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Packet Live: $PKT Community Roundtable
Recorded: April 9, 2025 Duration: 1:04:41Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, the Packet team addressed the current challenges in the crypto market while emphasizing their commitment to innovation and growth. They highlighted ongoing developments in the Packet Hub, the importance of simplifying user onboarding, and the potential for new partnerships with major media players, all amidst a backdrop of shifting regulatory landscapes.
Full Transcription
what's up everybody welcome back to another package live wednesday april 9th 9 a.m or 9.04 or 904 sorry we're a little late um good to see you guys how's it going yeah good
markets are crashing markets are crashing all big congratulations to caleb on the
arrival of his new uh new family member thank you congr. Congrats. Congrats. Congrats.
Another packeteer brought on, whether they like it or not.
CJD Jr. is in the house.
CJD Jr.
Let's go.
You got to give him a computer in hand just right when he's right out of the womb.
His first language is going to be coding.
First language is rust.
All right.
I'm going to go and do a little spread in the word.
Josh, do you want to kind of kick this off for us?
It's actually been cool i was gonna share some stuff because um though the markets are crashing though everyone's running around like their hair
is on fire um though packet is at the lowest it's ever been in the history of packet uh we're
building so we're out here building shit and um um, not getting, not getting caught up in the, in the mix of it all. Um,
so I was going to actually share, we're not done with it. So I'm,
I don't like really love sharing unfinished things,
but figure why not, you know, we're, we're out here. Um,
so I might just give you guys a little preview of um what's being built over here a lot of stuff's
being built and there's also a lot of business development that's been going on as well
on the packet tv front but it's a weird moment because the core community that was really focused on the cryptocurrency is, you know, everyone's pretty much shuffled off.
But the stuff that's being built here is, you know, undeterred and yeah, really, really cool stuff.
So yeah, fire away, Josh.
Yeah, well, this is with a grain of salt.
It's not done like i said um so uh
basically and this doesn't even work so um you know you'll be able to um
search this is all kind of doesn't doesn't work yet um yet. But it'll start showing you the different domains.
It'll query the domain.
What's it called?
The domain list to see which ones are available.
And then this is kind of the web 3 version uh the if you guys ever saw the you know the dump
stake domain thing that caleb had built this is kind of the front end of it you know it connects
to your wallet already um i think you can if i refresh this it'll whatever it's anyway so yeah
it'll um i've already authorized my wallet
but once this connects this thing you know find your wallet and i'm scared to go do anything more
than this because i don't know how far along the process is but this is kind of just to make sure
sizing and all that stuff works but it looks pretty sexy and uh it's coming along and uh and so
yeah it's just been been nice to um nice to put it all together and watch it come to fruition
yeah for sure and uh we have you built this specifically just to make it very easy for people to onboard domains.
And that's really the key here is just trying to make it so people don't have to go through the dashboard to get a domain and do the multi-step.
Yeah, that's epic.
Yeah. It really looks good. And, you know, being that the, you know,
claiming of domains and really encouraging people to get these packet
domains is such a key part of the network, you know, making kind of abstracting away the Web3
side and the need to have cryptocurrency on base and Ethereum and just trying to make that process
simple and ultimately make it so someone could just use a credit card to grab a web domain is
going to be key for the growth of this thing. So that's especially as it relates to the Packet Hub and getting people to start onboarding their websites and their content into the Packet Hub.
We just got to make it as easy as possible for people to use this technology.
And like I said, kind of abstracting away the
cryptocurrency side. Because in this market, I mean, this is where crypto struggles to
substantiate its relevance when the market gets completely nuked out like this. And
obviously, we've been watching the market get nuked out for four months now.
So this lack of stability, unless you're just in a four or five month short position.
Yeah, it's just not a lot of investor confidence out there.
But the truth is, on the blockchain side, this is where the strength and innovation of the technology really begins to thrive. And, and there's so much value in that, in that technology base.
But, you know, people get, you know, caught up in the,
in the speculative nature of their investments, which is, you know,
fully understandable.
But this is also where those moments where projects that have real technology,
you know, real utility can begin to
thrive and and you know we try and prove that consistency on on the packet side because you
know this project was launched in the 2019 bear market it's been through now multiple different
markets it's seen the market cap in the hundreds of millions and now under a
million. So, you know, we're just, and we're just here continuing to build because we have a specific
trajectory, you know, and what we're doing and why we're doing it.
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think, I think just being able to just, you know, and I think that's what's always made us just kind of stay strong and stay true is just we've always been focused on the technology of it all.
we continue to stay on track and stay on the mission. And, you know, we're lucky enough that
we're all, you know, smart enough to be dangerous and able to kind of keep building even regardless
of, you know, market sentiment and market conditions. But truth is, Packet launched
in an absolute, you know, terrible time in a bear market right as COVID hit.
Like, that was how we started this thing.
So we're no strangers to headwinds.
Yeah, no doubt, no doubt.
And, you know, they always say that when it's red the the strongest ones prevail so um we ain't stopping
ain't no stopping yeah josh what else what else do you have for us um yeah the other thing
like i said i hate showing shit that's not finished but um we're uh here let me find it um well it's been it's been kind of a cool you know
kind of behind the scenes process continuing to develop all this tech and the network itself i
mean on the on the just talking about the underlying packet network, there's still, you know, everyday use cases.
For example, I don't know if people are using the VPN.
I mean, we see people using the VPN, but I don't know if people in the packet community are using the VPN every day.
But the VPN is pretty amazing.
I guess you can't really use it unless you have a mini,
the mini, you know, or I guess the old school Android app. But, you know, the mini still
provides a lot of benefit. I know that I use it almost every single day as a hardware VPN in my
house. You know, for example, even if you want to, if you're watching TV and you have a
blackout on a, on a sports game or a blackout on a, on a streaming platform, you can just use the
pack of VPN. So that's still an everyday thing that's been, you know, it's, it's just been kind
of rewarding knowing that we built that and that that's available. So, um, you know, still encourage people to, to get on and after that. And, um, yeah,
we haven't really seen people building websites, but, you know, obviously still encouraging people
to go get their websites up. Um, it's always hard to get people to change their, their patterns
there, but, uh, I just, I I've been dropping websites off of go daddy and bringing
them over into the packet network and uh it's definitely been nice having web urls that you
have to pay a monthly annual subscription for what do you got josh? Yeah, for sure. And if there's anyone out here who's watching.
So, yeah.
So this is basically the creator hub.
Or this is the back end of the packet hub. And so you can kind of go in,
be able to change the different categories,
and then you can go into each category
and you can just kind of create each card.
And then you can't do that.
That's specifically what you built for.
Yeah, what we can do,
what we as admins get to do um so this just kind of shows
the back end of what it looks like and and all the kind of customization you can do or we can do so
when people are able to submit that we don't have to get a developer involved and go and you know
do all that process like the the uploading process of putting content onto the
onto the hub is much more fluid and frictionless for yeah yeah this has been a big kind of
hurdle i guess you would say with the hub because you know as people want to onboard
the first version of it was fully coded out and it was pretty fixed.
And so every time somebody came to us wanting to add a media title or a project,
or we wanted to do a books category, so like adding just a category,
these were just incredibly challenging hurdles that we had to basically have a developer jump in and do it so we end up spending the last two months
having a developer build uh you know a whole dashboard back end that allows us to you know
as josh said more fluidly add content into the hub and and i think that is obviously going to bring forth a lot more ease for us to onboard titles and get things pushed up onto the network.
The other piece of this, obviously, that coincides with the registration of packet domains is key.
But at least now we can simplify and streamline getting more content up into the
creator hub and onto the packet hub. So we should start to see some growth there. I think that one
of the other pieces, and the biggest challenge, obviously, is always going to come down to
messaging, marketing, awareness, publicity, and the consistency behind that. But at least now we have the functionality to grow this network and
get more people onboarding there. And that's really where we believe the next
version of the community is going to grow from and where we can start onboarding creators across
the media space, people who are, and media doesn't just have to
necessarily be digital media, but, you know, talking about, you know, books, podcasts,
radio, music, all these different places that people are being creative and people want to
share their content with the world and getting this to start being a place that people, you know, domicile and, and, um, and anchor their content and messaging
from.
And then the next piece, this is, this is kind of the next frontier is building out
a template so that it's very easy for people to have their own websites launch on the,
on the packet network.
That's really the next piece is making it as
simple as possible for someone to just have a location, a website for them to sell from,
do streaming from, even just market themselves from. And we're looking for a partner right now that that will help us do that help us do
those web templates is that that's your kind of thought right Josh on on web templates yeah I mean
I'm kind of I'm kind of shifting my thoughts on that just based on how good AI has gotten and just how good, like how easy things have become.
So I don't really know exactly if another partner is going to come and take over that
portion. I'd love that because they would obviously help with the hosting side of things.
But at the end of the day, it's a big ask of a platform to come and do that.
I mean, it's not a huge ask, but it's definitely some development involved.
So I'm still hopeful that we'll find a partner that's like, yeah, we want to take that tv and that whole ecosystem that that might just be something we
have to kind of build ourselves it's not too complex but being able to let people put up their
own you know their own tile and then when you click on that tile that that takes you to a website
environment where you're able to monetize your content within this ecosystem,
giving people the rails and the tools to just be able to go and build that out yourself and not
need to hire a whole dev team to go put that together. And then also having that use our
domain system, which gives you that free domain for life.
Now, if you want to go point that to your own website
where you build your own site, that's fine too.
But I think in the development of what we're doing,
being able to bring in self-hosting,
I don't know, there's a few things we still need to work out
from an architecture standpoint that makes it so that this remains free and available to all where you can put your libraries, you can put your individual piece of content, where you as a creator, this becomes like your portfolio for your content and a place where you can monetize it easily.
And we'll continue to develop that out and figure out solutions that can make that really easy and frictionless,
regardless of your technological know-how. Yeah. I actually, just what you were saying
that it was starting to kind of click for me, but these are, it's interesting because
what we've been building is a way to circumvent all the businesses that try and charge the customer along the way to do these
things. There's just major businesses. I mean, GoDaddy's a massive, massive, massive business,
billion dollar business that's doing the registrar side. You got companies like Wix and
Squarespace that are doing the website side uh you know you have companies
like uh you know itunes that are doing the content distribution side and and amazon and it's like
we're building a platform here where creators can just come and do all those things and have no
intermediary in the middle of that don Don't have to pay to have access
to that. So it's, yeah, it's not going to be built overnight, but that's really the mindset for us is
to, is to break down these, these, these walls that are set in place to essentially take the
content, monetize it and for the distributor to keep the money,
and then for the service provider to force you to pay them for the ability to do these things.
And really what the vision behind the packet network is, is to make it possible for people
to just do all that stuff on their own and to have the money come directly to the content creator
without having to pay the platform and the web and the web host and the, you know, and the registrar and, you know, the payment processor. It's just to be
able to do all these things on your own to peer play it. And imagine if these, these ways that
people are monetizing, again, it's not just about, you know, movies, it's, you know, books and publishing. It's, it's across all these
different categories. Imagine if it was just, you come up with an idea, you come to an environment
and start making money from it without having to pay a big portion of your revenue to all these
different media intermediaries. And you have to pay for just the privilege to have a web identity and and which is
not a lot of money but multiply it times you know millions or billions of people it's a lot of money
for these companies so putting all that money back into the creator's pocket is really the vision
at this point with what we can do with the network i actually think there's a lot of other incredible
things that are possible with the packet network but we wanted to just kind of hang our hat on this category right
now. We happen to know a lot about it. And so, yeah, we're just building, you know, these are
the first iterations of this ecosystem and what's possible. So the goal is to now create that spark so that people can come in here and start actually doing it themselves.
You know, as I've noticed kind of human behavior, people are always hesitant to try new things.
And, you know, see it every single day.
and see it every single day.
People would rather pay for something
just because it's familiar
or because they're worried
that it's going to force them to have to learn something
or spend some extra time trying to do something.
In this case, adoption just takes time.
And so we're just going to continue building these tools.
We know how to use them on our own.
And our goal is to continue to get people to adopt them.
And I think Packet TV, the good thing that gets me excited about Packet TV, obviously, it's a very large endeavor.
It will require a lot of capital to actually make it possible. And we're just now out in the marketplace starting to talk
to some just major, major players from media companies to personalities, celebrities,
distributors about getting involved with the project. And I mean, just it's been wild. Like
every single person we've been talking to has been saying yes. So Josh and I spent the entire
day yesterday doing dozens of contracts, you know, onboarding advisors and all these
different people that are coming into it. We haven't talked to anybody about these things
publicly yet, but there's a lot of momentum that's occurring in that part of the business.
And as soon as that really begins to catch on and that doesn't have anything to do
with crypto the way that that's being viewed and but ultimately it will relate back everyone
understands that the packet network is the underpinning of what we're doing and as those
funds do come into play our intent is for that to coincide with marketing, the Packet Hub, Creator Hub, and ultimately
Packet Network. So the use cases with regards to specifically packet domains, and I think we'll
have a direct relation to growth on the currency side as well, especially just on the utility of
the currency alone, even if people aren't speculating on it,
but just getting people clear that they need to hold it
and we can get thousands, hundreds of thousands of people to get involved,
it's going to have an impact.
So we continue to power through.
Not a lot of projects can say that.
You get knocked off your pedestal and it's definitely hard to get back up.
And we've just been a resilient bunch, just continuing to grind, um, irregardless of the price and, and, you know, build what we always knew this technology was to use.
Yeah.
I think also we've never had, sorry, I'm just like bringing people in um join no um anyways yeah uh we've never really had
this much this many people that just kind of rally behind what the vision is you know like
I remember when we first started packet um you know there's definitely people excited about what we were doing but there was
there was still you know it's still a little bit of a brain buster on how
it's going to work and who's going to use it and what's the use case and all that stuff and so you
know being able to start having these these conversations with extremely high level people has been really rewarding in getting so much positive feedback around it.
And really just kind of rest assured that we're on the right track with how we're using this because the network's just it's so broad and it's so kind of nebulous, I guess, of like what a network does.
So when you can have something that people can physically touch and use and engage with becomes a lot, a lot easier to grasp.
And also just in this economic time and uncertainty of like what's happening in the world, I think media and entertainment is something that no matter what's going on in the world, it's going to be something that people are using and engaging with.
And as things get tougher in the economy economy people are looking for cheaper and easier ways
to do things so um that's why i feel we're really on the right track with with this direction and
this vertical that we've been we've been focusing our energy on yeah definitely yeah yeah sure
those have been the that's been the the reason that we've been grinding on it for so long.
But I think we also need to get back into building in the,
and it's been hard, obviously, in the crypto community
because everyone is just so beat down.
It's been wild, but it's still important to continue to build
within the crypto community space.
I think probably the biggest issue with the crypto community space
is because prices have just been perpetually going down now since really December. It's just hard to get
people to jump into anything. That's why the only thing that's happening is these little flash in
the pan meme projects where the price goes up and everyone jumps in and then jumps out because you
just cannot hold anything. I mean, you can't even hold ETH right now. ETH has just been absolutely getting beaten
down. I mean, I was just looking, I think ETH is right now lower than when we launched on base.
I don't think we saw it down below 1500. But I mean, we're back back at we're back at like the highs from 2018 right now you know so
it's um it's in bad bad shape and uh bitcoin has been holding up uh bitcoin's been holding up
quite well but bitcoin's almost back down to the back down to the high of the last bull market.
So, you know, all the gains, you know, are gone from, you know, post ETF.
And yeah, it's just a tough time to be in crypto right now.
You know, I think everyone's pretty disgruntled with regards to putting their faith
in in the this u.s administration think that they were gonna um you know be good for the economy
clearly not at least in the short term and um i think i haven't found one crypto person that
doesn't feel completely betrayed but you know you buy snake oil from a snake oil salesman,
I don't know what you could expect you were going to get. I mean, everyone was forewarned about it.
Now everyone is reaping the unfortunate consequence of that. But regardless, it definitely marks a
regulatory change for crypto. And I think that's in the long term, the positive piece that we can all take from
this, obviously the negative piece being the global markets are completely cratered. I think
I just saw that China just had the biggest drop in their stock market since 2008 and yesterday.
And we certainly know that the US markets are roiled. Crypto has been absolutely obliterated. But from a regulatory standpoint, when I look back on the fear that we had launching PKT back and prior to it even launching, so 2018, when we were discussing what this was going to be and ultimately went with what we went with as a as a
proof of work um there was a lot of fear around you know launching anything and now that fear is
gone and and that is a result of this regulatory shift that's happened just in the last two months
three months so that that's that is
positive for crypto and and ultimately from a long-term standpoint will will lend itself to
to growth once we get through whatever this this uh this period looks like um and and depending on
how severe it is but once we do get through the other side um it's definitely going to be good
through the other side. It's definitely going to be good for there to be regulatory certainty.
I think that will invite new types of investments into this ecosystem. And I've also been seeing
some really interesting stuff around banking regulation and incorporating stable coins into what traditional banks are able to do,
paying interest through stable coins, things like this, which is an incredibly powerful prospect.
And we know that the reduced friction that cryptocurrency does bring forth is incredibly
valuable, especially for cross-border payments, especially just for
any type of transaction that's not on the Ethereum blockchain, which I'm still baffled on.
Maybe we all got completely gaslit thinking that the Ethereum upgrade was going to reduce fees.
Ethereum has got to be as close to a failed
project as possible with regards to its ability to transact. And thank God for layer twos. But
I'm just blown away that even when there's any type of market volatility, you just literally
can't even send a transaction over the Ethereum network without paying some exorbitant fee. I
mean, we're talking about sending $ five or $10 worth of ETH
and having to pay a 50 to $150 gas fee. It's just, that's not a viable project.
So it doesn't surprise me to watch the currency cratering right now because it looks like a complete failure in terms of its
ability to transact in mass. But from a layer two standpoint, there's unbelievable technological
capability there. And besides the fact that you have to onboard through Ethereum,
that's still a lot of viability in these layer twos i think the
biggest issue and caleb i know you've been giving some thought about this is is how to get people
into these layer two currencies you know with with some sort of ease you want to talk i was
going to think uh do you want to talk about the project that you just worked on caleb
with the uh that you had just done or that was it a grant project that you had just done
the hackathon yeah yeah um well i mean it wasn't really the way i see the layer two is working
and this is how i if i need to buy base if i just buy eth on a an exchange that supports base and then just withdraw yeah yep and that's that seems to be
the the way you know it's just ethereum's fine as long as you don't touch it uh or if you use
ethereum you need to be prepared to wait until there's a slow moment and then do your transaction then
and uh not in this you know oh it's all fast moments now i'm just no well just waiting in
sitting in ethereum when it's literally just going down perpetually i see yeah yeah yeah
in a currency that's devaluating itself because there's just yeah no yeah yeah yeah well
you know so your fees get smaller well that's the crazy thing no your fees get bigger as the
longer you wait that's what i just don't understand okay yeah sure so so you but you um you
you do the transaction you pay the 50 bucks in fees, but by the end of the year, you can pretend you only paid 30 bucks in fees.
Right, because now you're over on the L2 and it's a lot cheaper.
No, because you just exited your Ethereum position and then Ethereum took a dump.
And so you could just pretend that the fee you paid was even smaller.
Sure.
Well, yeah, talk through the hackathon and what
you guys were building the project that i did and it's just a library for um and it's it's actually
not even that interesting for it's not that interesting for um getting on and off of uh
l2 it's for uh being able to um it's like it's like the like the gas station network.
That's a similar thing.
It's like being able to have your fee be paid in the token that you're using.
So like if, you know, packet on base, base fees are pretty small.
But you need to have some base ETH in order to do any transaction.
It's just a real headache. And if you could do a packet transaction and have it paid
by selling a little bit of packet every time you transact, then that would be ideal because then
you'd only have to have packet. And that was the design that we came up with.
And it's sitting on GitHub.
It's called the Pollinate framework.
Go to pollinate.cgdns.ifr if you want to look at it.
Kind of a research prototype is what I would call it.
But it definitely has potential and something that we could think about using in the um the future in
uh in in packet pending a upgrade of the coin because we need to put a few hooks in it to
allow that to happen but um that would be something that would be potentially interesting
and then there's another component of it which does periodic um operations like paying out the
um people who staked their their their packet being able
to pay them out periodically automatically without having to have a you know paymaker sitting there
making those payments well first off I mean that's just that's such a it's such a simple full but necessary piece of technology just because you think about the um the time the
number of times where you have a currency let's say someone sends you some pkt you receive it
because it doesn't cost you anything to receive it right and then you go and then you go to send
it or spend it or sell it and it's like oh you don't have any ethereum to transact i mean this
has been consistent we've had this problem all over the dashboard where people go take their
perfect example go claim your airdrop and then you want to go stake but now you don't have any
base e i mean that's the perfect use case right and then all of a sudden we're having people
getting these error messages and they're like what's going on this shit's broken right and this technology that you're
talking about here just makes it so that it's a seamless transaction it's just going to sell
off some of the native currency that you're transacting in just to to and it runs that
around in a circle to pay the gas fee basically yeah and i mean it's it's kind of simple but brilliant we moved to base
to get rid of a lot of the user experience issues that we had you know running our own blockchain
but we have to acknowledge that the ethereum world has a user experience issue too which is that like
okay i i just got some like moon tokens what do i do with them you know you think about you're
you're a normie you've never done this before okay i've got a wallet all right i have i'm i'm
learning the computery stuff i've got a wallet it's it's in my in my web browser i guess it has
a password and stuff and then it's like okay i've got some some moon payment crap what do i do with
it is there anything i can do with it
and then it's like well i'll send it to somebody you go to send it to somebody it's like oh but
moon payment isn't isn't gonna solve your problem you also need to have mars coin and it's like the
fuck is this shit and uh you know that that's a that's a major user experience problem that all these L1, L2 kind of ERC-20 based
ecosystems have and we have it too.
Yeah, none of this stuff's perfect. It's all got kind of, you know, you trade one problem for
another problem. I mean, even Bitcoin has its own problems as well so i mean
well the l2s i mean sorry the l1s don't have this problem and i think that's part of the you know
problem if you're trying to go do a transaction and what problem 10 minute block i think i think
the biggest issue for bitcoin is that the wallet makers have decided amongst themselves that they should issue
you a new address every time you make change. So you don't really have an address in Bitcoin.
You have this continuous faucet, a waterfall of new addresses coming out of the ether. And that's
supposed to make it private but it doesn't
because any any coin analytics can just connect all those addresses together and uh yet you don't
you don't have a place like on the explorer where you can just check your balance the way you do it
in ethereum land so in ethereum you need two different you need another coin in order to spend your coin and then in bitcoin you don't
but you you don't really have one address that you can just go online and check your balance
because i mean it'd be like having a bank account every time you make a transaction it creates
another bank account this is just weird so i would say that's the biggest problem with bitcoin yeah and it was
interesting because a lot of that was solved with on the on the pkt side but yeah which is cool which
is that there was definitely some you know certainly some innovations there um and we've seen
that is that we used uh technology that was at a dead end uh peer-to-peer wallet um lightning
stuff that uh just that whole whole branch of the ecosystem never really amounted to anything
in 2019 it looked like it was going going places but it just didn't it was a failure to launch and the l2s and ethereum world just took
over so yeah we we just went went and jumped on the train because ethereum boosted so high that
like people now had a bunch of money to go innovate over there and so you saw kind of this
like exponential growth in ethereum over the last five years that you didn't necessarily see.
You saw with Bitcoin, but not in the same way that Ethereum had an explosive growth.
Now, fast forward to this last cycle, you know, Bitcoin really got to grow some wings and do some flying.
But you'd be interesting with like the growth that bitcoin just experienced
hitting 100 grand if there's innovation there if everyone's just like oh it's a store of value and
so we're just gonna go put that in our coffers and not develop there i don't think there is
any innovation happening on bitcoin i mean the lightning network is wake me up when it does something.
Most of the Bitcoin developers are now developing Noster, which is micropayments over Lightning, which is fine.
It's cool.
Lightning does work for micropayments because you don't tap out the channels.
payments because you don't you don't tap out the channels but um there isn't nobody's really
thinking about like layer twos or soft forking anything equivalent to solidity I mean I understand
why they don't want to do that because you end up with ethereum again which you end up with
these ridiculous gas fees which to their
credit bitcoin keeps it simple and they don't have the ridiculous fees so that's nice but um
well mostly ridiculous fees that's nice but um not having that you know getting around the complexity
uh not not having the complexity means that they have uh they don't have the ability to do stuff like l2 so
that's uh and i think the bitcoin guys just don't want to innovate like there is it it works
the point is not to be innovative the point is to be a known quantity that people can rely on that's
not going to change overnight you know bitcoin
in 2009 is the same as a bitcoin now and and that's that's uh kind of predictable and good
on them for that and that's worked out real well for them especially legacy finance they understand
that bitcoin from 2009 is the same as bitcoin now legacy finance guys love it uh yeah i think they
feel like they can't get their hands around Ethereum
because, you know, it's an amorphous thing every time the developers have a dream
and they invent something different.
I'm talking shit about all these projects.
I'm not invited to any parties.
But, you know, that makes Ethereum a lot more hard to get comfortable with if, you know, you're 70 years old and you wear a tie to work.
So, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see how it goes.
It's two different um it's two different
theories of how things ought to work and uh we need both you know we need stability we also need
innovation so right yeah yeah no it's it's super interesting i mean just the whole space the
evolution of of this entire ecosystem you know I know it'll be interesting what happens with, you know, the deregulation of crypto and all the, you know, all the fencing that has been ripped down.
And, you know, they took out the whole department of crypto regulation.
It's just like no longer exists.
Yeah, I saw that this morning.
They just disbanded the whole entire crypto regulation department.
Was that the consumer financial protection thing?
That warrants thing?
No, it was like an actual like like an actual department um sec
okay was it at the sec was that where it was i think it was um i don't know i i just saw
but you know i think what's a little silly about this administration, and look, I'm all for deregulation of crypto, like stop trying to throw people in jail for trying to innovate, you know, but let's not be foolish.
There are tons of people trying to scam people with crypto.
Like, that's a real thing.
That's not just like everyone that's trying to build here is trying to do the
right thing. Like this is, you're dealing with, you know, finance and, you know, financial
instruments and you're dealing with billions of dollars, at least hundreds of millions of dollars
per project, you know? So there's a lot of money there and for sure not every single one of these
projects are trying to do the right thing. And there's definitely a ton of fraud so there's a lot of money there. And for sure, not every single one of these projects are trying to do the right thing.
And there's definitely a ton of fraud and there's tons of rug pulls and just people just, you know.
Yeah, but they never caught a single scam artist. You know, that's the counter argument, right?
All the years and all the scams and all the rug pulls and things that collapsed and blew up, they would show up after everybody lost their
money and say, whoa, this is why we need more funding for more government regulation.
They caught that one woman.
After somebody, they would only go after people who are on the shit list of politicians.
So it's just like, yeah, it's a theory, but it never amounted to anything, so you might
as well cut it.
And there's a lot of scams with the U.S. dollar.
I mean, I guarantee everyone on this call has been scammed off of some way or another.
Right, but there's a regulatory body for that.
And there's a regular –
None of those people get caught.
It's to say that –
And it doesn't work.
Well, of course it's after the fact.
Of course it's after the fact.
You're not going to be able to preemptively know that somebody is going to scam you.
Like, I mean, maybe you can't.
But just because there's regulation doesn't mean that shit's going to prevent.
I didn't say there shouldn't be regulation.
I said that there should still be a regulatory body that is paying attention to these that are creating laws that are protecting consumers.
You know, it's like the FTX thing. Sure, anybody could go and do that. But there is certain things
and checks and balances that after that happened, you know, Sam Bankman-Freem is in jail and he
should be in jail for what he did and how the way he constructed that and the intermingling of
money and all this stuff he did like that
stuff's illegal because it should be illegal and if you take those regulations away and sure there's
in his defense he could never have predicted that the the rug would have been pulled out on all on
crypto but and he didn't have checks and balances to protect that but like he still
you were when you were sending money to ftx you weren't sending money to ftx you're sending money
to this other company that was then you know circling money around in a circle and they were
like separate but the same and intermingling cash i mean it was illegal because it should be illegal
and there should be a regulatory body that goes and
regulates people like that. If you go remove all that. Let's differentiate between two things.
So one is fraud and theft. And I don't think anybody's talking about getting rid of the
fraud and theft laws. So fraud and theft and these types of things, these come in after the fact. So if you steal millions of dollars from a bunch of depositors and run off with it because you created a fake bank and paid off a bunch of politicians like SBF did, then after the fact, you get caught and hopefully the process works.
But that process, that's not regulatory. That is the Justice Department coming after you for harming people after the fact. The idea of
regulation, where regulation makes sense is like, hey, can I build a nuclear power plant in my backyard? The regulatory say, no, because we don't want to
wait until the thing melts down and there's a giant exclusion zone and then tell you, you owe
$10 trillion for all the land that you've destroyed. And then have you say, well,
there's nothing I can do about it. I'm broke. So we're going to regulate and say you just cannot do that.
So regulation is by definition is preemptive.
You're trying to prevent somebody from doing something that's likely to be a bad idea.
So that's why if I was to go outside and build a building and say, I'm opening a bank.
Come deposit your money.
They'll be shut down before anybody deposits money because regulation says that a lot of times when
people say they're opening a bank, come deposit your money, that's a bad idea. A lot of times
they run with the money, so we're not going to allow them to do it, even if they're not going
to run away with the money. So I don't think
anybody's talking about getting rid of the actual common law of fraud, theft, and these types of
things. The only real question about regulation is, should we prevent people from doing something likely to be bad before they do it. And I would say that based on the track record of crypto
regulation from say 2014 until now, they didn't catch any of the bad guys. I mean, they didn't
really stop any of the bad guys in advance. You didn't see any like really, you know, all these
dirty, dirty operations
that everybody in the community was looking at going oh man you're gonna lose your money don't
touch that thing and you know and people in the community say how is that company still existing
and then you know then the company goes belly up and everybody's like lose a bunch of people lose
their money and and you know all the old are like, well, what did you think was going
to happen?
And then the government comes in and says, this is why we need more regulation.
No, it's not why you need more regulation.
It's why the people who were, who were supposed to be mining the store should be fired because
they weren't regulating.
They didn't, they didn't prevent the bad thing from happening. Be like, if you had a nuclear regulatory authority, and then somebody just builds a nuclear power plant in their shed,
and then the thing melts down, and then they're like, well, we need more nuclear regulation.
It's like, no, we need to fire the people who weren't regulating.
The regime change is about regulation by prosecution or regulation by enforcement.
I think the problem with the last, by the way, the Trump administration was even worse, but the Biden administration did nothing to advance this either, which is like everyone just wanted some regulation. They literally
wanted to know what the rules of the road were. It's like, hey, if you don't want me to go 90
miles an hour, tell me to go 65 and put a sign up. And not only that, they sued. You had Coinbase
sue the federal government asking for regulation, just saying,
hey, are we going 65 or 95 or 15? What's the speed here? And they would not provide that
clarity. And so that's really been, I think, the missing part. And that's why banks haven't been
able to get involved with it because they're like, hey, we're not going to like touch this and then get burned.
Like we need to know what it needs to be.
And but to your point, Caleb, you're absolutely right.
Like everything else, if anything, if anything, the strategy that had been going on, which is giving zero clarity and then saying that we're going to prosecute bad actors, it didn't lead to prosecuting bad actors. In fact, what it led to is prosecuting good actors because the good actors were trying
to do things on a larger level and trying to touch and benefit as many people as possible.
Now, it doesn't mean that they were doing good things because a lot of the exchanges that got
sued, you could argue are bad actors. The 200x leverage BS and the market
manipulation to basically wipe out your customers every single day, that shit should be illegal.
It's illegal in every other market. And crypto just being the Wild West, there being no regulation
that says that you can't just liquidate your customers and take all their money,
they're going to do it. But that wasn't even what the government
was attacking these companies for. And that is, from my standpoint, the criminal activity.
If you go look back on probably somewhere, it's got to be over a trillion dollars at this point
of money that has been essentially and effectively stolen from customers, from exchange customers
by this collusion between market makers and exchanges and the market making of exchanges.
Yeah. There's a lot of dirty stuff that that is that's you can take every single rug pull right and add them up
all together and create a super villain and then you can take every single exchange and what
they've done over the last 90 days and it's 100x over that and it's just messed up and and i mean
literally but that's the whole point that i'm making is that it should be a regulatory body that's looking at these exchanges and being able to prevent.
But the problem is these exchanges are not domiciled in the US.
So here's the problem, right?
The problem is that you need some congruence on a global basis.
And the US, look, this is where we need help. This is literally where we
need help. And I actually agree with you, John. I think we're just barking up the wrong tree,
all in all. If we were to just focus on one problem and the problem was exchanges and trying
to create some congruency across all these exchanges around the world and just let everyone rug pull and do
trump coins all over the place and f each other over just the exchange problem would solve in my
opinion like 90 of the problems with crypto because the exchanges is where is the most predatory stuff
and really where the customers global customers u, US customers at the very least,
are getting really, really hurt. And I can just point to literally the last 60 to 90 days
and Trump's tariff announcement and what the exchanges and market makers did to essentially
rug pull the entire market, that shit's criminal. I mean, there's no question. That was a complete fabricated
market manipulated situation to trigger leverage liquidations. And you can go and look at the
leverage liquidation website and you can just see how much money gets liquidated every single day.
And where does that money go? It goes the exchanges you know so they're incentivized
to liquidate their customers and it's basically theft you know because it's not anything I mean
we have a World Bank um regulation you know there is joint regulation on banking where the world has
kind of come together and say this is right this is wrong this is kind of how things have to work
you're shaking your head but like that is that what the banks are doing it's why people are using banks yeah yeah
just go to china go to russia you know there isn't any regulation the regulation is if it you can you
can do whatever you want as long as you have the right connections and that's the same thing as the
exchanges the reason why these nobody ever goes after these exchanges is because all these guys have phone
numbers and they can call a guy and they can make the problem go away and they have a war chest
they're liquidating and they have war chest and that's the truth is like you sit there i mean look
at what these guys just did i mean it's funny. I was just thinking about, you know, you know, the, if you talk to
a lot of regulators, they would say, well, what happens if you get hacked? You know,
are you going to be able to cover the hack? They're like, oh, we're good on hacks. We liquidate our
customers every single day. So if we get, if we get hacked, we have a huge war chest of all their
cash to just give it back to them in that circumstance. Being that that is such a rare
circumstance and that's how when BuyBag got robbed for, what was it? Hundreds and hundreds of
millions. Was it a billion dollars? Something crazy amount of money. It was a billion, wasn't it? It
was like a one point something billion. When they got robbed, they just said, no problem. We got
that cash sitting right over here. We've been stealing it from our customers every single day
for the last couple of years. Yeah, but that's just kind of the same thing of
like where people used to hide money in Panama and they used to go and hide money in these different,
you know, sovereign bank places and the World Bank and these world authorities have gotten involved
and being able to have- The companies got involved and they said,
if you don't clean up your act panama switzerland
etc we're going to put you on the sanction list and cut you off from swift so that that's how
the banks were forced to uh to do that was because the uh the us can cut you off with sanctions yeah
and i think that look i'm just i think what josh is trying to say and i think we can all agree
is that it would be good to have some congruency around what's right and what's wrong around crypto. At one point, we got to grow up
and hopefully it happens because I think it would ultimately be good for consumer confidence. I
think this is where, just ending on this point, I think this is where we get a little bit detached from reality with crypto is because it's been the wild, wild west, because you can kind of do whatever the heck you want to do.
And the threat of doing these things is relatively low.
And the reward is extremely high um and because
people are kind of just it's still so new people are like you can always get like some the next
person to take five grand out of their savings account and expose it to crypto and then lose it
all um and there's so many people doing that, generally speaking, that it's just going to
continue to happen and people are going to continue to get hurt. But here's the thing.
Every time someone gets hurt, every time there's a billion dollars with the liquidations or
hundreds of millions of dollars with the liquidations, The reality is that those retail buyers and their friends,
you know, just say, oh, yeah, I put five grand into that and lost it. That's not for me.
And so it really stimmies the ability for this marketplace to expand. But the benefit,
the reward is we keep getting all these hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffer. So it's almost like we'll just keep attacking the customer, attacking the retail idiot who makes
these bad decisions because who touches the fire and gets burned. And it's good for business on
the exchange side. And so the question we have to ask ourselves, is it better to continue to harm the newbie fresh retail customer
who takes a little money other savings exposes to crypto so the exchanges continue to get rich
and some you know crypto coin can flash in the pan go up and then come down or do we want to have
some longevity to this to this ecosystem to this marketplace where people and i'm not even
talking about like stability i'm just talking about like just harming people which is what
liquidations do which is what you know watching you know the manipulations do even if you're not
getting liquidated you put your money into a project, goes down 80%.
It's like, this is the type of shit that happens every single day.
And so do we want to have some stability in this market?
And yeah, maybe everyone's not making a billion dollars a week like they are right now, but
we can actually get hundreds of millions of more people to be involved with this market
or not.
And that's going to be the decision that maybe we just keep deferring that decision. But I think when we do get to
the other side of that, that'll be an inflection point where crypto becomes a real viable marketplace
versus just this wild, wild west that we're living in today. Well, you know, the thing that you have to consider is that gambling is an old problem. People want to gamble. And somebody's always going to set up a shop where
people can gamble. I mean, you can really say, hey, if you don't want to get liquidated, don't
use leverage. And that's a reasonably fair thing to say. I mean, We can get rid of a lot of the problems by just saying,
well, centralized exchanges can't do leverage.
So then you're only going to have, well, you're not going to have any CXs doing leverage
or you're just going to have these kind of shady ones that you need to already get some um usdt and wire to some guy and yada yada um so then get the leverage out of out
of all the um reputable exchanges and then then what well i mean aren't people gonna have to go
take their take their coins and send them to some guy who says he's
doing betting on racehorses or some other ridiculously stupid idea and it's probably
true that they will and so you know is are we actually solving anything you know i mean
vegas is a pretty rich place for a pretty good reason. And I mean, at some point you may just have to say, well,
we can educate people to a certain extent and we can make it so that you have
to kind of go to one of the dodgy exchanges in order to do the stuff that's
going to get you hurt.
But, you know, one way or another, I mean, people are going to put together,
people are going to make decentralized card games and rip people off with decentralized three card Monty instead of, you know, getting
liquidated on that. Yeah, I'll say two things about it. Number one, you know, the biggest
problem is that US already regulates the futures markets and doing
leverage trading. So you already can't just go on to exchanges if you're in the U.S.
And the problem that we experience is that the U.S. is just regulating U.S. people in a global
market. And so now you're just limiting U.S US people from doing what the rest of the world is doing.
And so I do agree that this isn't just a US thing. This is a global thing that needs to be solved as
a global regulatory body if you're ever even able to do any of that stuff.
Second thing I'll say is crypto has been pumping during this entire call and uh probably a good time to put some
shorts in and um ride that thing on the back down over the weekend so yeah i know these um yeah it
has been pumping but it's uh it everyone's gonna everyone's gonna sell that off for sure so whenever you see green candles
turn it around selling and buy it buying on the dip so all right well without further ado
good chatting with you all happy wednesday always a pleasure here every wednesday
and we'll catch you guys on the next one have a good one see you later all right bye guys
