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BlackRock expands money market fund to Solana
Recorded: March 26, 2025 Duration: 0:59:42Space Recording
Short Summary
Recent developments in the crypto space include BlackRock's expansion into Solana, significant capital investments like Snapster's acquisition, and regulatory shifts with the SEC closing investigations. The market also sees growth in tokenized real-world assets and innovations in blockchain technology, while some projects face scrutiny and market challenges.
Full Transcription
Good morning. Everyone, welcome to the modern market where every day we discuss everything to do with the modern market. That is the crypto market, the NFT market, and how to hopefully make some or a lot of money on the internet.
Load up for discussion today. We have BlackRock expanding money market fund onto Solano. We were just talking the other day about how everything's going to happen on ETH or the institutions trust ETH.
Maybe not the case.
We will discuss.
We've got movement labs drawing scrutiny once again following Binances, market maker
investigation.
We touched on that just briefly yesterday.
I think some more information and commentary came alive yesterday.
So we want to get into that too.
And then finally, on the more commercial side, Snapster was snapped up for $207 million to build
a music metaverse.
That is pretty cool.
And just one of our friends in the
In the, I'm not sure if he's in the audience today, but he just messaged me beforehand to say it was the, the art fund, hive mind.
They're actually initially a private equity fund.
And it was them who made that sale.
So congrats to them.
Maybe they're going to be buying some more art.
We also got the latest on price action on crypto and NFTs as usual, plus a general discussion on what we think is going on in the market, plus a couple of interesting opportunities today.
I'm delighted to say I've got legendary bread and Adam product lead at Pirate Nation and Proof of Play with us today.
I cannot wait to get into it, but just a reminder, friends, before we do, nothing that we say here is financial advice.
This market is very, very risky.
So please proceed with caution.
and exercise your own judgment with that out of the way.
Legendary, it is Wednesday.
It is the 26th of March.
How are you doing?
How are you feeling?
You accused me of something very bad when you first joined the call on the show.
Just before the show, you said,
I looked like I was in a good mood.
And I felt that was an accusation today.
Why did you do that?
I'll take it back. I'll take it back. I just saw you by yourself just to paint this picture, right?
Typically, I am the first one to join Stream Yard because I was screen sharing.
I prepare the links. I got everything on screen today. I shared the link for the boys.
But you B-Chic were there before me because I was just finishing up my protein shake.
And then I join you and I see you all alone in stream, you're smiling by yourself.
So I was like, you know, I could take this two ways.
Either something's going on or you're just in a good mood.
So I went with the innocent, hey, you're in a good mood.
What's happening?
I'll take that back though.
And I'll say that I am in a very good mood
because I've been posting, been spamming the timeline actually,
with GPT 4.0.
We should show this very quickly.
This is pretty awesome if you're watching in.
Have you got it ready?
Yeah, I got it ready.
GPT 4.0 released this new image creation model,
where you can basically upload a character,
upload multiple characters.
And I said, I want to see a full body illustration
of my Pudgy exploring Tokyo.
I want to see it in Ghibli style.
I want to see my Pudji running around in the landscape.
It also works with other characters.
This is the best one.
Where I took Benny, also shout out to Benny, if he's listening today,
his play Amber PFP and my Pudge.
I'm like, I want to explore this temple.
And it is pretty good at just taking the art that you upload to it.
and create something with it.
It was like, put me hyper-realistically
in an open-world medieval RPG setting,
and here's my Pudgee doing that.
So it's pretty, pretty fascinating.
And now it also nailed text.
That means you can actually create,
don't have an example with this right now,
you can create full-on infographics with it.
Reds, you should try that.
I was going to say, am I switching from Claude?
Like, I think shit might have swung back now.
I tried gibbleification.
I fucking, I could not do it.
I got, I was getting dicked by, by the content policy for like half an hour.
I did everything I could to get around in, massaging words.
Well, yeah, I started with just generic, hey, can you do this image?
But in general, our anime, and it's like, oh, can you give it a Ghibli style?
Oh, like I was doing all the suggestions because there was a huge threat of like a thousand people that did all the things and everything that they did.
It just didn't like me last night for whatever reason.
I'll send you my prompt.
It worked on the first time.
I was just sending my wife photos of our family,
like in studio Gilby style,
and she was just having the best time.
Because all these family photos,
I was like sending them to her one up to the other.
I saw a thread, it's like,
delight your wife by sending her photos of your family.
And I was like, okay, I'll try this.
And it worked.
Twitter has some alpha from time to time.
Yeah, that was literally, like in the previous iterations, that was the, that was the prompt I always tried.
Like, I love Ghibli.
I always used to try to get something in a Ghibli style.
And it was never, never that effective.
It was always, I had to massage it with actual words and it just never understood what Ghibli meant.
But yeah, so I'm super excited.
I actually get it to unlock this time.
That's something that Mid Journey historically has been way better at like,
not even only ghibli style take a specific artist take a specific anime take a specific game and
create it in that style but that did not support to upload a specific picture to it so it could
like create new new things but it seems like i don't know chat chitbc's content policy is kind of
fun because sometimes like yo i want to create this movie character um
And then it says, yeah, I can't do that because it's against my content policy.
I'm like, all right, just do something that's inspired by that character.
And it literally does exactly that character says, oh, yeah, I was very inspired by his character,
but it's exactly the same.
So it's kind of fun how it can trick itself to avoid its own content policy.
I had to do that for Abraham Lincoln.
It's like, I want Abraham Lincoln on a surfboard.
I was like, bro, can't do a historical failure.
It's like, give me Abraham Lincoln impersonator.
Like, okay, done.
You have to go to Gemini for that.
but you may get a black Abraham Lincoln.
That's the only downside.
I was about to say that it comes in like a hyper woke Abraham Lincoln, right?
Yeah.
Very, yeah, a huge variety in terms of impersonators, I think.
Seriously, the next part real quick to that is the, this is the impressive one.
Like I was having this conversation with chat GPT about my supplementation and compound plan.
And now I finished it like three days ago.
Now I have access to this new image generating model.
I'm like create a beautiful infographic of all the supplements I'm supposed to take,
which is basically just text, text, text with some nice illustrations.
It nailed everything.
Interesting. Because as you said, text used to be really bad at.
Remember when we were trying to do YouTube thumbnails with it briefly?
And like it could, it can't do a word.
Like if you said it's like Trump pumps the market by 10 billion.
Like it will just spell billion wrong.
The number will be wrong.
The dollar sign will be backwards or something.
This is fascinating stuff.
So, Ledge, if there's a top tip that you're taking away from this before we get into the main stuff now, what is it?
for people experimenting with AI. It's probably trying to stay up to date with like capabilities
of new models because there's new Gemini models coming, there's new coding models,
and not trying to explore every single domain of it because that can be quite overwhelming.
And honestly, it's quite expensive if you want to have like premium access to everything.
Like I'm on the $200 plan for GPT alone to have the
all the features the fastest, but pick a lane that you're interested in,
find a couple people who are reporting on that and play around with the new tools,
try to get early access to because the pace that it seems to speed up and accelerate is becoming pretty insane.
Yeah, okay. Interesting. And this latest one is GPT40, so this is the normal open AI one, right?
Yeah, I mean, 4.4 has existed as a model, but it now has a new image-generating algorithm that's tied to that model.
Perfect. Excellent summary. Like that. Like being on top of like the creative stuff as well,
because we're all creators on the internet, I guess now. Two, let's keep it moving, though.
We are getting into the price action, as usual, starting with the majors. We've got Bitcoin up a percent to 88.2K.
You've got ETH flat. As usual, just 2.2K.2.2.
2K, nothing more, nothing less.
XRP, up a percent to 2.5.
BNB, $632, Solana, up 2% to $145.
Getting into the meme coin side of things, we have Doge.
Wow, okay, is this?
I'm going to press refresh because this seems...
Seems too good. I'm just double checking. Okay, we can go with it.
Up 10% doge is to 20 cents. Shib's up 15. Pepe's up 15.
Trump is up just a few. Bonkers up 10. Bartcoin is up 15. SPX up 8. Whiff is up 8.
Pengu's up 4.
Almost double digital, pushing double digits for a lot of the memes into the green.
AI16 Z is up 4. Mogs up 13. Peanut is up 7.
So a lot of green, a lot of green on
The meme coin side of things, AIXBT on the AI, maybe a bit more muted up 4%.
Getting into the main headlines themselves, we've got BlackRock expanding their money market
fund into Solana.
Legendary is going to explain a little bit of the details there in just a little bit.
We've got movement labs drawing scrutiny, following Binance's market maker investigation.
Remember yesterday, now it's a $38 million buyback of their token.
But there's a variety of pieces of news coming out yesterday that were kind of suggesting a bit more
How would you describe this?
A bit more malpractice, potentially.
In the whole market maker ecosystem,
whether founders are involved or not, we don't know,
but we'll explore that.
Try to explain some of the stuff that's going on there
in a bit more detail in a bit.
Then on the commercial side,
Napster snapped up for $207 million to build a music metaverse
to build a music metaverse.
Thought the Metaverse might have been finished in 2021, but it is not.
Maybe it might resurge in a slightly different form.
So those are the headlines we're going to be discussing today in a bit.
We've got some interesting discussion before that.
Before we get there, anything we need to know on the NFT side still seems pretty hot.
Indeed, it is. And the mover of today clearly is the Bordaibiot Club. It's up 16% over the week.
It's up 9% over the last 24 hours, sitting at a 14.25-Eth floor. Very, very strong movement. 300-Eth in volume.
That is also impressive to see. And that's generally on the back of a lot of collections,
seeing a fair amount of green.
Obviously, mutant tapes are up to a similar extent.
But so are Uzuki up 6%.
The Good Vipes Club, which had a massive correction,
has rebounded strongly from that, is up 25%.
So it seems that we are seeing quite a bit,
quite more than actually quite a bit,
quite some healthy volume that we haven't seen in a while in NFTs.
Also had the taproot, whether it's mint yesterday at 0.2BTC for most minters,
but I don't think that secondary trading is live for that just yet.
So we can't report on the volume there.
Good stuff. Yeah, we'll touch on Taproot Wizards again in a moment. We've got, just get everyone up to be with everything else in the market. We had $11.5 trillion dollar BlackRock launching a BC ETP in Europe.
Legendary spoke about that yesterday as well. Star viral app builder, Nikita Beer announced he will be joining Solana to help app build apps build. I think that was pretty big news. If you don't know Nikita Beer, really, really well known as someone who can accelerate.
apps and grow them incredibly fast. That's considered to be a very big win for the Solana
ecosystem to have him on as an advisor to builders. We also had the new plasma chain for stable
coins on Bitcoin revealed their technical documentation. They shared a couple of interesting, unique
Selling points which they're going to be pushing for the stable coins to go onto their chain.
I'll share those in a little bit in a moment.
Tapuit Risards, as Legendry just said, had 95% of their guaranteed spots minted out.
There are 90 more that will go on public sale today if you are still interested.
Kaito wrote out a mobile version for pro subscribers.
Rec drinks shared a new flavor teasing an abstract collaboration.
And again, along with the trend where the SEC are shutting down all of these investigations into crypto companies.
Yesterday, they closed their investigation into immutable, which is good news, I would think.
That's the roundup to get everyone up to speed.
Before we get into the main stuff, maybe I'm going to come to you, Brad, first for anything that's catching your attention in the roundup before we get into the main headlines.
Honestly, it's that Nikita announcement, because that kind of steps outside of our bubble, right?
So for people who don't know, Nikita Beers, like a prolific growth application go-to-market,
VC, or not VC, but like I would say just like a startup.
personality. I'm not intimately familiar with him, but that's his, that's his persona.
And the fact that he's, he acknowledged Solana as a growing ecosystem and one that is coming to
market with a lot of product and one that he's going to lend his knowledge to. It's pretty fucking
big. If you look at his tweet, you actually see that like he did it in a two part tweet. The first
one was just like he kind of rambles a little bit in the second one. He's like I'm working at
Solana. And the second tweet in his thread actually blew up
whenever I checked bigger.
So that's 500,
86 impressions there.
His second one is at 680.
So like his second tweet was bigger than his main tweet because it called out
Salana specifically I'm going to work for it.
And that was the headline.
That was the hook.
That was the panger that I wouldn't kind of figure it out because it counts so big.
And.
And yeah, so it's actually something that's super impressive.
And the opposite of this is,
this is kind of just an aside that I kind of took notice over the last few days
is if you looked at Polymarket,
they actually did the one tweet bamboozle of everyone on the timeline
because they did the initial tweet that just said,
Solana and everyone freaked the fuck out.
They get on there, they're tweeting it, they're liking it.
They're freaking out.
They're speculating.
Polymarkets going to Solana.
And then they did a second tweet, like an hour later on top of it.
They just said like,
can now be deposited into polymarket to fund your polymarket account.
So it wasn't a migration, it wasn't anything.
It's just like we're announcing a new deposit address basically for you.
But they used the psychology of Twitter to turn that into a viral tweet.
So yeah, two big wins for Solana and headlines.
But one of them is actually really meaningful, which is the kiddie beer.
That's a long, that's a long term play out thing.
Yeah, Nikita is about as elite as it gets in terms of growth marketing and viral growth marketing.
And he just understands growth loops probably better than anyone else at the moment.
It's really exciting for Solana.
We'll see who he ends up working with.
He also has kind of a track record for building companies and selling them super quickly.
So it's kind of like a perfect fit for a chain where a pump fund is the most successful
you know, app to launch there. And so we'll see if he works on something that can persist long
term or if we just see a bunch of these like pump fun style like super fast rise and then crash out.
So yeah, I have a ton of respect for him as a builder. I didn't mean that in any like way to shade,
but it is very much like a bit for his vibe and how he builds and grows companies.
That's such an interesting point because I think
Kind of like with all leadership, you have people who excel at different types of things.
You can have companies in a really bad position and someone might excel in turning it around.
It doesn't mean they'll take them to becoming the top company, but you'll get you from like bad to now acceptable.
And then you go from acceptable and maybe the next person is the person to take you from acceptable to outstanding.
And I guess what you're saying there is Nikita's exceptional at going from like,
zero to one, maybe maybe higher than one potentially.
But then, you know, if you want to build that product out for the long term over multiple years or decades or whatever, like that's not, that's not his, the skill set.
He possesses, but he's outstanding at doing that first bit.
I just wanted to share one thing.
I tweeted this yesterday when I saw the news because this is the one thing I took away from one of the podcasts I listened to with him, which is on age.
Yeah.
the age of your consumers and he says he always builds for teenagers
primarily because for every year that your customer or your your audience gets older they are
less likely to share
your work and so the older that your customers are the more likely is that you're going to have to
pay to grow because the people who you're targeting are not going to be like hyper online or
they've just got other things to do in life so they're not even around each other in social settings
like in college or school or wherever where you're always around each other to make your app go viral
I thought that was really interesting. Adam, do you have any reflections there?
Was there any other key takeaways since you've been following his kind of journey as well?
Yeah, I think your point earlier was spot on.
There's very few CEO founder types like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos who can go from incubation through to hypergrove.
And so he...
He knows his niche.
He knows how, where he can fit in.
Like for example, like myself,
like I've done a lot of zero to one work.
And so it's very different from growth work.
I've also done growth work.
But from like my happy place is when I'm taking something from like,
something doesn't exist, your pre-product market fit.
You're in this like what's called IDMAs.
And then you want to like figure out how to delight your customers and find like a market.
I've done growth.
It's fun.
But this, the uncertainty of figure, it's like, are we going to make it?
What is it?
How to, like, to me, that's like there's a spark there.
And so I've seen the whole spectrum.
He is very much like right at the start into that spectrum.
And maybe it's because of his apps,
He just got cashed out so early.
He's like the dream of crypto, right?
Like he builds something.
And then seven months later, he has like a massive exit and just, you know,
sails off into the sunset.
He's hit his meme coin a bunch of times at this point.
Yeah, it's like it's actually a reasonable analogy because people in this space get criticized so so much for doing, for raising quickly and having all this money very quickly.
But it's possible to do that, I guess, in the real world of business too.
That is on the table.
Yeah, it is extremely unusual.
I don't, I'm not familiar with any other founders who have his sort of track record in the way that he builds and exits as companies.
Yeah. Awesome. As you said, I think that is the key conclusion there. Huge win for Salon to have someone of his caliber entering into their ecosystem. Okay, before we get into the main stuff, I wanted to share something today on plasma. So you like to dive into different opportunities, different things where we're allocating our attention to, even before we have an opportunity to allocate our capital. The thing I wanted to share here yesterday was, um,
I did this tweet where I was just explaining why I thought plasma is particularly interesting.
And everyone's obviously asking how you can get exposure to stable coins.
Stable coins is like the key topic of your conversation.
TVL is going through the roof.
Despite the market sentiment, at least on crypto Twitter being bad,
people know that stable coins are...
are going to be pretty crucial for the next leg of crypto.
And I think one of the best answers to that question of what one of the best
ways to get exposure to this stable coin is is plasma because A,
it is a new chain. It's backed by Bitfinex and Tether. It's supported by Tier 1
centralized exchanges on launch. It hasn't launched yet, but it's going to,
angels include Peter Thiel, Guy from Athena and Kobe, and
Obviously, the founder of Tether is very much involved.
as soon as i actually found out about this this was like a few weeks ago i reached out to the
team i was trying to figure out like can i can we get an allocation can we get involved in some
way they said they were closed i said like closed closed there's one type of close where you think it
can still be open and then there's a different type of clothes with like okay you're actually closed
i've still got a bit of hope i don't know i might try again at some point maybe there'll be
another round but um i think a the backing here is exceptional the people who are backing it are really good
And they actually released a bit more information yesterday as to why, like, why is this necessary?
Because one of the things people say about stable coins is that we, why don't, why not just use the EVM?
Why not just send it around on Solana or on Ethereum?
What's the point of having something more bespoke when you can already do this cheaply?
And I think they gave a bit of an answer yesterday.
So there are three things that they shared, which I thought was interesting to know of why they thought this stable coin specific chain is necessary.
The first is, the first is custom gas tokens, pay, so you can pay fees in USDT or Bitcoin.
So this is actually going to be built alongside Bitcoin.
That's one thing to note.
Okay.
You can actually do custom gas tokens elsewhere as well.
So that's not necessarily something specific to this.
They said confidential transactions.
So you can protect transaction details without sacrificing compliance.
But the main thing is,
is they said they're going to make USDT transfers free
for simple transactions.
So that is obviously something which is completely unique.
If the purpose of the chain and if the main asset
on the chain is gonna be USDT,
it's obviously backed by Tether,
and they're gonna start making those simple transactions free,
they can eat those costs because they're making so much money
because all of your USDT is in the bank with them
and they're earning,
earning on top of that instead.
Um, that becomes quite a profitable and a profitable business for them, but also just it
becomes a very decent use case for all stable coin users say, well, why pay even $2 or why even
pay $1? Why even pay $0.50 when you can do those simple transactions over on plasma for free.
Now, I don't know if this necessarily means they're going to have a moat around that forever.
Maybe this is just going to kick off a competition where everyone's going to have to start reducing
their fees on stable coins.
because they've been making so much damn money already, it's the best business in town, right?
They get you, they get to hold your money and the treasury rate or earn the interest without
having to give you anything. So maybe, you know, this is just going to kick off the competition.
But wanted to bring that to people's attention. If you're interested in,
in terms of getting any exposure, the only thing that there is to do at the moment is you can join
their Discord and they have something called a stable coin collective.
which is, you know, for people who are taking an interest, people who think this is interesting,
it's kind of to do with content.
You might be able to get a Discord role or be a part of that.
This is not sponsored in any way.
It's just something I've found very interesting and where my attention has gone in some way.
I'm going to pause there.
Adam, so you nodding along there on certain parts, maybe had some questions around the
Bitcoin aspect potentially.
What are your reflections here?
Yeah.
Well, I remain very convinced that stable coins is one of the very, very clear winners
and use cases for crypto.
Like whenever I'm trying to pill somebody on crypto, it's like, Cryptos is like, okay, probably
a lot of it.
However, like stable coins are like.
like a really important use case. On the Bitcoin piece, I'm pretty skeptical like that.
It should be used as a settlement layer. It is the most secure, like, you know, OG chain.
However, it's extremely slow and it's also quite expensive. Like what is the value prop of using
Bitcoin as a settlement layer where a transaction can cost, you know, let's say $50?
and it could take hours to fulfill when you can use Ethereum,
which could be seconds and dollars, especially now that gas is sub one.
So I don't know, like Bitcoin would be more expensive
than a wire transfer and debatably at the same speed.
And so if you're going to introduce a new technology,
it has to be better than what currently exists.
And I'm not convinced that using Bitcoin as a way to settle stable coins is the answer.
I am extremely bullish.
on stable coins generally and a sediment layer exclusively for stable coins seems okay.
It doesn't feel necessary given that you can already transfer them on any number of blockchains
and it seems to work. So it's unclear if this is like a solution where there is no actual problem
or if there's something that I'm missing that makes it more valuable to have an exclusive chain
for settlement. So I don't fully understand the why behind it.
to me actually, because I agree with your line of thought so so much.
To me, the thing that stood out more than the free transfers or BTC being the settlement layer
is this middle part, the confidential transaction without sacrificing compliance, because
We obviously now have a better situation around tornado, not OFEX sanction anymore,
but there's like so many more jurisdictions and that again reminds me obviously coming from
the U-specific perspective, travel rule. If I want to send you Adam more than 1K from my centralized
exchange, I need to actually K-Y-CU. Obviously, that's not the case if I'm sending it, you know,
from the centralized exchange from my like self-hosted wallet and then to you. But there might be like,
more business-involved transactions,
say the modern market is working with a partner,
and that's actually some more compliance to be done in the background.
And there is a requirement to have some sort of compliance,
whatever that process or regulatory requirement is,
could be crypto asset service providers in the EU, whatever.
but still have the protected transaction details.
Because now it feels like you can either be fully public,
or you can be like fully private and close to the tornado
the cash, OFEX sanctioned territory,
but there's like no midground.
So actually to me, this is the interesting feature.
The free gas tokens or
doesn't really matter like send something on if it's what six 12 18 cents depending on the speed
to send stuff right now settling on btc yeah it's secure but it's slow but to me actually the
confidential but compliant transactions is the interesting key point here that's interesting uh yeah
i think that is also interesting too there's those three reasons they give i think those two are
the most interesting maybe a quick one to bread then putting you on the spot as the technical person we you know
I think that's one of the things that most surprised people about plasma is going to settle to Bitcoin.
I found this one tweet which seeks to explain how it works.
I wonder if you can just give your quick instinctive takes.
I don't think you've seen this yet.
You might be able to.
It's this tweet here.
It's not that one.
I'm sharing it at the moment.
I just need to change the screen.
It says plasma integrates a native trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge secured by the same decentralized valid data set as plasma BFT by periodically anchoring state differences on Bitcoin.
Plasma achieves seamless interoperability and uses Bitcoin as a settlement layer, delivering permissionless finality, stronger censorship resistance.
and a universally verifiable source of truth.
It does also say that it will deploy its core components,
the PASMA BFT Consensus Protocol,
optimized for high throughput and low latency
and a fully eBM-compatible execution layer built on RET.
So that's a bit of a mouthful for me as a non-technical person,
but I can see a bit of an eBM compatibility settling on Bitcoin.
Does this make sense to you?
What's your instinctive thought?
Um, so like the like the literal like application of it like cool you can send shit over to a Bitcoin.
That's fine. It's the same stuff that like ordinals and stuff do. Like oh, it's on Bitcoin.
But the problem the problem with doing this stuff on Bitcoin is Bitcoin is not natively programmable.
Like it has some flexibility with scripts, but like you can't have logic applied to the things on Bitcoin,
which makes it materially different than a smart contract platform, not even Ethereum, just anything that has that has logic that can be applied.
And why that matters is like it's in the verbiage there.
It's a little bit of nuance that you can't really detect.
But it's like they say the same validators that are existed on plasma are the ones that
are validating the bridge on Bitcoin.
Right.
So that means you have the same entity on on the L2 that is making sure that everything that
exists on the L1 is cool.
That's like in the Ethereum world, that'd be like the sequencer, right, that everyone
is a scared of because it's owned by one person or small and group of people that says like,
I give this stuff over to the sequencer.
The sequencer then does all this magic, orders it, executes it, then sets it down to Ethereum.
Ethereum then has smart contracts.
It then has its own set of validators.
It has all this stuff that sits there.
And they do work against the information that is pushed down to Ethereum and says, this stuff's good.
And in a situation where the sequencer is malicious, misbehaves, the L2.
entity is broken in some way, they're trying to censor you, you can circumvent that.
And you can go directly to Ethereum where this bridge contract exists because this bridge
contract is the thing that says what is true in the world of the L2, right?
It's the canonical state of the L2.
It says what I own.
It says what you own.
It says what what what where the tokens just went, right?
And that exists there and the sequencer, all the stuff in the L2 world reads from
from that and says, okay, this stuff is cool.
The problem is if again, if you, the same entity that has the risk of censoring you at the first level also is the thing that is validating the thing on the second level, well, kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?
Like so you're not your, you're inheriting one part of the thing, which is good, which is the Bitcoin is like, right, it's permanent, right?
Like it's it's going to be there forever. That's good.
whether that is good permanent or bad permanent,
like this information that is permanent is valid
is not as strong on Bitcoin because it's not programmable
because it's the same entity that's doing doing,
doing both of those things.
Whereas in the Ethereum world, again, you have your own set of validators, right?
It's the most distributed, you know, proof of state network in the world.
It's like got all this stuff, right?
It's got logic that can be applied inside of the contract that says the last state snapshot
versus the next state snapshot is like it can actually be bridged to, right?
All that stuff.
And it holds like the data availability stuff.
So it's good on some, some lines.
It's still, you know,
not awesome on the rest of it because it's not programmable.
Maybe that changes with the opcat coming.
That's a big thing.
And then the secondary question of that is like, okay, how much value does this actually drive to Bitcoin?
If it's like this other entity, Plasma is capturing a sheer ton of value and then sending little like sending shekels back to Bitcoin over a long term horizon.
Like how does that accrue value for for Bitcoin in a world where it needs fees?
It doesn't, right?
We're not seeing that in an Ethereum world.
That's so, yeah, that's the TLDR based on that thing.
I haven't actually read their actual technical breakdown, but that's, that's my understanding
You're like a human infographic.
It's incredible.
How do you explain complex things?
So you're going to have to teach me how to explain things so simply.
It was my career for 10 years.
I worked in medical.
I had to explain tech to doctors.
And they're like, I don't know what the fuck you're dealing with.
I'm like, well, imagine you have two bunnies and do a thing.
Okay. So that's the answer.
Be working medical for 10 years and then pivot to crypto.
So you can explain all these concepts. Perfect.
Draw a lot of diagrams.
Easy.
You heard it here first.
Draw a lot of diagrams as well.
Good stuff.
As we said, you know, that was just on instinct bread breakdown.
but they've released more documents.
So I'm interested to find out more.
Also want to get the founder on, to be honest,
because I think that would be a really interesting conversation
to have in a longer form.
So we'll try to do that.
Let's keep it moving though for today and get into the first headline,
BlackRock expanding money market fund to Solana,
Ledge, what do we need to know here?
Why is this interesting?
Take it away.
Yeah, big news for Solana actually.
So BlackRock has the Biddle Fund, which is that 1.9 billion headland is a bit outdated here.
Money Market Fund, which lives on.
On six blockchains, it started on Ethereum last year, and now they are expanding to Solana.
Just as a recap for those not familiar with the Biddle Fund, basically the idea is to make it accessible to institutional investors, to qualified investors,
and it's a fund that is holding $1.9 billion in cash and US treasuries.
It's going to go into the stats in a bit. It's growing pretty quickly, so it's going to hit $2 billion soon, most likely.
The fund, again, it started on ETH, also lives on Polygon APTA's algorithm optimism,
and is now coming to Solana.
The basically co-founder CEO of Securitize is saying,
in the year since Biddle's launched,
we've seen significant growth in demand for tokenized real-world assets,
reinforcing the value of bringing institutional-grade products on chain.
And as this whole segment is gaining momentum,
it makes sense for Biddle to expand to Solana.
And as part of the article, it's also mentioned that there's only a bit more than 60 holders of that biddle fund, which if we take a look at RWA.xYZ, that is true.
So it's $1.9 billion.
That is up 200% by the way over the last 30 days.
So it's growing pretty, pretty fast.
And it is 62 holders only, but that is to do that, again, it's not open to everyone.
And it's going to...
You need to be a US qualified purchaser to be able to invest in that fund, which in my opinion makes it even cooler because
It shows that there is some serious institutional grade demand for that.
And that's not only for the Black Rock Biddle Fund, if you go through the whole category of tokenized treasuries,
that is now a $5.2 billion market.
It's up 13% over the last week alone.
And there's Templeton in there. There's a couple more other providers offering very, very similar products.
Most of that volume up to date, 3.8 billion is living on ETH.
We've seen a bit on Solana, seen a bit on Al-Alaunch, a bit on Arbitrum.
This is the Solana segment right here.
The pink one with currently 120 mil out of the total assets on the management.
And it will be interesting to revisit this chart to see both how tokenized treasuries are increasing over the next couple of months, but also to see how much of the new inflows will happen on Solana versus ETH for BlackRock Spittle Fund specifically.
Excellent summary. That chart was super helpful, because that was the exact question I was going to ask you next.
Like, where, in what proportion are these chains capturing those tokenized treasury markets?
Sounds like ether is by far and away the biggest.
The interesting thing there that I hadn't realized is what was the second one?
There was some yellow segment called Stella. Is that XRP somehow?
Yeah.
Stellar is its own thing, isn't it?
Or is still on XP?
I wouldn't know.
I think it's its own thing, but let me check it real quickly.
Okay, well, the thing that I was thinking, and maybe this is a question for the guys who are...
It's its own thing.
It's its own thing, yeah.
Okay.
So the way people, again, maybe this is just how narratives form on the internet, people think
about this stuff as ETH versus Soul.
And when you had that chart up, there's a bunch of other segments that were bigger than Seoul at this point in time, at least.
So I think that's interesting to note because you can see, I mean, what can you tell us, Legge, that's got more tokenized treasury share than Solana at the moment?
Currently, Arbitrum with 130 mil versus the 120 on Solana, stellar with 465.
Avax is just behind Solana at 106 mil, and again, the biggest one is obviously still
ETH with 3.8 billion.
Interesting.
Very interesting stuff.
Adam, what do you think on, I mean, we spoke the other day about being probably like
slightly more ether lined?
And then we also spoke about, I think there's definitely a confidence amongst
eth investors that a lot of this activity, because Ethereum is the most decentralized,
therefore it should be the most trusted when it comes to this type of stuff.
We had a long time listener message specifically yesterday to say, like, look, guys, it's
happening elsewhere too.
Um, what's your view on that? Do you think, do you buy into the thing where
ether's going to, is, it should be taking and maintaining that significant advantage
that it has? Or do you think in the end, like, look, people are just going to go with their
liquidity is and if Sanana keeps doing well, it will keep capturing more?
Do you want my honest answer or the answer that I wish to be true? And they like, so,
You know, I was at GDC last week and ended up talking about
ETH a lot with the CEO of Proof Play, Amith.
And we're both very much aligned with the virtual world computer vision,
like the technology, like the fact is the value accrual is simply not there.
Like the L2s and the L3s are not adding value back to ETH.
There's a number of like L1s that are taking away value.
I don't see the narrative story outside of it's the second best coin after Bitcoin.
But why is it the second best coin?
I think it kind of, this is not my line, but I think eth has maybe kind of become like a meme
coin at this point, where it will have value because other people believe it has value.
It's no longer deflationary. It's no longer like ultrasound money, like, you know,
gas is under one eath that just shows like the man for the chain itself.
as far as like where value goes i still think it's probably like the best place to do these
you know high value transactions that's why we put our our collections there that's why we're
settling to it ultimately but i think what you said at the end is right people will go where the
liquidity is wherever that may be like locust capital um what the end state of where like if we get
to a point where blockchain is accepted by fintech
in a more traditional way and it becomes like a set in the layer for either real world assets or stable coins,
whatever that looks like where it's truly integrated into the global financial system,
I think it's likely that would happen on Eath.
But ultimately it's going to be about like regulatory, things like regulatory capture,
like who has the right connections where, like, who's networking with the right politicians,
with the right, because like we have one administration now, who knows what we'll have next?
Like maybe they're not going to be XRP and Cardano aligned.
Maybe they're going to be, you know, they want to put everything on Dogecoin or maybe they're going to want to put everything on ETH.
Like nobody really knows, but whoever acts quickly to sort of like,
get that regulatory capture is probably going to be the ultimate winner. But I don't, I don't think we have the story, I don't think the story is played out yet. We're seeing a lot of things move around regularly. I think that's one of my biggest learnings of what is only my second cycle. I don't think this cycle's over. This is my second cycle. It's just
the understanding that Bitcoin is separate.
Everything else is just great tech.
And as we know from the past,
tech can be great for a period of time.
And then it has to keep working to beat the competitors
that want to take its place.
And I think that competition is going to be incredibly aggressive
over the,
well, for the foreseeable future, it will just be incredibly aggressive, really, really strong competition, which ultimately be good for the space, I think, because competition should be good. We should welcome that.
But it just means that the winner is going to have to keep working. I'm going to have to keep staying at the top.
So I definitely take your point there that, you know, the game's not up. I don't think.
Interesting stuff.
Look, talking of regulatory capture, let's move into,
that's not a good segue because...
Well, one of the things that movement have been talking about is like politics and how that is a good go to market strategy.
You know, crypto's ethos can exist in can exist.
But at the same time, these chains are going to go out there to get business as Adam was just saying.
But movement are in the news for some other for some other scrutiny this time, Brad.
You've got the scoop here.
What do we need to know?
It's kind of a.
kind of a disturbing story in some ways what's going on it's interesting if nothing else because
it's something that a lot of us probably didn't have visibility into prior to this um so the headline
is movement labs draw scrutiny following finance market maker investigation uh the initial
overview is from from blockworks uh and the t lDR is that movement hired a market maker web
report is the one that's been called out through investigations uh and after uh
going live back in December, it was discovered that Binance was kicking Web3Port off of their
platform, right? The sex. And it was because they saw irregular activities coming out of their
trading. And what that was was on launch, they actually had sold around $38 million worth of
tokens back in December, moved tokens specifically. And
That's not great, right?
The job of a market maker is not necessarily to just dump on retail, but to try to offer a bid, basically, for your actual provide liquidity, right?
Make sure that things actually tradable and maintain a delta neutral position.
But they were dumping tokens.
They made about $38 million.
Finance ban.
ban them. And the movement team set up and said, hey, we saw that they did this. We are now
going to set up a movement strategic reserve or strategic movement reserve buy back the same
$38 million worth in tokens and make it use it for future growth in the ecosystem, right?
You know, sustainable stuff, all this shit.
And then you just start to see a bunch of things come out from the rest of the ecosystem,
one namely from Kane, famously of synthetics and Infinex now,
where he gives kind of a little bit of a war story on market makers broadly.
So it's a long greed.
There's a lot of stuff to go into.
I think...
It's just kind of interesting to kind of peel back the curtains and see what's going on.
His experience with launching, remember, he's an OG.
He's been here through like the ICO era.
Like he's been on the corporate side, corporate being like the professional, like product side since the 2017 years.
So like he gets a lot of insight into like how people behave back then.
You can see him reference.
Yeah.
like how Alameda and SBX and a few others actually like behaved over the ages.
And his high level is that like, okay, you know, there was a call option structure where
the market makers would do a call option because it was cheaper than it allowed them to dump.
And then they came back short it and like just all the shit.
He expands on it.
And he's saying that the meta has evolved again.
Now you can you basically just get sold discounted tokens to liquid funds.
And then those guys actually just are able to operate that way.
And he gives a few examples in here.
Again, it's just a useful read.
It's like some lore to the industry.
He has a one, two, and three example.
I want to see what your guys' thoughts are on who this number three could be.
So he gives three examples of ways that market makers have been really good at sciopping, basically everyone else on CT.
Like they say like, oh, Alameda is actually these like goaded genius traders who were, you know, in the background.
They have this edge.
They're doing this shit in like, I think it was calling out Japan specifically.
Smartest shit.
Turns out that they're just like.
grifters that that like can't even track their own P&L and like they just have the inside so like
they create this mystique around people and then through that mystique they're able to do crime
and then eventually the crime gets found out and you know everything unravels and this number three
he's talking about like it sounds like hyper liquid but it can't be hyper liquid but number
his number three example of like grifting going on in space sounds like it might be something recent
And maybe it's the movement stuff that he's referring to now that I think about it.
But his description is, oh, no, you've got it all wrong.
It isn't this weird deal with liquid funds that is pumping that L1.
Again, because movement has been described as a side chain and L2 and L1.
It's all over the place based on its construction.
It's been getting dunked on by the technical crypto Twitter crowd.
We said it.
It isn't, it's this weird deal with the liquid funds that is pumping the L1 vapor token.
The founder is just rich from his prior startup and is bidding it himself into a low liquidity,
low float in reality.
And reality is like I guess what he's just referring to here, but like Rushi was a college student.
So he like I don't think he has this lore of being rich previously unless they're talking
about like his co-founder who's like this guy behind the scenes that I've heard about a few times.
Yeah, Hyperliquid had like the, the Jeff was previously rich as a market maker prior to his stuff.
But again, Hyperliquid actually has a really good product.
So like it's not a vapor L one.
So what could that be?
I don't know.
I like this.
I like this storyline for the show.
We need like one of those boards up with different people's names.
We've got to like pin people's images.
Who has all the traits?
Yeah, I don't know.
It's turned into a bit of a mystery game.
But, um,
As you say, I think it's a challenging circumstance because we spoke about on the show a few weeks ago, right?
Like when you talked about what the game's pivoted to, it's kind of become even less opaque.
Well, as in this opaque and that nobody knows about it, but it's simply, apparently the deals that are going around, which are as simple as by the token,
at this price on the market and you'll get given tokens at this price later or much,
much lower for you to sell later, which is, I don't know, it's just, it's very duplicitous
in a way, right? It's just, how is anyone in this retail market supposed to figure out
what's going on when you're seeing these tokens at the price that they are,
if that stuff is going on and those things are not disclosed,
it creates a hell of a lot of confusion, I think, and again, just a bad taste, I think.
One day I'll write the expose, the chaos monkeys of the crypto space,
If you're familiar with that book, it absolutely needs to be written because people don't
understand all the shenanigans that take place behind the scenes.
Yeah, you've gone through this, right?
I've been through it.
I've hired and fired, well, the foundation has hired and fired market makers.
You know, they've been approached by liquid token funds.
There is just all sorts of nefariousness going on behind the scenes.
One of the things that we at Proof-Play pride ourselves on is,
I think it's our first or second value is industry leading integrity.
Like that's a standard we hold ourselves to.
And it's extremely difficult to operate in a space where others don't follow the same set of principles.
Like you have teams that are just straight up doing illegal things.
Like they're not even like borderline, there's full illegal.
But they're in different locales and so, or they just have different risk tolerances.
And then you have communities and just like the entirety of the space have eyes on you.
And they're like, oh, why don't you also do that?
Like, wait, why isn't your-
Why don't you crime, Fern?
Yeah, why isn't your token pumping like nonstop?
It's like, well, because what you're seeing there is like inorganic, potentially illegal activity.
We're not willing to do that.
Like my job is not to go to jail to enrich you.
Like my job is to build something of value
that hopefully others enjoy,
want to take part in,
and therefore they think they see their value
and they want to buy it.
It's old-fashioned.
It's boring.
Maybe it doesn't work to be perfectly frank in this space.
Like maybe you have to have a bit of like joker in you
if you want to survive.
But at the end of the day, like,
I'm a doxed person, you know, like my reputation is the most important thing to me.
Like our team's reputations are the most important things to us.
And it's much more important that we operate and are able to sleep well at night
and operate with high integrity than make short-term decisions that have long-term negative implications.
And there's other teams that make the opposite decision, right?
And that's totally fine.
But it's hard to coexist.
in a place where it's such an uneven playing ground.
And every time a new story like this comes out,
people are seeing more and more of what's happening behind the scenes.
Like the Kessler, the Serana, like Radium, Jupiter,
like this is all happening all the time.
Like I didn't know anything about the Solana stuff,
it's not my ecosystem, but I knew it was happening.
I didn't know what was happening, but I knew something was happening.
But I couldn't, now I know, now we all know.
yeah maybe something you can give color to like the like movement's been shrouded in a lot of
these controversies and like the default now i think is people are just assuming that they are
the ones that are guilty of all of this where it's like oh there's no way that movement didn't know
about the market maker doing the thing because of the whatever um so maybe the color you could
provide is like is it plausible that people
people go rogue, like you had, maybe in your own experience, you had agreements with,
with a marketmaker that acted on their own interests and outside of what you knew they were going
to do. And therefore, that leads you to the next thing. Like, okay, we got to, we got to rectify
this. A market maker's job is to make money for itself. Its business is not to you. It's to its
LPs or to its proprietary fund, however they're set up.
They have agreements with the teams they're working with,
but ultimately if those agreements will make them less money
than decisions that they would be making that are countered to your own interests,
they're going to make those decisions.
And the only recourse you have is to remove them and no longer work with them.
It's all about incentives, huh?
You can try to align incentives really well,
but there's always going to be an ARB.
And if there is an ARB, they will take it.
Interesting. Really interesting conversation. I think it's really important for people when a, I think one thing, two things. One, I think that conversation is a really interesting one for people to hear. Two, if you haven't already and bread brought up the thread from Kane, go and read that in a bit more detail. So I think if you're going to participate in this market.
you have to have a handle on what is going on behind the scenes because it's kind of like shooting
blind basically when you're starting to realize the amount of stuff that's going on behind
the scenes and you're just like pulling up your chart on a wednesday morning thinking oh this is up
2% or this is up 9% what's going on here like you're not privy
Obviously, you can't be privy to all the things, but just to have an appreciation of some of the stuff that's going on, I think it's going to become super helpful as a tool in your toolkit, basically, to try to navigate this market because it really feels like when you find out some of the stuff that, damn, I've been shooting blind for a long time.
I don't even, you start to wonder how you've even been successful beforehand if all of this other stuff is going on at the same time.
So very, very helpful conversation.
Appreciate that extra.
insight, Adam.
Yeah, I'll just add one thing.
Even if you know how it works, it doesn't really help you, to be clear.
You can know, I know all the things that could have, I know the whole range of options.
It doesn't make me a better trader.
Maybe I'm too stupid to know how to calculate it to the right actions, but I know what's
going to have to know too much now.
I know so much and I still don't know how to action on it.
So these market makers behave in mysterious ways.
Some of them are just like straight up bad actors, right?
Kessler is just the bad omrace.
And then you have everyone else just self-interested.
And so you can try to put yourselves in their position.
But remember, they can make money on both sides.
They can make money longing a coin and shorting a coin.
So what do you do with that information?
If you know a market maker has 10 million tokens from an ecosystem,
they can take either action and make money because they have so many tokens that are able to move the market.
So how do you as a retail participant action on that?
And I don't actually know the answer.
That's a good question.
Maybe we're probably going to leave the final headline for today because we're running out of time but led to that question
if people are trying to figure out how to position themselves or how to respond to this type of information when we learn about it.
as an ordinary individual trying to participate,
how would you think about dealing with this information
and managing this information?
So, A, first of all, I think it's cool that we have this amount of information
because if you go back to the average chat-fair participant,
you wouldn't have that detail of inset as to how things work in the background.
So I do think there's more transparency in Web 3 already.
Very much agree with Adam's point because market makers make
money of volume, look at something like winter mute, who have done what seven, maybe now
$9,000 billion in volume already, and that goes both ways. You just, and they, if they hold a token,
they will know what the market, they will watch how the market is trading that, and they will react
to that, and they will make money on reacting to that. So it's,
not the best idea to try to out trade a market maker necessarily.
It's probably like the same thing if you're like, oh, I see Jared from Subway and I see
two of his main wallets who have done a couple billion in token outflows over the last
annual couple months and you're like, let me see if I can get a piece of that action and compete
with Jared when it comes to MEV stuff.
You're going to lose your money.
And I would basically take the same stance with the elite market makers.
If you're not the top 0.01% and you know what you're actually doing, don't go to quote-unquote war with a market maker.
If you see a market maker coming into your token, you're like getting kind of afraid of that.
And they use this as a good instance to question your conviction.
Is it long term?
What do you want to do with that?
Say you hold...
I don't know, I don't want to point out a token C, a holder token, which is called B, C, Z, probably like, even exists.
And you see a market maker is coming in and you're worried about that because it's like rather low market cap and you don't know what's going to happen with that.
And maybe this is the point to ask yourself if you are in for like a quick trade for that or if it's like a long term play.
And if it's a long term play for you, then one market maker entering that shouldn't like scare you off.
If it's more of a quick trade.
which was the case with some of the AI agents, right?
When we were trading AI XPT and smaller ones,
poly trader and you're waiting, oh, market maker is coming in.
In that case, that was a good sell signal, actually,
because they then made more money on the shorts.
So, yeah, don't try to out-trade the market maker,
but use it as a good spot to question yourself,
what do you want, what do you expect from holding that token in particular?
One final thing as we close out, not entirely serious, but maybe in the best case scenario,
if you can't beat them, can you join them in the sense that's not the nefarious ones, I hope.
But we've been speaking about Wildcat on the show Legendary last couple weeks.
It's this new protocol where you can provide liquidity to trusted borrowers.
So you have to be whitelisted.
You have to.
So one of the first teams who were seeking funding on Wildcat was Wintermew.
And so, you know, I provided some liquidity and now I guess as winter mute profit,
you profit as well. I'm hoping that there must be some like given the winter mute standard
seemed to be one of the number one market makers that there's some standards there
that they're operating better than others. I would hope that them being that in that position
would mean that. But I guess, as you say, it's kind of an opaque thing. We never know entirely.
But that is an interesting
alternative way you said you can't beat them or don't go to war with them it's one way to join
some of them that you might think are better than others um once is capitalism just beautiful
can't beat them just throw money at them and at least make money of them winning the best ones
the best ones the ones with where you think are better than the others um so
Let's see. That's the option. That's the final one to close out. Really, really interesting conversation. Glad we had that. Adam, I thought those extra insights coming from you being in the trenches and in the arena really was really helpful for that conversation. But guys, that's our show for today. We've run a little bit over. Thanks so much for joining us. We had legendary bread and Adam.
from proof of play up with us on stage.
Thanks to everyone for being here.
Remember, we do this every single day,
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