Why Meme Coins Are Beating DeFi – Farmer’s Take

Transcript

the market is telling us that memes are the thing and so like it's one of the like do you want to be smart or do you want to be rich yeah and that's it if something's hot and new like that's what I want to be in especially in Bull markets yeah um you think we're in bull market man yes 100% every morning when I wake up and look at the chart I'm just shocked that bitcoin's not at 90k by now MH I think we're about to be in a very awesome Bull Run [Music] I'm here at cosmoverse with farmer from

defi Dojo how's it going man good to see you brother welcome to the couch it's amazing yeah lot Between Two Ferns on I did a Between Two Ferns with metallic at ECC this year AB it was pretty good uh no this is the crypto Casting Couch yeah uh nice how many uh how many podcasts have you done up here I've done You' be the fourth or the yeah fourth but I've got a lots lined up today um but yeah it's um it was sort of impromptu I came in this room and I was like this is a decent place to do podcasts it's quiet and I've got the gear so it works great let's go yeah so what's I

like we were thinking what we're going to talk about here so I think we should do we should talk about IBC and how amazing it is and also talk about the cosmos SDK and how amazing it is and how taking over the world and how potentially uh ZK proofs could uh enable a lot of really interesting use cases yeah yeah ZK proofs and um and like definitely app chains let's talk about app chains but let's go over the app chain thesis cuz yeah make sure everybody understands the abstain thesis um well what's funny is like you know those are conversations that we've had 850 times I think over the last yeah uh two years and uh everyone's done multiple podcasts on so like that's all

we're laughing about it but like in the D Dojo like there's so many people who still like no one understands like really Cosmos what's going on IBC um it just hasn't gotten the Mind share so d dojo's a Community it's defi education yeah I guess is the best way to describe it okay um and a bunch of defi nerds uh all together in one Discord and everybody's just like hunting for like the highest possible yield on the highest possible quality asset right and of course that's always eth yeah and then there's a derivative and then maybe that's like slightly less quality than uh vanilla e and now there's a liquid stake

derivative of a derivative of a derivative and then restake derivative yeah and so basically what everybody's been talking about this year is just points farming you know everybody was points farming agen layer um then points farming KAC and then now everybody super stoked about symbiotic and uh using the Mellow pools to like gain a bunch of different points at one time yeah so it's hard to calculate the yield because you don't really know um yeah it's funny I was talking to I was talking to like a guy it's like a trifi guy but like is in the crypto and he wrote a book about um he wrote a book uh basically for institutions on on crypto and blockchain and uh and he was like wait liquid

staking or reaking you mean you take the stake asset and then you make a derivative out of it and then you restake the derivative yeah yeah well that's why um we were coming up for that name of that uh panel talk at nebular Summit is uh about liquid reaking he named it uh fractional Reserve banking yeah crypto exactly because it is like yeah that's kind of how uh fractional Reserve with all the like yeah everything that happened in in the US in the 2000s so so what's I mean you're like deep in the trenches of Defi and you're like my kind of like some ways my go-to defi guy when I have when

I want to know about like stuff that's happening deep in the trenches what what's happening right now like what are people sort of concentrating on to try to extract the best yields it was Ian Lair now that's kind of over y what's the next thing so like I'm I'm kind of the wrong person to talk about it so like um let's get that guy up here yeah I'm focused on like lots of other opportunities and like I'm not really focused on like eth and points for me yeah um I do think like the new like uh quazar pools that are in mellow is like interesting and like everybody should probably put a little bit of eth in there because you're earning all of these different points at the same time yeah you know so quazar has these pools that you put eth in and allows you to get points on everything

yeah yeah exactly and like you know could be you like everything's a rumor you have no idea right but it could be like Union bar chain melow um that's that's also sound as me e right um that the slen guys are working on yeah I'm not I'm not really sure but that's just what like all the defi guys are talking about and like I'm I feel like I'm in the like actual trenches like yeah goofing off with meme coins and then um the last good D5 position I did was the Mantra pool yeah which was amazing ended up being about 4,000% APR whoa um and that's not counting the karma uh that you were gaining along the way and So after talking to the Mantra people this week uh they told me I should be very excited about the karma that I've earned

so something like that was cool because I came to nebul because I came to ECCC that was something that I could bring back to our team and then like I got to you know give that to them and it's not something that they would have paid attention to yeah um without that so you know I'll get excited about a defi thing and be into it but I'm not chasing and looping and doing all these type of strategies uh like most of the people in the dojo are doing yeah how much time a day do you spend doing def5 talking about defi or doing def doing def maybe 30 minutes 30 minutes the day yeah another thing I don't like to get in stressful Loops where I have to like manage liquidations like that's terrifying I don't want that like in the

back of my mind all the time um and that happens a lot you know yeah people things get dep pegged especially when we're talking about like derivative assets and all this stuff yeah so it's pretty scary um and that's why the D Dojo is so good is because like everybody is on it it's like asking the right questions um what kind of Oracle are they using uh do they are they audited does it look sketchy all this different stuff and then the other thing is like the moment that something goes wrong one of the guys knows about it in the dojo and like puts it in the security alert so everybody can go and like start unwrapping everything doing all that stuff but I mean what's interesting is the market is telling us that memes are the thing and so like it's one of their

like do you want to be smart or do you want to be rich yeah and that's it so yeah it's funny how I I brought this up with a few people um like last week I was at this Ledger event in Paris and there were these guys there like that are big into nfts and like were in the nft cycle and did well there and buying nft art and there are actually like a lot of nft people at this event it's a ledger right and they're you know they've got this whole kind of go to market with with nft folks but nobody nobody bought into the to the meme coin um idea and no matter how spun it and uh they like no base like it's not tangible

value and yeah and it's it's interesting because you know the same discussions were happening three four years ago when when uh when nfts were popping Y and all the D5 people were say like you know nfts don't have real value right uh so yeah what's your what's your take on on the meme coin I think it's a simple as the market is always right and that's it the Market's telling us that like this is what everyone's interested in yeah and so like institutions are going to find their place like within crypto this cycle which I think is really cool but when retail comes I'm guessing that 90% of them are just going to want the memes on salana and so that's what the market

is telling us right now um and then you know of course we'll see Cycles through it and like every different place where there's memes on different chains eventually everyone will like it'll get hot you know was hot to bridge to Tron for a while and then it was hot to bridge to toie and like you know who you know who knows what's next probably aptose or something and maybe even eventually we'll get to where uh there are some cool Cosmos memes yeah um like it's so it's so easy to do it's so fun like you know see everybody should all these chains I think should spin up memes and air drop them to their Community yeah yeah I don't think you have anything to lose uh yesterday I was on a panel and one of the panelists said something which I thought was interesting I'm

going to butcher this but you know he said you know we was a VC panel so he says like youo War VCS you think of us as like poker poker players so you go to the casino and you sit down and you play poker and you sort of like try to play a good game and like analyze the table I'm I'm not a poker player so I'm going to mess up the poker analogies then you have a bunch of guys just playing flop machines and you know like you'll never go play those flop machines and those guys will never come and play poke or at least they'll never be good at it Y and I think that was a good um way to to illustrate the difference between professional investors in the space and also retail um but but also [Music]

perhaps um somewhat representative of of reality where like a I think I think funds are not really paying attention to mean coins so much right uh that might that might come like later in the cycle but at least for now um I'm talking the BC's and you know they're not aping in the mean points yeah with their LP money and we're we're not either so yeah yeah well it's I I think it's mid curve um I think everyone's mid curving it yeah um so I the market has told us that that isn't true uh and I think that instead of like going and doing the due diligence and the work that they

should be doing like anal just take it like it's another project just analyze it yeah you know how many like whatever metrics you think are important how many holders are there whatever it is yeah yeah um you know look at the charts and I think that should be their approach instead of just like of course not yeah we're not going to do memes like if you're Fidelity or something yeah hire a team of 24 year olds out of college and like get them to start looking into this stuff because it's um it's like a really interesting cultural movement yeah um and so that's where I'm coming to it from I I bought no memes last cycle wasn't into it all uh this is new for you though the memes cuz yeah 6 months ago you were looking at memes yeah and then I and then I decided that the

market was right and I was wrong like always and that's it and then um yeah it's actually been great but I do take I take the VC basket approach when going to memes you know I think you have to do that there's somewhere it's like wow that one's really good I should load up on it but in general there is such a higher likelihood of like rugging and not success yeah so if you're in a 100 memes and you get one to do a 200x you know then you're okay you're back you know you doubled it you like a lot higher chance so I spread it out in like a big basket um and it's pretty fun what are you what are you holding my favorite meme is zen zen what's zen zen is a highly addictive nicotine pouch okay

that I have in my mouth right now okay um and it's just it's become like is there a coin yeah there's a coin okay but it's based on like Zen has been like a huge culture thing in America and there was like a Zen shortage because the Zen Factory burnt down and there's like that Meme has already reached like mass population so if the general public comes in I think it's something that they'll really want um they didn't launch it no of course not I actually think um this could be wrong I could be saying this I'm pretty sure Philip Morris tried to like Sue in the uh the the meme coin the meme coin yeah and it's like well

who do I yeah send this to whatever um so for me like that time yeah on that's my favorite one year but I I I got lucky because um it ended up being the sky marad came out with his like his big list uh and then on his secondary list of like undervalued projects uh Zen was on there so that's kind of giving it a boost and people are seeing it okay so what about um Zen Zen's my favorite um oh man it's there are hundreds and uh I just got into like the new AI coins like yeah goat and fart and so what's happening there I've only sort of heard about this um I don't really know um I know like these are coins that are run by AI basically so my my understanding

is someone gave an AI a bunch of money and told them to like start a coin or do something yeah and then the AI did that and you can like follow along like the AI is like tweeting all the time and it's like sometimes really weird and it's just a bizarre thing and so you know is the AI actually in charge of it or is there like a Dev still behind that wallet you know it's like what's interesting um so I bought with meme coins if you see something get really popular like it's kind of one of those things where like you ape and then do the research later that's kind of what I do um just knowing like this has like the cultural fit every single person in the space is talking about it like it has enough mind share that it will probably do well mhm um but it's like

it's whole new class of meme coins um I think it will be its own it'll be like memes AI memes and it will be sort of its own thing it's really interesting I know uh like taim M and the humble farmer Army they've been doing a deep a really cool Deep dive over the last couple weeks so I'm uh looking forward to watching his podcast about all this stuff and is this mostly it's mostly on fana yeah yeah I think um I think someone launched one on E uh but pretty much everything's happening on salana I think the AI allegedly like started the pump fund himself you you're saying that an AI started pump do fun I'm saying an AI did the pump dot fun like he launched the coin on pumped out done God okay

yeah yeah wish incredible by himself by himself by itself allegedly allegedly yeah okay and uh what should people be like I mean for for like a boomer like me who's just holding defi assets and like farming and you know doing yield yield farming yeah uh what what kind of things should I be looking at in terms of not necessarily like the coins themselves but like what are some indicators or data points that one can look at say hey like okay this might be interesting yeah other than I like the ticker I think it's takes so much time and so much like mind share that like most people just shouldn't do it like

you shouldn't do it unless you want to like sit in front of the computer and like get in all these meme Alpha groups and like I do that already so it's like you know everybody's tell place I'm not telling anyone to buy memes all I'm saying is the market is telling us to buy memes and so like maybe we should stop like on them you know what I mean like yeah this is all an experiment this is all fun this is brand new technology and Industry and everyone's trying to like figure out and find their way so like if you're a really serious product like great like I don't know you could also still make a fun Meme and then air drop it to your community like or whatever yeah I think it should be red and not like shat on yeah but I mean you

know you you said a while ago and uh that you there there are some some some key indicators that one should look at like how many holders there are how how much how much of the supply do the founders hold yeah exactly you know thing things like that right what are those yeah this is something like Stephen and I was talking about cuz he's like you like how do I like in any way like make this work for my brain you know and so with pump. fun and then when you do a pump. fun then it automatically creates a liquidity pull on radium for you and then you can go to like Dex aggregators so I like this one called bird eye and um it will tell you of

course market cap and then it goes to number of holders like number of wallets that hold it which that can be scammed uh sometimes they'll like spin up Bots like oh my God there's 14,000 holders of this coin and it's only a 200 ,000 market cap yeah so you have to be a little bit careful there and then it actually tells you like did the dev like get rid of the rights to me more tokens uh it checks that off and then it tells you the top 10 holders right right and so you can go through and be like wow one wallet has 80% but like instead of like getting on some kind of block Explorer and figuring all that for yourself it just makes it really easy for you right there um and so you know what you really want to see is like 7%

on radium and then like everyone else with like 1 to 2% in that top 10 list yeah um so there aren't like ad devor whales who are immediately just going to dump on you yeah what could go wrong with the mcoin like well 99.999999% of them will go to absolute zero you know they have no value like it ended up not being that funny didn't catch on rugged too quickly uh wasn't a good fit so it's it's it's extremely difficult to know it's it's you it's gambling it's speculation it's not what people shouldn't just jump into the stuff do you know what I mean yeah so I mean the advice I give everyone yeah the the whole idea of aping in the stuff yeah I think start with a really really small

amount of money and like get your feet wet that's just what I want everybody to do is like if you're going to bridge to salana and start buying memes for the first time Bridge one salana you know bridge5 salana go go over there and like play around in the trenches for five bucks 10 bucks and like goof off that way get your feet wet before you like just start aping cuz there's so many things that can go wrong something that I've done a lot is a new Co coin has come out it's awesome everybody's talking about it people are talking about it like I trust and are genuinely right or at least like influential enough that it makes sense to get involved and then I'll buy the wrong version of that token because there's like as soon as something becomes cool

they'll launch like 30 derivatives and that's with the same picture and everything and so you've got to go on and you know look at like the volume and be like okay this is the one or like the meme coin equival of fishing attack yeah exactly so there's so many things that can go wrong you know I've been rugged a gazillion times messing with this stuff um but I paid for the education and I'm I'm glad yet I got it you know what what would convince you like does does whiff have to flip a eth before like people start like hedge funds are like okay well we we need to start taking this seriously yeah I I I don't think it's so much like the convincing part I think it's just the

kind of time and energy part you know um I'm a busy guy yeah I'm try you know I'm I'm I'm trying to do my best to just so stay on top of like the things that I'm I'm looking at and feel I have expertise in and you know this is just a whole other category of things that yeah you know I can't I can't like I can't be an expert in um I can spend time in it and you know I do I do hold a few meme coins yeah uh what what are you into Wawa I I've this one yeah I I bought I mean I have Wawa Doge I think I bought we probably have had Wawa steak since like you know yeah 21 or whatever it came out

um I recently bridged over some soul and I had some soul and like I bought some mother yeah I think Mother's a good one you know I think I bought some whiff and some of some of those kind of you know the the top top tier ones yeah but then you there's a whole bunch of other ones like this SPX 6900 yeah that one's great Giga and all these other ones I don't have yet so yeah for me it's just like allocating time to to do that it makes sense that was actually why I like gave you that advice it's like well you already exper all these other things like that's definitely where all your Capital should stay and then uh secret Indulgence Maybe could be like yeah but

having some you know 5% or may some up up to 5% of your portfolio in this stuff you know makes sense and I'm not at 5% but yeah I totally agree with that probably should be yeah somewhere between one to 5 what do you think that you know the classic M coin the Doge Doge sh what do you think of those and what are how are those going to perform I think they'll do well I think like Doge um what's interesting because do isn't is on any deex if if we were in like 2023 yeah uh in like the summer and I think that we would have been I think that most people would have been looking at this like we're going to start collecting memes and they're not going

to go up until Doge goes up you know so in a similar way people are like I don't I'm only going to hold Bitcoin in the bare Market because it's going to go up first and then I can start to trickle down into other uh you know kind of top l1s and now it's like and so I'm wondering in if new people coming in wanting memes are only going to want the memes that everybody's talking about right now yeah and not Doge but Elon Musk will probably pump Doge at some point didn't he just say that he was no longer he just I saw some video where he's saying he's not affiliated with any crypto project or endorsing anything and he's kind of attached himself from it yeah I I didn't see that yeah I I think that here here here the

take I we did panel in Singapore with um a few folks from in portfolio about liquidity and how to how to bring more liquidity into the space and one of the takeaways was that there's just tons of liquidity that is sitting there in top top 20 assets like cardono like Doge like Litecoin uh that most of that liquidity is not being utilized in defi it's either onchain or it's on index or on a sex Y and there's hundreds of billions of dollars of liquidity that just sitting there not being utilized in defi yeah and so I think someone should someone should bring build like Babylon for for Doge or like Babylon for uh for Litecoin and start bringing some of that

liquidity and security uh over into uh into defi into Cosmos and ethereum salana whatever that's interesting it's kind like your poker example you know it's like would anyone who loves memes also want like yield on those memes you know yeah and so of course I think most people will be using um most of retail coming in buying memes will be using apps like moonshot uh and a lot of like those type things that are coming out where you can just get up and then there'll be like a new cool featured meme of that day and like you swipe right like on tender and then it just brings up how much you want

to buy and you put in that dollar amount amount you swipe again and then it's done on your credit card yeah wow it's amazing um and I think that's what will be popular right and not necessarily like going to coinbase and buying Doge uh there's a lot of people who are trying to collect the high quality base memes because of the new um smart wallet that coinbase has yeah what's that called again just like SL wallet no they have like a cute name anyway they have a new great wallet that's really accessible and you can open it you know and make all your transactions with just your face and there's you know like crazy seed phrases to remember and all that stuff that would be difficult for new people um and so that's another angle thinking like

okay retail likes coinbase that kind of makes sense they're all going to get these base wallets and um those memes might do really well yeah so I don't know man it's it changes so quickly that it's like you you know you can't give anyone advice it's just like all you can say is do your own research and maybe try and understand crypto Twitter culture but you know know it takes years and it's wild and you don't know who to follow or trust most of the time yeah and so what do you think about um this has been coming up a lot in conversation recently bag bias bag bias bag bias think it's everywhere you think it's everywhere yeah yeah like people are

buas by the bags instead of BU instead of like making money it's like people like yeah typically you know people will you know hold on to eth or Adam for dear life Wild you know stuff is you know pumping elsewhere and there are opportunities in all sorts of other places uh that's a I don't know that that's a behavior that is prevalent amongst other types of assets yeah like stocks or gold or you know Commodities or whatever it's like yeah like I'm holding my rice like rice options it's just like yeah you you know You' D you've doubled down and bull posted your bags on Twitter every day for four years you know how do you just like change and get rid of it um that was my original my

first mistake in crypto I think um was buying a bunch of something seeing other stuff and be like oh my gosh that's amazing what a great opportunity okay I'm going to buy one I'm just going to buy more of this dumb that I keep getting right yeah I got obsessed with like one thing um yeah know that was a bad mistake I was actually I was telling my friends to buy cardano at 1 cent while I was accumulating more of this other stupid project because I just wanted more of that and I wanted to hit a number yeah um and so I think I learned I learned that lesson the hard way early on didn't know much about crypto anyway but I'm I'm not making that mistake again yeah I'm going to listen as much as I can of course I have back bias I mean of course right yeah um

but I'm conscious of my back bias and really trying to uh not make those mistakes it's like if something's hot and new like that's what I want to be in especially in Bull markets yeah um you think we're in bull market T that yes 100% um this Cycle's been interesting I think we probably would have had like a more typical cycle if all this crazy Bitcoin ETF stuff didn't happen I think that I think that hype ran the price up right we hit 74k and if that hadn't happened and it would have been like a slower General

trajectory than maybe we would be doing like new all times highs right now it should put like a ton of noise in the chart yeah and I think that especially is going to hurt uh projects that may be launched last spring into like really hot conditions and they market caps went straight up like Celestia did and now it puts so much noise in the chart for Traders that like it has to like find its way all the way back up and break through all these resistance levels and go through all the like the community he's mad at them because the token went down for 3 months you know or whatever um and so I think that's what has kind of made this cycle weird I think that every single bullish tail end that we could have asked for happened every

single one maybe like the Trump presidency would be like the last one so we'll know in a few weeks but I am every morning when I wake up and look at the chart I'm just shocked that bitcoin's not at 90k by now M I think we're about to be in a very awesome some Bon cool man well that's a great word to end on thank you great to see you brother yeah you too [Music] [Music]