Santi's Favorite Memecoins and What Kraken's L2 Means | Roundup

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and anyone that runs a business understands the amount of friction that they have when they for payment processing chargebacks that's right sh on because payment failure that alone is like in the hundreds and billions of dollars of friction this friction cannot go away until and unless you use crypto stripe has built a super successful business to facilitate you know payments API and make that backend of payment rails faster better cheaper they've been very successful at it there's one area where they haven't been able to crack and it's it's this idea of of of using the

traditional Financial rails it's very expensive it's an Antiquated Patchwork they came to this realization I'm convinced scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different other L1 networks have costly transaction fees clunky user experiences and lack true adoption in AI and onchain gaming explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale. space ecosystem and follow their Journey on X at scale Network that is scale with a hit the link in the show notes to get started let's face it building on crowded l1s or expensive l2s is just not going to unlock the next generation of applications super containers offers

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or go to blockworks doco join readers from all corners of crypto and sign up for the Empire newsletter today and we're live what's up Santi how much how's it going sir good five minutes ago you're late five minutes ago but I I I will allow to be late because you announced an acquisition let's just R right into it tell us more about it yeah yeah so we uh we just acquired the drop um the drop is was started by this guy Ganon brein they launched about three and a half years ago so we want we we identified this like Gap in our coverage which was more like

gaming culture memes nfts like we're very um we have a lot of really good technical shows and Technical news letters like xerx research and bell curve and we talk about like I don't know kind of the infrastructure side of crypto a lot we've also got really good institutional coverage so like on the margin forward guidance um but we're missing this area of crypto that is super interesting which is like the culture the memes the onchain art the like gaming um we're recording tomorrow with uh Off the Grid guys the game on Avalanche like it's a really like it's it's a it's a there are two missing gaps for us in coverage one I think is uh Bitcoin so like this whole Bitcoin

Renaissance like Bitcoin l2s that's a missing area the other missing area is what I just mentioned which is like gaming and memes and all that kind of stuff so whenever you see something missing I think there should always be at any company it's like a build vers bu conversation or first it's like okay well should we do this or should we let someone else do it so for this we decided we actually need to do it then it becomes a build vers buy so do we just build this in house and start a newsletter and a podcast and stuff from scratch uh perfectly aligned with I've known Ganon for years um he uh we started talking about this acquisition so we've been talking about it for several months and it just kind of the deal terms lined up and what we think we can do with it lines up and

he wanted to he actually took it to Market and was talking to a few other folks but he was really adamant that he didn't want the buyer to shut it down he wanted the buyer to 10x the he he really loves the brand and the community you know there 20,000 like dieh hard onchain people there so yeah he just didn't there were some buyers who um I think probably would have paid more than us but uh would have probably shut down the brand as well so that's interesting do you think that uh putting yourself in the shoes of the acquired was it your distribution was it the fact that uh you know you're a great person like what was it that really clicked yeah I mean I mean he talked a

lot about like we have a real well so one thing that was important to him is we're still a founder-led company I think another thing that's important to him is um we have a real like passion for just blockworks like like blockworks is Mike and my baby and um he you know he talk like I don't know if you ever if you went back and listened to the Antonio episode that I recorded with him but like all about just being a Founder it's like you when you build a company like you're so intertwined with it like it is your child in a sense and he's like look this is my baby like the 20,000 people who are subscribed to this newsletter I think there's like 25 or 26,000 he's like I know them individually like I onboard them like I

meet them like these are my people and I don't want to just uh maybe sell it to a crypto exchange who's gonna turn it into like the binance newsletter and like boom we just added 20 6,000 subscribers so sufficiently comfortable that you were gonna preserve his brand his identity whilst also morphing into a very good platform and just be a springboard for him to continue to execute while abstracting away a lot of the things that he doesn't want to deal on day-to-day yeah exactly I mean he's he's stepping down like he he he has a vision to go do some other stuff as well and so this yeah this allowed him to so unlike the acquisition of the breakdown so when we acquired the

breakdown Nathaniel Whitmore has stayed on like he's still for people who listen to that show um he's stayed on he still writes his newsletter um but Ganon is going to step away and we've got a whole like kind of infrastructure too we're gonna pause it for a little bit and then start getting the the newsletter out there five days a week so yeah so how much of this was um you're as an organization how you think about obviously being relevant and covering what is happening in crypto how much of it was you were seeing this opportunity of a lot of interest on Meme coins you know and and that being a big part part of the thesis or was it just tapping into a community an audience that you just haven't cracked into but again it

goes back to inverting like people want to hear about meme coins it's an important category as nfts were back in the day yeah um all of that is kind of right so the way that we think about building media companies is very different than I think how other people think about it so let's say if you're coindesk right you're like how do you scale something like coin desk you just make coindesk bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger um but in but my my humble opinion which I you know I don't know if I'm right or wrong or I don't know if Mike Mike is right or wrong but we believe that the way to scale a media company is by scaling Brands not by scaling One Singular brand so blockwork sits here but we actually have this house of Brands model where each brand like Empire or light speed or

xerx research is built around a DI hard community in crypto so that's the that's the whole thesis that we that we have for the building the business there's a new community that's popped up which are yeah it's like it's the mem coin people um it's just this like yeah it's the mem coin people basically and so you can either laugh at it um and like not take it seriously or you can say who am I to say that this is not a serious thing like this is just the way the world Works um and this is a dieh hard community so yeah if if it wasn't meme coins let's say it was a digital art boom you'd say there's an obvious Community here but because it's meme coins it kind of gets laughed at a

little bit so yeah that's um that was one of the thesis that's great man yeah very excited for you guys obviously it's an investment block Works get all fired up when you guys just go on the offensive it's great to see this so yeah it's obviously uh I flipped this I flipped on mem coins last year I was very critical of them and then you know I was just on a call with a couple fund managers over this week and they're all thinking about it yeah all should we hold it in our portfolio like a lot of LPS are wondering that too and like why is it any different like you know why why shouldn't you be allowed to what is so fundamentally wrong about meme coins and I think it's they've had product Market

fit for so many years like Doge and sheep and now the whole you know new category of them and it's if you're in crypto whether you like it or not this is one of the more important categories and I don't want to go into why we've cover but it's there and to your point on as a media organization I think you know be dumb not to cover it yeah exactly exactly so let's uh let's pivot that into talking about goat so round up last week um you know you start talking about this this this goat coin and uh on bananas where was that that was probably what it was trading at yeah roughly like

200 yeah I'm going to use cents because I have a small brain here so I'm gonna roughly 30 cents it's now trading at 80 cents so I mean every every day I open the charts it's up another you know 20 to 60% on the day to be fair it was down a lot over the weekend because the the terminal the truth terminal which is this account that it's tweeting out of made a mispelling mistake it tweeted group uh and inverted the O and the U and there was people in the timeline saying oh I've never seen an AI I've never seen like Chad gbt make a mistake there is clearly something wrong here they sort of suggested that Andy who's like the developer here was behind it

and it wasn't an AI and it was all like laring as an AI so then it went down pretty aggressively 50% like to to 20 cents I think it went down 18 cents yeah I haven't sold a thing um well I only sold a very small position for like what seemed like a um a clone a sister that wasn't being endorsed by this it was like she or something like this and then I went back to Goat um so no I haven't told I think it's a very fascinating experiment it obviously carries a ton ton of risk I'm not endorsing it uh just know people still do their own research but I'll tell you why I like it if you're interested or they can just go listen to the prior episode Give me the give me the quick

synopsis it is a pretty fascinating view into what a world might look like with AI agents on chain and being empowered with capital and I think there's a lot of knowledge that we might be able to infer by what it decides to do or Not by the way it got a grant it did not launch the coin it just kind of bought a position in it and people you know it sort of made it its own in in some respects because it's it's Coop yeah it's become the cult leader of of of this this meme right

and I think um yeah like it's one of the more interesting things so like as a category I think it's just like very differentiated from the whole host of other meme coins that are like you know animal coins that's very competitive category this feels very differentiated um and and so I'm paying attention for that reason like how how might you influence this like you know how how does it interpret um you know people try to scam it and it picks up on it people try to get its attention to focus on other derivatives of of the you know this goat type coins and it's just sort of very interesting to observe it in real time

what it what it does do and what it does not do as well you know it's also tweeted or intimated that like I think there's already millionaire it's already made a million dollars and it's like it has one tweet which was pretty epic it's like oh I just want to go retire in a farm something like that yeah yeah what happens if if if if this AI agent decides to dump all the tokens and like you know move on to something else or buy another mean coin or it's a wild experiment it has a I could see like so many different outcomes in the range of possibilities so I'm just excited to follow it as an experiment yeah it's interesting so Brian Armstrong

has started tweeting at it talking about like giving it its own wallet and uh just yeah very very the very The Meta is like it decided so I was on another of the podcast talking about like salana versus e and yada yada and meme coins and all stuff I'm like listen we're all humans here you know doing our own analysis but can't we find it very interesting thing that Mark andri gave 50k Grand to this AI bot and the first thing that it decided to do out of all the range of possibilities it decided that the most productive use of its resources and capital was to go and choose Solana and choose this

particular meme coin buy it and make it its own like that alone is like pretty mindblowing what do you do here what what do you do here what do you do here this thing's at this thing's I'm up a lot it's up a lot yeah it's I mean we're we're closing in I think it's at what 800 million fdv closing it on a billion like going up 20 to 50% a day um you're you're up a lot on it what what do you do in a situation like this I'm not touching it for now how will you make a decision on when to touch it like is it a gut feeli do you see something on Twitter you're like

o this feels like it's changing is it uh I'm I think it's impossible to trade for me at least to trade these things any asset in the near term uh my thesis again I remind myself of a thesis for the cycle like I am still bullish I think next year uh regardless of the election outcome but I if polls are right obviously if Trump wins it's far better but regardless of the outcome we get a relief rally I still believe we're in a bull market like structurally like crypto I'm not looking to sell here I think next year will be good I feel good about it um so I want to be I want to be riding the fastest horses and I think those are salana for me I think very clearly I see a lot of activity

happening in salana um and I'm excited about the projects there uh and I think it's the fastest horse and then I like memes it's a very proven category I like them because they are lever bets in a particular ecosystem with ample liquidity becomes super important to be able to pun out of positions with liquidity nfts didn't have that some of the other tokens don't have that memes don't have that problem and it's um it's a very proven category and I just think that I want to be long meme coins and I I want to be long like Blue Chip meme coins um and so for instance when you think about like I

think some of the more interesting categories uh obviously what's happening in salana but like deep into is super exciting I think AI will continue to do well as a category um you sort of side with to and Kos and some of these coins this is kind of the combination of memes with AI and I think for me that's like in a in a scenario where say the base asset I think it outperform soul is sort of the tldr and that's why I hold it it carries way more risk but I'm comfortable with that I have underwritten that most of these meme coins at any given point in time will have like severe draw Downs um whff had that from five billion to a

billion uh Doge has had that chep has had that and then they sort of rebound and they those are the memes that I am more interested in SPX kind of has gone through in this Evolution right now and it's kind of shown some strength recently but yeah they're they're like the way I see it is they enhance the return that I think I'm going to get on something like yeah yeah what do you if you had to pick three memes right now not Financial advice all that kind of stuff is it just whiff goat and yeah yeah I'll give you a cheat I'll cheat I'll give you four um and by the way none of this financial advice do your own [ __ ] work maybe don't need invest in these lottery tickets but anyways um that out of the way uh whiff

I've been vocal about it I have I have positioned on all these by the way and others but whiff I like because I think it's a dominant do dogcoin in salana You could argue it's Bon but Bon structurally has unlocks and cell pressure I think whiff is more organic and it's a cuter dog picture um so I like it for that reason I think it can become the Sheep of salana so like sheep is like the dominant dogcoin in ethereum I think W can do that for salana and you know you know sheep for instance was 18 billion fully diluted I think at the peak was much higher than that wh right now is sitting at two and 2.5 two and a half billion so you know I see a a path potentially salana does well I think whiff does well and outperforms uh again

lever bet on salana without the risk of being liquidated and with very with a ton of liquidity onchain and offchain um so w number one I also believe in this um catto dog uh compression like conversions uh even though I don't particularly love cats I love I love dogs but I'm also a professional investor I guess you could argue that I'm not a professional investor because I'm talking about animal coins nonetheless I'm making fool myself um popcat I think is interesting as again one of the the dominant meme the dominant catcoin in Solana structurally long Solana structurally long memes in Solana because it's a very retail phenomenon so popcat would be for that

reason it's like at a billion now a billion and a half oh God I think it's um yeah that the convergence of dog dog does well cat is G to do well probably does better because it should convert seriously um there's I'm I'm pitch So Yesterday Santi pitched me the thing that he's building and it was like it actually one of the most professional like decks I've ever seen very buttoned up very professional pitch and I'm imagining like I'm imagining you go pitch like seriously I'm seriously I'm seriously not GNA raise any money for the private Equity Fund people be like wait a minute man wait a minute bro you're like it's like such a clean deck

and I'm imagine you you know I know you're pitching some of these like you know endowments and pensions and some of these big names for suit and Tai and stuff like that and then they're like all right let's uh do this hopefully the Sovereign wealth fund of you know Singapore tasic or some of these Sovereign weal funds are not listening to this podcast but like hey hey analyst can you go do some due diligence on this Santiago guy because he you know he didn't put his picture on the on the deck he put this like this animated little Avatar thing uh he said it's like a punk or something anyways listen the same type of to be fair like when I was doing um investment banking at JP Morgan I did a lot of like veterinary clinics and like dog pet food companies massive private

Equity Funds would like do these rollups of veterinary clinics they would give you the pitch decks of like the data is really compelling people love their pets that's why seriously the the analysis you can laugh all day long about memes the analysis is structurally fundamentally the same dogs pets people have a very very strong affiliation for pets they're more lonely pets become literally they spend almost the same amount of money uh uh that they spend with their kids most of the time like half of pet owners the pet sleeps with them like you know and so anyways um I think there's there's like some you could do some serious analysis of meins I'm saying the third meme that I like is obviously goat I think it's the riskiest

of them all like this could be a flash in the pan kind of scenario a goat is is at 800 million 7 700 million right now fully diluted um the bod can go crazy it could sell it could there's so many things that could go wrong here but uh I see a very interesting F of returns it's just very differentiated AI is going to continue to be a very memeable category and this could be I could see this run up dramatically or go to zero but that Phantom is interesting it's just a very interesting experiment I want to own it because I want to pay attention um the maybe fourth category the the fourth one that I will endorse by the way I own all of these is SPX uh yeah this is Mor odds coin I still

think it has interesting I think it's interesting property in the sense that it's like when you think about I I did a survey the other week which was okay and I'll ask you this maybe I'll ask you this because I'll stop so imagine 100 users enter crypto they load up their wallet what do they buy first Bitcoin Majors like so Bitcoin a major like salana eth SOI or whatever apas cardano do they buy memes or they buy something else or an nft what do they buy what are they buying first the very first thing they

buy I think the very first thing they buy is probably Bitcoin or eth actually I know I know that's not what you're looking for I think the very first thing bu here's here's what I actually think like I'm I'm I'm picturing like a college friend of mine or like a high school friend of mine who like still doesn't own it okay actually probably a lot of them already own Bitcoin and eath but they haven't looked at their crypto portfolio in month in years probably then the Market's goingon to rip bitcoin's gonna hit 100K they're goingon to see it on CNBC they're gonna be like oh [ __ ] all right this crypto thing's real again okay um they're going to be like okay I probably they're probably going to buy salana I would guess first um they'll be like okay it looks like the salon of thing's ripping like I I

hadn't heard of it last cycle like let me let me buy that then I would guess I mean the unfortunate thing is I think they skip all of the defi tokens other l1s like if you're just a new person coming in yeah I mean maybe they buy memes maybe most respondents said they go direct to memes second one was like Bitcoin and ethereum I don't why do they go direct to memes though why do they just buy SPX Financial nihilism yeah that's what I mean look it's it's uh it's like moon to dust mentality moon or dust mentality it's uh for the same reason people like to punt stuff like biotech stocks or GameStop it's people don't don't not

interest an asset to give you 8% compounding you know they're not buying Coca-Cola it's same with uh you know same with I have a lot of friends who do sports sports betting like they're not they're not they're either actually betting czy parlay but you're not betting on the on the 2x outcome well they're either just betting on the game like just the normal the normal which is like I guess you'd call it the dust or they're the moon right they're doing like seven team parlays like just Ridiculousness so and I mean Lottery is a very proven category memes are lottery tickets with emotional cache and positive EV because they provide entertainment value yeah they really do then so the the reason

why I like just to round out this discussion on SPX is it's quite differentiated most people understand the S&P 500 it's very solid brand and most people structurally can't invest in the S&P 500 through their normal portfolio if you're not in the US it's very hard to get exposure to the US market so this could become in the most wild upside scenario this becomes like the proxy to you know you sort of becomes the proxy tokenized stock for the S&P 500 and then it's like how how can it go you know and it's it's like you either also make fun of the traditional markets there's some element of that some mocker of that so it's it's sort of yeah it's uh what I what I would look at uh just to offer by the way these are I may change my mind my sell

these positions so just bear in mind you know don't don't listen to anything I'm saying that's what I'm trying to say the thing that I will pay just I'll dispense some advice like gu useful advice for people is um look at things that and I tweeted about this the other day it was like you ought to look at projects that have a severe draw down and then bounce back and I think the pay attention to that because if the team in this case memes don't have like visible teams but if the community didn't leave they didn't go to another meme coin if it's if it's able to preserve and capture retain that attention through a very severe draw down and these meme coins by the way have them on the daily right then that's a really strong signal of

yeah of the potential of them you know so anyways these by the way these three whiff has had the draw down popcat has had the draw down um goat has had you could argue a draw down over the weekend and you know SPX has had some draw down yeah not a full one not I don't know if I'd call this charted draw down but yeah no no no no it's I mean it went from basically it went from like uh do what is it it reached almost what was the high you go down yeah so the alltime high was 90 cents and I think it it the it went all the way down to 50 cents so it was a pretty severe draw I mean it

was a pretty decent draw down I'd say yeah um okay the last thing I we'll say on this is uh there's something that uh George both George Soros and Stanley Dr and Miller talk about I think uh Soros uh the way Soros puts it is invest and then invest invest and then investigate Dr and Miller is buy first analyze later and um I just want to read this because I think it's a I think it actually really applies to to meme coins and some other things that will come this cycle um and it's a good it's actually good it's it's different than how I think most people think about investing um but look dren Miller and Soros two of the greats so dren Miller says I don't know who I heard a saying

with anal analysis comes paralysis or a source used to say invest and then investigate but it's more important now even than it was then we're in such a fast moving world with the all the new Communications that if I get an idea and I think it's attractive and for whatever reason the security price will be higher in a year or two I generally go ahead and buy it and then I tell the analyst to look at at it and if it turns out I was wrong after they analyze it I get out I don't like to wait around a lot of my best ideas I'm not that smart um so if I see it whatever is going on to cause that idea to happen someone else might see it and by the time we get done analyzing I might miss the 30 or or 40%

move and then I'm paralyzed this has happened to me all the times with these memes and then I'm paralyzed because it just went up 30 or 40% and I don't have the guts to buy it even if I think it's going higher so we're more in the camp of if we get a strong feeling we cut the analysis and then by all means do our analysis thoroughly and then just unload it if it turns out my thesis wrong was wrong so I think that's a really sound this be the most useful framework that I apply now yeah you w to get you want to get paid it all comes down to sizing a position but you don't have any exposure psychologically you're going to be in a really bad spot because you want to get paid when you're right yeah and the worst is not getting

paid when you're right meaning you told all these people so I'll tell you another a story there was this particular individual that came to me during token 2049 and said SP SPX he went and reached out to morat he talked to him he came to me gave me the skinny on why SPX that day I bought some without look just I bought some I'm like I want to pay attention I'm going to buy some and then I did more work I talked to him weeks later and say hey by the way you know know thank you very much you know really appreciate the the tip here and I's like I'm sure you've done very well for yourself he's like I didn't buy anything I'm like what he's like I was going to do a report and then publish it

but it's run up so much I can't I can't get around the fact I can't buy it now I was like okay you are just in a bad spot totally paralyzed Weeks Later same person pings me about goat at like 40 million fully diluted he's like look at this suda saw the skinny you know heard it from him and bought he bought he sized it too and I'm so happy for him because he now he's like I've learned from that mistake and I yeah bought and it and now is like he's I get all my Intel from him in the sense like he's constantly paying attention and Andy tweets and he's in the trenches he's doing the work and I just think like you know I'm I'm so

happy to see that because he corrected that mistake and look goat might go to zero but I think still the process was good like he was and and he sized it up more like I have throughout you want to keep backing a fast hor like Soros and drunken Miller talk about this too buy momentum and I think if you're in a bull market you want to back the fastest horse you don't want to buy a broken bird you know that [ __ ] that's not what we going for right um You have to be mindful of course timing becomes an important element but that's why again the piece of liquidity is so so important Soros was able to make a billion dollars because he shorted the pound and you could come in and out of that with size and I think there was an instance

where Soros went to his uh or was it drunken Miller went to Soros because drunken Miller used to work for Soros drunen Miller went to Soros here yeah and drunk he talks about in some of his videos like go and watch every single YouTube that drill Soros have you'll become a better investor I did it I don't know if I'm better investor but I learned a lot um but um I think drunkill went to Soros with a really good idea Soros got behind it fairly quickly and Dr suggested yeah we should size it like 5% of the fund he's like what are you talking about if this is a great idea like go 40% of the fun like go and it was just like okay like peer does this too from yeah went really big on China like a couple weeks

ago good ideas don't come every so often and I think you have to it's unfair to say that you're not going to like size it at 40 you're gonna size go like no one like 40% of their portfolio day one but if you're seeing strength you buy it at 50 you buy it at 100 you buy at 75 it goes down you buy at 200 you go to 300 you you keep buying strength right you take profit you do all this stuff but like yeah yeah it's tough I I like I know this I know that so I I missed SPX which kills me because I actually have a long connection with Morad um I Morad so I we used to run the pump podcast back it used to be called off the chain yeah

yeah and um there was this episode that we did in October of 2018 and if you look at this medium post marad the ultimate Bitcoin argument on pom substack with like the whole transcript of the thing I I posted this this was me on Pomp's substack or on Pomp's I guess we didn't there wasn't substack back then it was medium and this this episode was the best episode we had ever done and it was to to this day one of the best Bitcoin episodes ever I think and so I see marad start posting in like August about these memes yeah whatever and then he starts posting at the end of August and like really early in September about SPX it was A10 million market cap and I was like oh my God this

guy's about to do it again he is like the best Storyteller I know and he's and he's just he's just violent in his uh how much he pushes something and he did this looks like Jesus he looks like a mix between Jesus and the guy from Silicon Valley the show he did this in 2018 and 2019 with Bitcoin do you remember all those Bitcoin charts and he's like bitcoin's gonna become money and like all all this stuff and every day he would just hammer it on Twitter I was like oh my God he's about to do it and I didn't buy it and that's an adx Miss so you know what look uh I think you always this is why re underwriting your thesis is so important irrespective

whether you bought it or not and I really pushed this particular person on why he wouldn't buy SPX even if it had run up I'm like if you truly believe this has potential you're not buying this to go to the incremental 30% if you want 30% buy safe stuff you're fundamentally believeing this can do with 10x you either believe in this today or you don't if you don't get the [ __ ] out seriously it just comes down to that you either believe goat can reach T valuation or not that's like the bet you're making and I think it's really important to know the game you're playing like these if if salana does well or if no liquidity is enter the system so in one scenario there's no liquidity that comes into crypto it's all PVP there's this slash of money it becomes really hard

really choppy okay but if you are structurally long you get over the hump of the election you believe next year's going to be good there's more liquidity into the system then all you have to do is re underwrite the thesis is Will coin X outperform The Benchmark which is in this case salana or ethereum or Bitcoin and if it is then look at it objectively like that oh I looked at at 50 million it's at 600 million now oh my god I'm an idiot I'm like no you're an idiot for not believing that re underwriting that if it has strength like there's actually from a risk adjusted perspective you could argue that a meeme that wants surpassed like and broke out from 200 range into 500 it's like it's going a billion once it goes to a billion like it has staying power it has a draw down

like and it rebounded like there there's a lot of like really there's there's I would argue it's a better investment from a risk adjusted perspective then and there yeah yeah and so it's like you have to re underwrite these things right and so um position sizing and and and buying throughout the process becomes important I think yeah scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different let's face it other L1 networks have costly transaction fees that increase as the network gets busier scale has solved this problem with a gas-free scalable infrastructure where users never pay gas fees scale was awarded the most active

gaming chain in 20123 by coin Gecko and host five of the top 25 games on dap radar you should definitely check out scale I was using it the other day it really is incredible to use that's scale spelled with a K hit the link in the show notes or head on over to scale dospace ecosystem to get started today let's face it building on crowded l1s or expensive l2s is just not going to unlock the next generation of applications in crypto that's where super containers come in offering a completely new solution that transforms your development control imagine dedicated customizable app spaces running on supra's 500 ktps layer 1 blockchain you get complete control over

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right just finished recording with the founder of Inc so Kraken launch L2 called Inc um probably the best mental model for this is coinbase launching base uh exactly year ago so Kraken launched an L2 called Inc um they launched it on uh the op super chain so there's a couple ways to build on optimism you can basically just Fork op main net and not give them anything it's just free and open you can Fork op main net not share any Revenue not share any fees um but also not be interoperable with the other folks building on the super chain so cracking with the other option they opt it into the Super chain which means you split some of the sequence or Revenue with uh with Optimus uh it's also what Unis swap did with the

UN chain it's what coinbase did with base it's what Sony did with their sonum it's what mode has done it's what Zora has done so there's this um um yeah nice like actually we built this whole super chain thing um this whole super chain dashboard actually where you can see it it's optimism do uh optimism. blockworks reseearch do.com you can start to see like you've got Zora op main net mode base we got to add uni chain um uh Krakens Inc so yeah you can actually just see like the optimism this is the transaction count these are the unique active addresses so

they're just starting to stack chains on the uh on the super chain so this is also by the way the uh arbitrum orbit does this same thing too um ZK Sync has this with elastic chains Avalanche has this with Avalanche l1s Cosmos has obviously been doing this for years um but yeah curious I mean maybe we can get away from the stacks for a second what are what are your thoughts on uh I think there's two ideas at hand here this is so this is two weeks after Unis swap launched uni chain curious to get your take on like just the plethora of l2s and these like you you actually could call this an app chain I think as well it's an application with a bunch of users now launching a chain um we never really talked about yeah it's like base

it's you know it's it's also I would compare it to UNI chain as well you've got a frontend thing with a bunch of users you've got a thing with a wallet H and then you've got a you got a chain as well so curious how you think about this how much of you think was informed by the fact that coinbase launch base and Kraken is going public and wants to have a component of this um I think it probably gave them the confidence to do this but I think that every single exchange and every I think every application and every centralized company that has trades in finance will eventually have a chain and not not just crypto companies I think that NASDAQ will have an L2 I think that black rock will have an L2 I think that you treated about this right yeah I think that Robin

Hood will have an L2 all of these things will get a chain it also makes sense right they're they're they're creating a safer experience for their users if they want to interact on chain as opposed to them leaving because they see excuse me all the withdrawals right then they just want to own the experience for say no you're coming our chain and they might offer some incentives and have greater retention or wallet share of that activity which they're not like there there's leakage right fund exchange right as soon as you see a user you know um empty his wallet or or start moving funds from the exchange to offchain to onchain then you just know you're missing out on that Revenue um so I mean I think you're

right um yeah it'll be interesting I you're question around what do I think about the plethora of l2s I mean sort of inevitable right we've both been talking about it it's we're going to continue to see a proliferation of it we had episodes talking about 03s 04s 05s with stepen from arbitrum um we've had Jesse from the base team here um yeah I think it's going to continue to expand the two questions that uh I think we should talk about one what does that do to ethereum the base asset and because people are calling it parasitic I don't think it's parasitic

people calling it what is What is the value cruel we've you know so so what does that do for eth um and would you be more interested in like maybe owning the L2 token versus eth I'm curious what you think about that relationship not just from an I think we all agree it's kind of positive for the ecosystem but just eth as a base asset like what do you think about that what do I think for eth is the base asset like all these l2s will do yeah in a scenario where you continue to have L2 proliferation you get more users and whatnot but like what does that do to like do you feel excited about owning eth at that point or not so much I so no I don't I don't I mean it's the

same argument I said a year ago right which which my thinking hasn't really changed it's only gotten a little worse which is you know uh a couple this is my super I don't have the technical take that maybe Kyle Sani does or you know I don't have the I haven't thought about it as in-depth as some of these folks have I have a really left bell curve small brain take which is you used to if you had a thousand you wanted to buy ethereum it was uh all you had to do was buy ethereum then a year ago it became oh maybe I'll allocate some to ethereum some to optimism some to arbitrum uh and now it's like okay do I buy ink token do I B buy base token do I buy optimism do I buy arbitrum do I buy ZK sync like do

I buy the l2s on top of it do I buy the like uh um maker and a and Unis swab tokens on top of on top of ethereum like I actually just think it fragments the you've seen that picture of the wallet 10 different versions of usdc and you're like uh I just imagine a user that is new to crypto even even has been around for a while be like H what is this here here's the here's the counter AR it's just like eth my gut says eth is going to rip in the relatively near future that's the that's that's what my gut says my the counterargument isan for the sake of being a contrarian buy now invest later

Dr and Miller told me to buy eth so I'm buying eth and uh I'm actually not buying eth right now but um I don't know it just feels like you've seen this in crypto it's like when something is the most when someone it's a mean reversion of the mean like it's totally out of favor the pendulum of it's just so hated like you haven't seen an asset this hated in a long time like i300 billion doll asset like it's not cheap I'm sorry yeah I don't know I saw Mt tweet it out that like uh this um no no where was it B basically Mt tweeted out the same he copy pasted a Ryan Sean Adams tweet he likes to do

that and M was like uh crypto needs ethereum if if ethereum is not a trillion dollars like what is crypto something like that it's a tweet that Ryan had tweeted out and Mt got more likes than Ryan did and Ryan's just bull posting ethereum to his audience who loves ethereum so I was like okay if MD is getting more likes on an ethereum tweet than than Ryan Shan Adams is like it's just it's a pretty hated it's a pretty hated asset now on the other side you've got things like this happening which is right yeah I mean this is the real economic value of salana um by the way if anyone wants to see these metrics salana. blockworks research.com

uh I mean this this chart is a pretty beautiful looking chart so yeah I mean okay the second question is um do you think that at some point the interaction between these what's seems today fragmented experience will will be able to develop connectivity tissue middleware that really improves the user experience it makes it almost invisible where you just um you have routers as if in the same way that you had Rel layers facilitate just you know the smoothest experience when I say that it's it's really just taking the perspective of

the user like will a user interacting through a wall it be able to um you know not even have a have the same experience that you get in salana like the integrated experience which is you just have one ass you don't think about any of these things that we're talking about right now like do you think we'll ever get there or do you think that there's really kind of no incentive and we're just going to be in this L2 War where there's these big groups like optimism arbitrum that are just trying to fight and they don't have no incentive to kind of collaborate with each other so that's a really good point um the front ends are going to do every

all right there's a couple things inside of that one is the front ends are going to do everything they can to give you access to every single thing like where where you're basically abstracting all of that stuff away and if you look at like the chain abstraction stack and you look you actually play with some of these apps like I met with the founder of uh rally yesterday they used to be or they used to be floor now they're rally super clean like you as a user have no idea what you're Interac with so that's the first things the front ends are going to do everything they can the second is um you know I asked the Inc founder are you guys interoperable with bass and they they consciously decided to be interoperable with bass oh and I think that's a cool yeah I think that's

a cool thing however I think a danger a dangerous thing that's happening right now is that these Stacks like arbitrum orbit or ZK elastic chains or Avalanche L1 ones they're all inter operable with each other or with with the apps inside of there the chains inside of there so like bass is interoperable with uni chain which is interoperable with Kraken which is interoperable with mode with Zora with OP mainnet but they can't talk to anything outside of op right so the dangerous thing is I think the network effects are going to get super fast super strong uh super fast super strong um super excuse me super strong super fast uh inside of these Stacks so

like the super chain I don't know it kind of depends on I'm not I'm not technical enough to understand like can the super chain things being built on the super chain interact with things being built in arbitrum Pro probably they should be right um yeah yeah yeah we'll see I mean I um yeah I fundamentally just think that the experience might take a while it's more of an uphill battle and uh that's the that's the danger is these things creating these wall Gardens ins probably will it probably will in the same way that you know you know there there's

going to be build connectivity tissue between these chains and interoperability I don't think you need the buying of these chains because it's open source there might be just a a independent company that says there's a lot of value for me to create interoperability Within These Chains and I can capture some of that value um in the same way that you have Services bridges that allow you to move in between the L1 and the L2 and kind of you know you can pay up to use a particular bridge that might settle it faster right because you need to move the money really fast but so I think that the connectivity is going to be there the interoperability we might get to a point where it's ASM totically really close to what an integrated experience like salana provides but I just think that In This Moment In Time

it's not that and so I just I'm not I'm not when I have something that is working today I'd rather kind of double down on that and then just kind of wait and see and I think most investors are in that kind of state we haven't really talked about the ETF here but I don't know I'm sort of taking the extreme B barbell approach Bitcoin on one side pass horse on the other side just salana and then stuff that I like happening in salana as lever bets on that ecosystem that's kind of how I'm approaching portfolio constru ction uh like at the moment if I redraw redraw it from scratch yeah um there's all these chains launching there's also all these token La tokens

launching um yes there there's a new thing happening which is talking to some of the founders who are launching these things they are trying to launch them at ftvs they want to launch them at ftvs that are actually lower like not as as low as possible because you could launch it low but like they want to launch at low ftvs um so that their community and their users can actually make money on the way up because that seems to be the proven strategy right it's very different than like the strategy of the last couple years which is just valuation maximization like launch it as high of an FTV as possible there's there's reasons why you can't launch super low like you know the VCS have expectations um the you have only so

much control as a Founder right you like the you know binance kind of sets the price these days the market makers kind of set the price these days so you only have so much control but um I don't know how would you if a Founder came to you and was like Hey I raised at like 500 million my last round um should should I try to get like a several billion dollar fdv or should I try to do like a low as low of an FTV as possible I don't know if you've thought about this much I don't get involved in that decision historically so it's difficult for me to like tell you from experience like how that pricing Works my appreciation was like so you approach a centralized exchange like if you're going to the centralized Exchange Route

there's the negotiation with them I guess to set the price um like squirrel for instance just launched and they gave certain percentage of the supply to binance because you know as a distribution partner and the same that you would pay like I guess everybody has to everyone binance now asking like two to 10% of your tokens yeah it's it's pretty crazy U but hey you know they're like the JP Morgan of the space um and but it's difficult I as an investor I'm like well like I get the point of like not pricing it too high it's almost like pricing an IPO right it's it's art science it also depends on so many things you can't control like market conditions um but yeah there's some truth I guess in not

trying to go and price it to the absolute maximum that you can get and leaving some room for new investors to like have a good experience out of the gate you know uh I think there's some truth to that I think just this is how IPOs are priced as well right you you know I think when Facebook ipoed it like rallied dramatically the first day it was like up like even coinbase as well and so the question always there is like what happened did investment bankers do a really bad job the prices thing was the company under selling themselves like and sometimes you go back to the range right and sometimes they really modify this range based on demand as they hit the market market so the market is like not super efficient so yeah this is the problem with crypto it's like how

much can you the question is I don't know I actually love a Founder to come in this gone through this process like how much can you actually control I think that the the the I think I guess you could signal to The Exchange like Hey listen I don't want to go with 10 I want to go five say and the exchange says okay fine um but then you're diluting yourself more so I don't know there is something to be said about like how recent was the last round and who invested in that round was it institutional was it just so I think there's some signal around um you have a view on it by the way I mean I don't know like no I don't have a view because there's there's all the no I don't have a view it's I just have a view that it's gonna be

interesting to watch I don't know how the sausage making Works in terms of the pricing because there's also a narrative thing of like oh my God that like there used to be a narrative thing at least that is like oh wow the FTV is way lower than people thought like bearish on this thing so there's by the way most people don't care about FTV you know bll Market they care about now but it's it's difficult it's looking at FTV is also tricky because you have to look at the inflation curve are they giving all out Emissions on the first three years or is it like a file coin typ of emission schedule that like literally like hund hundred years yeah different right you gotta look at like emissions year one three five 10 at perpetuity like yeah um the last thing I want to talk about and

then we can wrap is the stripe acquisition of bridge yes sir uh $ 1.1 billion acquisition I think the biggest crypto acquisition in the industry ever um there was the Galaxy the other ones that came to mind were Galaxy Galaxy bitg go at 1.2 billion but that deal fell apart um there was coinbase buying poon or Circle buying poniac for 400 million right uh coinbase bought bag's company earn for what 120 um binance bought coin market cap the report Ed number was 400 million I heard that was a gross overe exaggeration um but I think it's the I think it's the biggest acquisition

actually whether it's the biggest or not it's the most impactful let's put it that way it's most impactful yeah um I've heard rumors that it is now forced the hand of a lot of other payment processors and financial institutions who are now starting to say crap we need a crypto strategy um and I don't think this is the crypto strategy of 2021 of and 2022 or you know they needed they needed to launch nfts if you were Starbucks to like look like you were cool now I think it's that they need to offer their customers some a crypto crypto technology so this was a a I mean a very bold move um I I I got some some of the story of how it actually happened

behind the scenes and the tldrs it sounds like Zach from bridge um is you know just an amazing at selling his company and it sounds like Patrick hollison basically just went not to overuse this term but just founder mode and listen to what he tweeted Patrick hollison tweets stable coins are room temperature superconductors for financial services I'll say that again stable coins are room temperature superconductors for financial services thanks to stable coins businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed coverage and cost Improvement ments in the coming years stripe is going to build the

world's best stable coin infrastructure and to that end we are delighted to welcome stablecoin meaning that's a Twitter account of Bridge to stripe right that's probably one of the best Tweets I've seen and you can guess that tweet is in my deck so the context the beginning of the year there were these Chinese Labs working on replicating thing called lk9 9 uh they were thought to have found a room temperature superconductor which is this groundbreaking idea because of this like enormous potential to change every industry so room temperature superconductor that comparison is um I

just thought beautifully put and what it sounds like behind the scenes is that you know the it sounds like stripe was like H should we do it should we not and Patrick allson just said stable coins are one of the most important things they're here to it's a build conversation I've been speaking with a bridge team because they become important Partners right to implement in the companies that I go and acquire and it's fascinating what they're doing under the hood if you're a company that that is settling ping internationally you have employees worldwide it's like a no-brainer yeah and that's the thing right there's this whole universe and part of crypto that

people outside of crypto don't appreciate unless you're using it but very few people are using it because they're distracted in this noise that crypto is just a casino but like stable coins and anyone that runs a business understands the amount of friction that they have when they for payment processing charge backs that's right sure because payment failure that alone is like in the hundreds and billions of dollars of friction that's why I'm doing what I'm doing seriously I am obsessed with removing friction from a system and as simple as it may sound it is a huge

problem the thesis is very simple and I'll just leave you with this this friction cannot go away until and unless you use crypto stripe has built a super successful business to facilitate you know payments apis and make that backend of payment rails faster better cheaper they've been very successful at it there's one area where they haven't been able to crack and it's it's this idea of of of using the traditional Financial rails it's very expensive it's an Antiquated Patchwork they came to this realization I'm convinced that in order for them to get to the next leg of

growth and become continue to be the leader they needed to use stable coins because it is faster better cheaper it removes the friction that they haven't been able to do and that's honestly that if that's one liner that's like that's the superer super bullish case on crypto yeah that's a more interesting part of it too it's like we talk about these grandio ideas it's like no man like crypto's really good today not in 10 years like today it is working and I think to your point everyone now is going to wake up and everyone like they were talking about how profitable tether was they're now going to say wait a minute I'm at a very competitive disadvantage because stripe already is

moving this direction black rocks already moving this direction and so I think it's to your point is very different than the Starbucks announcing that they're gonna nfts yeah like it is real for real this time for real yeah um cool it's a good place to wrap um digital asset Summit just went live we've got like 30 speakers confirmed already there's an open call to speakers for the next week that shuts down November 1st if you want your founder or you are a financial institution you want an exec or hedge fund and you want to come speak uh there's a thing on the website Google digital asset Summit block Works 2025 the page should show up call to speakers button on the right hand side New York right uh in New York yeah yeah there's um we have outgrown

most of the venues it is now um there's a BR so there's Javit Center which is actually just this like massive annoying pick up my Marathon number next next week yeah it's like a it's like a really big it's like honestly like me reputation but they have this beautiful brand new section of Javits and it's at this it's that the brand new section of Javit it's gonna be amazing okay I don't need any convincing it's in New York Man favorite city in the world so by the way leg and gentlemen if you're listening and you're running the New York Marathon drop us a comment I'll be there Yan's coming out to support me with a huge Banner because I'll need it because I've been injured and not running but I'll half ass it and anyways if anyone wants to run at a pace drop your pace maybe

I'll just we can do like a run group and like do a do a nice nice little Marathon run what's your what's your goal H I'm not gonna PR dude I I did a um with a really good friend of mine um I did the Amsterdam half marathon I hadn't ran in like three months because I was injured in my heel but I feel pretty good because I've been cycling a lot I think I will realistically run like at um 3 hours between 3 and 3:30 so obviously not my PR but you know Punchy enough to feel like it was a workout I mean it's always a workout but also I wanna there're so liberating that I'm not thinking about a time there's the pressure's off what's your right

what's what's the fastest you've ever run a marathon 247 two two hours 47 minutes 18 seconds London Marathon last year then I ran Berlin 2 hours 47 36 seconds oh Dam and New York was like 2 hours 47 58 seconds that's crazy that's nuts that's nuts 2 hours 47 I'm not gonna do that this year because I've ran Tokyo Boston and I was injured no excuses this is gonna be a fun run so if anyone's down a run you know at at that sort of pace range drop me a note we'll coordinate let's go what your do you know your bib number yet no I don't but uh maybe I can post up you can follow me just

pressure cool all right thanks for listening everyone hope you have a great rest of the Friday great weekend and uh we'll see you Tuesday we have um the Kraken episode Kraken L2 episode coming out on Tuesday then the week after we have a really interesting episode with the head of old head of comms at salana and the head of the CMO of Celestia um which was like a deep dive into crypto marketing so oh subscribe cool all right thanks everyone have a great weekend all right see you folks bye hey everyone thanks for watching today's episode just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor scale scale really is one of the best chain experiences out there today and I've used so many different chains there's a reason they are gaining so much adoption

in both gaming and AI use cases hit the link in the show notes to explore the scale ecosystem [Music] n [Music]