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FOMO HOUR: Crypto ATHs Loading
Recorded: Aug. 11, 2025 Duration: 0:59:41Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto market is experiencing a significant resurgence, with major cryptocurrencies like ETH and Bitcoin seeing substantial price increases. Fundraising efforts are also on the rise, highlighted by notable treasury raises, while trends indicate a growing interest in meme coins and reputation systems within the ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. GM, GM, everyone.
We're going to start the show here in just a minute.
Going to give a few shout outs.
We've got Belfort, Cyber Nomad, Zanzibar, GM, GM.
Thanks for joining us.
Erking, Antfex, McNutt, the homie. GM, Poria, all right.
Hunt Club, Hector, Donna, GM, GM.
Thank you for joining us.
We got Sims up here.
We're going to get Logan up here shortly.
Sims, I think whenever you're ready, let's kick it. Thank you. GM, everyone, and welcome to another episode of FOMO Hour. Today, today is Monday, August 11th,
2025. And folks, it was a massive week of crypto news last week, and yet price action was lagging
a bit, but it caught up this weekend, majors and alts pumping big time. And now we are asking
when all time highs. We're
going to break it all down on today's show. No for Oak today, but we got Mando in the house.
We got Logan in the house. Gentlemen, GM, how you doing? Mando, not retired. We were unsure.
We thought it might be 50-50. I'm doing amazing, man. How are you?
Doing good. This was a fun weekend, and this morning has been rapid.
There's been a lot of news breaking already this morning.
My husband's been trying to keep up with it, but it was a nice weekend for sure.
Logan, how are you doing?
Hey, good morning, Tyler. Doing well. It's been a while since I've been here.
So excited to be back, especially the market in better conditions, I think, than the last time I was here.
Yeah, fun to have you back on. I think we were still speculating on the easy road.
I actually want to check back in with you. Is this the easy road?
And or when are we going to get on there? We'll talk about it on today's show.
Folks, what are we talking about? We're going to get Mando's market report, this big overnight pump.
It's slowed off. It looks like we're grinding back up. Stocks are green. We got CPI tomorrow.
ETH Bitcoin flipping green for We got CPI tomorrow.
ETH Bitcoin flipping green for the first time since January.
Trying to acquire Stargate.
Memes might be heating back up.
Punks heating up.
And in the back half of our show, we're going to have a conversation with Serpent from Ethos.
So it is a big show.
Looking forward to that.
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All right, Mando, if you are ready, let's get right into it.
Who is the man, macro daddy of the land?
Can you dig it?
Yeah, GM everyone.
I am unretired.
I've come back out of retirement to these special shows.
ETH has broken through 4K.
I think it did it on Friday, right?
I was traveling in the end of Friday.
So I did already miss the show,
but we have smashed right through that.
2,300, I think it touched, which is a high since 2021.
We're getting close to that all-time high figure,
which is around 4,900, I think.
And look, I think it's a very high chance
that we get there now.
It feels like a lot of clean air between us and there,
although I reckon it bounces around that all-time high level
for a little bit.
The rest of the market also looked a little bit strong.
So Bitcoin also kind of approached its all-time high level for a little bit. The rest of the market also looked a little bit strong.
So Bitcoin also kind of approached its all-time high.
We had hype move towards close to its all-time high.
You had Solana even starting to move.
So it was a good weekend for crypto majors, I would say, in general.
Crypto market cap also coming close to all-time high, I think, right now.
Or is it at all-time high? I believe it's at all-time high, yeah. Yeah, it's to all-time high, I think, right now. Or is it at all-time high?
I believe it's at all-time high, yeah.
Yeah, it's at all-time high.
Well, I mean, it hit it overnight probably, but basically all-time highs, yeah.
So it's been a good little period. Bitcoin dominance is down at 60.7%.
So this strength of ETH is keeping that a little bit under wraps.
But Bitcoin still feels pretty strong.
I think owning those two, you can sleep pretty well at night.
This week, we do have CPI.
It's still a little bit of a quiet period, I would say, here in general for macro.
We do have certain geopolitics stuff happening.
Trump is meeting Putin, I think it's today or tomorrow in Alaska.
A lot of talk about Ukraine there, maybe an end to that war. And there was a deal overnight
between NVIDIA and the US government where they're going to give 15% of their China revenues
basically to the US government. So they're going to start selling chips in China, it seems like,
but with the blessing of the US.
Interesting move that because I think there was a little bit of...
There's been this idea that these chips are already making their way to China.
And there's two real strains of thought here. Is that
is it good to
make sure all these
chips are in Chinese
products? Because
then you often, it's
kind of like defense contracts.
Once you go down one route with one
chip maker, you can often be tied into
their style
of technology for a long time so there is an
idea that the china almost comes dependent on the u.s with these sort of chips at the same time this
probably allows for like copycat firms to come in and build similar products slightly easier so i
think the u.s has been slightly wrestling with that and probably knowing that whatever export
controls they try and do just delays it.
So maybe kind of embrace it to a certain extent, which I think is what they've done here.
They've embraced it with a 15% kicker.
So I think that's an interesting deal.
I think it's an interesting deal.
Let's see where it goes.
The other aspect of that is there's the reaction that it's these companies paying King Trump
the toll to do business.
Right.
And that's a little bit more political.
We don't need to get deep into it, but I've seen that.
And now Intel stock was down last week after Trump was saying the CEO should be fired.
And now it's up 5% because the Intel CEO is perhaps going to go bend the knee today in Washington.
And I said Tim Cook from Apple gave him a,
what a solid gold.
He's given some,
some piece of gold last week.
I forget the exact details.
And then Apple stock popped on the back of that.
So it's,
it is a bit like that.
There's no denying that this is,
maybe it's a bit more overtly like that.
That's what I would say.
Like maybe this was already happening,
particularly on the Senator level, I think,
in terms of lobbying,
and this is just bringing it to the forefront
on, like, presidential level.
What I would say is that AI companies
are increasingly important for national defense.
You know, OpenAI is willing to give
all of their chips to the US government,
I think, for, like, free at at the moment, like AI meets defense is basically where this is all headed. And, um,
there's going to be a lot of sensitivity around these companies now. Um, they're not dealing
with social media anymore, you know, or like mobile it's now like, right, well, this sort of technology has the ability to massively
impact geopolitics here and allow some nations to go way, way ahead of others in various different
forms. So I think you're going to have to see the US government be very close to some of its AI
companies. Yeah. Agree.
Away from that, yeah, we have CPI this week. Like I said, it's a quiet week.
We've had some strength in
well, some of the
coins that have been strong before
really. Hype has been an interesting one to bounce
back. That one's kind of back to about 45.
That one feels like
it has a bit of momentum behind it
right now.
There's a lot of talk about when's the time to rotate out of ETH into another coin.
I'm still of the view that until proven otherwise,
this isn't a broad-based altcoin season,
and strong coins will continue to do well,
but I don't think it's like
buy a basket of alts necessarily uh but hype feels like one which has been strong for a while so it's
an okay bet on interestingly we've seen this layer zero stargate buy out and that that maybe moves
zero into this kind of more stable coin play we've seen've seen Athena continue to rip as its stable coin
just went above $10 billion.
So maybe that's a continuing underlying theme at the moment.
But it's not like it's a super interesting one.
It's just like, oh, everyone likes stable coins.
That's these sort of stable coin plays.
And they're doing well, but they're not like unbelievably,
you know, like 10x or anything
like that um i thought it was interesting that blackrock came out and said they're not they're
not going to do an xrp or solano etf because i think that for me as i've said several times in
the show would be the main signal at least for solana we're ready to do the same thing that we
just did for ease which is like right we're going to ram up the ETFs, TVL, and then
we're going to do a bunch of treasury companies. And yeah, I don't really know what's behind that,
if I'm honest. Maybe they just feel like they have momentum with ETH right now, and they don't want
to feel the need to spoil it. But BlackRock is the beast when it comes to all these ETFs.
They are the one that essentially is the vast majority of TVL.
So I don't know if they're cannibalizing the others
and we'll still see roughly the same TVL go into the Solana ETFs
or if this is a bit more of an impact.
Yeah, I think maybe let's dig into that for a second.
I feel like this was actually one of the more important headlines
from the past few days to monitor,
specifically, I think, for the ETH trade.
I think ETH is the big winner here.
You can make a big case that it's Bitcoin and ETH
and that Sol is a pretty obvious
loser XRP as well. To put this in perspective, if you've been casually following BlackRock's ETFs,
I bet it's Bitcoin ETF and ETH ETF are two of the top three new ETFs that have launched in the past
year. And I think they're both in the top 10 of all their ETF products or of all
the ETF products in the world.
They're incredibly successful.
We've talked about it at length on the show.
It took a long time for the ETFs to ramp up.
Part of my bear case for the ETH trade earlier on was that it would be
diluted by the sold ETF when it inevitably launched.
And now that's not perhaps on our current radar.
And I think that is a really big deal.
And I think ETH is the big winner.
And I think you can expect to see these types of inflows perhaps continue.
And Friday was the fourth biggest day in their history.
460 million, I think, came in overall. Logan, I'm curious if you have any reactions to that.
Yeah, nothing outside of what you shared. I spoke with some analysts last week about the crypto 401k stuff, which I'm sure you guys spoke about on Friday. And they just mentioned,
you know, how much benefit that Bitcoin and Ethereum stood to gain. And then potentially,
right, would it be Solana or XYZ asset, right, that gets added next to fall in line. But if those
things don't transpire, if you don't see those products available as readily, then yeah, I mean,
it's just gonna that money is going to be there there and it's going to keep flowing to the products that already exist. Namely,
of course, Bitcoin and Ethereum. So I'm right there with you.
And we're seeing it in ETH. A, we've got ETH up 45% of the month. What's it on the week? 17%.
The treasury co's are just booming. Tom Lee's BitMine is up
25% again today. It was up
25% on Friday
and up another 25% today.
It's back at 65.
Just an absolute monster.
If you haven't seen the latest,
they have 1.2 million
ETH now. Almost
$5 billion worth.
They are rapidly accumulating Joe Lubin and crew at 600,000 ETH now, almost $5 billion worth. So they are rapidly accumulating.
Joe Lubin and crew at 600,000 ETH.
They are up 12% today as well.
So the ETH Treasury Co's are reacting quite well this morning.
And it seems like the race is on and they're just going to keep buying.
I think SBET's got $900 million on hand to continue buying.
I actually don't know what Tom Lee has,
but I imagine he's going to be able to keep buying about as much as he wants
here for the near future.
Mando, how are you thinking about all this right now?
I think you've been public.
You've got this ETH trade on.
We were talking about 4K.
We smashed through 4K.
Now we're at 4,300.
Separating, there's near term and there's long term i'm curious how you're thinking about this near term oh you're muted i'm not saying trade is over but but as a
trader i think that the easy easier bit of the trade is probably over.
So I'm going to be reducing from, well, I've already been setting limits from 4K to 5K.
And then I'll reassess, I think.
I do think it could go quite a bit higher.
But, you know, it's been a good trade
and I don't want to ruin what's been a good trade.
So for me, I'll probably just look for the next trade,
which feels like early-ish in the trade
rather than the middle of the way through.
And I'll probably, if I'm honest,
I'll probably move a lot of this into Bitcoin
because I think Bitcoin has been kind of trending sideways and I'm still pretty bullish on Bitcoins. So that's what I'll probably end up
doing. Makes sense. I feel a couple of reactions on my side. I feel like the time to be max bullish
ETH was here at 2,500, right? And most people were still off sides. And now I'm seeing folks,
like everyone's trying to get into the
hyperliquid trade everyone's trying to long east and i think it can still definitely go up especially
if these treasury codes are going to keep piling in but it's more dangerous to put on a 10x long
at 4270 than it was at 2500 right or 5x or whatever leverage you're using uh just just
want to put that PSA out there.
Yeah, I'm sorry, not to interrupt,
but I also think you've got to consider the numbers, right?
Like 10% at 2,500 is just shy of 2,800, right? It doesn't feel like a big a move.
Now it gets you like 4,700?
Yeah.
That's 10%.
We're now at double, basically, or close to double what we were at.
So you have to like,
I think people are ready for it now to move to all time high.
It's just,
I can find a lot of trades to make 10% in if that's what the trade is.
Right.
There's so many trades out there.
You can make 10% in. yeah i'm just uh i'm just a bit more cognizant of not being that person like i think
hyper liquid we could do a 10 today you know yeah i mean it didn't want over the weekend right
so i'd rather and hyper liquid felt like it was kind of unloved there for a little bit,
so it was a good trade.
There's a few more of those, just I'm kind of like,
I'm just peripherally looking at, again, on majors.
I haven't yet decided to get into Solana, if that's the thing is.
I still don't feel like that's the one.
I feel like the easiest one is probably just staying Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I think Bitcoin kind of feels unloved a little bit.
Back at 120, everyone focused on ETH.
Like the whole timeline is back flipped ETH, it seems like.
Or has already gone down the risk curve.
The link marines are out in force.
We've got Ansem bullposting link Link which I do think is an interesting trade
and I've been thinking about
getting in myself if folks miss
this. Why is Link an interesting
trade?
Cult community plus buybacks
plus the chart looks good. So are they doing buybacks
or are they just buying their own
treasury? Have you seen what their
actual comment was when the buybacks?
We are doing off-market
transactions to buy back Link.
Which makes me
think that instead of the Link Foundation
just dumping on them, they're just going to
trade treasury vehicles to buy
back their own bags.
They're not doing
market buys of Link.
That does change the calculus a little bit.
Link also works with Bank.
Link also works with Bank, but the revenue of Link
is not
a revenue multiple coin
in my opinion.
So you either have to think of it like
a... I don't know.
Maybe we are
at that point of the cycle um
link is gonna it may be like i agree with you your first point is the right thing that link
is a bit more like xrp and there's there's like this army of people that want to buy it
but uh and maybe i'm just being a bit makeover about it but don't talk to me about revenue
mortgages like this or the buybacks because they literally said,
look, we're going to do this off market.
I mean.
Very fair and good to know.
And I did miss the fine print, so I appreciate you feeling me.
We have another comment.
Isn't Pump the easiest trade now?
Speaking of buybacks, I mean,
I don't know that it's the easiest trade by any means,
but it is an interesting trade.
It's been doing well, but it's also up 60% off the bottom.
For me, the overhang on pump is the airdrop.
We still don't know when, how they're going to do this.
And I think that's going to be a very volatile
announcement whenever it does come.
But the numbers are strong.
They're already back at 70% market share.
Honestly, I tweeted this over the weekend.
I cannot believe how quickly they reclaimed it
they reclaimed it and how let's bonk is now back down to 10%, 14%.
and how Let's Bonk is now back down to 10%, 14%.
Like I thought it would be more of a 30,
30 or 40,
40 battle there for a little bit.
Like they just went,
they were 80% down to 10% and now back to 80%.
And it happened very quickly.
Tyler,
have you been following the pump fund fees dashboard?
They have their own fees and revenue dashboard.
I saw the announcement.
I don't have it handy. If you have the link can drop it to you but they i mean they're it gives
you the indications of just how much uh pump they're buying back every single day um i don't
have their wallet address to like verify i can't imagine that they would be lying about this stuff
i'll drop it to you somewhere um but you But they're buying thousands of dollars,
or sorry, thousands of Solana worth,
or at least they had been.
My axes are screwed up now,
but worth the pump every single day based on that.
Yeah, let me pull this up.
Yeah, there's some serious buybacks.
They've been buying back the community tokens as well.
Let's take a look at this.
They've already put $31 million into this.
So yesterday,
$15,000
sold worth of pump yesterday.
Wow.
What I don't understand is the cadence of all this.
It doesn't look like it's necessarily on like a very hard coded schedule,
but maybe I'm looking at it wrong.
Yeah.
I mean,
I don't,
I don't have an answer for that.
I'm not sure the team has said anything about that,
but this,
if anybody is curious about following along,
I can't think of too many others who are this,
at least thus far,
this transparent about the exactly what they're doing with the buybacks
if you're really in the buyback meta and you want to be able to follow.
Yeah.
I mean, it's clearly – I'm not in this trade right now.
I misplayed it.
It has clearly been very strong off the bottom,
and these buybacks are the clear driver right now,
that and their market share going back up.
And now folks are calling for meme season.
I don't know if you saw this.
There was a lot of green on the Salon and meme board in the last day.
Basically over this whole weekend, this Clippy coin up 100%, 25 million.
The spark up at 50 million.
Tokabu at 64 million.
We haven't really had that many runners into the $50, $60 million range
post-Trump Q1 fallout.
There's been a handful that have gotten to $100 million.
We had the Boss token run to, what, $40 million in a few days.
It's now back down.
There are signs of life.
And I felt like just like a week, a week and a half ago,
it felt as dead as it had been.
And then it's just totally flipped.
And I'm seeing more chatter about it.
I don't think there are new entrants.
It still feels like the same cohort of folks.
So be conscious of that.
And I think there's also now a little bit of split with what's happening on
Zora.
We'll go there in a second.
But there are some signs of life over on Solana.
Logie, I think you might be closer to Zora
and its ecosystem than me.
I mean, this was arguably the trade of the month
for anyone who hit it.
It's up 15X.
Check those airdrops.
Remember there were all those jokes
about your cups of coffee.
They are now worth probably 10 or 20 coffees. You can get airdrops. Remember there were all those jokes about your cups of coffee. They are now worth probably 10 or 20 coffees.
You can get a full breakfast.
Yeah.
I don't know how much you guys have talked about it on the show,
but I mean the app itself is sort of like a friend tech slash Instagram crossover.
That's how I sort of characterize it.
You know, easy download.
You can mess around with it and gives you those creator coins and stuff.
It's interesting.
And the token launches are no joke.
I actually, like, refreshed.
I wrote a piece about this last week,
but the number two creator coin on the platform right now is from Fake Taxi,
which is a UK-based porn adult film content company.
It's around a $10 million market cap.
So we're not seeing like incredible runners
or anything like that.
I think the top one right now
is like an AI artist around 12 million.
But you're seeing tons of tokens created
and you're seeing a lot of people
messing around the platform.
And oftentimes that's all it really takes, right?
And my timeline, at least,
some of that, of course, based on the algorithm,
but my timeline is talking about this quite heavily.
And the base people, Jesse, they have leaned in
and they are championing this very, very hard.
It's justified, I guess, based on the performance of the last couple weeks, for sure.
Yeah, now's the time to put the full court press on.
But there's a bit of a base season happening. So there was also the announcement i feel like it got kind of slept
on coinbase said all of the base tokens and their decks is going to move to the coinbase app
so basically everything will be tradable on coinbase um which has been bullish for aero
the main decks it's up 50 now on the month, one of the larger movers as well.
I think there's broadly green across the base ecosystem.
So there's a lot happening.
Mando, I kind of interrupted your report.
Was there anything else in your report that we need to be aware of here looking at this week or this past weekend?
aware of here looking at this week or this past weekend?
This past,
I mean,
it's just been ETH really,
hasn't it?
And some of those stable coin players,
it feels like the trenches are back,
but there's been some runners.
Ansum's back.
Ansum's back.
Engagement's back.
Feels like,
yeah,
it feels like people are ready to gamble a little bit more.
It does. It feels like the animal spirits are back
and I'm seeing a lot more folks
the mindset it's time to lock in for the next
three months.
Did you see Alan's tweet from last
night or yesterday? He said
I feel like we're going to run back Q4
2024 pump fund trenches soon
but way higher i mean like he's goading people on these people are and they've already talked
about incentivizing right these coins that are launching on the platform does feel like some
stars aligning um at this point in time yeah i mean he of course will be heavily incentivized
for that to happen um but they've also got some firepower to potentially help.
So the pump game is back, it certainly seems.
Well, we're going to go to our interview here in a few minutes with Serpent from Ethos.
But, Logan, I think arguably the biggest headline from this morning is this whirlwind of Treasury Co. announcements.
I tweeted this out, but we had three big ones,
and the theme is we're going down the risk curve, folks.
So this Alt-5 company, $1.5 billion treasury
for the Trump WLFI token.
A huge number for an alt.
And this is already going to be like a,
I mean, one of the biggest raises I think we've seen outside of Bitcoin and ETH in Seoul for a treasury cost.
That's huge.
There's what this cash company doing 360 million for IP.
I think A16Z is tied into that.
And then there's a meme coin one.
So there's a $25 million bond treasury. I'm curious.
Did you get a chance to look into any of these?
Yeah.
So as outlined, I mean,
not too much additional to share.
Some of these are like the, as you mentioned,
the IP one, that's the story protocol
that has some partnership or some
inclusion and participation from
really notable crypto companies.
AI16Z, I think there's some others
listed in there. It's like a $220 million
pipe with the story protocol token trading at like a fixed $3.40. Yeah. The biggest takeaway
from me, Tyler, I mean, without getting into the specific details about how these folks are raising
these to add, is that the openings for them have not been received well by shareholders and investors.
I think CASC is down like 40%. The SHOT token, which is the Bonk one, closer to 50% today.
Actually, the World Liberty FI one, I think, has held up the best, down about 5%.
So probably way too early to suggest that none of these will bounce back
or that this is the end of the treasury company thing.
But at least in my sphere, you know, most people have surmised that the end of this
cycle or, you know, whatever black swanish type thing may come would come from these
treasury companies and the continued move down the risk curve.
And when you see stuff like this and you see the immediate lack of performance,
just gives you a little bit of pause, a little bit of the heebie-jeebies.
So hopefully it doesn't mean too much, but that's the first thing in my head when I see stuff like
this. It does. In some ways, is it good if there's not a lot of demand for these? Is that
ultimately a good thing? Yeah, I do think so.
I mean, this is kind of showing, hopefully the market is showing like, all right, we know, we understand these assets are not exactly the ones that we want to be standing behind.
You had some others previously too, right?
companies like Origin and other things like that, that just never, they never really got the steam
that some of these others, like, even if you go down, right, to DFDV and those that went to Solana,
for example, none of those other companies really got the steam. You know, it's not quite that Long
Island blockchain iced tea phenomenon that we saw, like, last cycle. It just hasn't transpired that
way. So I think that is good. Maybe some maturation in folks trying to look to the valid theses behind something like ETH or Bitcoin as the real vehicles to play with.
So we'll see.
Yeah, that's where I'm at.
I mean, you read the headlines.
Yeah, you can say, oh, this feels top signally or whatnot. But then on the flip side, you've got Joe Lubin, Tom Lee.
They're literally just getting started.
They're two months in, and they've got pretty significant demand.
And, yeah, of course, that could dry up in reverse on a dime.
Don't necessarily feel like it will.
I mean, at this point point now it's got some serious
momentum behind it as well and folks are are really feeling that yeah and there's a lot of
calls for eth to go much higher which is another propellant i'm sorry tyler the one i shared with
you right before the show too and i haven't refreshed the stock price or anything yet but
the one treasury company i did see that was kind of spinning against all these was the bnb company which was up like 30 or something that was
announced a few weeks ago i think they might have just finalized the uh the deal and so the actual
purchase of the bnb and everything funded with like 200 000 that was cea industries i can't
remember what the ticker is.
It's changed at this point.
I think it might be BNC.
Yeah, there you go.
Up 22% today.
It was interesting, just as an aside from this, I got a chance to talk with the incoming CEO of CEA Industries
like a month ago when they announced this.
I was asking about what the CEO of a treasury company does.
What is it?
I thought an interesting responsibility he talked to me about was
that just needing to be able to craft the appropriate narrative for
investors and stuff and like actually tell the story about why this
underlying asset is important.
You know,
you're not getting that with some of these announcements,
right?
Like the,
the story one from this morning,
I think the CEO from story came out and said some stuff about that. And if that speaks to you, it speaks to you. But some
of these others, like you're not getting the narrative and that makes it harder to invest in.
I think Tom Lee, Joe Lubin are doing a great job of giving you the narrative and why it actually
matters. And much like any other investment that you could easily perhaps be
swayed into, like you do have to have that front man and that champion giving you the why.
And the ones that don't provide a good one, you know, maybe investors are wisening up too.
I think it's as simple as that. That's such a great point. To me, there's the big three in
the Treasury Coast. It's MicroStrategy. it's with Sailor as the spokesman,
it's Tom Lee
and Bitmine, and Joe Lubin
and Sharple, I guess, bet.
And I can't even name
a front man for any of the other
Treasure Coast, and I cover
this space for a living.
And I'm writing about it daily.
So if I can't, I can tell you
that most other people
most likely can't as well.
That would be my advice.
We had the DFTV team on a couple months back
and they had a great pitch,
but I think my advice to them is you need that front man.
You need the spokesman who can go on TV, on CNBC,
and give the pitch.
And you also have to keep actively buying.
So I think DFTV also hasn't really been buying too much,
which is another part of it.
Well, it's harder as you get down that risk curve too
because the underlying asset is just –
CNBC would put on sold perhaps,
but they're probably not going to put on bonk.
They're not going any further down.
Yeah, and they shouldn't yet probably, right?
That makes sense. But yeah, I'm with with you i thought that was just an interesting thing just because
we know we don't we see sailor you're right we see sailor we see tom lee we see jude logan joe
lubin but we don't see the others uh and we don't hear from them and i think it's really important
to be able to craft the narrative why should i buy this versus buying the underlying asset why
should i do this like if you want to be seen legitimately as an entity and as a potential investor,
why should I invest in this company? You got to have somebody out there telling the story.
Not all of them do, but the ones that are most successful definitely do.
The one interesting one to watch, I think outside of the big three, will be this World Liberty 5 one.
We also had that Bo Hines resignation
to go to the private sector. So connecting
some dots, is he going to be the front man for one
of these dads? So we'll have to revisit
that later this week. So I want to dig more
into the WLFI trade
because I think it could be a big
one. But we've got Serp
in the studio.
So I want to make sure that we
welcome him. Folks, we are going to get
into the second part of our show, talk about Ethos. Sir, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, guys. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks for coming on. Probably overdue. Well, let's just kind of kick this off,
soft open for folks who may not know. Maybe give your quick background, maybe the quick background on ethos.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
So, hey, guys, I'm SERP.
I run a hedge fund in the space.
I was a successful trader in the past.
I always did that on the side and finally found my calling with building, which is what I'm actually professional in.
I have spent 12 years building products in Web2 SaaS, Bay Area tech company type stuff,
and finally found the perfect union between, wow, I fuck around with crypto on the side,
and I could actually make this my job and build something really meaningful.
About a year and a half ago, I guess.
And with Ethos, one of the things that I found was I was super inspired by Frentech.
I thought Frentech was super interesting.
Obviously went to zero, thanks Racer.
Not a lot to talk about Frentech anymore, but in the time it really captured everyone's attention.
And the big thing with Frentech is it got everyone to have a little sense of accountability.
You bought someone's key in someone's room and suddenly what what you did and what you said were on chain
forever and this idea of like oh wait the space does need a lot more trust and accountability and
how could we improve the entire space by introducing that concept of reputation which
is basically how the real world works and so yeah like basically Ethos is a culmination of like me being a trader, turning into like
recognizing there's a massive problem in the space to, oh, maybe Frontex showed that we
could actually solve this problem.
And now I have a real product with 15,000 users and feeling good about the last six
months of growth for us.
Yeah.
I mean, it's clearly taking off.
Maybe elaborate a little bit more on the problem that Ethos is trying to solve.
Yeah. I mean, the problem is the crypto is a wild west. When you think about the state of nature
of crypto, it is very much like more, you're better off being the person robbing the train than being the person that's like an
upstanding citizen. The quote is like, morals are expensive in Web3. Like having morals means
that you have a lot of opportunity costs that you've lost. And so I believe that in Web3 and in crypto, we have to push past this concept of kind of, you know, being what most people believe is just scam and fraud all the way up and down to becoming a reputable place where we can trust people we interact with, trust people that we listen to on the timeline, understand more about who each other are, how credible they are, and why we should listen to them. And so at the end of the day, it's solving the problem that there's like $10 billion
every year that's lost to fraud, whether it be a rug pull or a fishing link or whatever
it might be.
That is a lot of money that comes out of traders' hands.
And we want to introduce this concept of reputation in a very Web3 first way.
So how is reputation represented on ETH?
So I've got the page up for those in the stream.
Yeah, so there's a few ways.
First off, most people that have tried to solve this in the past use things like on-chain history.
Okay, this guy, he minted a CryptoPunk or he has 100 100 eth of volume on openc or something
and what we felt like is you really needed that concept of social proof or the concept of like
hey some other person says this person is reputable hey some other person is willing
to like put money against this person's name and so so the definition of reputation on ethos is pretty, it's pretty exhaustive in terms
of the things that we put into it. But I would say most of it is driven by what people say about
each other. And, and backed by economic security, where if you vouch for someone, you actually put
your money where your mouth is. If you go into ethos markets, which is what you're looking at
here, you're actually like speculating on someone's trust.
And so we use a bunch of different things that go into like,
mostly boils down to like skin in the game. And where did the,
like sentiment come from? Who did it come from?
Got it. So combination of, you know, you can,
you can stake capital with someone and actually bet effectively on their reputation,
and you can leave reviews,
which I feel like is probably the majority
of where users are interacting with the app.
I'm curious.
So how many months in is it now?
Is it three months?
Six.
Six months.
Wow.
Congrats.
and it's been a big run.
And it's been a big run.
Are you surprised with how it's been used?
Are you surprised with how it's been used?
I would say happily surprised, I guess.
There are some things that have not surprised me
in terms of how people are trying to kind of gamify it.
If you make a metric,
people will try to turn that metric into their opportunity.
And so I would say we're seeing all the things I expected to see.
I'm happy to see them. It means that we've had some success, right? Like it means that
people are starting to care about the ethos score a little bit so much so that they're willing to
invest time in it. And I mean, like if I'm being totally honest with you, if you go back to
January before we launched, you're like, I think people will care.
I think people will like it. I think there's this flywheel of like human psychology and wanting to
care about your score and wanting to look reputable. And maybe you can unlock something
for doing that later because other teams recognize that you're reputable. Like, I think it'll work,
but we had no idea, man. Like you really don't know going into it. So pleasantly surprised with
where we are and very happy and feeling good
about the opportunity for us going forward.
If you could snap your fingers and change one thing about the ethos ecosystem,
about its user base, about its adoption, what, what would it be?
Man, you know, the,
the thing I think about the most probably is like, what is the perception from third parties that have never used ethos?
And usually, like you're showing the leaderboard now, most people will log in and they'll be like, wait, who the hell is this guy?
Why is this guy the most reputable artist or whatever, right?
Um, one of the things that we have been working really hard on is how do you, how do you leverage existing credibility to some extent and put it into the algorithm so that when you or someone else looks at the leaderboard or the, which is just for fun, really, but you go look at like X copies profile.
You're not like, what the hell?
Why is he like known instead of reputable?
reputable. That doesn't make any sense.
That doesn't make any sense.
So it's like
the data normalization, getting to the point where
we have enough data where it
actually makes sense why people have certain
scores that they have. I think
once people start figuring
out that the scores are
kind of more normalized, then they
can more easily become
the source of truth of what reputation means.
I think that makes sense.
That's kind of where my head is at, right?
I think the product and the vision makes a ton of sense.
Where I struggle as a user when I come look at rankings is like Vitalik should be number
one.
Right.
Right.
And instead, it's someone that I loosely know from crypto Twitter who has probably been very active.
On ethos, for sure.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So I guess, how do you fix that?
Do you want to fix that?
Does that mean it's right or wrong?
Of course, yeah.
We're actually fixing this a little bit this week.
So we have ethos improvement proposals where we change the
score and we let people vote on it. And one of the things that we're introducing probably this week
is the concept of like your existing followers. And so if Vitalik has a significant number or
ranks in the top 1% of all what we call reputable followers, then we actually were going to give him
a significant boost on his credibility score, which will help normalize a lot of the data across the board.
I'm really excited for that. I think the other thing I'd push back on is like,
in a binary example of Vitalik, it's easy to be like, well, Vitalik should be at the top.
pop but then once you get into the ranking algorithm it was like okay well should kobe be
But then once you get into the ranking algorithm, it was like, okay, well, should Kobe be second?
second like you will you will meet people that argue that kobe should absolutely not be second
and you're like wait why and then you get to like 10th and you're like well how would i ever like
pick x over y and so like the ranking problem is really tough it is tough and i don And I don't have the answer myself.
But I do think it matters, right?
So one of the goals for this, and I don't want to put words in your mouth,
is this is a primitive that will be built on and incorporated in other InfoFi apps,
social Fi apps.
And I think we're already seeing that, right?
I feel like I saw one.
The name is escaping me, but it's going to combine on chain financial activity with your ethos
score,
maybe your Kaido yaps.
And as that happens,
like we need this.
I mean,
we want it to be accurate.
Right.
Like,
and I guess what does accurate mean?
And I'm talking to certain,
it's a hard problem to solve,
but I think another thing that you're kind of talking around circles it's a hard problem to solve but i think another thing that
you're kind of talking around that's harder to understand and and if i go back to the question
of like what would you snap your fingers about is like education in this space it's really hard to
like get everyone on the same page about it but a good example is global versus local reputation
so someone might be globally reputable like um likeik, but there are people on the top of the leaderboard who I find very reputable that you've never heard of.
And it's not necessarily wrong that they are reputable if they have that local reputation.
So global versus local is also a tricky thing.
To be honest, I think the leaderboard is a little bit misleading for a lot of people.
It's really meant to be something fun. The concept that
Ethos is really solving, in my opinion, is
identifying those who are reputable
rather than identifying in a perfect
stack ranking how reputable they are.
I guess my
feedback would be, you didn't ask for it.
You kind of asked for it.
I feel like the
global needs to be weighted heavier somehow than the local.
And I think part of the reason I say that is someone might be locally very ethical and reputable, but it's easier because the stakes are lower.
Because they probably haven't been approached by 100 KOL managers to go launch, to tweet about this token, right?
And the bigger you are, the more opportunities you get to do that.
So if two people are equally ethical, but one has 200,000 followers
and another one has 200, I think I can make a strong argument
that the person with 200,000 followers should be significantly more,
higher rate on the leaderboard. No, I think it's like a strong argument that the person with 200,000 followers should be significantly more higher rate on the leaderboard.
No, I think it's like they're more hardened almost.
Like they've been through the like, oh, you've been tested.
Like we'll send you tokens.
We'll send you equity, whatever.
Like now just tweet about it.
Right.
And the people with 200 followers have never experienced that and they might fall for that.
You know, I think it's interesting to think about it in terms of like reputation or
credibility backed by or associated attached to influence but also just think about it from like
more simple terms of well someone is launching a new project and maybe it's someone that you know
but no one else really knows them and you want to help like support them and have them have a good showing on ethos overall.
Now people have the avenue to do that.
It doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to have global reputation or any amount of influence or attention either.
They might just be a builder.
But if you had backing from the right people, you might decide, oh, I'm definitely going to participate in that. In fact, that's how we make a lot of decisions in Web3 anyways with trading is like,
did X, Y, or Z invest, right?
Did Paradigm invest?
Oh, Paradigm invested?
Hell yeah, I'm going to treat this thing seriously.
So, you know, I'd like to think that at some point we can actually kind of lower that bar
of like what is required to give other people reputation.
It's not like there's a high
concentration of people in that global reputation category the people that have influence and i
actually really want to uplift people maybe not because they're going to go launch something even
if it's just like i want to do like an over-the-counter trade with this guy um such that
local reputation can be recognized still too makes sense lo, I know you've been following this as well.
Hey, sir. Interesting to see all this and learn a little bit more about it, especially as somebody who cares so much about reputation and is not a very big follower like Tyler or something like
that. I was curious about how you think about use of the platform in a proactive versus reactive
nature. One thing I was thinking about is comparing it to Yelp, for example,
thinking about looking up a restaurant
and trying to understand if it's good or not.
How do you think about that
and what the actual user interaction looks like
in a proactive versus reactive nature?
Yeah, so great question.
In most web apps or building web app thinking, the philosophy is it's called a 99 in one.
And it's representing percentages of how users use their product.
For something like Reddit or something like Yelp or really any way that you're kind of like searching the Internet, 90% of your users are workers.
90% of your users are lurkers,
are people that are just getting value
by like seeing the score somewhere
or reading up on something,
just like you would look at, you know, a pizza shop.
9% are more of your active users
who might comment or engage
or they might participate in some way,
but they're not like a core contributor, right?
So 9%.
And then you have like 1% of people
that are like core contributors, right? These are the people that you have like 1% of people that are like core contributors,
right? These are the people that you go to Yelp and they're like, I'm the Yelp certified faster
local guide or whatever. You're like, yeah, whatever, dude. Like you expect about 1% of
your users to be that like daily active, like, but also feel re-opinionated and want to help
people understand what pizza place to go to or what KLO trusts on
the timeline. And we've seen that split effectively. Like we've got about, I think it's around 7,
6,000 daily actives right now. And the ratio of that not perfectly goes, you know, it's more
around like, let's say 5%. We have about 100,000 monthly active random lurkers.
So anyways, trying to explain like,
I actually only like someone like you or Tyler,
I wouldn't expect you to use it every day, right?
Like you have to feel very opinionated
and desired to like share your opinion to do that.
But maybe you log in once a month
and you're like, oh yeah, I want to support this guy.
Or like, oh yeah, like this guy's launching a new project and I really like it. I want to show my
support for it, help them out. I feel like that those numbers are actually a little bit bigger
for us. We do have more contributors than a normal 99.1 rule, but that's kind of what we're
targeting to be, to be frank. I'm curious, sir, maybe a quick side question about youth.
You mentioned the monthly actives, the daily actives.
You probably have a decent amount of CT demographic data at this point.
Any takeaways?
It's so much smaller than you think it is.
I mean, two things.
It's so much smaller than you think it is.
I've built products that have 3 million users before, like 3 million monthly active users and it it is a whole nother animal
from operations performance everything and and you can just feel it they're not three million people
on ct there's not even close right uh i look at it like relatively like you look at a youtube video
you look at something else you look at how many people are watching the stream and you compare it to like a video game or something and we're just tiny still
um i see i see that in the data just so far like how many people are getting reviewed there's like
i think we're probably at like 30 000 unique twitter accounts reviewed so not just people
on the platform it just means that the pie is small right now um my other takeaway what was i gonna say
i think that's really my big takeaway to be honest is just a little bit smaller than you
think it is oh the other thing i was gonna say is the niches are are significant in in crypto like
i knew this always but like if you think about like the ethereum uh aligned nft trader versus the like solana focus trencher like i have worked
really hard to onboard as many people as i can to ethos and every time i do it i'll go talk to
a new discord group or i'll go talk to another community i've never heard of before and you're
like there are people in x country that are really passionate about organelles
what the fuck like what is this like
and then you go and you're like talks to Solana
group and you're like oh my god they don't give a shit about
reputation for a lot of reasons
or in a lot of cases but like
they're still interested and intrigued
and it's really interesting
to see how like siloed
those are and it shows up on
some of the like the social graphs right like
oh like tyler and everyone else that he knows review each other he's reviewed by a lot of people
that share these characteristics eth aligned nft trader kind of thing um it's just it couldn't be
more different the kind of social groupings that exist out there it's weird and fascinating that makes
sense i've seen it to a degree there are very distinct cohorts of people doing different things
and the venn diagram doesn't really overlap there's not a lot of overlap there's not yeah
it's weird man it's because twitter does act a little bit like a neck chamber especially if you
only use your your for you like you if you only use your for you fee
you're really only going to see the same like 200 accounts a day you're not going to get the
ordinals chatter yeah you're not going to get engaging but it's so it's like me as a trader
i'm like yo this is actually really cool to like see a group of people that's talking about
ordinals today and you're like who's talking about ordinals today man like i get it but
it's also kind of mind-boggling when you get out of your, like, comfort zone.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
Well, one minute or two left here.
I am curious.
So, like, where are you going to take this thing?
Yeah, I mean, my belief, like, year-long goal, right, is next summer, basically everything
that you do in crypto is at least touching your ethos score in some way.
Whether that be, oh, how someone like hires a KOL,
or oh, how someone interprets someone on the timeline to,
oh, maybe like, you know, you go to trade on Uniswap v3
and it looks up your ethos score and it gives you better trading fees
because you're a real person.
But why would they do that?
Because there's like 99% spam everywhere, right?
When a new app goes to pay for your fees, they look at your ethos score. Our app pays for fees. We already, like say, if you have a high ethos score, we'll pay your fees. It is already apparent in Twitter very easily
with a Chrome extension, but we have an open seat.
We have it, we're going to launch it on Zora this week.
We have it on Farcaster, on Kaido.
Like it really is meant to go everywhere,
whether that be on the front end,
your ability to interpret information based on that,
or more on the back end of like,
I as an ethos reputable
person, get more out of it because we've removed 99% of the sloth and the bots and the bullshit
out of the equation. So in a year, I mean, that's what I think. And to be honest, I'm pretty much
exclusively focused on crypto right now. But if you think more long-term, this reputation system
is something that has much
wider effects, can solve the exact same problems, whether it's, you know, I've had this problem with
trading Pokemon cards, buying and selling Pokemon cards on the internet, watches, or whatever it
might be. Like every anonymous interaction on the internet requires reputation. And so there's a
lot of room for growth, I think, for us beyond the next year kind of thing. And, um, and so there's a lot of room for growth, I think for us beyond the next
year kind of thing. And there are also black mirror episodes about social scores taken to
their limits, right? So I think the bigger, the bigger you grow, the more important.
Yeah. I've made the argument, the black mirror episode is, is, uh, really interesting and almost
important. Like I'm leaning into it only because crypto is so so much the wild west like you don't need the black mirror
episode for your daily interactions like with talking to your the guy mowing your lawn or
whatever like that's not even close everything we do in crypto is financialized so you have to have
that um so i try to lean into it to to be honest. Makes sense. Well, this has been a great discussion.
I'll be excited to check back in a few months down the line, you know,
as you progress against the vision and certainly as a lofty one,
but we'll be watching along and rooting for you. Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for jumping on. Well, folks, that is going to be our show.
No yeet action today.
We are going to do double yeet spins tomorrow and we are going to be our show. No yeet action today. We are going to do double yeet spins tomorrow, and we are going
to be back to our normal process, so we won't be doing the leaderboard picks here on the weekdays
this week. So we will be back with those tomorrow. But as for today, that is going to be it. I want
to thank all of our listeners. As always, I want to thank our co-host, Logan. Thanks for jumping on
today. Thanks to SERP for joining us. Thanks to our partners as well.
We will see you tomorrow at 10 a.m. Eastern.
Until then, go make it a beautiful day.
Goodbye. Thank you. um
