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FOMO HOUR: Joined by @EthereumJoseph
Recorded: June 3, 2025 Duration: 1:07:10Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, revealed a groundbreaking partnership with Sharplink Gaming, which has successfully raised a billion dollars to acquire Ethereum. The conversation highlighted Ethereum's recent growth, the restructuring of the Ethereum Foundation, and the optimistic outlook for the crypto market as it transitions into a new super cycle.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Oh my God, it keeps...
That was me.
Sorry. check check one two okay it works sorry guys there you go we're good we're good big show today
big show today we got a big joke for the big show look at that damn papa joe lubin
make it here i'm great again yeah man himself was going to be a big one. What up, Jeeps? How you doing, Jeeps?
What up, Cyborg Nomai? What up, Jittery? What up, Alexander? What up, Arnold? What up, Diggy? Nick Knot? What up, C-Foss? What up, Phantom? Been a minute.
What's up, Phantom Scribbler? What up, Steve? What up, Sankara? What up, Nathan? What up, everybody? I want to see some retweets.
We got Ethereum, Joseph, the man himself, coming on the show today.
So I definitely want that you guys to share that.
Let's get some listeners up in here.
Okay, perfect.
We're short on time, so let's kick it, Sims.
Oh, Sims is back. Thank you. Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo.
What up?
What up?
Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025.
Look at that.
Another beautiful day to have a beautiful day.
I got my co-host in the house.
Tyler.
Mando.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Good morning.
We even got our producer back.
Good morning, everyone.
How y'all doing today?
I'm doing amazing, man.
How are you?
I am fantastic, Mando. Thank you for asking. I'm fantastic. I'm great. I'm amazing.
Ah, feeling good, man. Feeling good. I'm feeling like Mando in 2024 and 2023.
I know what it's like now, man, to have the sunshine just like, you know, hitting me in the face all day long.
Ah, feels good.
What's up, Tyler?
How you doing?
Nice background.
I'm good.
Yeah, it's sunny here as well in Chicago.
Feeling good today.
Our coin green and big show.
Big, big show today.
Big show with Big Joe.
You know, we have, for everybody in the audience, we have Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum, founder of ConsenSys.
And now, you know, chairman of the board, I think, of Sharpling Gaming, or at least on the board of Sharpling Gaming, the investment vehicle to acquire a billion dollars worth
of Ethereum.
So the Ethereum macro strategy is here, and Joe Lubin is going to be joining us in the
studio and on the show in about 24 minutes.
Normally, we haven't booked for 10.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, so he'll be with us
in a little bit. So today on the show, we're going to go quick. We're going.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, so he'll be with us in a little bit.
So today on the show, we're going to go quick.
We're going to do a market report.
We are going to go through Tyler's top 10 real quick, his quick topics, see what's up, what's up.
And then we'll just drive right into the show with Joe and do an interview.
We are going to postpone the gateways.
Shout out to Yeet, though.
Yeet.com.
Sign up using the fomo hour
code uh in order to have a chance to win money every single day on the show i know i say every
day we do it with keywords every day we didn't do it yesterday today but we'll do three on far
growing friday this friday so it'll be fun three winners on friday a winner tomorrow and a winner
wednesday uh because you know we want to focus the show today on joe and then as usual this show
is paired by wallet connect we all love wallet connect Wallet Connect. Check them out. You know the logo.
You've seen it.
Wallet Connect on X and Telegram.
To stay ahead of what's next.
And Mando, what's next?
I mean, look, some green on the board today.
You're an Ethereum bull, so it's perfect. You've been super bowled up on ETH.
It's like a genie.
You rubbed a little bottle and you got Joe Lubin coming to the show today
because you kept talking about ETH.
So let's talk about the market a little bit.
Hello, everyone. Good day, I think.
We had a bit of a bounce back uh across the board really um we had bitcoin kind
of going back to what's up towards around 105k eth at um just over 2600 and solana back towards
160 so a bounce after obviously a week a weekend terms of headlines, the main one on macros is that we're going to have, again, a delay in the tariffs on China.
So a little bit of a softening of an approach there.
And that led to a little bit of a rally kind of across the board.
You've also had some weakness in the dollar, which has meant gold has gone a little bit higher again.
higher again and alongside, let's say, Bitcoin.
And alongside, let's say, Bitcoin.
So, yeah, just the same sort of trends of trade not seem as bad
as everyone thought.
Bond yields are still pushing higher.
That's a bit of a risk.
You had Jamie Dimon came out and said, prepare for 5% plus on the 10-year,
which I think would be pretty high.
And then we've had, yeah yeah gold going higher as well so
a relatively supportive backdrop i would say for for crypto but just some worries about if
one yields are really going to cause some pain here for crypto specifically it was another day
i think of eth broadly um uh outperforming um we've had as tyler pointed out this morning we've had
continual inflows into the etfs actually outpacing the bitcoin etfs which is kind of wild
we haven't seen that for a long long time um just over 400 million it's i think it's 10 straight
days of inflows and bitcoin bitcoin is looking pretty good. Sorry, ETH is looking pretty good here
just in terms of flows-based.
In terms of actual headlines yesterday,
there were some headlines
that the ETH Foundation is going to be restructured.
There's been a lot of commentary around this.
If you go to DC Investor, actually.
The first tweet
that shows up is just Mando's
you can't make this up
right this is such a good timeline here
so you're saying DC Investor
yeah he actually
made a good post yesterday which is
remember they have made some changes here but
go down
no maybe go down a little bit
Down, down, down
He's been tweeting a lot recently, obviously
Down
Down, down, down
There we go
Yeah
Even extremely long-time Ethereum
Foundation can barely comprehend how much the
Ethereum Foundation has changed in the last few months
Most waiting for some kind of catch or a stick in the eye.
I don't think either are coming.
The org is radically transformed
and is adopting a laser focus on pushing you forward.
Long-time ETH fans can even get cropped this,
and I'm sure the broader market still has no clue.
Full speed ahead.
I think what we're seeing here is they are listening,
and they are now putting in a more aggressive team for change.
So there were comments yesterday from Vitalik saying that we want to 10x, basically ETH on a range of metrics over the next few years.
And then now they're putting in place these sort of core ETH devs with more power, I would say. So there's changes to
if you should go to the East fan. Yeah, there we go.
They had this big blog
post. The main thing is that they're putting
like a different team
of core devs in charge,
which I think is going to be
relatively beneficial.
The main person is this Dankrad
Feist guy
supported by Dankrad Feist.
And, yeah, people are very, very bullish on the idea
that this is now going to be the one that pushes it forward.
And what we've always kind of lacked before
is that they've taken a step back, right?
Like, I mean, they haven't really been part of that BD stuff
that we've spoken about.
This team seems like a team that's going to be a bit more focused
on stuff that's going to push forward the BD stuff that we've spoken about. This team's like a team that's going to be a bit more focused on stuff
that's going to push forward the
BD side of the chain too.
So, yeah, just generally
some
bullish
sentiment coming out of ETH there.
But we did see a rally kind of across the board.
Hyperliquid also, obviously, is the
one, L1, beating everything
there. They got a spot listing for Binance US,
or at least said that they will be getting one in the future,
which is pretty wild that Binance US got that list,
has decided to list them.
I didn't even think they would ever list them.
But they have.
After Coinbase, right?
Pressure came on from the Coinbase side, no?
Exactly.
So we now have major exchanges in the US looking to list them.
Obviously,
Binance,
I think,
and Hyperliquid are in kind of somewhat of a battle.
interesting to see where that one kind of goes.
But Hyperliquid's definitely been one of the main,
definitely outperforming here.
Yeah.
What is it at?
The WF374.
Reverse the Clementic curse.
Rare.
it's,
I would say it's ETH and ETH beta.
So you've had,
you had big wicks up in like ETH memes.
Are they,
Athena all had a good day today.
And interestingly on the Solana side,
whiff has been the biggest gain.
Whiff looks like it's about to reclaim a billion dollars.
It is.
Which is now starting to catch up with Farcon,
which is pretty interesting.
Yeah, like a big, big move kind of across the board there
in a number of different key ETH-based coins.
And then Solana, I think, was dominated by WIFT.
Which has had a few KOLs going after it, which has been good to see.
Yeah, I see that.
It just looks like it's about to print a double-digit kind of, though.
Hopefully.
Yeah.
We still have a number of different people saying they're going to raise to buy Bitcoin.
Interestingly, Sailor is going to do another craft share offering.
That got some semi-fud on the timeline.
I think they're going to raise $250 million.
There's another firm in Hong Kong, Retail Lodge Tech, I think is the name.
It's going to buy $1.5 billion of Bitcoin.
And then you start to see Tether move its Bitcoin to this new vehicle, 21 Capital.
It's moved 37,000 Bitcoin to this new vehicle now, which is a pretty wild move.
There was another company that said it was going to go out and buy Sol yesterday, Classover.
So they're going to raise 500 million of Sol.
So this is now a bit
of a trend but like crypto treasuries from all these um all these companies remember like this
people don't really know why this started and why it's been so aggressive if you remember it was the
um it was all the the accounting changes that we saw last year that that um
uh was it sailor at the time yeah sailor was very vocal like this is going to be a
big change that they can mark them to market essentially um that has allowed a lot more
companies now to explore this and it feels like it's going to be uh that's going to be with us
for a while um you know going to be with us for a while. So good across the board.
Probably best for Hyperliquid,
ETH and ETH beta, and then
other stuff I would say is a bit mixed.
Okay, perfect.
Good outlook here. We're looking good.
I feel like we were looking bottom,
but I'm always scared to call
bottom there.
And I'm definitely not calling it out season by any means.
So just wait.
But love the news on Ethereum.
We'll dive deeper into all the Ethereum news, thoughts, and all that stuff in about 15 minutes
with Joe himself, but super bullish on the ecosystem, really waking up here and making
a move.
I think it's kind of, we've talked about this before, guys, like that meme, like do something,
you know, the stick man,
like,
and the thing is doing right.
And so now it's like restructure and this and that.
So I think definitely pay attention to that and what's going on.
And on the theorem side there.
All right,
Tyler,
let's get a quick fire through what you got for us today. For daily NFT and crypto analysis.
Tolerate on FOMO.
Our cause to KitKat.
Great ambassadors.
Yeah, folks.
Crypto majors.
Nice little rebound after some China tariff relief.
We have ETH leading the way up 4%, 2620.
Bitcoin at 105.3.
HYPE leading all up 15%.
What a rebound on HYPE.
A lot of overlap with Mando's headlines.
I'll go through them again quickly.
The Ethereum Foundation announced protocol.
That's their new initiative to focus on scaling the L1s and L2s,
plus a better user experience, along with a change in leadership.
Hong Kong-based Reitar Ryder Logitech, $1.5 billion in Bitcoin to buy.
Michael Saylor's strategy announced a new IPO for Standard STRD,
perpetual stock offering.
I think starting with $250 million to buy Bitcoin,
but they can, of course, raise more.
MetaPlanet got to $8888 Bitcoin
and also achieving a 225% yield over the past year.
So Bitcoin's strategy is working, at least so far.
Manuel mentioned the Tether News
moving to 21 Capital.
Another piece of Tether News,
they announced
XAUTO,
tokenized gold.
Tether is tokenizing gold
now starting
on the ton blockchain.
They plan to go multi-chain
with that product.
We also saw Circle
up its IPO offering
after interest from BlackRock.
They're now looking to raise
up to $900 million
in a $7.2 billion valuation.
So that raised target is going higher.
And then somewhat negative news,
Meta shareholders resoundingly rejected their Bitcoin treasury proposal.
95% no vote on that.
So Meta will not be acquiring Bitcoin anytime soon.
In token airdrop and protocol news,
Rob Hood announced the acquisition of Bitstamp.
That is officially complete.
We knew about this for a few months, but now it's gone through.
Giving them more than 50 global crypto licenses,
a new crypto client base, Infra,
and this crypto as a service product targeting institutions.
Gandhi saw his first ever ERC-20 loan,
a loan against a token holding.
Guess what? The token was? It was Rekt.
So Rekt, making some history over on Gandhi.
And Klanosaurs
getting an animated TV series.
39 episodes,
seven minutes long, aimed at kids
6 to 12. So that's going to be an interesting one
to watch. And then Rekt, of course, we've got to
bang the drum one more time.
That drink sale goes live here in about 100 minutes.
So 12 p.m. Eastern.
Make sure you're ready for that.
Sell out five minutes.
Public.
Go USA.
USA is going to...
No, Team Europe now.
Let's go Europe.
We will see.
Rounding this out, AIF is up 5%, 10.3 billion.
Leaders were green, slightly green.
Splat and AXR were top number, about 25% each.
MemeCoin leaders were slightly green. Splat and AXR were top mover, hit about 25% each. MemeCoin leaders were very green.
Pepe leading the way up 10% width of 15%.
SPX up 10%.
LaunchCoin, that ecosystem was up.
It rebounded back to 140 million.
And one of their eco tokens, KLED,
one of the top movers on the day,
up about 150% to 16 million.
So big move there.
Loud, down only,
seeing below6 million now
as they've been talking about
perhaps changing some of the levers
and measures in that experiment.
So we'll see where that continues to go.
Other than that,
a couple of pieces of NFT news.
Moonberg's continuing to grind up.
They're 0.9 ETH following the acquisition.
The Skull of Lucy set a record yesterday.
$120 ETH, $300,000.
Record-breaking sale.
Wow.
And right after yesterday's show, Pixel Vault
announced they are auctioning off
their historic set of 16
CryptoPunks. Those were an
icon back in the 2021
NFT era for those who were around.
They were the basis of those
comic books, the Punks Comics, which were
also an incredible trade
for anyone who was around
in early 2021.
I got some,
you're going to know
some Pixel Vault lore
tied to Mando?
Yes.
So the first collection
Mando and Ovi did
was inspired by Pixel Vault
because they were going
to make a comic.
I remember the D-Gents comic.
I do. Pixel Vault was just before D-G's comic. I do.
Pixel Vault was just before DGEN.
Yeah, literally.
The week before, the weekends before.
It was the same compressed time, right?
That was funny.
Very soon.
We were just after DGEN University.
Oh, no.
We don't talk about that.
Oh, I remember that.
That was crazy.
Yetis, Cool Cats, all of those were around the same time.
You guys.
What a cook, though, Pixel Vought.
We were the same weekend as Bulls on the Block.
Bulls on the Block.
I still have some reply guys with Bulls on the Block PFPs.
Pixel Vought was .08 ETH Mint.
I went to like 12 ETH.
I cooked. I think I turned like 1 ETH to like 55 ETH
on Pixel Vault back then
that was one of my best trades of my life
crazy, then I lost it all
that's just part of the course
I was like scraping together ETH to buy on secondary
like .2
then a few months later 5
despite me banging the drum as hard as I can do either of you own ETH? buy on secondary, like 0.2. Then a few months later, they're 5.
Despite me banging the drum as hard as I can, do either of you own
ETH? I told you
I bought a lot of Pepe and Mog
a couple weeks ago.
And Rekt. That's the same thing.
What do you mean?
I need ETH.
I would say I have
30% of my
portfolio is allocated to Pepe Mogrecht at the moment.
Right.
And the other 70% is Farcoin.
Tyler's got the nod of a man.
Tyler?
I'm in the ETH betas.
CryptoPunks and a couple ETH memes.
No, I didn't count my CryptoPunk in there.
No, get out of here.
CryptoPunks is kind of a beta.
You're going to die with that thing.
It's going to your kids.
What's our beta lead?
Come on.
But you're not going to sell it.
You're going to give it to your kids.
I don't think you buy it to trade it.
I can still participate in the Root on the ETH rally.
Everyone's giving me shit now.
Wait, hold on, Mando.
I'm bagging the drum as hard as I can.
You guys.
Well, brother, brother.
Pepe, you saw the candle.
Brother, brother, you saw the candle on the Pepe today.
You sound like that Iranian restaurant you went to last night.
Dude, honestly, you know what, guys?
I have a story for everybody.
Yesterday, I was a victim of cultural appropriation for the first time in my life, and now I understand what it's like.
Mandel recommended, by the way, Mandel has been incredible.
He's recommended, so far, 10 for 10 recommendations in Lisbon.
He, incredible, incredible.
I got to give him that credit before I bash it.
But he sent me to this place called Cafe Tehran.
My last name is Tehrani, okay?
Supposed to be an Iranian restaurant.
I walk in there.
First of all, it's nothing Iranian on the menu.
It's Arabic.
And you guys know it's pretty frothy out there.
And then I said, you have kubide, which is like our main meal, right?
It's like you go to an American restaurant, like you have the burger.
And they go, what's that?
They go, what's that?
I was so pissed.
So I accepted the fact that I was in a different restaurant.
And it's not an Iranian restaurant.
So there's no Iranian restaurants in Lisbon.
And there was cultural appropriation, Mando.
Yeah, they claimed we were a Persian restaurant.
All I said was, I think there's an Iranian restaurant
I'm going to open my own, don't worry
I'm opening my own
You can be partners
You're welcome to be partners
You can be a silent partner in the restaurant
My mother's going to run it, it's going to be called Distan
Just like our parent company here
And yeah, exactly, Ari, he's like, what the fuck
An Iranian restaurant without Kubi Day Thank you, you Ari that's my fellow Persian Middle Eastern food is
something that I have the weird things that I have not found very good on Lisbon are Middle Eastern
food and Italian food there's not that many it's okay the rest is great I just I just had a meeting
with actually one of those but not that many italians and like middle eastern is like it's like what
you said it's like it's actually some guy from a completely different country who decided to do
the cuisine every single chef in there is like full-on like white which is fine but like you
know if i go to a person restaurant i want to see a grandma in the back fucking cooking up you know
like i want to see like that's how it is. You go to a Persian restaurant,
it's like, oh...
You were playing
Ed Sheeran, bro. Ed Sheeran sang one Iranian
song and they're playing his shit all day.
Nothing wrong against Ed Sheeran.
There's one of the two Israeli restaurants.
It's like,
there's one Turkish
and it is light
on the Levant area.
I'll open it.
I got this.
I'll open a Persian restaurant.
You're all invited on me the first time.
Then you got to pay.
So back to Tyler's topics.
Yeah, we still have a few minutes before Joe comes in the studio.
What's your top headlines here, Tyler?
Should we talk about the sailor headline a bit more?
I think it always gets people a little rattled mouth for sure when he makes these announcements. What's your top headlines here, Tyler? Should we talk about the sailor headline a bit more?
Because I think it always gets people a little rattled now.
For sure.
When he makes these announcements. So the news is he's launching a new perpetual stock offering.
It's Stride.
STRD will be the ticker.
It's a perpetual offering.
Institutional investors select non-investors. It looks like
they're going to price it $100 a share, going to
issue $2.5 million
against 10% preferred
Class A
microstrategy is how I understand this.
I'm just curious on
Mando's thoughts here. Is this the
type of raise that we like because
it's via equity? That was my general
read on it versus like a levered debt.
Yeah, so it's interesting.
If you go into the details, they have non-accruing dividends,
which is quite an important thing.
Now, what I do think this is bad for is the common stockholders
of microtraction.
When you get a preferred equity offering, this may go over the top of a lot of people's heads, but it may not.
But preferred means that you will get paid a dividend first.
So if anyone's going to get paid a dividend, you get paid it first.
And they've said you're going to get 10% dividend.
Now, they don't have to pay that dividend.
It's a non-cumulative dividend.
But if they are going to pay a dividend, then they have to pay these guys 10%.
But it is also equity at the same time.
So it says strategy will have... Sorry, let me just... but it is also equity at the same time.
So it says, strategy will not have any obligation to pay a regular dividend
for any regular dividend period,
unless strategy declares such a dividend period.
Yeah, so there's no dividend interest or other amount will accumulate.
So basically, it layers the,
if you own MicroStrategy stock,
like I don't particularly love these
because it means that these guys get paid a dividend
and you might not.
And that's absolutely fine.
That's kind of actually how this has been designed.
It's not a huge amount,
like of what I could see.
So it's not like it massively changes their leverage
and I think there's a lot of
focus on microstrategy right now
there's a lot more companies
which will fall before microstrategy
but this does
point to
this is the thing right now
we're going to raise debt
to buy
crypto here.
And I think it's a little bit of a worry kind of across the market.
Two major things that you heard from that Bitcoin conference was,
we're going to raise debt to buy Bitcoin.
Sometimes it's prefs, but sometimes it's converts.
And the second thing was Bitcoin lending.
Both of those things just add leverage to Bitcoin
and at an institutional level.
So I think what you're really is sowing the seeds
of quite a horrific downturn
if you saw a sustained period of lower prices.
Let's go that way.
Perfect.
I totally understood everything you just said.
What are you drinking?
What's a drink of choice today, Amanda?
My wife just got this for me.
I actually don't know.
I think it's like a chai latte.
Nice.
Nice.
What would we do with otherwise?
I feel like all three of us would be fucking dead.
Suddenly a drink appears.
Suddenly a fruit bowl appears.
Or else I wouldn't feed myself, dude.
Anyways.
All right.
So that's great.
I see Joe in the studio.
Just a reminder to everyone, we're live on audio, but this show is really more of a visual experience.
Let's put it this way.
So Joe will be joining us on video.
I see you in the studio, Joe.
I'll add you in 10 seconds exactly.
So we've posted Tyler, Mando, and I
on our pages,
respective pages of broadcasting.
But you can also catch the show on YouTube,
which I kind of think it's a better experience.
And soon on other platforms.
Next week, we've got some changes coming to the show,
which are for the better for everyone.
But anyways, for now,
you can catch us on Ruck Radio, YouTube, or on X natively.
Anyways, let's get the man himself, Joe Lubin, in the house.
Joe, how are you doing today?
Good morning.
Hi, Ruck.
How are you doing?
Hey, guys.
I am fantastic.
Fantastic.
Actually, Joe, I just left a meeting with one of your team members on the men of my side this morning.
He says hi.
Very cool.
Yeah, Alexander.
Where are you today?
I am in Lisbon.
No, no, no.
Very nice.
Yeah, I'm in Lisbon.
There's an NFC Lisbon conference.
A lot of us are out here.
Benny.
I know Benny's been trying to get you to buy a pumpkin.
I know you're to Sam Spratt.
Did Benny whisper in your ear
to mention that first thing?
Benny's the whisper.
You know,
punk master, Sam Spratt
whisperer, but we'll talk about that a little later.
We'll talk about that a little later.
A lot of people, as a matter of fact, were saying,
we got to get Joe CryptoPunk, but
we'll keep that chatter for later. We got a few options
for you. We're going to show you on the show.
Anyways, we're all tuning in from all over the world at the moment.
Joe, it's a pleasure to have you.
Listen, I don't think we need any introductions here when it comes to Joe Libin in the world of crypto.
I'm Ethereum co-founder, founder of Consensus, which obviously you got a lot going on there.
And most recently, you became a board member of chairman of the board chairman of the board of sharp link
gaming which we're going to be talking about here congratulations joe i mean why don't you give us
maybe a tldr of this new announcement which we've been talking about every day uh we were going to
go in depth uh into it yesterday we said nope hold your horses. Joe's coming on tomorrow. Talk about it. So why don't you take us through this sharp-legged gaming and the billion dollars that was raised
in order to acquire Ethereum? Yeah, so I'll keep it brief because you guys probably have
questions and we can riff. But we've been doing research for about six months to decide whether we wanted to get into this kind of investment or this kind of opportunity.
of doing it, scanning different target companies
that we could either reverse merge into
or lead a major investment round into.
And Sharplink popped up a very small number of weeks ago,
and we've been sprinting to get it done.
We felt it was going to be incredibly valuable to be
pretty much the first major mover. ConsenSys
thinks of itself, has always thought of itself as the Ethereum company.
More recently, we're an Ethereum first pan-ecosystem
company because we've got to provide infrastructure
to the whole reasonable decentralized protocol
ecosystem. Lots of great projects beyond Ethereum, but of course all roads flow to and through
Ethereum. And so we identified this opportunity. We said, let's go.
We talked to lots of investors.
And it was just an unbelievable sprint.
Our corp dev team, our legal team, our finance team did the most heroic thing.
Days, nights, weekends.
And we got it done.
And I don't know if you noticed, but it popped.
We definitely know this.
Yeah, we were very pleased with the initial performance.
And structurally, we think there's no reason why it shouldn't just keep going for maybe years, maybe decades.
The way society moves, there are deep structural things that drive certain financial flows.
You've got treasuries that for 30 years grew lower and lower in their interest rates and appreciated for a very, very long time.
So lots of trading strategies were based on that. Japanese carry trades, decades of borrowing yen and investing in different higher yielding trades.
And we strongly believe that there's a paradigm shift underway to a more decentralized world economy, society.
And we think that's going to be pretty good for what I think is the major
productive asset in our ecosystem, Ether. Should be quite good for Bitcoin, should be pretty good
for a whole bunch of other tokens. But I think the big E will end up being Ether. And you can imagine with the
structure of these kinds of
companies, these kinds of
treasury
strategy companies, you can
imagine that if you
invest in it, that
you're going to keep growing
the amount of ether
that you hold in each of your
shares and the price of Ether is likely to,
this is not financial advice, I'm not licensed as a financial representative, I am licensed,
I'm self-licensed as an Ethereum rep, so I can talk about Ethereum. And it seems just enormously likely that the Ethereum ecosystem will continue to grow.
I think we're at our broadband home now.
And I guess one more exciting thing is that TradFi meets DeFi.
We're going to be on earnings calls.
We're going to be on CNBC and Bloomberg,
Wall Street Journal and Bug Radio.
And we're going to be talking about Ethereum and DeFi.
And we're going to be explaining it to TradFi professionals
because they're going to be seeing people making money
in this particular strategy.
And there's nothing more motivating to learn about the intricacies of Ethereum and DeFi than a really compelling strategy for Wall Streeters to make money with.
Wow.
Go ahead, Mando.
Can I answer that slightly?
So is the theme, because I think a lot of the Bitcoin treasury companies,
they're just buying hold.
They're more like commodities traders almost, or not even trading.
They're just like gold vehicles almost.
You consider this to be a productive asset,
so you're going to be doing a range of different things with it?
Oh, yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
So Bitcoin yield, as Michael Saylor has defined it, is you buy some MSTR and you rely on them to grow the number of Bitcoin that you have access to through your shares on a fully diluted basis. So you're hoping Bitcoin goes up and you're expecting that you're going to get more and more Bitcoin for each share that you own.
So we'll certainly do that.
But staking, restaking, DeFi at prudent risk levels.
defy at prudent risk levels. We will add ether yield to this other form of yield that they've
defined. So it's a productive asset in that sense. It's also productive because people use it to
power applications and store data on the Ethereum network. At some point, some points in our evolution,
when there's a lot of activity on the Ethereum network,
it turns into an ultrasound asset where we're burning it
and deflating the monetary supply.
No, I think that's super interesting.
I mean, that's kind of how I was hoping even Seda would go down the route
of actually earning a yield on the Bitcoin
but it hasn't really happened with any of these companies
Yeah, he's very
clear and strict
about
saying something
and doing it
He wants to be extremely reliable
for his investors
and so when he says
these things are going to be in cold storage,
I'm never moving them.
I'm just going to keep accumulating.
I believe it.
I don't think he's going to get fancy.
How many chairs do you sit on, Joe?
How many chairs?
I'm sitting on one chair right now.
I love that.
I love one chair.
One chair.
That is always, that is historically. This is my chair. There you go? I love that. I love one chair. One chair. That has always, that has,
in his tour,
I mean,
it's working.
This is my chair.
There you go.
I love it.
I love it.
Go ahead, Mando,
and I know Tyler's got some questions.
I'm sorry.
My second question would just be like,
why do you think it's taken this for people to start to get heat?
Like,
you could invest in a vehicle like this.
You could invest in an ETH-based fund,
right?
Like,
but it seems like this has been the best way to do it,
like almost take over the strategy of an existing stock
with some sort of publicly listed equity and be like,
right, we're going to now do this.
Why has this been the thing that's really unlocked Wall Street, you think?
So first, I mentioned earlier that I feel like we're now at our broadband moment in the Ethereum ecosystem.
And what I mean by that is more about the functionality of the network.
So with the roll-up-centric roadmap, which is going incredibly well, We've enabled us to
grow horizontally and
vertically in terms of scalability.
So infinite scalability like the internet.
You can just add new
layer 2 networks. We can
take that new ZKEVM
technology. We can enshrine it
into layer 1 and
beat things up that way.
We're affordable.
Lots of block space for now.
The internet's a really big place.
So when we start migrating all of Web 2 to Web 3,
we're going to need lots more block space,
but it's quite affordable right now.
Things are pretty usable.
They're going to get delightfully usable
when we have AIs in our wallets and in user interfaces.
And in the United States of America, it was dangerous to hold tokens.
Your GC wouldn't allow you to hold tokens.
Your GC certainly would have laughed you out of the room if you suggested that you issue
a token if you're a normal enterprise or a traditional financial institution.
If you're a brilliant application developer, it was kind of crazy to decide to build in our ecosystem
in the United States of America until essentially the chair Gensler was effectively removed from gaslighting our industry and trying to kill, slow, or co-opt our industry.
But now we have all those structural things handled so that people can start building applications for end-user consumers, for end-user enterprises.
So that's on.
And more directly to your question,
again, it's about identifying a strategy
that captures Wall Street interests,
that sounds sort of cool and edgy and enormously profitable.
And so that's when the financial geeks get interested.
If they get interested, it starts to take on a buzz.
How do you think about the messaging to the Wall Street crowd versus perhaps more of a crypto crowd?
Are you changing some of your emphasis points?
I'm curious how you think about that as you're about to go on a road tour.
Well, I like to talk about Ethereum.
And the financial stuff is very interesting as well.
But it's really the capabilities of Ethereum that drives all this.
The internet a long time ago came along and it changed information.
It changed the travel industry.
It changed the journalism industry.
So many different industries were scaled by digital transformation.
Pretty much one industry managed to avoid that.
There's been very little innovation in the financial services industry.
So they put some websites in front of their terrible account structures,
in front of their terrible account structures
and they innovated on some financial instruments
that they used to exploit lots of people.
But really, the financial industry
has not seen the same kind of transformation
that the internet brought to so many different industries.
But that's on now.
There's structural fatigue in the financial system.
It's breaking.
We're at the end of a super cycle effectively.
And the excesses of the financial industry,
the financialization of America,
the hauling out of the middle class in America
is leading us all to essentially the end of this super cycle
in a Strauss and Powell sense.
And we, our decentralized protocols, are the answer to bringing forth a new global financial system.
There is no global financial system right now.
It's a whole bunch of siloed financial systems,
scotch-taped together via correspondent banking relationships.
And now we have this thing that some people put together a decade or so ago,
in terms of Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.
in terms of Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera.
And now it's a global, real-time,
hyper-connected financial system
with programmable money,
programmable financial instruments
where anybody can actually build something
and deploy it and use it.
Total transformation.
I think it's an easy pitch for those who understand the vision and the it. Total transformation. I think it's an easy pitch for those who understand
the vision and the mission.
Maybe drilling into Ethereum
and the Ethereum Foundation, we had some big news yesterday
with the announcement
of the protocol initiative
and now this new refocus on
scaling the L1s, the L2s,
and user experience. Curious
for your reactions to that
and perhaps the timing of you
spinning up the Sharplink vessel
alongside this recent pivot
from the Ethereum Foundation,
it seems to have.
Yeah.
So it's a recent pivot
in the sense that people became aware of it,
but things have been in process
for around a year.
There was a lot of malaise in our ecosystem.
Bitcoin was doing great because it has a clear value proposition and a clear message.
Solana was doing great because Sam destroyed the protocol, crashed the price down to, what, $9 or something like that.
And then it found this meta that it leaned into.
And, you know, so meme coins are a very cool innovation,
but there's a lot of disturbing stuff that went on around meme coins in Ethereum as well, but at a smaller scale.
So they rode that up nicely.
And Ethereum, the middle child, was sitting there planning for the future.
We're trying to do all the things right and build epic infrastructure for our broadband moment.
And so Ether price goes down and narrative follows price.
So everybody, slightly lighter Ether bag starts pointing at everybody else and saying, you
suck, this is your fault, et cetera.
But really, things were going great in the Ethereum ecosystem. We took this ZKEVM technology that we've been pioneering at Layer 2,
and we're now bringing it into Layer 1.
And Census hopes to participate in that.
We're really excited about that direction.
So Layer 1 will get really beefy.
We'll have lots of blobs.
Layer 2s will be incredibly important.
I actually think that they will be important for scalability,
but I think they'll be more important for diversity,
the different kinds of databases that sit on top of layer one.
All the layer twos are essentially databases with functionality.
And in terms of the political constructs,
so we're talking to
major sovereign
wealth funds and banks
in a particular country
who are interested in
how do we build
infrastructure in the
Ethereum ecosystem.
And they're
thinking, okay, we've got to build our own Ethereum
because we're worried that the Americans might control
the Ethereum network.
And I said,
that's not a problem.
That's not going to happen.
But still,
you probably want to build some of your infrastructure
at Ethereum layer one.
And you probably want your own constructs at layer two.
So you can have a nation state layer two and then all the different political subdivisions.
So I think that's how our ecosystem is going to evolve with layer twos being an organizational construct.
So there's a sovereign country looking into doing something like that.
There's a very big country now.
Mando, are you hearing this?
Mando's been bullposting, bulltalking
Ethereum, Joe, on this show.
Awesome.
30 minutes per day out of the hour we have.
So music to zero.
Go forever.
There's been some very concrete changes.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And let me answer your question.
So I think organically, everybody's feeling a lot better about stuff.
The changes that were announced in the EF have been wonderful.
The access, the proactivity.
the proactivity.
So I've had discussions with leadership
and I'm so excited with what the EF is doing.
Frankly, I was pretty comfortable
that the EF has been doing great things all along.
I do think that a more proactive posture
by the EF is valuable. I think it's the right time for that.
But I think the EF has done a great job for a very long time.
And all along, we've been building.
And we just keep going. And the world
is catching up to us.
I think the main thing that's got me more bullish is this.
I think, I mean, Solana's had a great cycle in terms of activity.
You can't really deny that.
It's a really good lead in terms of that for a long period of the cycle.
What got me, what I think has got me more bullish has been,
firstly, just like the changes around how we're going to view
the layer one um for fees i quite liked the ultrasound narrative i thought was a very strong
one for ethan it's kind of drifted away because it might come back and if i look at the top
blockchains out there activity is only one real measure of success like bitcoin bitcoin doesn't
have as much
activity as most of the others. It's really just a store
of value. XRP seemingly
has a crazy high valuation.
It doesn't really have much going on there.
Best marketing project in the history
of the world. I actually think the value
of a cryptocurrency
is often down to that store of value
or it being seen as
just like a productive asset like you
just said uh i think that if even if it doesn't capture all the activity and that moves to the
l1s if it can recapture that this is a really good store of value which can still be productive i
think that is where it can become very strong and i think the changes to the ef have really just
have been the icing on the cake where i felt like, okay, this has now shifted and it's been beaten down for a long time. And now
it's got the narrative back. But you can feel it. ETH has got the narrative back. And I think
now I can hopefully use that because it has all the TradFi rails.
What you just did, you're going to be the first of many. You must know there must be
about 10 other companies now. The reason why you want to do it so quick is because everyone's
seen what just happened to the Sharpen stock and gone like,
right, we're going to do the same thing.
And ETH is probably the best asset to do it with,
given the rails that it has.
So it feels as though there could be now this issue.
Yeah, for sure.
Like, yeah.
Exactly.
And while everybody was taking shots at Ethereum,
it was still by far the biggest ecosystem out there.
It still had
the bulk of
the real world assets, the bulk of the
stablecoins. It has not all of
DeFi, but a
giant proportion of DeFi.
I would say that
the Bitcoin maxis are really good at talking shit, and the Solana maxis are professionalizing that as well.
And the Ethereum people are really good at keeping heads down and building, because there's a lot that we need to do.
There isn't a lot that the Bitcoin people need to do.
Their protocol, I love Bitcoin. I was
a Bitcoiner in early 2011. I'm still a Bitcoiner. The Bitcoin protocol is finished and perfect. So
what do they have to do? Well, instead they did runes and ordinals, but that's another conversation.
Tyler! Yeah, ordinals are cool. Yeah. Tyler, go ahead.
Joey, we run this as a market show as well.
I'm curious for your thoughts on the market as someone who's, you know, I'm thinking out years, decades, I'm sure.
But I'm kind of curious for your thoughts on the broader crypto market outlook on like a one-year horizon as well as a four to five-year horizon here. You mentioned the structural, the deep structural changes earlier on in our convo.
You care about maybe did elaborate on some
of that. Yeah, so it's probably
dangerous to listen to an eternal
optimist like me
but I think
we're moving
into a period where
as we
discussed already
the mainstream culture,
Wall Street,
all the Wall Streets around the world
are going to have to take notice.
The existing economy
is being reformatted.
I do believe that the United States
had to make some changes
because a long time ago, the United States ended up being the sole superpower.
And it was a kinder period where the U.S. helped lots of countries rebuild themselves.
helped lots of countries rebuild themselves.
The U.S. was very comfortable allowing tariffs in lots of different countries,
essentially paying for the rebuilding.
U.S. for strategic reasons, made itself world police,
established NATO, paid for the bulk of NATO, released the seas to keep trade inexpensive via naval transportation.
And some countries took advantage of that.
One country in particular took extreme advantage of that and has been at war.
China's been at war with the United States, pretty much declared for a long time, doing some disturbing things.
And we need a good, healthy relationship with China and every other nation and it should
be balanced so the U.S. we are moving into a multipolar world and and we need healthy trade
relationships and if the U.S. is going in the background, we're going to see massive change.
We are seeing massive change. And in a multipolar world, you probably want a credibly neutral
platform on which to execute transactions, guaranteed transactions, to maintain relationships.
If you enter into a treaty currently,
it's really easy to just break those things.
They're not really worth much.
If you enter into a treaty on the Ethereum blockchain
and you put many billions of dollars at stake
and maybe there's utility in the United Nations,
maybe the United Nations can help adjudicate
when there are conflicts with respect to a smart contract.
So if there's a strategic arms limitation smart contract
that both parties put a whole lot of money into
it and one party breaks
that agreement,
then they should be slashed massively.
So we now
have
financial means to
interesting and healthier geopolitical
things.
Anyway, total transformation,
that's probably going to be really good for the economy.
I believe we're at the end of a super cycle.
I believe we're at the start of a new super cycle
with a new promise, a new system of the world,
new social contracts,
and that can be really good for anybody
who's coming into the
world now or
maybe 10 years from now because it'll probably be rocky
for a little while.
Do you think...
I was going to ask maybe a slightly controversial
question but like there
was a lot of talk maybe last cycle
which was that ETH
could maybe even overtake
Bitcoin with this productive asset capability.
Do you still have that belief?
Do you still think ETH has got a better proposition
potentially to the world here in terms of value creation?
Yeah.
So I think of Bitcoin as gold 2.0.
I think it will probably have that use case probably for a long time. It seems to be a strong enough religion at this point so that it'll stick.
computer, electricity, energy, oil, or what I really like is Ether being seen as the most
valuable trust commodity on the planet. So information is a commodity. There are different kinds of
promises that can be treated as a commodity, assurances, agreements. We don't really think
of trust currently as a commodity, but if you think about the levels of trust that you need to add to certain situations to make them more valuable,
you could probably come up with a grading system
for different kinds of trust.
Satoshi Nakamoto invented this most profound thing,
decentralized trust, the highest grade trust in the world,
especially if it's on a radically decentralized network
and there's no better trust network than Ethereum.
It can guarantee execution of transactions.
And I think of Ether now as the gold standard in trust
or highest octane trust, et cetera.
will that be more valuable than Bitcoin?
Seems very likely.
Maybe, yeah.
Maybe an AI,
that could be very valuable.
I love that.
That's a great question, Mando.
Joey, if you have five more minutes,
I think Tyler is just another question
on the Metamask front
and some of the cool stuff you guys have been up to.
It would be great to get some of your takes on Metamask and stuff going on in Linnea, but go ahead, Tyler.
Yeah, I found a notable, the Ethereum Foundation refocusing on user experience.
And I think Metamask has been doing the same. Yesterday we had the announcement, the acquisition of Web3 Auth.
We had the announcement, the acquisition of Web3 Auth.
I'm just kind of curious to hear from you about why that was strategic,
kind of what the focus is right now with MetaMask.
Yeah, so they're awesome.
They built some great technology.
So it's instant onboarding.
It's ways of recovering your account.
If you lose your secret recovery phrase,
they have thousands of different projects
using their embedded wallet system.
So we see it as top of funnel.
There are millions of users in those thousands of projects.
We see it as top of funnel with all these different projects
that can instantly put together a quickly-skinned wallet.
And then we'll just set up a MyCLEO network underground
that enables, if you've got a few of these wallets,
you can connect them into your MetaMask
or if you just want a longer term, durable,
more secure relationship,
then easy onboarding
from one of these embedded
wallets to your
MetaMask.
That's the end user
perspective.
We're
building an
increasingly capable developer stack
so they'll be a big
part of that as well
I'm curious as well
how you're contemplating the AI agent
revolution, are you
contemplating how MetaMask will
integrate with perhaps agents
part two, is Ethereum going to be
the home
yeah so we're exploring AI from so many different perspectives.
In particular, we do believe that you should be typing to or talking to your MetaMask.
the internet is already too hard for us to use
The internet is already too hard for us to use.
it's exploitative and nobody has the time to read terms and conditions
so we just click through stuff and we get regularly abused by big tech
and just the business model of the internet is adversarial pretty much
so how are we all going to deal with this even more complicated version of the internet?
Smart contracts.
Who's going to read smart contracts?
Who's going to read proposals and DAOs so they can vote on that?
It's kind of unreasonable. a digital twin AI ally, an agent that coordinates your activities,
it'll know what you care about.
You can delegate tasks,
you can delegate voting permissions,
you can give it allowances,
it can essentially do your bidding on the internet.
If you want it to explain a DeFi protocol,
if you want it to explain what the latest proposal in this DAO means
and what it thinks you should vote, then it'll do that.
So we finally have a powerful interface that we trust,
and we're going to need to own these things. We really don't want
big tech to own our interfaces that know everything about us to Web3. So if we own these things, we can train them. They'll be... so first we will sort of be their parents,
in a sense, training them.
Then they will be our mentors and life partners.
So a very, very long-running intimate relationship.
And in terms of where they sit, they're going to get smaller and smaller, I believe.
There will be large language models, foundational models
in lots of different societies that understand
subtease in language and culture.
So I think that's going to be important to different nation states.
But then there will be just giant swarms of mixture of experts,
agents that do lots of things.
I think we'll have a controller that manages all of that.
And you probably want it on your own hardware somehow.
There will probably be blockchain systems that are fast enough and big enough,
decentralized storage systems that can house some of those things.
That's a big technological step,
but we definitely have to get away from centralization in the AI space.
If big tech is able to win this, then we're all in a lot of trouble.
Makes a lot of sense. Appreciate all your thoughts.
Yeah, some really good thoughts sense. Appreciate all your thoughts.
Yeah, some really good thoughts here.
All right, Joe.
And listen, I know you have a busy schedule.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
Here you go.
Sorry.
I know you got a busy schedule, Joe.
Listen, popular request question here.
I have to ask for the people.
You know, when are we going to see a Joe Lubin CryptoPunk?
You know, you're... Who's paying you?
Who's paying you to bug me about that?
Not enough.
Hello?
I know who's paying you.
Node Foundation.
Hello, Node Foundation.
You know, I'm a good advocate.
I'm a show.
They are awesome.
I'm a big fan of the Node Foundation.
And I have regular conversations with those people.
So who knows?
I'm seeing Benny tonight.
And I know he's going to ask me if I ask you.
And he told me to ask you about the mask you want.
Give him a big hug for me.
I will.
I will.
I know you bought a mask as well from Thumbsprite,
that you're involved in the NFT ecosystem.
So, you know, it's good to see some love on the NFT side, okay?
I know it's a 2021 thing, but we still need a little bit of love.
My issue is that if I'm going to do a PFP, I want something unique,
something that I'm going to feel good about for a long time.
All right, you heard it here, everyone.
Start shilling your one-of-ones to Joe Lubin.
Not too hard, not too hard.
Joe, last question.
What's one thing you're most excited about?
I guess
I guess it's on
I think we're finally
crossing the chasm into
the mainstream financial system
mainstream economy
mainstream culture
I am
at a party in Las Vegas
Bitcoin conference
and Scotty Pippen shows up.
We chat.
He's taking pictures with lots of crypto people.
So we may have arrived.
There you go.
We may have arrived.
Joe Lubin, thank you very much for coming on the show today.
It's a pleasure.
Appreciate it.
All right.
All right.
Well, that was a lot of fun guys great interview we got
some oops what did i do see amando no matter how to go we got we got some some good alpha out of
this one tyler i think that was a successful interview so with that i'm bowled up i can say
that i'm i'm i'm rethinking my 30% portfolio allocation.
Market's pumping while Joe's talking.
You love that, don't you?
Oh, yeah.
He's ripping on the back of all of his words.
We need to clip that part where he said a sovereign state is looking at the bill on chain on Ethereum and we could get first sovereign state L2.
There's no way this has been said before.
I think we got to,
Omar,
we got to get clipping ASAP.
We got to repost this entire interview.
That was some great,
tomorrow we'll probably have some time to,
to recap and go over this interview,
which was a really,
really awesome.
I'm glad.
And the market's doing well right now.
So you obviously love to say,
all right,
well,
Tyler,
that was a good one.
Good work.
Love that,
you know,
Mando also got involved here. It was a one. Good work. Love that, you know, Mandel also got involved here.
It was a great interview.
With that, we'll see you all tomorrow morning.
Same time, same place, 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time for another episode of FOMO Hour on Rock Radio.
Let's go. I'm going to go ahead and get the camera on the camera. Thank you. .
