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☕️ @AwakenTax with AI on Coffee w/ Captain #989 pwd by $APE on Solana
Recorded: Sept. 17, 2025 Duration: 1:59:52Space Recording
Short Summary
Awaken Tax is transforming the crypto tax landscape with innovative solutions that simplify tax reporting for users. The platform has experienced rapid growth, expanding its user base significantly while partnering with CPAs to ensure compliance and accuracy. As the crypto industry evolves, the demand for efficient tax solutions continues to rise, making Awaken a key player in this space.
Full Transcription
I'm on the web and I'm shooting at three. I've been golden when I'm three. I'm an elegant boy from a different planet.
So I got my drink.
I'm riding in the 1920s model T Ford.
Car, era, Lord.
Call me Levi playing on the keys, boy.
And I'm about to put my gloves on.
If I said it, then I meant that.
Yeah, I like that one.
I'm about to get that.
Crash that whip for the drumsticks.
Whiplash.
I'm about to get them all.
Are you with that?
In a white boat, surrounded by blue
I want one, but I got a cop turned
I wanna fly high in the sky, arms out wide
Tryna soar, to my bird type view
I'm on fire, Ricky Bobby
Cracking the pavement, Whitney Bobby
I'm a Saki Bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki
Bruce Wayne been a dog, and I keep it 101
Cause I'm feeling kinda spotty,
sippin' on Serac and I'm sippin' on Octane, the only thing around my neck is the blockchain,
I got coins, I see where y'all go, I'm popping this web one,
I was living the dream, now I'm on web three, and it is what it seems,
top in the pyramid schemes, I'm telling you. I'll sell you a percentage on Nebula.
Shout out to this.
Yo, set it up.
NFT, Twitter, blockchain.
CM with the ghost and we bond like crypto.
Crypto, crypto.
We can make a trade, get a memo.
Reviews not falling for the FOMO.
Listening to Coffee with Captain.
You're a way local.
I ain't never gonna stop rapping.
Orlando, yeah, we working magic
We rocking Ethereum in a tease
I just went and caught me a half bass
Man, I gotta shut up the 40s
Now I got coins
I see where y'all going
Been popping since Web 1
Hella hoops on Web 2
I was living the dream
Now I'm on Web 3
And it is what it seems
Topping the pyramid schemes
I'm telling you
I'll sell you a percentage on Nebula, shout out to Vince, yo set it up.
Breaking the mood to choose one, but it got knowledge to move, son. I'm shocking in shades with my brother in suits, yeah, them blues is coming.
Even though it's hard to pick, anybody more, soda on the mix, no biting lips, it's time to go.
Index number one, no thumbs up, you gotta scroll, looking at the ghosts in studio, it's time to go. Index number one, no thumbs up, you gotta scroll. Looking at the ghost in studio, it's time to go.
Had a helmet on by myself until I met a mask.
Dad wanted to have a face-off.
Had to bring my chainsaw full-ticket gas and a bribe with my brakes off.
I'm A1, but a different kind of steak sauce.
Welcome to Coffee with Captain, powered by ApeCoin,
where we dive into all things crypto, NFTs, Web3, and cutting-edge technology.
Remember, nothing here is financial advice. Early-stage tech
can be exceptionally volatile and risky. So grab your coffee and join
Cap and Steve for today's conversation. Welcome to the future.
Welcome to Coffee with Captain GM. GM, thanks so much for joining us.
If anybody doesn't do a favor, drop us a GM in the chat down below, then head up top, smash that like, repost a bookmark on today's space.
We greatly appreciate it.
It does warm up the algo and does us a solid.
We're also live over on YouTube as well as my abstract today.
Appreciate all the love and GMs over there.
Just did an abstract swap prior to the show.
We may hit on that here shortly.
But as always, I'm Cap, Jim, my co-host, Steve,
Nerdy Financial Vice, and I share crypto is risky and a teaser risky.
Meme coins exceptionally risky. You can go to zero in a moment. so please don't put any money in you can't afford to lose notes steve and i hold tokens we'll talk
about from time to time we are not financial advisors certainly not your financial advisor
don't join us for that just join us for some fun some information and education along the way
gm steve how you doing sir uh excuse me doing all right um had a realization today i am getting old um first real getting
old moment like i mean and all the different things have come to fruition but the past few
days uh so i've always had better than 2020 eyesight my entire life and things in the
distance are starting to seem a little blurry so the eyes are starting to go gonna have glasses
pretty soon i would assume i'm gonna go get them checked out at some point but um it's uh it's not good because
i never understood what it was when people were having trouble seeing um from like the whole
you know people who've had glasses and described it um and now i think i i get it it's like you're
trying to focus but it came i was describing it as dawn the other day It's like you're trying to focus, but it came. I was describing it as a dawn the other day. She's like, yep, that's what it's all about. So
I'm going blind. So
kind of down horrendously, not great.
Being less
than happy
with that. So that's kind of where I'm at.
Just randomly or something you think is triggering
the decline in
your vision? I think it just is.
I think it's just age.
I'm, you know'm 42 years old now
and just continue to
I've never, again, I've never
had any issue with eyesight before and then
suddenly I've realized in the past, I'd say
my wife was
pointing out a sign because she
has, she's always
she's always been
but she hasn't had the glasses.
My daughter actually just got glasses, which she got my, my, my wife's eyesight.
My son is fine, but I've always had great eyesight.
And she was pointing out a sign and being like, oh, I can't read.
And I was like, you know what?
I can't really either, but it might just be the distance.
And then I've noticed recently, it's been more of an issue as I've been like, if I try to look at something across the room that I know used to be clear,
it's just a little as bit blurry. And like, I can't focus no matter how hard I try on it,
where it used to be like, something might be blurred and be like, okay, just my eyes just
naturally focus for it. So I am, uh, yeah,
I think I'm getting old.
I think I'm losing the eyesight.
And,
first thing to go,
it's,
it's, it's the eyesight that really is,
sending me into being an old man.
So not great on that.
you got to start working on that squint,
squinting,
important skillset as you start losing the eyesight.
Yeah,
actually it does help a little bit.
I'm,
I don't know. I'm not above LASIK. Yeah, actually, it does help a little bit. I'm, I don't know.
I'm not above LASIK.
I will get it if I need it,
but it's so minor that I'd probably start with glasses, but will eventually get LASIK,
because it's something I would definitely do.
It's funny, like Thomas said,
had LASIK 25 years ago.
25 years ago, I didn't even know they were doing LASIK.
It was the best thing I ever did.
I would say
LASIK
does terrify me when you actually
Google what LASIK is to see what it is.
But I did have a friend who had LASIK
who was like, yeah, it was awesome.
Great decision. She had glasses her whole life. She couldn't
see very well. I don't know. We'll see
how I go with it. I may
swing some glasses. I am
a nerd, so I should have glasses by
all accounts. It's funny. People would be like,
oh, you have glasses. You're a nerd. It's like, no, this means
I can't see. Now
I should. I probably look correct
with glasses given all that.
We'll see what happens.
Give us a like or retweet a comment on the room.
I won't see it because I'm blind.
But do that for us as we continue to have this choppy, choppy market
as we move towards hopefully some rate cuts.
I think 25 is perfect.
I think 50, I know you said, but some other people have said
they think 50 absolutely sends.
I do worry that 50 might signify an overcorrection.
I saw this from a couple of people who thought it was well.
If we get 50 pips, I think we absolutely teleport.
I don't think we get it.
I went ahead and put a...
I'm not a hedger.
If you've been around here for a while, you realize I'm much more...
I would double down before I hedge.
Most cases, I did put...
A few days ago, I opened up Polymarket on 50 bips
just because it just felt like the math was mathing.
I'm not expecting it.
I think it's 25 bips today and we move on.
But just the returns were great.
So I actually put one on 50 pips cut as well as one
this morning. I opened up one on no rate cuts just because it was like 10 returns 500 and
a hundred returns five grand. I'm not a hedger, but if we get no rate cuts, I think we probably
see a sell-off today and that would help my other bags. If we probably see a sell-off today and that would help my, my, uh, my other
bags. If we do get a sell-off, I'll cash out the, uh, the poly market bet. Yeah, no, it's, um,
I most likely not cashed any of those days. I do. I just think it's 0.25% and we move on.
Yeah. I think that's where we're headed as, as well. Um, also realizing on my myriad markets
yesterday, I was playing around with, um, around with some cash and putting some liquid to work.
And I was like, what the hell do I need USDC on Abstract for anymore?
Because by the way, my Abstract XP again about...
What's that?
Pudgy strategy.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm looking at it.
I had a few hundred dollars in USDC on there and I moved it off Abst abstract because I'm like, I'm getting 9,000 XP a week now.
I reconnected all my stuff. I still got 9,000 XP this week.
Jeez, so I've actually flipped you somehow.
Yeah, I'm out on abstract XP farming.
Like, there's some cool stuff on the chain. I'll use the stuff on the chain as far as the XP farming goes all the way out.
Just because, I mean, anything that I bought on there, generally speaking, memes, NFTs, all are down.
Not doing so well, for the most part.
I like Newt, because Newt comes in the mentions.
Newt's been nuked from where I bought it.
I think Abster's down.
So I bought a bunch of memes, and people said to buy memes.
Those went down.
I bought a bunch of NFTs, and people said to buy NFTs, and the said to buy memes. Those went down. I bought a bunch of NFTs and people said to buy
NFTs and the team was pushing those. Those went down
so I ended up selling those. And
I will say,
I need the USDC back because I want to use
Myriad Markets. So that was a mistake. I forgot that's
what I had that on there for in the first place.
But yeah, I'm just...
I'm...
You know, Gigaverse, I play and I
do what I'm supposed to do.
Yeah, I know that.
Yeah, Vic still does about it, but
yeah, it's one of those things where it's like
there's a group of people who are going to farm
and they're going to get hundreds of thousands of points and they're going to eat a TGE.
I am not one of those people. I don't know
the right things to do anymore.
Slowly watch that dissipate, so
you know, just
one where I'm pretty much down on that.
Good for you, Thomas.
Hit that gold.
You will be at the same level as me.
We will probably get the same TGE for sure
because I am not getting a platinum
unless they tier it out within the rewards
because I am about halfway through.
So I'm throwing in the towel on abstract XP, I think.
And I will use the daps I like to to use continuously as you should with the chain, but I think there's some people who have, uh, who have figured that out and, uh, got it done. And I'm not one of those. Um, also our stream, uh, sort of continues to be, uh, I think three to four columns down from people who almost all have less viewers watching than us. So it is what it is. There you go.
Abstract, I am.
I like Abstract as a company.
I like the people and all that.
I like some of the daps, but XP farming, outie.
It is kind of wild.
I mean, I just checked and yeah, there's the top left on the live streams
is 59 watching Abstract Gaming.
This guy's flexing is like pretty much locked in
at that top spot for some reason. I don't know if he just
leaves it on all the time and has some bots or whatever, but
it's always in the top spot.
Why would they not fix that?
That's what I don't understand.
Especially right now where you're getting real pressure for streaming
like, it's a miss.
I thought they had a good thing going here.
I am a fan of the portal. I think it's well done.
Debatably
the best portal in all of the Layer 2, Layer 3s. I think it's well done. Maybe the best, debatably the best portal
in all of the layer two,
layer threes right now
because it is just,
it's easy.
The user interface is simple.
They're promoting things
they want to promote.
They just stop promoting them
and stop shipping updates.
Like the fact that the top row
is 59, 11, 6,
and then 1,
or I'm sorry, 6, 3,
then 1, 1, one, one, one.
Then you get to us eight right now that should hit double digits soon.
But it's like, it doesn't make any sense.
And I felt like they had something there.
And unfortunately, oops, sorry.
And unfortunately quickly losing it to PumpFun,
who paid out $4 million to streamers yesterday, one day,
$4 million in creator fees paid out to PumpFun streamers.
It's just like they lost before they even started.
Maybe they can turn it around with TGE,
but no one's going to abstract us to stream.
We're kind of like pot committed at this point. It's easy now. We're live there. We click the button.
I'm grateful for it because it got us on video and there's a lot more we can do with this.
But as far as being financially rewarded for
streaming there, it doesn't seem like they're putting... I mean, the simplest
thing is just discoverability is broken and I don't
know... And the numbers suck, right? It's like Just like discoverability is broken and I don't know.
And the numbers suck, right?
It's like, I'm not saying PumpFun is pushing Twitch or YouTube right now in terms of concurrent viewers. But I mean, they basically have one stream with more than 10 viewers.
And those that are, it could be, they're not,
they're not,
yeah,
they're,
they're just,
they're not promoting to help with discoverability.
So I don't know,
man.
it's,
it's also as wild that you,
even though you've sold,
you've exit your positions,
like I've been 11 and 10 the last two weeks and I,
I still am not doing anything.
I hope my Pingu I'm connected in discord.
It's really a,
that I stream two or three days a week.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
I just don't...
Yeah, it's just...
I don't get it. I think that there's a few...
Like...
I'll be curious to see what happens to the builders here on Abstract
as they continue to go.
Again, it started...
Abstract started and came out of the gate hot.
There were some people who disagreed with me on
this in the war room and whatnot but like i i felt like abstract was very hot out the gates a lot of
people were really excited about it people were begging to get the streaming people were begging
to jump on to uh you know jump onto the platform people were looking to release tokens and and and
and apps on there i think proof of play has done a really good job. Like I said, I think Gigaverse has done a good job.
What have they done, though? What has Proof of Play done on Abstract?
Oh, besides
providing all the RNG support,
Proof of Play also has an arcade
that's cooking right now. Is it, though?
Tons of users. Oh, yeah.
Tons of users. I went and played it,
and I didn't... Maybe I just need to give it
another try, because when I played it, it was just like a stripped-down
version of Pirate Nation.
It is.
So it is.
It's meant to be a little bit shorter.
But over a million credits have been sold in the Proof of Play Arcade.
So, you know, like they've had the arcade up for a month.
And I'll have to check what credits are there.
But I know that they're doing some really fun and
creative stuff because they're they're creative people like you know they're doing this like cool
little i mean i'll show i could show you it's like this cool little meme uh thing although i don't
want to play an entire round right now because it'll take some time but what does a credit cost
so credit costs 0.0001 eth what does that cost so um i'm gonna do the math on this real quick to
figure out what it is but i know they've sold a million credits in about a month, a million credits. And that's, by the way, they're B2B
companies. This is not their main thing. So a million credits is, let's see.
Also, while you're pulling that up, looking at the 30-day mindshare, the pre-TGE mindshare chart, abstract down to 1.86%,
trailing companies like Billions and Plasma
and OG and Polymarket, OpenSea,
Base, Monad, Falcon, Met.
Some of these I've never even heard of
have now flipped abstract in terms of mindshare.
And to your point, they were really hot early on.
It's about 500,,000 or so.
So, I mean, it's not like a cooking thing,
but their main offering is they offer,
whether it's Death Fun, Gacha Games,
the Wheel of Fate and Ape Chain.
They sell products, RNGs.
They're helping people bring...
Oh, I get that.
But that product, their core business is not abstract exclusive, obviously,
because they're on a chain and many others. I'm just, when I think about the chain itself,
I mean, I guess basically your, your, your, your read would be the proof of play arcade is sticky.
They did million credits their first month, not just because of an abstract farm, but people are actually using it and enjoying the games in the arcade.
And therefore, they've got at least one game that people are going to continue to play post-TGE.
Yeah, that's my thing.
That's on there.
But also, they've moved chains before.
Well, this is kind of my point.
is like right now the arcade is there pre-TGE.
Right now, the arcade is there pre-TGE.
Proof of play is obviously multi-chain
as they're building across all chains.
What keeps them on abstract, right?
Unless there's a deeper relationship,
some agreements that we just don't know about.
You need liquidity, you need users.
And I think the other thing that kind of got lost in yesterday's shuffle or announcement of base token coming
is that's going to suck some air out of a lot of these other chains, I think.
Like, the farmers who've been farming, like, just to farm,
I would imagine a lot of them take their balls and go to base.
Some have been doing that for a while to pre-farm the pre-TGE announcement.
But I just, again, I could see liquidity.
Maybe not before TGE, but post-TGE.
What is going to keep people using the chain?
I thought they were making plays with streaming i just i i really
as some people are streaming there i don't why would we like because it's easy we'll click the
button but if we had to make a choice and someone said you can you have to scream here or here
there's almost zero world we would stream exclusively on abstract
unless unless tg is just massive and then post tg they have some war
chess for for streamers and again i understand they needed to create the excitement but feeling
a little um i don't know feeling a little over promise under delivered in terms of streamer
rewards on abstract yeah i i personally just don't uh i don't i don't get it um i'm not i'm not sure i
i don't think i got i didn't get uh i didn't get open c credit for making a swap just now
um but yeah i um i was trying to swap out some of my eth usdc oh because i didn't do it that's why
the reason i didn't get credit is because I didn't make the swap
because I think ETH might go up today
on a rate cut.
So I was going to swap some ETH to USDC
and I didn't.
So actually,
I'm going to, yeah,
like FUD,
I didn't get credit for the swap.
I didn't do.
Yeah, man,
I don't know what's going to happen
with Abstract as I look at it
because it's like,
you look at,
like they're sort of at this crossroads.
Like you said, the streaming thing was a big thing.
They pushed out the gate. PumpFun put that out.
PumpFun is just absolutely cooking
right now. The PumpToken,
PumpStreamers, everybody's running over there,
getting on that meta.
We're going to, but I'm so
confused because people are telling me
we have to throw
basically 8-10k at our own token before we launch it, which, you know, I don't know that we're going to make that back immediately, right? Like, I don't know how the fee structure is going to work, but that makes me a little worried. So I, you know, like, when I hear that, you know, I'll make sure it bonds and all these other things. Like, I just, I don't know, like, I'm still, I'm not uncomfortable with that meta, meta but i don't understand it nor do i know what the correct move is there for us and 40 to 50 soul at something is
a lot of money uh to to kick off to basically pay like eight to ten grand for distribution and
streaming but that said like other people are doing it right it's like it feels like you don't
have to do that you can just launch a token you don't have to buy be clear, you don't have to do that.
You can just launch a token.
You don't have to buy your own token.
You don't have to control the supply.
It's just if you want to really do it properly,
that's recommended primarily
so bots and snipers and just traders
don't buy the new token or let's say you bond,
the newly bonded token,
and then immediately dump on your actual
listeners and following as
soon as you get any sort of pump.
You definitely don't have
to drop 50 so you can just
go launch the token. It's just
in doing so,
it's probably
got a short life.
These all, most likely, 99.9%
of them all are going to have a short life.
Most are going to go to zero. I do think there's a real opportunity for actual streamers, you know,
in some cases, like what seems to be hitting now is like the Johnny Knoxville type stuff,
like the slapstick humor and doing pranks in public. And, and I, but I just think I'm not,
I'd actually a pretty, had a really exciting conversation
yesterday.
I'm not going to, I can't share it yet.
Um, but probably something I'll participate on in and it's like a real actually baked
out strategy for not just a stream, but whole full blown content and looking at pump to
be the main distribution channel for that content.
It's exciting.
Like, they are attracting, like, we may, I don't,
it's so early, I don't think we've seen the final stage.
I have a conversation at 10 a.m. today
that I bet it's the same conversation,
but it's going to be funny.
Keep going.
Maybe.
Could be another one.
I just think there's a lot of people that are looking at this
and talking about this right now because it makes sense.
And they have the eyeballs, they have attention. there's a lot of people that are looking at this and talking about this right now because it makes sense. And they have the eyeballs.
They have attention.
There's a lot going on there.
And I don't say this,
like this isn't a shot.
It's just abstract streaming
doesn't have any of that motion right now.
Like, I haven't talked to a single person
who's building a content strategy,
talking about launching new properties
and doing so, not launching on YouTube,
not launching on Twiq,
and then also streaming on PumpFun,
going to PumpFun as the launch.
And in this case, yes,
they would be buying significant amount
of the token at launch to help control the supply,
create creator funds, et cetera, et cetera.
And I probably already said too much,
but yeah, I'd be curious at 1030
if it's the same conversation
or if there's multiple, because I do believe
there's going to be multiples for sure.
They're probably, well, I know of at least one for a fact.
And I think, well, two, because we've had a conversation.
We're not just going to do it willy-nilly.
Yeah, I just, I think that,
and Bonfron has a good point here too.
It's like, you got to move quick in this space.
Like abstract, it's people are, I think people are exhausted.
I'm not speaking for you.
I know some people are enjoying the open sea farming.
I'm exhausted by it.
I don't want to do it anymore.
Like it's one thing to have a protocol live for years.
And then you get to a point, you have a short sprint and you you tge
or you just go to tge and you reward your loyal users i think it's another thing to draw these
things out for both of them are going to be pushing a year and people get exhausted it's
especially when it's vague and lacks transparency or you don't really know different for both parties
but i just right now pumps had their tge no airdrop yet but they've had their TGE like they
came later they already did TGE uh the tokens in the wild and you know they've got a war chest of
tokens and they continue to add to that by buying them back so it just I don't know I think there is
real downside to I understand why protocols like chains,
like abstract and marketplaces like open sea.
I understand why I fully get it,
why they want to drag out their,
their farms.
It's just,
I do think there's negative consequences and I'm not sure if those are fully
taken into consideration by all these teams.
It's just like people get bored,
people get exhausted and it's,
it's not in a vacuum.
There's other places to go. There's other things to do. Beach, I got a tweet this morning talking
about it's like, in this space, it's not just your capital and where you're investing your
capital or where you're parking your liquidity. It's also your time and attention. And
it's nearly impossible to take it all in, to participate in everything here. So you have to
make choices and people just get bored.
They get, they get bored.
Isn't even the right word.
I think exhausted is better put.
And, um, it's wild here where he says, you know, um,
we don't have the attention span for it.
It gives others in this case,
pump to get the second mover advantage or first move around to advantage.
It's like,
I mean, like, no, I was going to say like on that advantage. It's like, I mean,
like,
I was going to say like on that though,
it's like,
I mean,
different circumstances,
but,
but,
but on abstract specifically,
like we talk about traditional marketing,
not being in web three.
This is an example where,
again,
I will tell you as a traditional marketer,
there's generally speaking,
no such thing as a year-long campaign.
There are year-long...
By the way, remember when Andrew said that
long-term marketing strategies don't work?
This is why you need long-term marketing
strategy. Because if you have a year
to do things out, you want to plan
campaigns and individual sprints within
those campaigns that have rewards and other
things based on that. And by the way,
I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. This is like what i did for a living for like 20 15 20 years which is
you need to have individual sprints within long campaigns because like von von von is exactly
right year-long campaigns are hard year-long campaigns are hard think about the last time
you had a year-long campaign about any brand at all now I've done year-long strategies that have-
Multiple campaigns, monthly campaigns, right?
How often we talk about monthly retail strategies?
You know, if you don't have a grocery store
doesn't have a year-long campaign,
they go in sprints.
They have one month at a time.
You know why?
Because if you're having a sale that lasts a year,
no one's buying because there's no end date.
It could be the same exact sale every single month,
the same BOGO offer.
They're just calling it something different because this month is September. So it was Labor
Day. Next month, it's going to be Thanksgiving. Then it's going to be Thanksgiving. Same exact
offer, but it's many sprints within a longer strategy. And yeah, like you just further,
how many times have we heard this? I'm miles away from platinum. What's the point?
So far away from it. What's the point? So far away from it.
What's the point?
When you have something that is drug out so long, a lot of your real users, the users you want, they're going to get to gold.
And then you have like, oh, I need another 10 years to get to platinum at the rate I've been going, like a lot of people, I've just given up because you've got such a long campaign.
I would guess the majority of people who are actively farming it and using it and potentially like real users are in the gold tier already.
And yet platinum seems almost impossible to us unless we're going to move a ton of more money over or spend a lot more time and really farm the thing.
It's like, all right, we're there.
I'm done.
I'm just going to wait now until they actually do TG and then I'll,
then I'll reevaluate. It just,
it seems like such an obvious miss in terms of these lengthy campaigns with
no, with no mark actual marketing strategy. Just, just, uh,
we're, we can drag this thing out because we haven't dropped the token yet.
Like, yeah, you can,
but you're probably alienating some of those people
who they may pretend to stay around
because they're going to want to claim their tokens when they drop.
But it's so hard to re-engage those people
and just dropping a token most likely isn't going to do it.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons why,
and again, I'm not going to get into the OpenSea thing this morning.
One of the reasons why and like again i'm not gonna like get into the open see thing this morning like one of the reasons why they probably went from launched and people use a platform to rewards again people can argue they drag that out a little longer than normal
to to chess to the next thing because you need to have an actual change in campaign again not
litigating that specific campaign but you know looking at it and how marketing works in general generally speaking i am if i am in a position in a in the progressive insurance marketing department
and the directive from the ceo is that we need to get more of what we called robinson so there were
you know uh sam's and diane's those are people who are high risk and younger there were you know
i believe the rights which were then the uh sort of there was the Sams, which were the really young and risky people.
Diane's a little bit more.
Maybe they rented Wrights, which was sort of a family.
And then Robinsons, which were people who bundled a bunch of stuff.
So basically, the Grail person is the Robinson because they set their insurance, they have a bunch of products, and they don't think about it.
So it makes sense.
You want the best, highest quality customer.
So we realized we did Sams and Diane's really well, and we didn't want to leave them behind, but we needed more Robinsons.
So the CEO says, we need more Robinsons.
Okay, got it.
So then what do we do?
We go down and we say, how can we move towards that overarching shift, and what is our marketing department theme for this year?
We're going to do, you know, we're going to focus on this area, this area, this area, and this area.
We're going to do programmatic.
We're going to do advertising here.
We're going to do PR here, and these are going to be original.
Great, so now we've got that. Now what are we going to do on a monthly basis? And
we work with all of our clients to plan out and do that. Oh, special lines as boats. That seems
like a Robinson potential opportunity. How do we do that to swing that into getting more people to
have their homeowners, their insurance, and all everything bundled under there? So basically what
we do is we take the overarching over from the CEO, our marketing department general spend strategy,
and then we say every month we're going to have these campaigns.
I kid you not, when I was at Nestle,
I was working with an agency on Thanksgiving campaigns in like May
or before or April or March because we would be planning out
two, three, four, five, six months in a bit.
Now, again, I know the tweet that was out there,
which I wholeheartedly disagree.
It's like, oh, mom turned marketing strategies are stupid,
which is like absolutely not true.
This is why they're not.
What you're seeing right now
with the sort of apathy with a lot of people with abstract
is they had a really good launch.
They had a really exciting launch.
They had really good products out of the gate.
And now we're at this point,
and it's not just marketing, it's product,
et cetera.
But like we went from having a flash badge.
Sometimes it feels like every week,
I think it was too.
We haven't had one in three months.
They're like,
well,
we didn't like the flash badges.
Well,
yeah,
pull it off the site.
It just looks like you've almost abandoned.
it's like,
it's a real head scratch.
I'm not,
I'm not taking shots.
It just,
it is a head scratcher for me because they came out
so hard out of the gates and then just
seemingly taking the foot off the gas.
Well, and I'll give you an example of how this
doesn't happen in traditional marketing campaigns.
Again, I'm not trying to knock them or critique
or whatever. It is what it is. But like, part
of the problem is like, if
you had a campaign like that at Progressive or Nestle,
you would have five ideas
surrounding the campaign and you would go with the one that works and you would say, okay, cool, we're doing this.
And then when you got feedback, hey, here's why we don't like it, you'd already have something ready to adjust because you would have planned for it, and you'd have it ready to go.
And within a month, you'd say it's already back, right?
Or you'd have a different campaign.
You'd have five ideas, maybe ones that hit the floor.
But the bottom line is – and it's not knocking abstract.
This is my critique on the space in general and why i think andrew's tweet was so unbelievably misguided which is it's
normal for everywhere outside of crypto this is how people operate we did it in retail we had our
work with our agency we give them our here's our calendar of events here's our calendar of campaigns
for the entire next year and then yeah things change and so the month before the quarter we
dial it in we check for confirmation and then the month before the quarter, we dial it in. We check for confirmation.
And then a month before the actual campaign went live, we'd get their actual artwork, their designs, their actual campaign.
We get that for approval and sign off.
Yeah, you at least lay out the outline.
You know what you're doing.
You have a strategy months, if not a year in advance.
And it's just – I know crypto fast i know it's it moves at
a different pace you can you can you can tweak you can make adjustments but just to be flying
in the dark and and reacting to every change in the marketplace without having a thought-out
strategy is it seems short-sighted well and ian said he's like i felt like the i like the flash
badges i feel like i earned something verse x just going number, you know, just number goes up until.
Exactly.
And like, yes, it's like you pivot, you have plans, you get ready.
And I just think like, to your point, like this is how it works outside of it.
And like, again, in that same tweet, this is where it's like misguided.
It's like, and the thought on the space is Andrew's like, you want a long-term marketing strategy, hire people who tweet a lot.
Then you don't have to go after, you know, encourage them to work more.
And it's like, no, if you want a long-term marketing strategy,
you look at the,
it's one of the reasons, by the way,
now at this point,
it's like I was really bullish on Doodles at the time
because the first thing they did
when I initially did the contracting work with them
is I talked to Austin
and they showed me a year-long roadmap
with plans and activations.
And it's why for that period of time
when Julian was there,
and again, I'm not saying whether Doodles is better or worse.
I know people have strong opinions on that.
I'm not trying to get into that.
But one of the reasons I felt good about it is that every single campaign, Rubik's Cube, Chase item, items around it, Rubik's Cube tweets about it.
You know, every campaign that they did like that where they would have these bigger Crocs, Crocs tweets about it.
They tweet about it. G-Shock, like event, like remember G-Shock, it was like launch event,
flew out people, had people out the door waiting to get that G-Shock, had items ready to go,
a physical and digital head. Like this is how most people plan campaigns. And you can say what you
want. Oh, doodles, extractive, didn't like it, whatever. But we've been saying it for two years.
Like you said, you know, we talked about it and you and I talked about it three years ago.
Retail holidays are the easiest thing to just pop on and have campaigns ready
because then you could have something ready to go like you know it a fourth of july campaign
around you know abstract i know like hey it may be a little bit of a fuck you to our british
friends because it's celebrating kicking them out of our out of our country but like you know a
fourth of july campaign a labor day campaign, a Thanksgiving campaign that's related around giving, a, you know, starting summer campaign, a winter campaign, a holiday campaign.
Like, all of these things are things that you can build out long in advance based on what you know is coming, what you're doing.
And yes, you adjust.
But you know what, Cap?
The other thing you know the beautiful part about that is, is when you get, like, let's say that suddenly Proof of Play Arcades, as we're going to move over to abstract you haven't had it great you already have a campaign planned for july august september and
you slide them into it and figure out a way to make it work with them not like oh well we're
launching this thing let's tweet about it and now it feels like you're constantly people talk about
like how difficult it can be to you know sort of keep up with the pace of the space but like
you want to plan and you want to be able to break it and so it's not just an abstract thing i know we're using
abstract as an example this morning but a lot of the companies that lose motion or don't do well
at it it's like they basically go in and they say okay we have a launch launch plan's great you have
a couple months things it's like shit now what we got to come up with some stuff and it's like
it's not just marketing it's like the entirety of having a campaign. And like I've said it before in this space saying you are not bullish enough on insert thing here is not a marketing campaign.
It's just, it only works for so long.
Like we'll see how Spencer operates.
I'll be curious, but like, I feel like Spencer has had a cadence since he started.
Now, again, it's early days, but it feels like Spencer bought Moonbirds and had a cadence of things that
he was trying to do with it.
It'll be interesting to see how that continues,
but even last, that
sort of presentation he
did, he announced the
physical, he didn't say what it was, he said something else
was coming. He teased a couple of things, but
he has some things. He's clearly got a long
process. Rectrix.
Rectrix has partnerships planned out.
Every time there's a partnership announcement,
there's teasers, there's announcements,
there's a drop, there's rewards.
They've been doing a really good job.
Where Rekt, I feel like, has been hitting partner after partner,
and they have something planned for each and every one.
So I just, I don't know,
I'm getting a lot of people who are saying great take.
The truth is, this is just what I did for 15 years of my career,
and so i understand
how it works at a large level but like i i found a lot of people in web 3 in general feel allergic
to the idea of saying like well traditional marketing is boring like people don't want to
do things like sms and email it's like that is the lowest hanging fruit the and you know who does do
it and is actually crushing it v VFriends. Again, continually.
VFriends always has a campaign.
They do holiday campaigns.
They do character-specific campaigns.
They drop new boxes.
They always keep it interesting.
And by the way, when they're dropping things like Friends caps,
guess who I found out?
SMS and email.
And I think a lot of people would as well.
So, yeah.
So, I don't know.
Since we're talking abstract, I do need to give a quick shout out to Beepic.
He posted Pudgy's strategy this morning in the war room at 400k.
Clean 5x from there.
I didn't get it in 400k, but I kid you not.
I said I did a swap before the show.
It's already 2x since then.
So someone did like a $65,000 buy.
Absolutely cooking.
We may hit on it a little bit later, but if you missed it,
it's essentially the punk strategy being replicated for uh pudgies i know someone's talking about apes but i think i think pudgy beat him to the punch here whoever's doing this one and um yeah it is uh it's running this
morning so um that that in itself i don't think token is gonna gonna you know turn the tide or get people streaming on abstract or using it.
I do think it is somewhat critical for – it's a critical time.
Yes, pre-TGE can drum up a lot of excitement and momentum.
You've got to be on.
I'm not saying I don't expect teams to not make mistakes,
but it's just like when something starts fading,
you got to feel that sentiment.
You got to have a pulse on the sentiment. And the reality is we may have more pre-TGE farms right now
than any period at any time before in crypto.
And people have to make decisions with their
capital, with their time. There is a lot of opportunities. I saw a tweet this morning.
I'll see if I can go find it. Like dozens of real viable farms, real chains, real protocols that
some in many cases already have found product market fit, or they have real users, they have real volume.
It's just, it used to be not that long ago,
if you had a TGE coming up,
you were almost assured of keeping attention and number would go up until right when you hit the token announcement.
And I think those days,
it's like having a pre-TGE farm
doesn't necessarily guarantee
even the eyeballs and attention
during the pre-TGE,
let alone post-token event.
Like it's just,
it's a very competitive time in the space
and a lot of major protocols and platforms,
base being one of them
that just talked about a token is,
I think it can really suck the air out of some of these teams. And I don't think it's like being in pre-TG is definitely not a time to rest and become complacent.
which not even on purpose, right?
Like some of them are just like,
like we talk about the open seas,
the abstracts of the world,
but like maybe project X,
I'm going relatively hard there because I,
a lot of smart people I know who have cooked on a lot of airdrops are
telling me that they see it as a major opportunity as it continues to
expand.
So I'm going pretty hard at project X.
I'm probably, man,
I might even just,
I've been L P on meteor and just kind of collecting a little bit there.
I may pull my meteor funds and put some of it elsewhere,
only because I just don't know that I need to be sitting in.
In fact, I may pull it now or now-ish,
just because it could be money that's useful elsewhere.
But I mean, I talked about it.
Again, I'll pin one to the top.
I know a couple people have looked at it that I'm doing.
And you actually have to use a Rabiwild,
good example of MetaMask and issues they're having,
but like, you know, up into the top,
this Turtle Katana one that I'm doing.
It's, I mean, like, I, you know,
I'm sitting there just depositing USDC and Weeth
through the Turtle protocol.
I'm like top 200 by doing it and it goes into a katana
yordler revolt so now i'm running towards the katana airdrop the turtle airdrop and if i talk
about both i'm running towards a a kaido camping and it's like i can spend money and time there i
can spend you know there are so many places you know polygon i've talked about where i'm just
staking in polygon there's just a word polygon the way, on their site flat out says,
here's your airdrop section where you can check where you're qualified for and you can put an email in when you get a,
because I own Polygon that I'm staking.
You can literally put your email into the Polygon site
and they will email you around airdrop opportunities.
That's on their site, on their stake site.
There's so many things that exist out there right now.
You want to maintain attention. And again, this is where we've, you know, we've talked about like
where the creativity is. I think people take for granted. They're like, well, X is where,
you know, like we see a lot of mindshare leads and people being hired because they're like,
Hey, X is where the attention is. It's true. But if you want people to actually be engaged
in your product, people aren't stupid. They need things that are interesting to do on there. And I think for a lot of these companies, a lot of these protocols,
I just, I don't know. It's their, like Project X is a liquidity pool. What are they selling?
Points, farming, and your liquidity that you're already getting from there in the fees. Like
Meteora, same sort of deal. But I mean mean some of these like companies it's like you want
to i mentioned the turtle one turtle provides liquidity for other sort of things like for
example katana you deposit your turtle their liquidity provider it's like they can add new
protocols new interest there it's just i i continue to be almost surprised that you know people don't
take the approach that a lot of the companies do. And it's one of the reasons, by the way,
I think the ape chain team has been cooking. I do.
I think ape chain team has been cooking. I have,
we've been critical at times of certain things on here.
We've been dead honest about it. And my dead honest opinion,
I put it out yesterday. I feel good about where the team is.
They have a fest coming up, which is exciting.
They just finished wheel of Fate, which is exciting.
Storytelling.
You had Drew, a great community member, win an Ape.
You had a bunch of people enter the community
through new NFTs and assets.
You had people winning things.
There were people who didn't like the mechanics,
but it worked.
It got people going.
Then they immediately announced Project Raid right after.
They're going on that.
Project Raid is just the first step of that,
as Simple Farmer has told us.
He's told us to be ready for more, right?
We know that you can work on that leaderboard, right? the first step of that as simple farmer has told us he's told us to be ready for more right we know
that you can uh you can work on that leaderboard right they got feedback from the community codas
weren't going to be included they had a codas do it great another thing that includes more people
in the community then they have eight fest coming up i'm hoping they have stuff planned post eight
best i believe they do and so it's like that team they're planning campaigns they're cooking the
mindshare shows the the motion is showing and i just think like it's like that team, they're planning campaigns, they're cooking, the mindshare shows, the motion is showing.
And I just think like, it's something that I think we, we should be more conscious of, in my opinion.
So I just, I don't know, it's something in this space that I think a lot of people say like, yes, a Kaido campaign is a campaign.
You can pay for that thing. It's a great thing that can do you pretty well.
But like, there's so much more you need to be doing.
So I'll end rant. It's just, you know,
the abstract thing brings it up where it's like you had all the motion,
but, and it felt like they had to like,
maybe like three months of real good planning out the gate.
If your TGE isn't for a year,
you need to have long-term marketing strategies.
Yes.
And it's not just the progressives and the retailers of the world and non
crypto companies that have long-term
marketing strategies and don't drag out pre-TGs. You don't have to go any further than look at the
top two darlings of this cycle. Look at Hyperliquid. Look at Pump. Arguably the best two performing
tokens. Arguably the best two, I mean, as far as revenue generation goes, they're winning.
They have attention. They have motion. They've won. What did they do? In both cases,
They have motion. They've won. What did they do? In both cases, they built a product.
They spent a couple of years building a product. They, it was a good, they were good products.
They found product market fit. And then they had a TGE. Neither made people jump through hoops.
They didn't have a long drawn out pre-TGE. Hyperliquid just built, they attracted users.
And then they did their airdrop and they dropped $18 billion to their users. What happened? Well, you got a lot of users that made a lot of money. You got others
that saw, wow, I missed that one. And it started the flywheel versus not one person got frustrated
over farming hyperliquid because it wasn't a farm. It was just use the protocol, use the platform.
You've seen it happen. You have two darlings this cycle.
Neither of them had long drawn out farms that forced you to jump through hoops. They just
asked you to use their platform and they rewarded their early users. Wow. That's, that's a wild
concept. You know, it it's in, they're moving fast. You have to move fast in this space. You
just, you can't draw stuff, drag stuff out like this. It's just, it's going to exhaust people,
if not worse. And a lot of
those people that you exhaust or frustrate or alienate, whatever, whatever, like a lot of them
aren't going to come back. They're just going to move on because there's going to be another
exciting new protocol or another farm that's, that's, you know, has a second mover advantage
and they're, they're filling the gaps that you miss. I just, it is not a, not a time to, uh,
to take the foot off the gas in my opinion and
again just look at look at pump fun and look at like a hyper liquid you've got two playbooks of
what worked really well and it's it's not the long year-long farms yeah i um i see i i again i i think
like the other thing is like the reason why i separate the products is like, Abstract is a chain, so you need...
And because Abstract is not doing the polygon and the flow thing,
they're basically selling the chain as the community
more so than the actual...
As opposed to selling the dApps themselves on the chain,
which they do talk about dApps in the chain,
but we talked about that strategy yesterday. If you're selling the dApps themselves on the chain, which they do talk about dApps in the chain, but like, you know, we talked about that strategy yesterday.
If you're selling the chain as a community,
like there are other chains with other dApps
and like dApps can move.
And so it's like, there is like that thought
where it's like the reason why I separate the products.
And again, I'm not getting into like OpenSea,
where's other things?
OpenSea still has a pull position
where Magic Eden isn't to me as good of a user product.
It just isn't a good user-friendly product.
Could somebody come and disrupt? Sure, but
even if you don't use it for swaps and other things,
people are probably going to trade NFTs there.
Still. It's just something people probably do.
Maybe they'll use Blur or whatever, depending on how you
go about it.
If I'm...
I actually think they
gave us a very clear vision
into the future, and it not marketplaces aren't don't
matter it's commodity they're everyone's going to use aggregators openc's doing it openc's doing it
for their own foundation they're using aggregators they're buying off blur for their own flagship
collection because it's just it's how the space works like yeah which magic in does as well i
think where they like aggregate yeah it's like minify it's why i'm a fan Minify. That's why I started using Minify because it was an aggregator.
You always got the best price.
Like why would you go buy from one singular marketplace where they get a
portion of the listings?
You may be paid more in fees,
like go shop at aggregator or use an aggregator that pulls from all.
It's part of the beauty of blockchain tech is you don't have to force
yourself into just one closed,
you know, ecosystem with a, because of the front end user.
Now they all have it, but it's like an NFT marketplace I do believe is a commodity.
You're going to use an aggregator because that's what's going to get you the lowest price and find all the supply.
That versus a chain where if you don't have a killer dap and you're promoting the chain as a community and you have people saying, well, what am I using a chain for?
Well, we have this rewards program.
Okay, well, there's about 10 people I see on my timeline who are eating and basically posting P&Ls, quote unquote, of like 300K points every week.
And I'm getting 9K and going down and don't understand it.
I think.
You know what?
That's also, that doesn't have been talked about enough like that probably is more of a
discouragement than i think they realize is i i shared earlier like there there's so many of us
are like just basically stuck in gold with no real viable path unless we want to double triple
quadruple down to get the platinum
and at the same time you're seeing the six-figure xp weekly claims it's like well
it's it's it's a really large gap between like the top one percent and everyone else on that
or top point one percent i don't even know platinum is, but it seems like a massive chasm. And this is awesome to those of you doing it.
I see TMA, who I think TMA gets 50, 60, 70, 80,000.
I got 80,000 XP last week.
It's awesome.
I'm pumped for TMA to eat at TGE.
It's just like,
outside of me making a significant change
and moving a large chunk of liquidity over there
and spending a lot more time on abstract,
to me, it doesn't seem possible to go from,
we'll say 10,000 XP a week to 80,000 XP a week.
And even if I did it, Steve,
let's say I make the change, I do it.
Okay, now I'm sweet.
I'm getting 80,000 XP a week.
Doesn't matter. Like if i do make that
change to go like to 8 or 10x my xp i'm still seven eight hundred plus thousand away from
the million i would need to get to platinum so it's like even if i get to 80 000
i don't know if the if this pre-tg goes another 10 weeks so i
even have a chance to get to platinum and that again that's a making huge changes and still
unrealistic to get that next level um we we probably beat it in the ground at this point
but yeah that's just you know we we share our authentic genuine feelings and uh you know i'm
not i'm not stopping abstract.
I'm going to keep streaming there,
but I made the decision a while ago.
I'm not doubling down.
And it's thinking post-TGE, what sticks?
What's still on abstract?
Yeah, and that's what I worry about
is people say abstract, blast.
I know they're not trying to be that.
And who knows?
There could be a lot of things.
But yeah, it's like, to your point, it's like like when frank d gods was posting pnls
of a gazillion dollars and everybody else is like i'm not in on this and people feel bad about it
and they feel bad about the meme coin stuff it's like i was like initially like getting excited
about my abstract xp and i saw everybody posting around the same more or less a little bit to be
like when i was getting like 20 000 xp i'd
see people posting 25 i'd see people some people posing 50 i'd be congrats or 100 oh my god how'd
you do that maybe some people post 10 ask me what i did now it's like i get nine and then there's
300 000 from somebody on the timeline i'm like well that's it for me like it's just it's just
such a discouraging thing so i think like yeah like you said we beat into the ground but it's
like and it's not abstract specific,
even though we're using it as an example,
although it is abstract towards some of the things we said.
But, like, this is why the long-term strategies do matter.
And having, like, monthly plans and things,
like we talked about, like, I was like,
oh, abstract August.
This is going to be cool.
Like, awesome.
And then we got, like, one launch.
Didn't even get get that i don't
know i don't know what came in august um and also the other thing is it just goes to show how
hard it is to build in the space like you can't just do one thing well
it's you gotta you gotta be nailed all you gotta hit getting hit on all this stuff. They nailed the portal.
The badges were working.
The streaming was a great...
Obviously, streaming certainly makes sense.
I mean, there's certainly an appetite for it in this space.
Will it attract other streamers from the outside of crypto?
I don't know yet.
But when you see what PumpFun is doing with it now,
they were on the right path there. I'm not going to say they fumbled or blew a 3-1 lead because pump fun was a different animal
like but just play that out could it could it have played out differently steve if they
instead of dragging out tge for a year or whatever it's seemingly going to become
imagine they launched a few weeks later they they pulled the hyperliquid
and they they go to tge and now all of a sudden they've got a uh creator war chest of hundreds of
millions of dollars that they can reward these streamers and give them creator fees and maybe
they beat pump fund to this like the pump fund chart is insane like if you look at the oh i know
it it's it's it's been I mean, it, it goes,
I'm,
I'm using,
I got the unit pump with hype going on project X and it like,
it would regularly go to a hundred percent hype.
In fact,
it's on its way there again,
which by the way,
that is my open C farming strategies.
I'm just token swapping,
to even those out and giving my fees that I make a pump on right back to
open C to kind of move that up.
But yeah, man, I get it.
It's like, it's a very real issue.
But to your point,
it doesn't have to be TGE though
if you're not ready for it.
It's like, you have a bunch of games on Abstract.
Launch the Abstract games
and have teams compete for a pot of USDC
that you have in a marketing budget on a monthly basis
and promote the shit out of it and stream it and have people talk trash and create team logos.
It's one example of something you could do that would get communities involved.
Bring in other communities.
Have the Bored Apes crew, the Good Vibes crew do what we did in that initial fantasy draft that we had done on DGEN where you have crews in different groups there.
And you have them compete
in the abstract games and the winner gets something like proof of plays doing it who plays arcade has
a battle of the meme coins you could do a battle of the meme coins not just on proof of play arcade
but you have people and you stream and you like there you have a streaming platform you have a
bunch of games like it's ripe for campaigns it's just i know the team is we'll say oh other stuff
to concentrate on yada yada yada community activations but it's like if you took like 10 games on abstract and had an abstract
games games like tournament and did it once a month and you announce for the next three months
we're going to do this so there's a three-month campaign and we're going to have 100k or 120k
usdc in the pool so that means you know top place gets this second place gets this enter your
teams these will be your team like you could do something like that and find a way to make it
work perfect example of a campaign that you would need that you could do instead of so so it's just
i don't know it's again it's just a rip but it doesn't have to be your tge but you can have
seven to ten ideas leading up into your tge where you can be like let's pull the trigger
on this one let's pull the trigger on this one let's do this one let's do this one and i think
that's what we're missing here so anyway that's again long rant but it's like abstracts a great
example because they have so much motion or had so much motion they continue to be something that's
super popular where you can engage a lot of people who would understand how to use your product and
want to use your product and i think that's the, that's the missing piece here.
So, and that's my thought on that.
Eight hours ago.
It's running for sure. As I share that though,
I do want to share the other side of this because I don't
want anyone to get hurt. It's also not easy to buy. I had to change slippage to 15%. The second
time I went to go do another swap, I said I was getting about half of what I was swapping out of.
It's far from perfect. So please proceed with caution. And here's a good advice from Chris.
Before you FOMO buy,
no, a group of people control supply.
A bunch of outside KOLs are shilling.
The punk one is down,
which was launched on a place with liquidity.
Abstract has no liquidity,
so just be careful.
Dope to see something run, though.
We need more.
So this is the punk strategy.
You see it ran up.
It's pulled back significantly.
Right now, the pudgy strategy is running up.
It may have more room to run.
Just know that it could very well pull back significantly like the others.
I'm not really bullish on this idea of it's going to buy NFTs,
and then when they sell the NFT for a 20% gain, they're going to buy nfts and then when they sell the nft for a 20 gain they're going to buy back
and burn their token i i don't think the thing i think it's a house of cards i think it folds
i think they all eventually fold we probably see like the meta probably runs for a little bit more
as my is why i made the swap this morning so just be extra careful out there don't as with
everything don't put any money in many you can't afford to lose know that it it likely will go to zero even though it's theoretically you know it's
it's yeah it's got an asset in that it holds assets that it's just it's not you're not by
budget by buying pudgy strategy you're not owning a percent of that pudgy like it's just pretty
pretty uh pretty clear on that so just just go proceed with caution on on any and all those last thought though on on pump fun i showed it a
second ago they this the streamer meta there it's went from they had six consecutive days of two
million dollars in buybacks uh and now two consecutive days of three million dollars in
buybacks because more token creators equal more revenues, equal more buybacks.
I had the chart pulled up there a second ago.
The token creators are, it's, you know, double, triple.
I think I saw it was the biggest day they've had in months
in terms of number of creators, number of tokens that actually made,
that actually graduated.
And yeah, it's just, it's just wild. You think about, you know, how
important timing is in this space that there's some, there's some parallel timeline where
abstract beat pump fund to that. And they have all this motion. And I know it's not a perfect
comparison, but my point being is you can have the right idea.
Execution and timing of said execution matters tremendously.
A ton.
I mean, it matters so much.
And so I think, again, it's not trying to beat up on any individual protocol or anything like that.
It's just something we've noticed.
And by the way, last thing I'll say on that one is one of the problems is when you have a system like this, I was doing pretty well on this thing.
And then every single week when I see my XP, I'm reminded of it.
So that also isn't super helpful.
In fact, I forgot about XP yesterday because I'd given up on it more or less.
And then I logged into Abstract and was like, hey, congrats, here's your XP.
logged into abstract.
It was like,
Hey,
congrats.
Here's your XP.
I'm like, oh, that doesn't feel good with what I'm seeing on the timeline.
that doesn't feel good with what I'm seeing on the timeline.
that said cap,
I know we have a special guest coming on here in a little bit.
I was going to do more,
you know,
and then maybe we could dovetail into daily market updates.
Cause I know we're waiting for our guests to jump into a stream.
yeah,
I popped in there a second ago.
Must have,
just dropped back out.
But yeah,
I think,
I do want to do a daily market update before our guest today.
We'll do a special intro.
Should I do more you know now?
Or do you want to wait and save that one?
And when they pop back in, we can do a daily market update.
You tell me.
Probably do a daily market update.
Yeah, let's do it.
All right.
You want to do the old daily market update?
You got it. it it's more update time let's set the play power by awaken the smart tax way from quick
one flips to deep five stacks they keep it clean got you back grab your coffee let's break it down
daily update right now
i don't have my live read written down anymore for the Awakened daily market update that we had done last year.
But I know that there was a lot of people who were very happy with the Awakened partnership.
We did that because they were able to get some actual good tax offer.
I know for me, I'm just going to say it.
Coin.ly is stupid.
I tried to use it.
I tried to use it.
It does not understand my transactions properly.
It got mad when I took a doodle out of staking and tried to give me like a $3,000 like cap gain on something when I sold it.
So it wasn't great.
It wasn't great.
And I know the Awaken was a much better solution as far as understanding the actual dynamics of all the different things.
And it'll be interesting to talk about that today, especially since I am playing quite a bit in the DeFi streets. But Cap, I'll hand it to you for the
daily market update. Yeah, happy rate cuts day. Everyone except for Diablito thinks we're not
getting rate cuts today. Bitcoin is up a percent to 116.257. ETH flat at 4489. I wonder where we
end up today. That meeting is at 2 p.m. Eastern time if you're planning on
tuning in or watching the charts. XRP down a percent to 301. Solana flat 234. Doge flat.
Cardano flat as well. We're going to skip over runes and talk about the other memes.
Shiba's flat. Pepe up a percent. Meme core down 4%. Pump up a percent, Pingu is flat as well. I don't know where the hiccups came
from, bad timing on that. Toshi, talking about base and the base motion and the base farming,
Toshi is a leading base meme up to 57% on the day to 389 million. And then we talked about that big
mover or early mover, still low million or 2 million market cap is Pingu's strategy over there on Abstract.
And then looking at our NFTs,
Far World, this is a base,
I assume looking at the numbers,
a OpenSea Farm.
I will say this, if you are playing the OpenSea Farm game,
you may as well find it, do one on base,
save your gas and double dip there
with the
likely base tge likely base token at some point maybe they reward activity uh as well
mutant no no confirmation on that obviously mutants flat at 1.31 shrimpers big sell-off
after you know some miscommunication or uh if you remember yesterday, I think we talked about,
that was like above minute 0.2 something,
and they basically came out and said,
believe it or not, hey, we're going to delay TGE,
or your allocation's not coming until season two.
Essentially, the whole thing we've been talking about this morning,
there is an overall lack of patience,
and especially if you mislead your users, your supporters, your collectors,
and then give them a curveball, and something's going to be a lot longer than it is,
you will see them, you'll see a mass exodus as they saw here.
It's down 76% on the day as people were not willing to hang out for another extended farm.
Ape's up 1.89% on the day.
Pudgy's up 1.89%, 9.1% and 10.28% respectively. Little's up 1.75% to 1.24%. The Gimasis NFT, as people position themselves for that farm over there, down 3%, but still holding at 0.02 ETH. Little bangers, this is on base and price point tells me part of that OpenSea farm.
me part of that open sea farm moon birds down 2% on the day to 2.44 that's starting to look like
it might be getting by territory and i've not made a moon i'm probably not gonna make a move
on a moon bird although if it keeps dipping i might uh i might add an oddity to go with my
mythical or maybe another mythical and then last but not least everyone's favorite farm because it
is on base uh hits the right price points dx terminal leading the again, 0.007 ETH floor. It's up 14% on the day
because there's an active farm. I did see this morning, the DX Terminal has generated,
just this one collection off the OpenSea farm has generated $350,000 in fees for OpenSea. So GG
to the farm and bringing in incremental revenue. DX Terminal and the others on base.
They hit the sweet spot.
I don't know if it was within 10 or not, but they hit the price point sweet spot.
They're on base to avoid the gas fees there and, you know, fell into crazy.
I think it's, what would work that map backwards, I think over $30 million in volume on an NFT that no one wants.
They're just buying to farm.
It's pretty comical if you think about it.
But that's our Daily Market Update today, brought to you by Awaken Tax,
a special guest today. It's actually not a sponsored market update, but a prior partner
of ours and a big fan of Awaken, the product, and the team over there. Saul Duca has been out
making some moves and on some talking tours. I don't remember what announcement it was,
but there was something recently that Duca had shared
and I commented on and said it long overdue
to actually have him on the show
as we had a lot of our loyal Coffee with Captain listeners,
our Awakened fans.
And while it may not be tax season right now,
best time to get your taxes prepared is prior to April.
So you're not scrambling last
minute. You're keeping track of stuff throughout the year and it makes it much, much, much easier
when it comes time to actually file those returns. So yeah, without further ado, I think we'll bring
our special guests up here, Steve, and just jump into the thing. Duca GM, welcome.
Hey, good morning, guys. It is 6.05 a.m. for me, and I went to bed at 2 a.m., so hopefully I'm clear when I'm talking.
So, yeah, hopefully.
Well, appreciate you joining us so early. Yes, that's a quick turn.
I was dragging yesterday morning after a late night, went out, hit a concert, and then just couldn't.
Steve, I told you I was going to get the colada. I got the colada yesterday, and it did nothing.
I took, like, the full five shots of clout of the head and I was,
I could have took a nap right after.
So yeah,
sleep,
sleep is valuable and certainly appreciate,
appreciate your time.
This is when I got to ask what kept you up until two was at work?
Was it,
was it,
you having some fun or you traveling?
Yeah,
it's a,
it's funny.
Cause like,
I mean,
I love programming.
It's like my passion,
but now that like awaken is,
is starting to grow a lot. our team is actually eight people now.
We have a lot more devs.
We have people helping with marketing, customer service, and stuff.
And so I don't get to code as much.
And so sometimes I really want to program something.
So I just start doing it.
And then I check the clock.
And it's 2, 3 a.m.
And I'm like, oh, I got to go to bed.
I forgot I have to wake up early.
So usually it's related to code.
Because it's kind of like the evening time is easiest for me to kind of unplug and, you know, work on the stuff I really like it.
I enjoy doing it doesn't really feel like work.
That's why I can go till 2, 3 a.m.
It's the thing I love doing.
So that's the best.
Well, I definitely we'll get into Awaken Tax.
We'll talk about what you what you know, what Awaken is for anyone.
That's the first time they're hearing it.
What you've been building, what you're working on, what they might have to look forward to.
But before, if you don't mind, I'd love to get a little additional background on yourself,
learn a little bit about what you did prior to crypto and Web3 and ultimately what led
you to starting Awaken, if you don't mind sharing.
Yeah, definitely.
I'll give you my life story, but I'll try to make it somewhat brief.
So I wanted to be a founder since I was a little kid.
My dad's actually an entrepreneur.
He was in the enterprise software world.
He actually created a company called Bunk Speed that was later sold to SolidWorks.
But it was like a 3D rendering engine.
So before you had like Unity and Unreal Engine, his rendering engine was used by car companies like Honda, Toyota, Porsche to render the cars before they would take them into production.
And so like even as a kid, when I was like 10, 12 years old, I was going to his office, he was taking me to conferences. And I would just get to like,
see him demo products, do sales, build products. I was like, wow, that's awesome. I want to do that.
But it wasn't actually until high school that I started learning how to program.
And I think when you're learning how to program, it's really helpful to have like an end state of
something you want to actually build. And so that's usually a website, an app, a video game.
Like these are things that are fun to build because like you're making incremental progress to get to that final destination.
And so for me, like, okay, I need a project.
And the first thing I ever built was a mini version of Eventbrite for my school.
And I was part of Model UN and did a lot of different clubs.
Like I was always kind of like raised to like, you know, go to an Ivy league school. So I always made sure to like stack my extracurriculars.
And they always made us pay in cash. So I'm like, that's ridiculous. I'll build a mini version of
Eventbrite for my school. And I built it, launched it when I was in like 10th grade.
And my whole school was using it for like prom, Model UN, all the clubs, all the students were
using this thing that I built to pay with a credit card for all their events.
And then I was making commissions. So I got to go to every event for free.
Took my girlfriend to prom, 100% free. I was like, whoa, this is awesome. I love that.
And so at that moment, I really fell in love with building consumer products.
And then I went to Brown University to study computer science and ended up dropping out, though, after three semesters to join a startup called Snack Pass.
And they were in the food order headspace. They had launched at Yale, went to Brown. They were
doing the Ivy League circuit as a common Facebook-like distribution. And I was a user of
the product, fell in love with it, dropped out, and joined them full-time. And I was with them
for four years through their seed, Series A, Series B, going from around a million dollars
of gross merchandise volumes. So you can imagine college kids ordering burrito, series B, going from around a million dollars of gross merchandise volumes. So you can imagine like college kids ordering burrito, boba, all that sugary good stuff. So going from a million
dollars to $150 million by the time I left. And one thing I built for them that I did not know
would come in handy was their accounting system. And then in 2020, 2022, I jumped into the world
of crypto. And for me, I was initially interested in stablecoins
because we were working with the ACH system, spending tens of thousands of dollars for APIs
just to make payments to restaurants. Plus all these fees, we had all this patchwork of code
because you're literally submitting text documents to the Fed of the payments you want to make. You
have to do it by 2 p.m. It's like, that doesn't make any sense. We're in the age of the internet.
And so I was initially interested in stable coins, but found my way to
Solana. And this was like 2022. So Phantom was sub a year old. Jupiter was a few months old.
But the ecosystem was full of awesome builders. And so I was like, okay, this seems like a good
space to immerse myself in. And I started out as a DeFi founder, and I actually built a protocol
called Accru Finance, which was very similar to Yearn.
So this was in like the copy pasta era of Solana.
It was like, let's take everything from ETH, bring it over here so we can have parity.
And we were working on that product.
And while working on that, I then had to do my taxes.
And because I was using all the Solana DeFi protocols, it was like an absolute nightmare.
I tried like Cointrack or Coinly.
All of our competitors have like coin or ledger in their name. Awaken is a very different name. And they were all just
like clearly built for a different world, which was like a centralized exchange world. And as
soon as you went on chain, they just broke. And that was the inspiration of what became Awaken.
And like since the beginning, we really focused on being a crypto tax platform for crypto natives.
And so if you love blockchains, you love to use blockchains and all the innovations that
are happening on them.
Like it's been awesome to see in the last year, we've seen a lot more Dex volume.
We're seeing Kirk's volume, prediction markets, like on chain is where all the innovation
is happening in finance, in my opinion.
And so we work really hard to build a great tax product for there.
And I mean, so far, the journey has been great.
That first year, we had 2,500 users.
Next year, we grew to 8,000. This year, we, I mean, so far the journey has been great. That first year we had 2,500 users next year we grew to 8,000 this year we grew to 27,000. And like our approach is just like very customer obsessed. Like I'm in the trenches with users. Uh, first thing I did when
I, when I woke up this morning at 6am or 55 am, I checked telegram. I have like 140 messages from
users. And so we just try to like stay up to date on everything they're doing and try to support as
quickly as we can.
And that's generally our approach.
So that was like a long winded version of like literally baby Andrew up till today and
kind of the impetus for what became Awaken.
That's great.
I love it.
Appreciate you sharing.
And I have to ask.
So like, well, first of all, congratulations on the success and growth and love to hear
the story of just, you know, humble beginnings and continuing to go grow, ship new features, new product, listen to your users.
And it is.
For anyone that's used it, I won't talk or bash the other competitors, but I've looked at several.
I've tried several.
And despite your smaller team and maybe not having the time in the space as the others in terms of
they beat you to the punch. We were just talking about second mover advantage and being nimble and
quick. And it is. You guys have shipped a great product. If you've not yet used Awaken or if
you've not yet used any accounting software for your crypto taxes, can't recommend it enough.
I will ask you this though do
you what do you see as the future of awakened do you do you see yourself staying in the in the
crypto native space do you see because i was hearing you describe that and and seeing some
of your your posts and just talking about you know what ai can do for crypto tax prep my brain goes
to like is is the market are you are you thinking much bigger than this?
Do you think like we'll awaken move outside of the crypto natives? Do you, what, where do you see
your, where do you see awaken in five years? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think like
as any like startup founder, right, because you have limited resources, you have to go after like
a very niche segment and make sure you like serve them super well before you have like the, even
like liberty to go to kind of like next segments of the market and like we still are
very small compared to our competitors we were relatively like late to the game like a lot of
them were founded in 2018 and so i mean it's really been like i'm very passionate about this
problem i think it's a really like fun problem to solve and so that that energy has like helped us
accelerate in like two years hopefully our product i think people will agree is better than what other people have built in eight years, even though it was literally just
me. Literally for the first two years until six months ago, it was just me and a million lines
of code that I've written over the years to build a product. But ultimately, I think the problem
area that I'm really interested in solving is how do we make something that is super boring and
tedious and painful, which is accounting in general and i think crypto is like the most painful uh part of that specifically that takes like the
most time because it's like obviously so new and so complicated and like how do we take that and
make like delightful user experiences and i think that can apply to a lot of other business segments
like we're already seeing like businesses um even like token funds all these people are actually
approaching waking wanting to use our product which has only been built for retail people so far. I imagine
over time AI is going to play a massive role in reconciliation
in general. Right now it doesn't make sense. Some of our customers literally will
purchase Awaken and then pay someone thousands of dollars to spend
literally dozens of hours just using our software. That doesn't make sense in the world of
AI agents. We should have have like, you know,
things that you can kick off workflows
and that can like follow complex tasks,
just like an accountant.
And so I think like next steps for Awaken
is we really want to focus on like doubling down
on like one, creating features
that are like really magical and new.
So for example, we have like lots of analytics stuff
that we're actually baking into the platform
so you can understand your P&L even like throughout the year.
So you can simulate trades. have some people um where they're
trying to figure out you know i have a bunch of soul right now but which of the soul should i
actually sell to minimize my tax liability um because you might have some like in staking
positions you might have some in different wallets etc and so we really want to build tools to like
save you money so that you don't have to spend as much on taxes and those are built for like
crypto native but also just like anyone in crypto um which is the market that we're really interested in general. And then beyond that, like, I think AI is going
to change the game for like all taxes and all accounting. And we want to play a role in there,
of course, like starting with crypto and really focusing on that, because that market is very
large and will continue to grow. And we want to make sure that we, you know, dominate that. But
ultimately, I think that we're in a really interesting space where there's like two big
tailwinds for Awaken. One, there's like the growth of on-chain.
All of a sudden, that's been happening in the last year.
And then two, we can finally make this really annoying, tedious experience magical with artificial intelligence and actually using LLMs for some of the recon work.
And there's like a little bit of nuance there to make sure that we're doing it in a good way because taxes are very important to keep accurate.
And so I can talk about that maybe if we want.
But those are kind of the two tailwinds
that we're going to keep going deeper and deeper in
for Awaken and spend all of our time there
over like the next few years.
Yeah, there's a lot of love coming in the chat
for you, by the way.
Mason, I know one of our regulars here saying,
I just want to pop in and say,
I love Awaken.
Helped me so much this year with taxes.
Would have been screwed otherwise.
I can say for my personal opinion,
my first year full-time as an entrepreneur and in crypto,
I tried to do, and not in crypto.
I'd used crypto before, but I traded on Coinbase,
got my little tax report and been done that.
Once I got in here, and then I actually went full-time, went three.
Not fun to get hit with like a $30,000 tax bill because you did it wrong.
Because I thought I did it right and I got bad advice. So I paid all my back taxes. I got all my stuff taken care of.
And immediately I was like, I need some software here. One of the things I want to dig in on though
is something you mentioned there, which I think is important, which is you talked about, like,
I was not familiar with your game as far as your background. So hearing like your background,
I think is really helpful to hear why you're so good at what you do. Because I started getting really into DeFi in the past few months.
I'd done some light stuff, but now I've been LP-ing and getting into vaults and all the other things.
How do you navigate that from two ways?
One, obviously you have a background to get it.
So how do you navigate on making sure that software does what it's supposed to do?
But two, the regulatory environment is constantly changing. Do you do you navigate on making sure that software does what it's supposed to do? But two,
the regulatory environment is constantly changing.
Do you try to err on the side of being more conservative,
more liberal,
like what the laws say,
like how do you navigate like such a space that's constantly evolving with new information coming in?
It's a great question.
Cause that's something we spent almost all of our time thinking about,
you know,
but in terms of like supporting protocols, we just make sure.
I mean, one, I actively use as many protocols as I can.
And our team is very crypto-native in general.
So we generally have a pretty good pulse on the ecosystem.
It's kind of funny because within the first three, four months of building Awaken,
one of our biggest competitors actually tried to acquire us.
I remember talking to the founders and I was mentioning, at the time, it was like 2023-ish.
I was mentioning Radium for liquidity providing. and he had no idea what that was.
And I was like, okay, like this is where like I can have an edge of like, I'm actually on chain
using these protocols and can like understand them and build really good support for them.
And we still have like a lot of work to do, but in general, like we just try to stay on top of
all the different protocols and use a combination of building in-house automation so that we can actually handle them.
And then also just general rule-based system that we have so that we know that generally liquidity providing follows a certain pattern.
We can automatically tag that and match it.
And one of the things that's really satisfying to me as a founder is when people come to me and they were like, oh my God, I went on chain.
I started doing my taxes and it was like been a nightmare.
Like so much so that I actually wanted to stop doing stuff
on blockchains and then I found Awaken
so I know I can keep doing stuff now.
And I'm like, awesome, like that's what we need
because like if we want to actually compete with TradFi
and offer all these financial services,
we need our products, like the tax products
actually have to be really good as table stakes.
Otherwise people are going to do this stuff,
realize it's a pain in the ass during tax season
and then just get out of there and not want to do it again. And so I think it's really
important for crypto. And one of the less sexy things that people don't like to focus on, but
it's a real thing where people will actually churn out of crypto if we don't give them the
basic table stakes that they need. And so we just make sure to really stay on chain,
stay focused on the products that are coming out, making sure that we're using them ourselves.
And so much so that I love using products because then it makes it really painful for me to do my
taxes and like it makes me have sympathy with the users who are using these products too so that's
kind of like step one and how we like make sure we add good support we just like use all this stuff
and then go super deep um we have a bunch of different data providers too we spend a lot of
money to get the absolute best data for our users which is why we have 99 cost basis across our
users which is extremely high
and probably definitely highest in the industry. I don't know what other people are, but I opened
my, I've added my Solana wallets to CoinLane. It's like 50%. So anyways, we really focus on that.
And then in terms of like the regulatory landscape, we take the most conservative
approach in general. We work with a bunch of different CPAs that give us advice on stuff.
And we just try to like make sure we can educate the users. So for example, like the hyperliquid airdrop this year,
there was a lot of like different nuance in the tax.
We need to be conservative.
So we of course treat it as an airdrop,
tax at like $2 FMV when you receive it.
But some people want to take different positions
because like the LP pool wasn't set up right away.
And so you could argue that it didn't have value
when it was first airdropped.
It was airdropped to everyone at the same time,
no trading yet.
And then trading was enabled a couple hours later. And so there's different
approaches there. And we offer guides and articles, big lists of CPAs that you can talk to
if you want to figure out the stance that you want to take. And then we start with the
most conservative stance in general. And then last thing I want to add about actual regulatory
landscape, because stuff is changing. There is a lot of gray area, which is why there's some room
for interpretation. We're actually working on something exciting that I will not
go too much in depth, but I literally have a call with the law firm a little bit later today.
But I think there's a really good opportunity for Awaken to help pioneer what should actually
be taxed and what shouldn't be taxed. There's a bunch of different things, like even bridging,
that we don't believe should be taxed. And a lot of our users don't believe should be taxed. And
the IRS has not said anything. Thank you.. IRS has not said anything specifically. So we're actually
working with a top law firm to create a legal letter kind of documenting some of these opinions
on taxes of, you know, wrapping, bridging, all these different things. And we think it should
help our users hopefully save some money and feel more confident taking some tax positions, given
there is some gray area. And so we try to like help our user with that. Like we want to save our users the most amount of money. We want them to
have a, you know, tax, a painless tax season. So that way they want to stay on chain. All those
different things are our North star. And so that's a little bit about like our approach to supporting
protocols, how we do it. And then also kind of like we are generally conservative, but we also
want to help push the industry forward and give educational resources where we can so people can
make the right decisions on their taxes. Dude, I's funny. So I used, before Awaken, I used Coinly with my tax accountant
because I basically hand it over to him, let him do the work on it because I'm willing to pay to
get that taken care of because I don't want to screw it up. Did that once, was a very expensive
mistake. So I've worked with him. And actually, after last tax season i was like you know i know we we had worked with
y'all on some stuff and i was like dude i'm trying to get him to recommend awaken to his clients
because he has you know some crypto clients i knew this guy knew what he was doing though by the way
because when i was interviewing uh for the accountants afterwards he was like yeah this
guy a couple years ago he sold a couple mutant apes this happened i'm like okay you're you if
somebody's saying like i'm not just doing your ago, he sold a couple of mutant apes. This happened. I'm like, okay, you're you. If somebody's saying like, I'm not just doing your crypto taxes, but he's talking about
mutant apes and the swaps to like do the, you know, tax loss harvesting based on how
it is.
I'm like, all right, you got your, you got your shit together.
Um, but I've been trying to get him to use it because frankly, like that's the issue
I think people run into is like, I feel like even though coinly feels like, I think I'm
not trying to ask you to bash competitor, but for me personally, just explaining my user experience, I feel like one of them doesn't feel like it was coinly feels like i think i'm not trying to ask you to bash competitor but for me personally just explaining my user experience i feel like one of them doesn't
feel like it was built as much by a crypto native person and awaken feels crypto native and when you
talk about those sort of differentiators you're making like i think they make a difference that
said do you build a software because i know a lot of people are hesitant of using accountants or
they can't find one you should build a software that's like look if you have to do your own stuff we got it
for you if you but also like do you say like generally speaking do you have a thought on
whether people should be working with an accountant on top of it like i'm curious your take on on that
sort of uh debate obviously you're not giving financial advice here but curious your thoughts
on that yeah i mean like our goal is to build a product that you don't need to necessarily pay
anyone else to help you use um that is like generally our North Star. That's difficult
because, you know, it's a hard product to build. Like I was kind of saying earlier, like everyone
a million lines of code for this thing. And it's probably many millions of lines more that we need
to write to get it to like where we want to get it to in the future and being really, really great.
So I would say like, I mean, everyone is different. If you can't afford to have someone use the
software for you, that's definitely great. Like ultimately, we want to build a product that makes crypto like accessible for everyone. And I think there's like a lot of things that like are really software problems that right now are patched because like basically with humans kind of making up for the software fails.
like taxes are reactionary and it's like basically like new year comes you're like oh crap like i
didn't like tax us harvest like oh i didn't even realize i had this thing like there's all this
like stuff that you know you don't even realize because um there's like a person who's helping a
lot of other people and they can't necessarily give you the like special time but like software
is infinitely scalable like software can like literally spend like hours working on just your
account to like surface insights just for you that can help you even like you know be more like
predictive you know prediction versus like a reaction based um later on it's like we want to build a software i think
like a lot of like the problems with like parsing understanding data all these things are like root
or software problems that we want to solve and so like we want to build a product so like everyone
can do their tax by themselves you don't need to like pay someone a bunch of money to help you do
it for you that's generally like where we want to get to um but also like having someone to check
over your work is always helpful um so even So even if a product can do almost everything itself, it can be helpful to
hire someone to help you do it. It has been interesting though, because we've seen a lot
more success with adoption from retail people who want to save time, who want to DIY than CPAs.
And I think there's a bunch of reasons. I don't want to bash CPAs and accountants because they
do important work, but I've literally heard that some people will not use us because we're like too good and there are some cpas out
there that do uh they build by the hour and so if they use our software they just can't build as
many hours and i've literally heard this i won't i won't name drop any names uh although maybe some
of them you know because you've worked with them but they're super expensive um and so they use
software that actually like will take that more time to do stuff because uh they could build And I'm like, that's crazy. Like, I don't think that wins long
term. Like I'd rather focus on building a product that saves people time. Like a tax product is
valuable because it saves you time. Let's go back to doing stuff you actually want to do,
you know, spending time with your family, going back on chain, all those things like that is like
why you pay a tax software. And so if we're doing our job, right, you should be able to do
all of your taxes in a fraction of the time by yourself for very little money.
That's where we want to get to in the future.
But there definitely is always a role for accountants.
Someone to double check your work.
Make sure that you understand all the nuance and different tax stuff.
So I don't want to say they're not valuable.
But definitely be careful of some of them because they might actually be putting you in a worse software so they can bill you more.
I've seen this constantly.
I've seen this constantly.
I won't call it anyone in specific though.
I may actually ping you offline
to see if we can get a free trial
for my accountant to use.
Absolutely.
It's like, I literally,
I don't care if he charges me for the hours.
I want him to get my stuff right.
And like I said,
there was a point in time
where it basically took the,
the software I was using
took the doodle that I put into space
for the space doodles
and then took out and sold. It was like, oh oh you got this for free from that contract and sold it it's
a capital gain i'm like no like it's not and so it's like then i have to go through great lengths
to correct it but it needs special permissions and it's like this shouldn't be this hard when
i actually if i was doing it manually not that i want to if i was doing it manually i would have
done it correctly um so it's like it I can't and I can't fix it.
And then I have to have this conversation with my account
and explain it and remember the transaction.
So stuff like that, I think is really, really helpful.
I have a tactical question and a theoretical question.
I'll go with the tactical one first,
which is let's say that somebody were to connect their wallet now,
in September, thinking about going in tax season, and they connect all their wallets and it goes through.
Is that going to take this year, last year?
How does it work as far as tactically if they're trying to look at their tax?
Let's say someone maybe hasn't done things right and they want to look back at yours.
Or let's say that somebody just wants to do it for this year.
Is it going to look at your whole year?
Is it going to calculate everything?
Is it going to ask you questions?
Talk about what that process looks like if someone's trying to get nine months of what our our listener base is a lot on chain activity so what does that look like
yeah so generally like i would recommend plugging your wallets and sooner rather than later
um so when you plug your wallet and we pull all of your history like to do taxes properly we have
to actually like replay your account from like the very first transaction you ever made all the
way through and you want to link all of your accounts because like let's say you have like
ethan wallet a you transfer it to your ethan you know wallet b
we actually transfer the cost basis for you too so it's important to add all of your exchanges
all of your wallets because we build like a massive graph transferring your cost basis all
over the place and we really started from like day one and we calculated all the way up um and
so that's generally like how awaken works so look when you plug in your wallets you'll be able to
see your taxes for all your past years. We give most of the product away for
free. The only thing that really costs money is downloading a report. So even if you like toggle
past years, it will like, let's say you made $101,500. We say you made $101,000 XXX dollars.
So you basically know, okay, like I'm in the ballpark. Like I actually hated that other tax
softwares would like blur out, like you would say none of the number at all. It just had this massive lock.
And if I didn't pay, I didn't even see the number.
Well, that's ridiculous.
Like, how do I know if it's right?
So we basically show you like all the information for free.
And then when you pay, you pay for a tax report.
But it's better to like put your wallets in now.
You can see, we'll import the whole history, do the taxes all the way up.
You don't have to use past tax reports.
If you've used different providers in the past, you can just use the future ones.
But we do replay your entire account. And a lot of people though, when they put their
wallets in, they're like, oh wait, in 2023 and 2022, I paid way more in taxes. And now you're
saying I owe way less because our software is so good at automatically picking stuff up and they
actually will go amend past tax returns and save money. So that's also always an option because we
have such good automation that we actually like understand stuff. And so like, even without you
tagging, we like get almost everything tagged, you know with a few few exceptions of random sends
and receipts you don't hook up all your stuff and so generally like add your wallets you can
replay the entire account you can go and see past years and this year and then also there's going to
be a bunch of goodies that we're going to be releasing in the coming months especially
specifically for december and tax us harvesting that will help you save some money and those are
important to do before the tax year closes in 2024. So if you haven't filed yet, actually,
it's extension season right now. So like we're starting to heat up because a lot of people
encrypt the file late, they file on extension. So if you haven't definitely try out Awaken.
And if you have also good to put your wallets in because I will have a bunch of features that
will save you money, but you have to do them before we get into next year in order to take
advantage of the tax loss harvesting. Yeah, super helpful it's it's definitely stuff that i've gotten from like i i
didn't know anything about it because i just worked before web3 i wasn't an entrepreneur i
worked a normal nine to five day job and it was like cool i get a tax return and i send it in and
i use turbo tax and whatever and then it's like it get a lot more complicated as i got more into
crypto and it got a lot more complicated and i've been in crypto since 2016 2017 but it was like coinbase trading right and
then it was like 2020 everything changed so um love that you're helping out with those strategies
because i think those are important and that's a major value add um that said i want to ask you
a theoretical question because you you touched on ai and we are very adamant in this in this show
that like ai like if you are not thinking about like we see these stories about someone getting fired for using ai to do their job it's like you should
be promoting that motherfucker because they just figured out how to do your stuff um you're
obviously using uh you're obviously using ai you're talking about it i think that is a major
lead pole position talk about where you think it fits in and maybe also where you think it's
not a good idea to just put it in great question uh so it fits a lot of places, but also doesn't fit in a lot of places.
Maybe I'll start off with where it doesn't fit in, actually,
and then I'll talk about where it does fit in.
And so in taxes, it's really important to have determinism.
You can't have your numbers constantly changing when you do taxes, right?
And I think because LLMs are prone to hallucinating on things,
you don't want any of your core pieces of a tax product to be an llm like you don't want your core cost basis engine
to be llms um for example like that needs to be deterministic like there are certain rules of like
lifo fifo hypo spec id share pooling in the uk like acb in canada and other countries is to
adjust the cost basis like all those things like you need a high level of determinism and any place I think you need a high level of determinism, like you shouldn't
use AI, you should try to like program something that's deterministic, which is usually just like
if else statements and code. And so we have like all of our core parts of our tax agent are written,
well tested, like those are like important to keep deterministic. And that's not where AI really
fits in. I think where AI fits in is like taking a lot of like workflows that humans do.
And like, how do we make them more efficient or at least have AI do the first pass on things?
And so with that in mind, like how we use AI at Awaken is like, we obviously use cursor.
We like use AI a lot in our programming.
We have like a test suite that makes sure that we're building stuff correctly.
Plus we obviously review, like humans review the code, but we use AI to help us accelerate.
And how do we build like integrations faster for new blockchains?
How do we build support for protocols faster?
How do we build some of these new features that we want to draft up to like make it way,
like taxes way more like prediction based so we can advise you on things maybe before
we get to the next year.
All of that is like heavily aided by AI, which helps us program faster.
So like as like an org, we're small.
I mean, for a while, it was just me.
Now we're eight people, mostly engineers.
We use AI really heavily to help us
with a lot of those things.
And then I think like AI for us,
right now with CryptoTax,
you have a lot of like accountants going into software
and doing these like workflows
over and over and over again.
And a lot of those are really good use cases for agents.
And I think like bookkeeping and accounting in general
will be more and more agent-based
and it'll be humans like reviewing the work. And so instead of you having to go through Awaken
and tag 50 transactions as staking, because for some reason we didn't pick it up, an AI agent
should be able to go on chain, go into the block explorer, look at what this is, research the
protocol, realize it's staking, label that as staking, find the other transactions, label those
as staking, and then be like, hey, here's the work that we think, you know, we think should be done on your account.
Does this look right?
Yes or no?
And I think that is where our product will be going.
Like, how do we have AI agents do a lot of this?
Like, how do we take a task that's like an hour or two hours and make it five minutes
of reviewing?
That is where I see like AI being really useful for a product like ours.
And not necessarily like replacing humans or even accountants, but like, how do we help them be like way more efficient? And we've actually done
a lot of this without AI. Like, it's actually awesome. Cause one of the CPAs, his name is Dan
that we worked with when we first developed Awaken. Awesome guy. Like also like, you know,
DJ and like NFT trader, which as a CPA is rare to have someone, you know, a CPA that knows about
NFTs. But I remember this year, he actually reached out and he actually sent me a message
and he's like, just so you know, I literally literally was able to in the past I was charging my clients $3,500 and now
because of Awaken and how much time it saves me I charge this guy that I would have charged $3,500
I charge him $1,000 so like a third of the price because like our software helped him save so much
time and so for CPAs that don't care about just like maxing out their billable hours and people
who obviously want to minimize the number of hours they spend doing taxes. I think there's like a lot of work that we can use. We've done it with
like building great software and automation. And I think the next step is like, how do we take these
workflows that take hours to complete, like humans are manually doing, how do we make it so AI does
it? And then you can kind of just check through. And that kind of pairs a little bit of like,
how do we outsource this tedious and annoying stuff to AI, but still have a human that actually
like looks, make sure it actually is okay.
Final decision because it is taxes
and taxes are obviously important to get accurate.
So that's kind of like how we use AI internally.
And what we don't use it for is really anything
that we need high determinism.
We need it to be like very like,
this is always going to be two.
Like the output of this thing will always be two.
And then the thing that we do use it for
is anything that is like non-deterministic,
usually like really laborious for humans right now.
And how do we do the first pass with AI and then make it easier for people so they can save time?
This is huge.
And I referenced back to the question earlier about expanding outside of the crypto natives.
And doing it here first, I feel like you're doing it on hard mode, right?
There's just so much more when it comes to taxes and crypto and all the mini transactions,
the micro transactions that you need to account for.
And as opposed to a W2 job,
I want to read a comment from the chat here for Mason.
It says something I came across during my experience is my girlfriend who is
an accountant.
I had her sit down with me and did my awaken taxes.
She's not crypto literate by any means,
but she understands the Awaken platform almost
better than I did. He says, I think there's an interesting opportunity for actually creating
tools for CPAs and accountants because I've never seen her so interested in crypto before.
So it's like crypto taxes, building software for crypto taxes is hard mode relative to building
tax software for normies.
And I think when you get accountants like this,
like Mason's girlfriend, excited about this,
you better believe she's probably going to go back to her firm or whatever.
Maybe she's an independent CPA.
And it's like, how can I use AI?
Or how can I use Awaken and tools, platforms like this
to make my job more efficient,
to 10x myself as a tech prep professional.
It's just like everything you just described there,
yes, it's almost necessary for crypto because it is so complicated
and so many thousands of transactions for active users.
You solve this, I don't want to sound like hyperbole or get ahead of ourselves.
Like truly like changing the game for tax prep and accountants everywhere.
Now, some may look at it as a negative because they're going to think like short-sighted,
oh, you're taking money out of my pocket for billable hours.
I think the wise ones are going to realize they just 10X themselves and they can go scale
their business tremendously without having to add dozens or hundreds of employees, right?
100%. And I think like the good ones that will be be around in five, 10 years, they have to think
like that. And that's awesome. Macy's girlfriend is thinking like that, of how can you actually
use software to accelerate the work you're doing, to do it faster, to give a better experience for
end clients. No client wants to wait multiple weeks or a month for you to get back to them
with their first round of numbers, which is what you have to do today. You have to go into softwares and do all of this stuff.
Maybe you have crypto.
Maybe you have real estate.
Maybe you're a founder.
These are all things that make the tax return more complicated.
And we're starting with crypto because we think it's the most painful.
I imagine we'll be able to help with a lot of other areas.
And ultimately, I think we'll be riding these two big tailwinds, like crypto on-chain adoption,
growing a lot, really focusing on that. Plus, AI going to like change the game for like tax prep and accounting
in general like the accounting market is actually massive and right now if you look at it like this
is like not just like you know crypto taxes but like accounting worldwide is like a 600 billion
dollar market um and software is actually a 40 billion dollar piece of that it's mostly services
on top of software like the the market for services on top of, you know, accounting services that people like
in business go for doing is 14 times larger than software.
And I think software for the first time ever is like, oh, we can actually help you with
some of these services so that you can actually offer a better experience.
So like the pie for software is going to grow.
And then the experience that you're willing, you're able to give your end users is going
to be like 10x better if you're leveraging these tools to help them, you know, serve
them better.
So it's more accurate.
You can help them faster you can help give them insights that like you
know better insights across like all aspects of their you know tax return because crypto is kind
of a piece and there's all these other pieces too and i imagine over time we'll do more and more of
those uh mess mess is this limited to the u.s where is as far as awaken the product what
where does it work or who who are you serving today yeah so right now I mean for a
long time it was just the US but recently like last six months we now support most countries so
like if you're in Canada UK Australia Germany most of the EU etc we actually support you now
and so we have all the different tax algorithms to support based on your jurisdiction a lot of
different currencies in our settings page you can just toggle on your country.
I think we support like 50-ish countries now.
So most countries we support.
So we went from just the U.S. in the past to now a lot more, which is awesome.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Congrats again.
I know we're keeping you a little longer than we planned.
We're running past that half hour.
And I know you got up super early this morning or maybe up, but joined us in the early morning hours.
We greatly appreciate it.
I saw Craig jumped up on stage.
Usually it brings good questions.
Do you have time for a question or two from the audience?
Yeah, for sure.
Awesome.
Craig, GM, thanks for jumping up.
Pleasure as always.
Do you got a question here for Duca?
GM, my friend, I appreciate it.
Hey, Duca, I really, I'm excited to share this with my accountant this past year.
I signed up using Coinly
and I was just like,
hmm, I was just like,
there's something that fell off
and everything that you're saying
touches upon so many important points
and what you're doing
brings such credibility to the space
as well as those unreluctant,
those surprises that we don't want.
Do you feel that a tool at this point, and I was
talking with my cousin this morning, who's huge in the space, and we were talking about tax prep,
do you feel that this is the time, you know, this Q4 of this year or any year for that matter,
is sort of the time for people to come in, play around with the system, kind of understand where
they are, where those gains or losses might have taken place? Do you feel that this is the time
for people to come in and interact with your system?
Definitely.
Yeah, it's actually best to join in Q4 versus wait till Q1.
Because if you join in Q4, you can actually do some stuff to minimize your taxes for the
upcoming year.
So it's really great to do it earlier rather than later.
So 100%.
I think that's a good reminder.
I know we've said it on a couple times, but yeah, if this is your first year in crypto or maybe it's your first year of big gains
in crypto, it's critical. You're like what you do in December could, I mean, four or five,
potentially six figures of difference in your tax bill come April. And it's legal. It's not a,
it's not doing anything under the table. It's just understanding tax loss harvesting and the assets you're holding.
And there's also no washlight trading laws in crypto.
It may make sense to sell a token and immediately rebuy it.
And it's 100% within the legal laws of tax laws in the U.S.
I can't speak for other locations, but it's critical to understand that stuff in December,
not start thinking about it in March or April.
Cause you're too late at that point.
You know,
you're basically just looking at the following year.
I mean,
I had like a world of women galaxy that I bought for way too much when they
were like cooking and we were going into Basel a couple of years ago.
And I literally sold it and bought one.
I liked better off the floor immediately. And I incurred
a massive tax loss harvest, which actually helped my taxes go down. So it's like those types of
things that you're doing to educate, I think are so important because I literally like,
this is not a joke. Ever since I had that incident with the tax, I checked my taxes like
multiple times a month, sometimes multiple times a week, just to check where my capital gains are at,
make sure nothing's off.
And if there's opportunities where I say like,
Hey,
like this NFT is down that I had a while ago.
You send it to a burn wall.
You accept the,
you know,
accept the,
you know,
the offer on it.
And so I think like the way that you're approaching this is,
is so,
so smart.
and telling people to do that.
And I can't,
I tell people,
I know people don't like to talk about taxes as much. I know it's not the sexiest topic, but it is something that we all
need to do. And there is no reason you should leak thousands or tens of thousands of dollars
to the IRS because you did things wrong. So, um, look, that said, I know we've kept you a little
longer. Okay. We did have a question. Cause we did have, when we ran the the uh promo back in uh tax season we had a uh a
discount code uh for our our war room or our coffee with captain listeners that may there was
just a question if the if it's still live or not the code was coffee i'm not i'm not sure maybe i
wasn't supposed to show that if it's not supposed to be live but uh we will um we'll get with we get
with uh do go off off after the show
here and see if we can if there is something we could uh you know discount code or anything yeah
it should still be live but if it isn't we can we can toggle back on so we can sync offline about
that but yeah i think there is a code set up it's been a while now um but i think there should be
and we're happy to give you know first- listeners a discount. And also like a bit of a teaser for next year. We actually right now we don't sell 2025 tax reports yet.
We're still selling 2024 because of extension season. We have some exciting stuff for next year.
If you're switching from a competitor, that's going to make it like really easy for you to switch and kind of some crazy incentives, too.
So make it a count now when we actually announce those things. We'll be announcing it to you.
So you don't want to miss on these crazy incentives because like ultimately like where we're at as a business
is we're profitable we raised two million dollars recently from a lot of awesome people like luca
from pudgy mert from helios a lot of great names in crypto and we really want to grow our user
basis so we're doing some crazy incentives this year so definitely sign up because you'll get an
email blast about these incentives and be able to benefit otherwise you might you know forget about
them so let's let's definitely set up the code We'll do something there. There's also a bunch of more
incentives coming too in the coming months.
I won't know who was asking, but try Cook Coffee. It may
very well still be live. If not, let us know and we'll circle back on that.
Thanks for asking and appreciate the offer.
If I'm not mistaken, I think it was $50 off.
It was a fairly sizable savings and
I know it was,
was well received and candidly more so than the discount you're getting on the reports is
you're likely saving far more than that on your taxes, or maybe you're paying a little extra,
but you at least have peace of mind knowing you're not going to be like pull a Steve and get a $30,000
tax bill that you weren't aware of. So it's like, this is like, yeah, discounts are nice,
but doing things properly, it's, it's potentially a much larger savings and, or peace of mind that, that
you're doing things proper. And, uh, I can't speak highly enough about getting started now or, or
certainly before the end of the year, because you just like, these are the moves that you can make
that get fully legal, but you have to make the moves within the calendar year.
And especially if you're having a good year,
especially if you have a good Q4,
like do this stuff now,
don't,
don't delay.
And it's an awesome team.
As you can,
you can tell today that they're,
they're,
they're really in the weeds.
He's got a great team on the cap table behind them.
And if you have questions,
jump in that discord,
give them,
give them,
you know,
ask the question.
I think he said,
he said he woke up his 100 and some messages
and his TG, so they will get back to you
and you're not the only one out there
with tax prep questions.
But I truly see, we often talk about,
we're fortunate we often have founders on here
that are pushing the space forward.
This one gets me excited as yes,
clearly pushing the space forward,
solving a very real issue and problem many have had
with taxes and crypto and just the hundreds, if not thousands of transactions.
And just it's difficult to reconcile, especially if you're playing catch up.
So solving real, real problems in crypto.
I also, the more I think about this, like this is the way the world's heading.
Accounting is a massive, massive industry.
Software for accounting's a massive industry.
And Duke and team are doing it on hard mode right now.
Like, this is something that really could be, like, there's a world.
See, we look, you know, five, ten years from now, and it's like, this is just the way the world is done.
Like, every, you know, most people, not just your W2 employees that are using TurboTax or QuickBooks or whatever.
It's anyone that has a small business or anything that anyone has anything in addition to a W2.
They're using Awaken because it just makes things easier.
And you should be using AI like you don't have to.
Using AI doesn't mean you have to use chat GPT for everything in your life.
use chat GPT for everything in your life. In fact, something like taxes, you know, you don't
want to use something that's going to hallucinate on something that could be a four or five, six
figure, you know, hallucination. Use professionals that are working with other professionals that
can make you more efficient without having you to rely solely on your AI prompting skills. And
yeah, this one gets me excited about where our world is heading, Steve.
And as more things come on chain,
this is just, I hadn't really stepped back
and thought about accounting software
because let's be honest,
it's not the most exciting thing.
Most people, they get like,
start having anxiety when they think about taxes
or tax prep or, oh my gosh,
the time I'm gonna have to put into this.
Like it's maybe not the most exciting.
It's not going to lead to an airdrop. There's not going to be an awakened tax token or a TGE
farm here. So it's not going to be the free magical internet money, but sometimes it's
doing things the right way and using tools and software absolutely can lead to you keeping a
lot more of your magical internet money when it's all said and done. Yep. Love it. Well,
look,
it's awesome having you on.
I know we kept you longer.
And again,
we're,
we're fans.
Unity are fans.
So obviously super,
super helpful having you on here.
We didn't get one more question.
It came from Joey who actually was responsible for the awaken tax promo.
Spearheaded that,
that, that, that connection and partnership
back in tax season. So yeah, if we've got one more, Steve, we'll let Joey get in here for the
quick one. Yeah, let's let Joey get in here and then we'll let him go. Yep. Go ahead, Joey.
So as bad as this sounds, I never, even though you guys worked with them for so long,
I never signed up till today just because I'm lazy. And I just signed up and started connecting all of my wallets
and just realized that I had 0.63 ETH in one of my random wallets sitting in the blur pool
from, I guess I had moved it over to do like blur bids at one point and didn't know that it was there.
And thankfully, Awaken just showed me it was there because I connected all my wallets.
So now I just found like money in the couch cushions because of Awaken.
Be like Joey.
You go sign up for Awaken, find about $3,000 in your couch cushion that you'd forgot about.
Love it.
Yeah, we love that.
I just had to come up and share because we all use so many wallets for so many different things.
And I'm going to pump Rabi as well because Rabi helped me find like $500 that was in random blur money a couple months ago too, um, or blast money.
But yeah, I think software is, so yeah, I had to come up and praise you guys. Cause I, I couldn't
believe it. Like, I'm like, where's this, I don't have this much money. So thank you.
Love it. Yeah. I'm glad you found some money. Yeah. I love, I love when that type of stuff
happens where either like users find money they forgot about. And then, you know, awaken because
you add all of your stuff to us. And we've had people add half a million wallets to us at this
point. We can help you like find money, help you save money, just winning all around. I love,
I love to hear stuff like that. So yeah, I'm glad you found some ETH. That's awesome.
It was honestly, it's super easy. You just copy and paste your wallet address in,
you name them. I was able to connect my Coinbase really simply.
It literally took me less than five minutes to connect all of my wallets, whether it was
Sol, ETH, Coinbase, et cetera. And now I'm looking at everything I've done. Some of it's
Some of it's making me cry, but then I also found $2,800.
making me cry, but then I also found $2,800.
Some wins, some cries too.
If you tax off, we'll do that to you.
Yeah, you'll get it.
But no, that's awesome.
Glad to hear it.
Another good unintended excitement thing that you have when you make those connections.
And I think it's awesome.
But look, again like appreciate you jumping on
with us today um again we will be talking about this throughout the tax season we will get people
going on this um and uh yeah i'm trying to tell everybody to get and use it because i just think
it's strictly better product so thanks for everything you're doing thanks for your building
and thanks for waking up nice and early hopefully you can get a little bit of a nap in before you
get down to coding all again yeah definitely yeah thanks for having me guys uh having me, guys. And yeah, if you do try Awaken,
let me know what you think.
Like, we're always accepting feedback.
My ex is just big underscore duca.
Send me a DM with any feedback you have.
My telegram is Andrew underscore duca.
I got a lot of messages,
but you can also message me there.
Like, we love feedback.
So the more feedback, the better.
So if you can help us make the product better,
I'm always happy to give free credit too
for feedback that helps us make the product better for everyone.
So thanks for having me on guys and look forward to helping a bunch of people
this tax season and hopefully before the tax season too.
Awesome. Awesome. Have a good one.
Right. Awesome. That was, um, look, I mean, that sort of stuff's fun.
Love this. I mean, taxes aren't fun,
but having a founder who's actually building and moving the spaceport is,
um, that said, I'm going to hit a more,
you know,
and I realized the only time the person I had to meet with was 10 o'clock.
So I'm going to do a more,
you know,
probably skedaddle.
And I can even let you close the show if you want to keep cooking or we can close it and,
and jump off to go ahead and do the meeting,
but let's hit the more,
you know,
and then we will,
we'll move on and kind of wrap things out.
The more,
you know,
brought to you by ENS.
It is time for the more you know, brought to you by ENS.
And look, we're waiting on the 2 p.m. meeting to see what the Fed is going to do with rates.
But when Fed cuts rates, it's usually what's called a risk on environment.
And crypto has historically been one of the biggest beneficiaries.
Should we get rate cuts today?
Cash and treasuries become less attractive as yields fall.
And investors look for higher returns.
For example, when the Fed cut rates by 50 basis points.
Or you'll hear people say 50 bips.
That's what they mean.
On September 18, 2024, Bitcoin jumped about 4.5%.
In the same day, trading to nearly $63,000.
And in the months after that cut, October through December,
Bitcoin surged from 60,000 to that 100,000 mark
for the first time,
a gain of around 70 to 80% in just three months.
Going back to 2020,
when they hit rate cuts in March and April for COVID,
Bitcoin at first fell a little bit,
but then between April and the end of the year rallied 1,500%,
1,500% towards the end of the year.
More recently, August 22nd, 2025, Jerome Powell signaled that cuts were coming
and Bitcoin surged from 112,000 to 117,000 along with the rest of the market.
East pushed to almost 5,000, remember, on that Sunday when it hit an all-time high.
And in the months that followed, as easing expectations solidified,
Bitcoin is continuing to drift upward.
Hit about 124,000 before some nervous pullbacks.
So bottom line, rate cuts tend to be bullish news for crypto.
So keep an eye on that today as it goes.
And even if there's some initial pullbacks like there have been in the past,
long-term tends to set up a pretty good risk on environment.
And that was The More You Know brought to you by E&S.
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Cap, like I said, I have this 10 o'clock thing I got to jump to. The person had a Calendly, and the i have this 10 o'clock thing i gotta jump to uh the person
had a calendly and the latest time was 10 o'clock so my choice was get up uh do the uh duca and
wake up way early or uh go on the later so gotta get ready for that but um anything else you want
to hit on uh before we sneak out of here if we get close to 10 o'clock i'll just sneak out stay
in the room some of our recording stays but But anything else you want to hit on?
Just thinking, I'm trying to think where I might have $2,800 on the couch kitchen somewhere.
That would be nice to find today.
And yeah, good chat today.
Enjoyed the combo early.
Enjoyed the chat with Duca there.
And 2 o'clock is the big time today.
I think it'll be...
I mean, yes, I'm interested because of my bags,
but I'm also just curious to see how the market actually does respond.
You mentioned it in passing earlier.
For those that are doing the Ape Chain raid,
the CODA multiplier got added now so if you add all them up
it's like a 7.4 multiplier
stacked with codas, mutants, apes
and the 500 ape
did we share the badge code?
I know it got shared in the chat
someone found it, I'm not sure if we shared it
yeah, CWCW
so coffee with captain Wednesday
so CWCWOP. Yeah, CWCW. So Coffee with Captain Wednesday. So CWCWOP.xyz slash claim.
CWCW will get you the badge code.
So if you're badge hunting,
we'll probably share it again tomorrow
when people are in
because I realized I meant to share it earlier.
It's been live since like 7 a.m.
and I totally forgot to share it.
So a few people figured it out
and I think shared it around.
So congrats to you, Clevors.
But CWCW,
that simple is the badge code if you're looking for it.
And probably share it again tomorrow when we have more people in because I
realized I forgot to bring it in today.
CWCW for that one.
We need to pick a hundred dollar winner for today.
I don't know if you have anyone off top of your head or we want to do
scanning through the chat for that.
Also in passing,
I did want to mention probably,
probably do a more of a deeper dive after I actually get in.
I didn't have a chance yesterday,
but I did see Outbreak launched in OtherSide
and seen some good feedback on that on the timeline.
Again, I've not been in yet,
so I'll hold my comments until I actually get a chance
to check it out.
I've also seen several announcements from OSF and the REC team today.
It looks like Ovi is going to be delivering a keynote at Korean Blockchain Week, talking
brand coins, REC, and have some official announcements coming up too. That is next week.
Yes, a week from today. So if you're going to be in Korea, I'll actually pin that up
top. If anyone's in that part of the world or heading that way, you can register for the talk.
I didn't talk about it. I did share it on my post. And I'll leave you with this, Steve.
Might be some nightmare fuel for you.
But the keynote or the registration for Movi is pinned up top.
And last but not least, for anyone that missed it this morning,
there's so much talk about.
We just had an incredible conversation with a founder
who's building awesome software,
leveraging AI to make not just the users, but also accountants more efficient, more productive.
You know, it's like so many people like AI is changing the world, Steve, you can, you know,
you can 10x your productivity, your efficiency, all these cool stuff. You can do things you never
could do before. A lot of really smart people doing really amazing stuff with AI.
And this is what I use AI for.
I saw that.
I was surprised JetGPT was able to do it
with their new shitty image model.
So that's awesome that you were able to get that through.
I kind of want to try one myself,
although I know that I look horrible with a bald head.
So do me a favor and text me your prompt
so I can copy it.
How do you know you look horrible with a bald head? Well, i've shaved my head where it's been shaved like shave shave like
shiny shapes not not shave shave but buzzed and the buzz was a bad look so uh or at least i thought
it was i i got some compliments from a couple people but i think they were just patronizing
me so i mean my my prompt was please make me bald in this pick. Alrighty. I will,
I will see if I can find a good one.
I will say it.
I know you got to run.
So I will say that I wasn't,
I thought it made my head look too big.
It was like a little Mark Andreessen effect.
Almost there's the original pick.
Here's what it came back with.
And I said,
can you please make my head a little smaller? And then I looked like rigs.
I thought,
yeah,
I think the first one is a little better. You look like a
like the second one's a little more
NFL kicker. The first one
is a little bit more
professional wrestler. So I
I'd go with the first one over the second one.
First one, you look like you're juiced up. You got that
Barry Bonds chin thing going on.
The second one, yeah, you look like a
that's NFL kicker vibes right there.
Am I wrong?
I mean, that's like a, yeah.
That's actually good.
You see that guy on the sideline,
he just hit a 64-yarder to send it to overtime, right?
It's like that.
It's very much NFL kicker vibes.
Enjoy your 10 o'clock.
I don't think it's the same person,
so I'm curious to see who else is talking about
going into Pump Fund's creator coins with a strategy
because I don't think the person I spoke to yesterday had a Calendly.
So yeah, we'll have to connect on that later.
And yeah, they must have added the Barry Bonds head filter.
It definitely made my head a little larger than I actually believe it is.
But I don't know.
I've never went all the way down to the skin on the shaved head.
Yeah.
Well, look, I'm not above doing PEDeds and steroids one day to uh continue my myself being young as long
as they're safe and uh you got to do what you got to do and now you have a little bit of an insight
into what that might look like so uh that said i'm going to uh i'm going to jump out of here so i
don't know if you want to close it out there is a good time to close perfect all right let's uh
let's let everyone stay up in the day. Appreciate everyone coming through this morning.
We will talk to everybody bright and early tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. Eastern time.
Have a wonderful, wonderful day, everybody.
Thanks for tuning in to Coffee with Captain, powered by ApeCoin.
We hope you enjoyed the show.
And remember, nothing we discussed today is financial advice.
Until next time, keep exploring, stay curious, and we'll see you soon. Have a great day.
