh Bankless listeners thanks for indulging David and I in a little catch up a little bit of housekeeping we appreciate you after the break you're going to have to fade out to sponsors David because I don't even know who's sponsoring us anymore but uh you got to update me on some of the big things that happened while I was out because I have

so many questions so let's get to that thanks for the station we're going to get to the Trump memecoin the Bitcoin strategic reserve and the Libra debacle but first a message from some of these fantastic sponsors like Uniswap uh that make this show possible unis swap is your gateway to a more efficient DeFi experience with Uniswap swapping and bridging across 13 chains is simple fast and cost effective helping you move value wherever whenever thanks to deep liquidity on the Uniswap protocol you'll enjoy minimal price impact on every trade and now UniS swap V4 takes it even further swappers benefit from gas savings on multihop swaps and ETH trading pairs while liquidity providers can create new pools at 99% lower costs the best part you don't have to do anything extra each trade is

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just logged in those two clicks and I'm already into my Infinex account so let's go make a switch i'm going to go switch my USDC that is on base and I'm going to buy Barachchain which is a completely different chain uh so we're going to switch this i'm going to press that button and then Infinex is going to execute this order this crosschain order for me and now it is done but actually I'm not really feeling bearish anymore so I'm going to go from Barra uh to Penguins i'm going to buy a Penguin on Salana so I'm going from the Barra chain to Salana see no transaction signing no gas to worry about you just switch across whatever chain that you want with Infinex that was so easy go check out Infinex and try your first switch today in the wild west of DeFi stability and

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your go-to dex stake it and help shape FRA nation's future ready to join the forefront of DeFi visitfra.com now to start earning with FRAUSD and staked FRAUSD and for Banklist listeners you can use fra.com/r/bankless when bridging to Fraal for exclusive Fraal perks and boosted rewards before we get into the uh the three subjects that I uh teased right before going into the break Ryan I just kind of want to talk about some numbers really quick okay since your since your departure on on January 16th your uh 90-day hiatus ETHUSD is down 48% from $3,000 $3,400 to 17 that's what I remember i remember it was in the 30,000 3,400 yeah well it's it's 1750 hopefully you weren't on margin when you left uh

Bitcoin Bitcoin USD is down 7% from 100,000 down to $93,000 salana USD is down 30% from 20 $210 down to $150 and the total crypto market cap is down from 3.6 trillion to three trillion and interestingly Bitcoin gold Bitcoin is down versus gold 25% interesting yeah since your departure what's your reaction what's your reflection on on these numbers i mean honestly it looks Okay so uh it looks most painful for ETH it seems like Bitcoin's doing just fine bitcoin's doing just fine as of right now i mean like I know it was down like I I think I

was looking at the charts i think it was down like a lot more when the tariffs got announced all that stuff uh Salana looks like it's doing pretty well as well it seems like the the sort of the the bare market right now is Ether uh I don't know about the other long tale of assets i've looked at kind of like DeFi tokens and such that I hold i don't think that they have had a resurgence l2 as well so it's like the entire entire Ethereum ecosystem is kind of it's down fairly bad relative to Bitcoin and Soul um like Bitcoin relative to gold is pretty interesting only down 25% i mean I only down 25% 25% gold moving 25% I think is pretty big deal gold is

crushing though right and it's all because of uh you know another theme that seemed to have emerged while I was out which is like um the end of the dollar the like end of PAX Americana you know what I mean like the end of Bretton Woods is that seriously happening under Trump it seems like it might be at least it's the beginning of the end and so I think like gold is kind of repricing that that's the way it seems and uh you know so so it's definitely been on a tear um Bitcoin seems like it's doing really well though um but yeah like it's ETH that's really suffering right now bitcoin so as as you know I did this Bitcoin uh Bitcoin versus Ethereum podcast before uh Bankless it was called POV Crypto it was me the Ethereum guy

and a Bitcoiner co-host and we were just debating we just yell at each other since we were college friends it was fun um a lot of what he said in the early days of that podcast in like the 2018 to 2019 era is coming true where the brand and lead that Bitcoin has uh is actually large and more large than what like Bitcoin detractors say and that eventually Bitcoin will be purchased by central banks and we are not seeing we are not seeing Bitcoin being bought by our central bank but I would say the Bitcoin strategic reserve is like pretty damn close to exactly what that like idea that concept was where the Bitcoin brand is so incredibly strong and the Bitcoin story story and the immaculate

conception which I like minimized back then I was like no it's actually about like scale and productivity and revenue and innovation and software updates that's actually the real thing I think Bitcoiners have uh like old school Bitcoiners that we would debate with back in 2018 2019 uh were had more foresight than I gave credit for back then I I think that um I I got a couple things I would say i don't think it's um over for Ether at all i think right now it's uh losing the Midame and your comments about it kind of like um I think I read a tweet from you where that you know the Ethereum ship is kind of it's taking a long time but it is

turning the big ship to turn and it is turning i definitely see that i know you've got an article coming out um that you've been working on right about Ethereum and sort of the you like the shift and the signs of life that you're seeing and like maybe call it a pivot in some ways like this emphasis on the L2 um I've been ruminating L1 excuse me yes i've been ruminating on like uh another article about um uh what I think the Ethereum community kind of got wrong and what it needs to do interesting um particular okay so actually what the Ethereum community needs to do is actually what I would say my article is about okay and I think you're probably talking about more the um Ethereum network which is important yeah i have

some thoughts on ETH the asset basically the TLDDR from my perspective is holy [ __ ] ETH just got totally outplayed by the Bitcoin religion it did not like you know Ethereum talks about uh building right it's like we're a community of builders we build that's what we do right that's our advantage okay building on the technical side but has not built the meme base layer has not built the cult has not built the religion and we are seeing and it's not something even the theorem culture would kind of acknowledge right it's like it doesn't it doesn't do mass has that DNA well that's the that's a problem and that's that's where you suffer if you're trying to become a global store of value asset anyway I want to take that angle and

kind of uh explore that a little bit but love it Um that's the other side of why you like Bitcoin's been super successful cuz it's gotten to the level of central bankers but in order to get there dude you needed this cult you needed people like Michael Sailor you need people like Dave Bailey who's like rubbing elbows with the politicians getting to speak at conferences about this asset like you have to work your way up to central bank and uh Ethereum hasn't done uh hasn't done that on the community side anyway not to say it can't cuz it's got all the raw ingredients there and some like many that we've argued are like better attributes for a store of value than than Bitcoin but it has to really work on on that side of things so you know that's what I've been thinking about what's your take on the story of the

immaculate conception of Bitcoin leading to its very strong credible neutrality like the elimination of Satoshi uh so Bitcoin has very strong credible neutrality in that context versus the mere existence of Vitalic Buterine and is like s like more like the Ethereum foundation while Ethereum we like we like Ethereum because it's credibly neutral compared to Bitcoin and compared to Bitcoin as a monetary asset it doesn't have that same story and so it disqualifies it from central bank inclusion what's your take on that my take on that is just that it's a religious proposition and it's a fantastic religious proposition for Bitcoin but there are different types of religions that you can form and uh that doesn't have to be the only way a

religion takes root you know it is one of the strengths of of Bitcoin but that does not preclude ether from becoming a global like monetary asset now it feels bad because it's like not winning that midame right now and even I was thinking compared to like 2021 2022 I feel like ETH has fallen behind on the uh global store of value reserve asset like conversation narrative right and like um I think that that ground needs to be re regained if we're going to see material price appreciation in the future for ETH and it's an open open story there's like some probability that happens and uh there's some probability that it doesn't

and I think part of what we're seeing is the market pricing that in so Ryan you uh had your departure on January 16th and if you had left uh 3 days later on at January 19th uh the ratio between Soul ETH would actually have gone down by 10% because that was the day that Donald Trump launched his memecoin and that was the day that Salana broke alltime highs soul USD broke all-time highs yeah uh I mean soul ETH the ratio of Soul Solana to ETH has been going up uh pretty consistently in a pretty consistent trend since like December of 2023 which I mean it violently went up from 2023 into 2024 and it's been consistently trending up versus Ethereum and the so the recent both dollar and

ETH ratio terms has been marked at the top by the uh Donald Trump memecoin uh you said that you didn't see the existence of the Donald Trump memecoin uh until seven days later and you know congratulations for uh you know being able to dodge that mess uh so let me let me kind of guide you through some of the conversations that um has been happening downstream of this uh of course Donald Trump launches the memecoin it's on Salana uh all memecoins in that one moment of time on Salana had their liquidity sucked out from them and I was I was trading meme coins on Salana at the time i had like four or five or six meme coins i dumped all of my meme coins for the Trump coin all of them did you buy Ivanka or just Trump uh I did not buy Ivanka okay um when Ivanka When the

No not Ivanka melania when the Melania Okay how dare you invoke Ivanka's name into Yeah when the Melania memecoin came out that caused the Trump memecoin to dump because it was dilutive right like Trump is the Too many tokens not too many tokens i thought we Yeah got it apparently like we're going to talk about the Libra debacle uh but apparently the same guy that launched the Libracoin was involved with launching the Melania coin we'll talk about what did you not know that the No and the Libracoin was um Javier Malay javier Malay's Javier Javier Javier Malay but in the back end there was this one mastermind who was trying to like find the most clouded people possible convince them to launch memecoins and so

he got a hold of Melania somehow uh and then also got a hold of Javier Malay but that that's jumping forward in the story when the Melania coin launched the Trump memecoin lost like 40% of value 30% of value billions of dollars wpped out it was completely like unforced error because everyone wanted to speculate on this Trump memecoin everyone everyone was like holding a superp position of oh my god this is so bullish for Salana memecoins versus uh oh no this is a terrible grift and we don't know we don't exactly know what's going no one really knew what was real and then when the millennia memecoin got uh launched the superp position collapsed and everyone was like oh no this is a bad it's a grift it's a grift uh okay okay

can I ask you a question all right so so uh I know you're talking about this happening last quarter but it's an ongoing story so I was see reading even catching up this week right now um the top 200 250 holders something like this of the Trump token they're they're now going to be invited to a a private dinner with Donald Trump okay the most powerful man in the world Donald Trump president of the United States okay you buy a memecoin to get access to the most powerful man in the world like you like that that's a political thing that's like lobbying that's like Trump's adding utility to his memecoin david isn't that what we always dream of it's Gary Vee it's Gary Vee strategy right gary V dinner with Gary Vee okay so so my question to you is like how is this like

how is this perceived when it happened and now like is this a good thing for crypto because the other thing I was catching up on is like all of our wildest dreams on the regulatory front are coming true do you remember the the the twisted world we lived in 2 years ago where Gary Gensler was god king and he was coming with this you know Thorhammer to smash everything in crypto and the whole administration was backing him and we had like FDIC we had Operation the whole you know apparatus of the government was going after crypto aggressively now all of that's reversed they're all friendly we're going to get stable coin legislation i was watching a clip from Marua who's a commissioner of the SEC and catching up with like on Hester Pur stuff he he basically said

"Hey you know the Gensler regime that's all gone now we're super cryptofavorable and we're doing all of these things to support the industry." It's like Trump literally fulfilled his promise on that front right like the regulation regulatory winds have completely shifted in crypto's favor treasury secretary commerce Howard Lutnik he's doing stuff with Tether now it feels to me David like we no longer are at risk from the government of being squashed we're at risk from the government of being corrupted okay and so like we move to a different vector of uh the pendulum has swung yes and so the Trump coin itself like is this viewed as like oh this is

what true adoption looks like the president doing this or is it viewed as oh god another vector for corruption and this like longterm will not go well it was initially uh considered the former and it is lately considered the latter um and this was what Vitalic Buterine tweeted out pretty quickly after the launch of the Trump Beamcoin he tweeted out this tweet that said "The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle if a politician issues a coin you do not need to even send them any coins to give them money instead you just buy and hold the coin and this increases the value of their holdings passively." And then of course Donald Trump announces that the top 200 holders uh gets to have dinner with Donald Trump

which means like if you hold enough of the market cap of Donald Trump you just get to whisper in his ear directly in this dinner well how's Trump how's the Trump token doing on that news responding to market catalyst uh it pumped like 60% with the announcement of uh that yeah so So here here's the chart here it was down 89 it was down 90% over 92 days uh and then so there was there was a three-month lockup so the Trump team which owned 80% of the supply of the token had a three-month lock lock up uh we are now 92 days into the issuance of the Trump coin so the unlock happened uh 3 days ago uh and now just recently it it pumps up it pumps up 70 80% just

two days after Vesting unlocks uh so is someone gonna come up with like some analyst group going to come up with like uh the thesis for Trumpcoin which is like all the lobbyists in Washington DC will have to bid on this thing in order to get you know uh like influence to curry favor with Trump not only not only all the lobbyists and corporations and such but um other countries like you could you could create a bullcase for Trump token based on its kind of like naked uh influence with the president of the United States like By the way society society that sounds like a complete disaster to me like a further corruption of our political system but I guess it's not like illegal i like I

don't know where do you think like where do you think this leads it's not great i to fill you in on what the crypto community has been doing in response to this like to go back to what you're saying about like the Gary the uh Gary Gendler's out and you know now it's it's crime season again that's that that's the that's the meme in crypto but people are like actually posting like somewhat satirical but somewhat serious tweets of like Gary Gendler and being like I missed this man i miss Gary Gendler did you Did you see I think I saw this in passing again I'm not up to speed yet but uh Richard Hart the case against Richard Hart was was dropped that I haven't I haven't tapped into the details of that i've been waiting for someone to to synthesize that okay okay all right so that's happening what else

uh okay okay so the other one is the Bitcoin strategic reserve uh and so Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve wow around this time there was a ton of just jostling positioning by companies foundations corporations to become Trump aligned uh and so like Ripple uh Brad Garlinghouse started uh what was what's it called like um proximity posting and so everyone started posting like the United like United States pro- USA like tweets on Twitter brad Garlinghouse was talking about how great Trump was um Salana released this marketing video that was just like regurgitating the cultural shift from

the left to the right about like the line was uh in the in the video I don't want to invent genders i want to like innovate on ideas or something and the crypto community just rejected it because it was so cringe they did and the salon accounted it was It was It was too cringe it was too cringe they ended up deleting the video but there was a bunch of like jostling did Anna totally apologize did he have He did and people people accepted his response it was a good response it was a good response um uh so yeah there was just like like jostling like of everyone trying to become aligned with being pro- United States because everyone wanted to be in the strategic reserve because we didn't know what would constitute being in the strategic reserve and then Donald Trump on Truth Social you're saying that there

was actually other assets that were like like contemplated for this like like So Donald Trump tweeted out on Truth Social about the existence of a strategic reserve and he tweeted out how it's going to be things like Ripple Cardano why salana I think no one knew no one knew and then I think one more made in the US was that is that yes I think it was like US coins but it was also just coins that had like I think successfully jostled their way into position to get the pro tweet from Trump then also there was somebody taking like a margin long position on something like uh I can't remember what it was uh one of these one of the shitcoins like XRP hours before that truth social post nice nice okay but but the the the story of the reserve

is that it's just a Bitcoin reserve it's just a Bitcoin reserve there's also something else that I can't remember what it's called but like Oh yeah digital asset stockpile which is just the assets that the United States already has and that includes like Tether Ether um and they have a lot of ether still right they have they have a decent amount of Ether and digital in Bitcoin in the strategic Bitcoin reserve cannot be sold that is what the Bitcoin reserve is in the digital asset stockpile there is discretion and there is somebody going to be in charge of like a long-term plan for the Treasury so they're treating the digital asset stockpile as a treasury that someone is going to sell and make strategic decisions on but the Bitcoin strategic reserve is not going to be sold and that's the whole point wow i mean this

kind of stuff is why Bitcoin is so strong right now right it's like you were talking about other assets like jostling for kind of power like you could argue that that Bitcoin did that too the community did that in a decentralized way and actually like they started 10 years ago and they started 10 years ago and they won you know remember that uh uh David Bailey having Trump at the the Bitcoin conference right it's like that whole thing that grassroots effort to suade the Republican party that Bitcoin was the asset i mean that's part of their religious victory here mhm yeah the reason I would say the reason why it has the Bitcoin strategic reserve and everything else has either nothing or a digital asset stockpile is like the Cardano Ripple Salana tried to jostle position in a top down way like

leadership made made decisions to try and get you know close to Trump and the best that they could do was getting in the stockpile but Bitcoin being a bottomup movement won itself as a strategic reserve uh because it's bottom up it's grass it's grassroots and then too gave them votes gave them votes and money uh And then also there's Ethereum which is just like opting out of this whole entire thing we're too good for that we're too good for that yeah yeah exactly yeah i mean okay that's what's happening all right what else what's it say uh Libra you said Li the Libra memecoin okay so this is this uh this ended the meta of the memecoin meta this this was the blowoff top of the memecoin ended it permanently for everything like all permanently because they're still

meme coins but I I think memecoins will never be as big as they were leading up to that point like the I think the Donald Trump memecoin what it was the top of Salana USD it was the top of memecoin volumes and then the launch of Libra was like the jumping of the shark so this was like 2017 Katy Perry with her like nails with all of the crypto assets on her nails okay got it that's right okay so February 14th um this erupted after the Argentine president Javier Mair Malay launched a memecoin called Libra with a Salana contract this isn't all in Spanish he has since deleted the tweet uh and that that launched off this frenzy and I remember where I was i was at dinner with a

friend and I got my tweet Twitter blew up and I was like "Oh my god Javier Made was launching me." Uh and this was like after I had been down in Argentina for a month at this like crypto grassroots uh just like pop-up city for that it's like Argentina really gets it i missed Argentine crypto yeah yeah and Javier Mele just never came uh and I think it was because our reputation as a industry is pretty bad but apparently he's also This helps this helps i'm sure uh and so uh it hits its $4.5 billion market cap what like 45 minutes after launch$4.5 billion dollars and he's just running running the Trump play this is the Trump

play it's a Trump token so he I think Javier Mle had very low context about what was happening he got used he did not know exactly what he was doing he was getting directions from people like pulling the strings puppeteering him um at the at the peak of a $4.5 billion uh market cap uh this guy who orchestrated this Hayden Davis and many other insiders uh cashed out hundreds of millions of dollars uh and the the price went from $4.5 billion down to less than $1 billion inside of two hours which is insanely rapid price movements like $4.5 billion got created and then $3 billion got destroyed inside of two hours kind

of nuts uh and this you know international uproar there was an attempt to impeach Javier Malay in Argentina that didn't go through because Javier Malay's party uh controls like what is equivalently the House and Senate like he's in control so he's not getting impeached he's fine but it was very embarrassing and if there's one thing as a politician in Argentina you do not do you can you can be corrupt as a politician in Argentina you cannot be embarrassed as a politician in Argentina that's the culture down there cultural okay and this was embarrassing did did this was incredible embarrassing for Did he have to apologize what did What did he do uh he deleted his tweets he said that he uh um he said that there were people inside inside that corrupted him

and he's going to like oust the rats that got into his like you know in his like sphere um there's this guy Hayden Davis do I have a picture of him i don't I need to show you a picture of him do you Did you ever see Hayden Davis the picture of this guy who is this oh my god who is the Oh so he's the guy that orchestrated this this guy chief villain this guy this is a mastermind this is the mastermind all right he looks pretty young yeah he's in how did he do this how did he get in with like you know uh world leaders i lost the picture uh so apparently he found a way to he found Javier Malay's sister and was texting his sister well that's scrappy yes it was it was very scrappy it was very

scrappy i can't get a picture to load but you can kind of see it here we go all right he he texted his sister and this sister was the way that Hayden Davis got his way into convincing Javier Malay to launch a memecoin and this is what this guy does he realizes that he can find people with clout he can convince them to launch a memecoin and then he can extract the memecoin because he knows the game better than anyone except this one last thing happened Ryan where this uh meteora which is kind of like um maybe it's like a a unis swap or balancer or like liquidity on uh liquidity launching pool on Salana uh Benchow is the the name this came downstream of Jupiter a meteora which again the liquidity pool on um on Salana

was working with Hayden Davis to launch these meme coins but Ben Chow was the one guy who could me Hayden Davis so Hayden Davis was trying to snipe the supply and he was working with Ben Chow who owns and operates the infrastructure and Ben Chow was like "Oh I'm going to snipe the sniper," which is what he did benchow realized and people in the Meteora community realized that this had been going on that Meteora uh Hayden Davis and like many other people had created this influencer memecoin uh infrastructure complex like industrial complex where they would find influencers they would pump up meme coins and then people earlier ear and earlier and earlier in the stack would snipe the supply and eat and like max

extract and this with the launch of the Libra token was everyone realizing that this memecoin influencer infrastructure industrial complex existed and that's why the game was up because everyone saw how exactly corrupt it was it was not fair at all uh and it all went collapsed down to the person who was able to snipe the supply quickest and earliest in the stack i can't help but wonder if like the things that are going on today will cause a backlash among the neutral kind of observer the kind of the hearts and minds that like we have been trying to get on the crypto train right which is like now you have major politicians rolling out these meme coins that are that seem to be uh perfect surface area

for vectors of corruption right yeah and the good the good news about this whole story is all the regulatory winds are blowing our favor and maybe we can use that to actually build things that are useful for the world like a a non-s sovereign store of value and like stable coins everything and all of the like the good things the pure things but I can't help but wonder if this is like just going to be super bad for our reputation long term and that there's going to be a backlash and uh some hell to pay at some point in time mhm this was my and I I think our concern about the whole political season and the three months leading up to the election where you and I were resistant to the idea of throwing unanimous support behind one single

party the Republican party because we want crypto to be neutral we would like to hedge our bets we don't want it to just only be partisan uh I think that is that what's happening here downstream of that is vindicative of that position um I know you and I both listen to in respect to Sam Harris i have listened to Sam Harris mention the corruptability of the Donald Trump memecoin uh three or four times uh and it's focused yeah i think I I I'll go as so far to say that the current brand of crypto right now is worse than it was post FTX collapse really you think it's that bad among among a certain subset like neutral third parties like among among public public non-crypto sentiment like

outsider uh sentiment of do you know crypto one way I I judge this is like how embarrassed are you to tell people that like you love crypto or you work in crypto or something like that at like a cocktail party among like normie people yeah and uh I have for the first time called I had for for in that context working media I said I I run a Frontier Tech podcast so that's where we are right now this is previously like post FDX I was still beating my chest about like crypto crypto like yeah FDX for the world freedom tech for the world the FTX is an example why we need crypto actually not that crypto is bad and now for the post of all of that I was like no I I do Frontier Tech okay so good news is huge

regulatory progress everything we could have wished that is actually happening and that counts for something bad news is we may have chipped away some of our soul and I wonder if the trade-off's worth it uh I I wonder I think it might be still but I don't know i don't know we will see we'll have to see we will see this is the frontier you know i'm glad you're with us this is the journey all right just last thing uh you got to catch me up on the the news of the week but I think we got to break for sponsors first yeah okay yep that's right uh so okay news of the week content coins Jesse Pollock base Zora uh you like Zora so I want to actually get your take on Zora before you left because you were a Zora bull and I want to get your take

about like what you thought about Zora because I will update you about what Zora has transformed into as of recently and then and then it's all about the Ethereum pivot and then we're also going to talk about um uh Bitcoin as well so we're going to talk about those subjects but first a message from some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible imagine verifying yourself without handing over personal data no hacked databases no unnecessary personal exposure for airdrops and no AI bots ruining community governance meet Self the onchain identity verification protocol built for privacy and control self protocol uses a zero knowledge proof to confirm your identity safely users prove key details like age or citizenship without revealing sensitive personal information self never stores your data it only generates cryptographic proofs here's how it works

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and FBTC ready to step into the future of finance follow Mantle onx at mantle_official and join the onchain revolution today ryan let me tell you about content coins okay so content coins are what Jesse Pollock and and Jacob from Zora are talking about when they say um you can take a bit of content you can take a 10-minute uh short like long clip you can take a JPEG and you can make an ERC20 token out of it and generally you would do this on Zora and this to you might sound like a memecoin uh and I would say that it structurally is the memecoin and Jesse's advocating for it is it's not like different from a memecoin but it's where

it does differ is the culture and the intent around these things uh and so it's where a memecoin is you know meant to have a super high market cap uh content coins are really just meant to be traded more than have a high market cap uh and they're for creators right they're for creators yeah not for not they're not Tik Tok crowd or like whatever the influence yeah okay so the idea here uh this is a friend of mine that who you know as well he posts on Instagram and he has a an Instagram account that has 120,000 followers and he makes clips that have like hundreds hundreds of thousands of views uh and so he tweeted out for 3 million views last night last month Instagram paid me $3 in the 12 hours since Jacob and Jesse

showed my Zora post some love I have earned 28 in rewards not dusting off the yacht yacht catalog but it's not hard to see the vision very cool and feeling thankful Zora isn't just for crypto so the idea here and I would also say it's very important to open up the Zora mobile app and scroll through it because it looks and feels like Instagram and Tik Tok but there is a market cap associated with a post and the idea here is like you know memecoins on Pump Fund look like 4chan and are optimizing for traders and memecoin speculators and that's great and then Zora is optimizing for creators and it's not trying to have like a $500 million banger it's much more optimizing for like quantity and creators to do like what early Instagram

was doing and Tik Tok and and just allowing people to speculate on whatever the rise of the attention the virality of the post which isn't too different from memecoins uh but they're trying to make a cultural distinction between content coins and memecoins what do you think about that well so let me ask you what what's the reaction been to this in you like very negative is that crypto Twitter is that all circles is that different which tribes are saying what you know Bitcoiners hate it all but um like I imagine a lot of people hate it because it's like Ethereum ecosystem based that sort of thing and then some of the like more purity focused people are like why is Jesse doing this why is Coinbase doing this it's a memecoin you shouldn't

like pump pump memecoin prices is that kind of the reaction yeah I would say that's the reaction yeah salana a lot of people are looking over at the Ethereum camp and they are saying that this is Ethereum doing what it's best at which is taking stuff that is like Salana figured out and making it highbrow and like putting it in an ivory tower these are like just highbrow meme coins and you know it's like it's meme cocoins at the end of the day and the Ethereum community has been [ __ ] on meme coins for years but now they've made their version of memecoins and they're highbrow and they're holier than thou and now now meme now memecoins rebranding it to content coins and you're just like doing the same thing yeah so that's the salon to take i would say like I would say more than half of

the Ethereum community is not bought in on me on content coins it is specifically like the Jesse Orura Azora base culturalists I would say that think that are convinced by content here's what I don't understand what's wrong with the experiment it it doesn't have to be your thing i mean there's tons of things that haven't been my thing in crypto i mean NFTs was never really my thing but I like I respected that it was you know for some people like what's I guess what's the what's the harm what's the what's the downside in doing this experiment i guess the the good side from what I see the Zora first of all let me just I know we've known Jacob uh founder of Zora from from like uh the very early days right I should uh disclose uh I've also you know

previously been an I've I'm an investor in Zora and have been since the early days as well so maybe that that colors my bias but I'm trying to be super unbiased here and just say like Jacob has been trying things in this um creator economy ownership economy vision from for the last like I don't know six or seven years he quit Coinbase to do this and he I've watched him kind of like pivot to try different things does this work does this work does this work continuing to build and pivot um and he's stayed true to the original vision which he actually thinks every single bit of content on the internet is mintable he sees minting as a verb okay and I've watched him try

different experiments on this right and it's takes so much time in crypto because it's taken up to now to get an actual user interface that's like comparable to something like Tik Tok and that's like because he's been doing it the sort of the right way you know with like L2s and making sure that all the creators have like full ownership of the actual assets not taking uh shortcuts anyway this is the most recent pivot of that same vision it's but it's been the same experiment that he's been playing uh like trying at since day one why not give this a shot like what's the downside i mean if you don't want a piece of content like don't buy any content when I when I see the app I um I see oh cool i I it doesn't even feel

like crypto it feels like like a mature app to me i love that they're they're uh they're using LTS they're using bass it's all quick fast transaction times they're actually for for the ETH uh heads out there they're actually pricing everything in the unit of account of Ether which is great for your ETH like bags if you're like an ETH is money type of advocate um anyway I see a lot to like about this project and sometimes I just feel like the tribes are a little bit too uh quick to um shoot something down but again I'm just getting like up to speed i don't know like you know what's was there like a scam here or is there some improprier impropriety here the uh critique of Zora and the content

coins meta is that it has been very topdown pushed by Jesse uh and Jesse I trust Jesse when Jesse says something I believe him uh but the critique is that like it's it's uh in addition to that Coinbase Ventures invested in Zora uh Zora deployed the Zora app on base and they also have the Zora chain which is like aligning you know Jesse base and Coinbase ventures to pump Zora and content coins because that's that's the base cabal uh and then Jesse says he did not know this i I heard through the u apparently he said that on Twitter somewhere but three four or five days after Jesse really started pumping Zora

uh Zora the token is launched and so this token got launched yesterday uh and inside of that token it was announced that this token is for fun it is a fun token it is a meme coin uh and it's also being given to investors Pratta their investment into Zora but it's for fun uh and data setting people off the wrong way uh and I had a I had a good conversation with um Dan from uh Block Works uh on on Twitter here so maybe I'll just kind of run through that dan says there's a very real reason to be disappointed about a four fund token with a short investing schedule in 2025 uh he and he says that there are United Statesbased uh development companies that have have launched tokens and have

Dows actively discussing doing distributions to tokens inside of the you know like meta context of Donald Trump and his administration um I I was pushing back and and I was saying that you know the SEC still hasn't you know delivered regulatory clarity there's no market structure bill passed we have a new admin but no actual new regulation has been passed so they could still be using that this is a memecoin as cover as regulatory cover and he's just declining that and saying like that is not actually the meta has shifted development companies are issuing tokens um that aren't like that uh and so that doesn't really hold weight uh and so people are frustrated about the launch of the memecoin downstream of you know Coinbase ventures investing Jesse doing this top down pivot this top down push of of content coins in Zora and then the

Zora token just happens to go live people are throwing uh throwing flags at that yeah i don't know i don't feel like um like Jesse and Coinbase are kind of like you know uh they can make money in other ways they've already like shown that they are long-term players i think what Jesse's probably looking at at the end of the day is like um base more content more growth more users more activity more things to do on base i think that I if I had to guess that's where his true motivation lies it's less about like the Zora token itself i guess like the other piece of it when you just look at Zora itself uh it feels like sometimes in crypto we produce too many assets like too many tokens right it

probably makes sense for Zora to if it even has a token there's probably an argument for like why are you having why do you have a token right like why even have a token in the first place but if it has a token maybe it's just a fun utility token because when I look at Zora the the app itself I'm like this is an app that doesn't need a token right the the money is ETH you don't need a utility token there you're not staking it's doing everything on base you don't need a token to secure there's no like work token right to put a token in there is is like um pointless i mean so maybe all you're left with is either no token or a fun uh token and maybe the argument is like then why do why do the memecoin why do the fun token but like it's a

memecoin platform i don't know why can't investors be happy with owning equity in Zora like they can make money off of fees and revenue why are we unhappy with equity and I would say that that is probably where the true value uh acrru if Zora takes off and is successful it's probably just like any other startup with an app it's like equity in an actual like quote unquote security um but understanding that I I understand why Twitter is pushing back like the majority of Twitter 85 90% is like saying is rejecting the Zoro token uh because they think it is just a a way to just dump the token uh on on just it was just exit liquidity like all the other all the other reasons why like all the

same reasons why people reject tokens in the first place now I put out this one tweet uh where somebody was basically um alluding to that fact and you know like the the rejecting the token this is the Zora token is worth the zero don't buy it blah blah blah blah and I tweeted out like this this frustration that I have with crypto Twitter which is that there's this meta of if it's not your bag destroy it and it's insufferable and it's it's very tox it's toxic and it's frustrating uh but since putting out this this tweet I have since appreciated the idea that uh Anatoli replied here saying survival of the fittest and what I think he means by that is yeah the crypto Twitter meta is so toxic and destructive of other

people's bags if the meta doesn't agree in the validity of the existence of the token people will FUD your bags and I do think that it is this very fast rat race the the queen's race where like if you aren't if you aren't swimming faster than everyone you're you're going to get eaten and if that is the meta that tokens must find their existence in you need to be the best token possible or else you're going to get just chewed up and spit out and people are going to reject you yeah you'll be part of the 99.9% of all tokens that are heading directly to zero right relative to the dollar relative to Bitcoin or ETH yeah and so I do think that there is this like auto like white blood cell process that's happening on Twitter where people

are rejecting lowquality tokens and telling token issuers to you know hold yourself to a higher standard with and that and that's totally fine you know what the the normal response to that would be is just don't buy it then all you have to do is just not buy it what what kind of is a little bit annoying is when you have builders who are have proven themselves kind of long-term oriented not pump and dumpers like um like Jesse and Jacob from Zora how all of their motives are in question how they're like put in the same group as that guy's name was named Hayden Hayden Davis who is doing the Javier uh like the the all the the politician meme coins i don't think that based on their reputation they should just be put in that camp right they're clearly doing

something different much more long term yeah I would agree with that i would agree with that i would also say this whole uh survival of the fittest is partially contributed to your burnout because that is a terrible mill to be a part of for five years straight on Twitter yeah absolutely it's like it's like Yeah it's um you know all the turtles you know turtles on a beach they have tons of turtles and they all die they get picked off by seagulls before they go to the ocean and like you're watching that carnage play out and it's uh it's emotionally scarring I guess so you just zoom out just zoom out is one thing I've learned what else we got there's two more topics to talk about uh the Ethereum strategic pivot which is underfoot u this episode I put out with

Donrad and Onsgar with my help of Mico to discuss what changes are happening at the core of Ethereum uh and my takeaway from this episode is that you know the Ethereum pivot has been ongoing and happening for the last like six months uh I think we could talk about this for like honestly an hour and I also think we're going to do more episodes on this uh so I don't necessarily think we need to hash it out here but uh like I kind of alluded to in the beginning I'm pretty stoked about what's happening that's more that L1 is just like um asserting some strength relative to L2s we are rep prioritizing the layer one you put you know you know when you're the you're in a plane and the oxygen mass drop down and you're supposed to put it on first yeah the L1 is is

putting itself first and I think that's great yeah that's been interesting the other thing that that was really been happening over the last couple of weeks as the crypto market has started to repair is it looks like Bitcoin is starting to decouple from all of the riskon assets all the equities all of the fangs everything you know uh inside your uh your your stock portfolio it's acting a bit more like gold and that is starting to happen which is very interesting because I think this gold trade is going to the non-s sovereign store value trade right the the US dollar post Brettton Woods kind of era trade is just heating up we're seeing that in the price of gold and Bitcoin is just catching a bid because it's got that narrative of like new digital gold

uh so watching that will be obviously very good for for crypto uh and uh Bitcoin as a store of value mhm i think the Ethereum pivot and Bitcoin's elevation to a non-s sovereign store of value is like the two most interesting stories in crypto right now well we're going to talk about all of those things i I imagine David in the uh the weeks and months to come so uh why don't I just take us out um you guys know crypto is risky you could lose what you put in but we're headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot