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Simplified #87 | Aster vs HYPE | Ronin Buybacks | PN Reactions
Recorded: Sept. 22, 2025 Duration: 1:59:10Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto community is buzzing with recent developments, including the anticipated launch of the Mask token by ConsenSys, a resurgence in Web3 gaming, and the controversial sunset of Pirate Nation, which has sparked discussions on project sustainability and community expectations.
Full Transcription
Thank you. you
yeah Everybody sing groove it and went silent Everybody wanna do this, they trying Despicable how I grew this time flying
Shoes looking like the loosens, I'm tying
Big sprint into the tarmac
Long way from a minivan
But we're still sitting in the far bay
New ride door suicider
You should see the damn Carfax
Always said that it's do or die
And I haven't had a damn heart attack
Got it on lockdown
Bigs of their shows is not loud
Guess what my stock down
Give you a hint
It's not a down
Gonna fuck out
Big hook when I drop down
How many songs out
Give you a hint
I lost count
Everybody say they feel me
My team like the SEAL team.
Neighbors hear the wheels scream.
I'm sorry.
New whip, I'm flyin'.
Everybody say improve it when solid.
Everybody wanna do this, they tryin'.
This big boy, how I do this, I'm flyin'.
Shoes lookin' like the Lutens, I'm...
I keep on goin' and goin' and stop stopping was really an option and i would have quit
calling the shots i'm calling it plucks the one thing that i'm never calling the splits
they try to hate on me wait on the end of the verse and i promise you gotta admit
you got a couple he got a knockdown how is he not gonna mess i'm at the top now i got
the code you locked out check in the box now. Bucket list getting cracked out.
Everyone talk loud.
Calm down.
I used to shop around.
Don't even check what it costs now.
Everybody say they feel me.
My team like the SEAL team.
Neighbors hear the wheels scream.
I'm sorry.
New whip, I'm plotting.
Everybody say improve it.
It went silent.
Everybody wanna do this. They trying. Despicable hot brew. Everybody All right, everybody, raise your hand if you had on your bingo card Connor Price putting out one of the hardest songs of 2025.
Put your hands down.
Nobody thought that.
Where's the prediction market for hip-hop, Icy?
Put it in the comments.
Wait, I'm getting just a couple more people up.
Knock, come on up.
Big Bro is in Korea already,
about to DJ a couple of parties.
Make sure you guys go support him if you're in Korea.
I think he'll also be potentially DJing in Singapore, but it's like three parties in Korea.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say which ones, but one's definitely the one you're all going to want to go to.
So make sure you're peeping the Lumas.
Wish I was out there.
It's always a blast whenever we get to party together.
But with that being said, super stoked for all of my friends and fam that were able to make it over there.
It seems like Web3 Gaming is actually kind of alive and well whenever you look at it through it.
Enough of a magnifying glass.
But whenever you zoom out, maybe not so much.
Dub with the 100 emoji.
How was the YGG event?
I was seeing some videos from.
Oh, dude, it was so lit.
It was wild.
Lines out the door.
I fucking loved it.
This whole Korea has been amazing.
That's sick, man.
Really cool to know that they can pull in a country like Korea as well,
where stuff is obviously a little bit different than the Philippines.
What was your favorite part?
I saw the videos of like 100 people all playing Giga Chatbat at the same time.
Basically, everyone who came in got a wristband with a number on it.
And based on their performance in Giga Chatbat and LLL land, they got rolls or balls in this gotcha thing at the end where we were giving away YGG.
thing at the end where we were giving away ygg and this you know when the balls roll down the
fucking thing and you know it's gonna be number 44 or 51 and all that there's these two dudes that
were like 54 and 41 and they're losing their shit as it was like the balls were about to it was an
epic fucking moment and uh yeah it was cool seeing people losing their shit over not winning money.
All right, well, with that said, let's jump into it up first.
The man I was just speaking to, he's played more Web3 games than most of us can name.
A human patch note, a living save file, a player too who never unplugs.
The Redemption Art continues with Dub.
Yes, sir. Everyone in Korea thinks I'm a professional baseball player.
And there's like around 30 pictures of me going around social media and some autograph signs.
So I'm fucking famous, boys.
We got to get you in like a Shohei Otani jersey and just have them lose their fucking minds.
That'd be incredible.
Up next, once a firefighter.
Oh, wait, no, Jerry's not here yet.
Fuck that guy.
Up next, this man is a titan of gaming temples from Jagex to King, from Miniclip to Robio.
And now with Warp, he's architecting an all-in-one arsenal,
an entire galaxy of growth with wallets, marketplaces, funnels,
and more that can help your game regardless of the chain.
It's the master of multi-chain.
It's Matthew Buxton.
It's going to be good to actually finally get out to Asia.
The FOMO is so bad, I bought bought some extra spicy ramion and regretted the
living shit out of that um but yeah i'm not regretting here uh being here today it's uh
it looks pretty stacked lots of shit going on yeah throughout the week we have a group chat that we
send you know links to and different ideas for topics too and this week we had like at least
three times too many topics uh which is whenever you know it's been a spicy one in Web3.
Super excited.
Up next at the helm of Games.gg, he's made the ultimate hub for gaming news, reviews, and quests,
and turned the Game Awards into an annual industry main event.
He's got the marketing magic touch and a pen chip for midlay mechanics.
He's the godfather of Web3 gaming. It's OG.
What's up?
Wow. Powerful opening statement. up next uh he was trained by the
sec forged by founders and now he's educating us one tip at a time from vtubers divisionary
games from andromeda it's the lethal lawyer the ace of andromeda it's michael christine
hey what's up everybody let's Let's get into it today.
Yes, sir. Great to have you back. And in a market muddied with memes and mayhem,
he is Clarity Incarnate, the banter beast, the seed stage surgeon, the strategist with a storyteller's tongue. From crypto banter to Nexus Labs, he's threading the needle between
storytelling and strategy. It's Johnny, aka Hustlepedia, back on the show.
It's been way too long, boys. Good to be back.
And some good topics today for sure.
When Nox sent him over, I was like, oh yeah, I'll be there.
Hell yeah, dude.
Great to have you back.
A couple of returning guests that are long overdue.
Super excited.
Up next, having evolved far beyond the average Pokedex with Wolf in one hand and Wolves down
and the other is crafting revolutionary products while rallying peerless pooches to craft Kaizuna,
the ultimate Discord tool.
It's time to face the fur and meet their master.
It's the curator of canines, the patron of pooches.
It's Peyton Okalanica, but I know I can never hear.
Yeah, let's go, baby.
Sam's not racist, I promise.
It's his real name.
It's actually how it goes.
Up next, he's the silverback of speculation,
the vine-swinging virtuoso of volatility.
From the treetops of trading to the depths of DeFi,
there's one beast who rules them all.
He howls through bear sessions and thunders through bull runs.
So beat your chest and brace yourselves for the gorilla of gains.
It's CryptoGorilla.
Thank you for having me.
It's been way too long.
Glad to be here.
Looking forward to it.
I'm realizing I put beast in way too many of these intros, given that we have the one,
the only, sharpen your pencils and silent your cell phones.
He, a class is officially in session with his EVM Maverick is in the building.
He's the professor of profits, the Sultan of Speculation, the DeFi Don,
who's always down to lend a helping paw. It's ICO Beast.
Good afternoon, everybody. I kept hearing Beast. I was like, oh, is this me? And then I was like,
no, he said something about a gorilla that can't be me.
Yeah, my bad, buddy. Great to have you back, as always. Thanks for making the time.
And up next, this man is building Grand Arena, the next battleground for DJ and Glory in the
castle of Kathleen Osgood. He's turned shitposting frozen supremacy into a global spectator sport
excuse me and it's the human highlight reel it's hand out yo sam is definitely not racist
somehow that makes it sound way more possible than i am up next whether it's tea times entrance
or tokenomics ted talks this man does it all equal five systems shreds and screams whack-fuck on the back nine of any golf course.
He built talent pipelines in his early 20s and blows that money on Pokemon card packs.
It's the masochist of metrics and mulligans.
It's knock.
Daniel Dollars has led the Colts to 3-0 for the first time in my fucking lifetime.
That is tragic, but true, and I'm super fucking excited about it.
Okay, Jonathan Taylor did the leading, but Daniel Dollars,
is this what we call him now?
Now that he's 3-0, we call him Daniel Dollars?
He was Danny Dimes in New York, man.
He was not worth much there, but he's got at least 10x the value here.
That's incredible, dude.
Got to give a huge shout out to our amazing
sponsors you can open remix right now and play a thousand games with zero installs and all a
thousand games were made by people just as unqualified as you discover your new favorite
like it's tiktok one swipe at a time instead of slogging through the app store build or play as
soon as today you're not too late you're just in time for remix the official ai studio of simplified
and before you log off don't sleep on ygg's latest grand slam giga chat bat
is live where you can swing big score bigger and maybe even snag some ygg tokens along the way
giga chat bat is pure arcade madness one bat infinite swagger and the leaderboard begging
for your name pair with lawland you've got the ultimate one two punch of degen boards and digital
dingers go show some love to ygg the official game publisher of simplified we're jumping in
first with a quick one this This should be easy, okay?
A few days ago, the CEO of ConsenSys,
which is MetaMask's parent company,
finally confirmed that Mask token is coming
and that it might be sooner than you think.
Obviously, there's a lot of people excited
because many, many, many people used MetaMask in the past
or continue to use it to this day.
Does Mask, though, end up over or under
a $5 billion valuation by the end of its
first week? And how should people set their expectations given the hype? Do we think people
will earn maybe over $1,000 if they've been using this since 2021? Or is it like everybody's getting
20 bucks? What do we think here? I'm going to go to ICOB, then we'll go to Jerry.
Yeah, man, I think FDV calculations and price I'm going to stay away from entirely.
Just there's no way of knowing without knowing how much supply control this thing is going to have.
So I have no idea there.
As far as actual allocation goes, I would love it if they just looked at when you first generated the seed with MetaMask and did you keep using it?
I don't know if they have malware embedded in MetaMask that tracks all that you keep using it? I don't know if they have like malware embedded in MetaMask
that tracks all of that or if they do like IP tracking or what, but I'm concerned that it's
probably just going to be something like how many times do you use MetaMask swap or like,
are you providing liquidity using MUSD and something else on Linnea or something along
those lines? Cause that'll be less exciting for me personally um being like effectively a
pre-meta mask um or like day one user but i think that's probably the way it goes
damn yeah that would similarly break my heart but at the same time i've tried to keep my
expectations woefully low uh jerry and then dub i probably should also stay away from fdvs uh but you know i don't fuck it i mean you know i
say over because uh i'm in retard season and i think we shall be permables so um yeah i i have
no idea though um but fuck it over we ball um but also i will say the thing that's going to be the best to see is like simultaneously the most like the airdrop we've all been waiting for the most and the disappointment that we all get from us being like, well, we've never really used any MetaMask products other than the wallet itself.
So we're all going to get like nine dollars and, you know, we'll go get nice, uh, you know, iced, iced macchiatos one day on
MetaMask Sam. But I think there's no way that people walk away from this happy for how long
we've been waiting. Right. It's like, you know, I mean, maybe like I see obese, the whole, like,
when did you generate the seed versus like, is it still an active wallet? That's maybe the best
hope that any of us have, but like, none of us have used MetaMask swap,
like none of us are providing liquidity, you know, I'm happy to call all of you guys liars, if you say that you're using MBSD to provide liquidity right now. So I think it's also going
to be probably the most fudded and like disappointing airdrop of all time at the same time.
So as someone who's currently in the transition to Rabi, they couldn't have announced this at a
better time.
Let's go to dub and then we'll tag an ant out.
Yeah,
dude,
this is going to the fucking moon and we're all getting goddamn millions.
I've been using metamask swap like a goddamn idiot for years. And I'm so glad that I'm going to get repaid a hundred X thousand X tenfold
for it.
First time hearing about MUSD,
but I'm fucking full porting into that right now too so i'm i i'm just glad that personally everyone yelled at me to switch to rabbi
um easy like set me up with rabbi and everything and i still have refused to use it other than
tracking uh what's going on with my metamask wallet wallet. So, you know, yeah, I'm not going to be disappointed here
because this is our Lord and Savior MetaMask,
and the fox is never going to let any of us down for sure.
That image that was going around with the fox with gold teeth
and like a diamond-encrusted chain was so good.
Let's go to hands-out.
Real quick reminder, nothing you hear today is financial advice.
I've heard from the Tattered Lawyer that literally it doesn't matter if i say this but the more spicy
gets around price i just have to i just have to hands out over to you yeah so i mean let's say
they gave everybody a million dollars right how many metamask users are there if there's 10 000
let's say we like cut off everybody who's top using metamask and there's 10 000 people left
you would only get a hundred dollars if they airdropped a million right so they have like
i looked this up the other day it's like 30 to 60 million active metamask wallets right now yeah i
think it's like 100 lifetime million and then yeah like 30 million active is what i've heard
right so what i'm saying is like there's not that much of a difference
between 30 million and 1 million, if I'm being honest, because that's only a 30 X between a
million and like 10,000 users. That's quite a lot of a multitude, right? So when you're looking at
the actual numbers itself, uh, we're probably looking at a few bucks, but I was not expecting
a Metamask drop period ever in my life. So nobody's using Ethereum.
So if the token is launched on there, we can claim it for 10 cents.
And hopefully it's more than that.
So still bullish.
Reasons to be optimistic.
Let's go over to Matthew Buxton, then we'll tag in Crypto Gorilla.
It's going to be the same people who make bank every airdrop somehow mysteriously
make bank on this one it's going to be something like yeah we looked at all the people with metamask
and massive x accounts that want to post about metamask and then we decided to give all the
people who already have all the money more of that same money and everyone else can go
fuck themselves no matter how old their account is i'm betting it's something like that and that you know otherwise it'd be great just imagining like
the entirety of x posting about the three dollars they got from metamask i mean that's great in a
way i think that'd be adorable i mean i've been using it since god knows when um and i expect to
get nothing just like with open sea when i actually some bizarre reason
made an fts on open sea and still got fucking nothing um so you know that's um it's it's
expected it's it's definitely in it's probably going to be over five billion for like three days
it actually it just probably might make the top of the cycle. Might be that one that everyone's like, actually, I'm going to get in this one and see how far it
rides. And then just then, just like the normies are dumping on us today by selling all that XRP
because someone said something on Reddit that we don't know about because we don't read it.
And the same thing will happen. We'll all get in there and all get our answers handed to us.
I look forward to it. Gorilla, what say you over under 5 billion after a week?
And what do we think is maybe the aggregate
that a user could expect as a medium MetaMask user,
if you had to guess?
I don't like playing the over under either.
I have no idea how to evaluate a wallet token.
I'd have to look into their numbers and everything.
What's the token going to do?
Are they going to be using fees for buybacks, like a hyper liquid type of thing uh I I'm honestly
ready to get disappointed I'm ready to have my heart broken here uh like like was said already
there's by Hatal there's way too many users I mean I have well over a hundred maybe even 200
uh Metamask individual addresses on multiple seed phrases so i don't know how they
reward reward that i do think it's going to be more about swaps and bridging i remember like two
years ago when i so the first time they ever mentioned it that i could find was four years ago
november 2021 where they said uh he was answering to a post about coinbase somebody's saying like oh coinbase
is doing a wallet extension metamask better drop a token and then uh the dude said um stay tuned
he said when masks stay tuned like four years later now they're it's finally coming so i don't
know about this soon i'm thinking it's probably gonna end up being like next year uh knowing our
luck um but yeah i don't think think most people are going to be disappointed.
That's what I think, because it is probably going to be based on swaps.
It is probably going to be based on bridging what made them the most money.
And it's going to be through that.
So thankfully, I have a decent amount of swaps because I've also used the swap feature just out of convenience.
Sometimes I'm too lazy and I use it.
So but yeah, I'm just ready to be disappointed.
I think there's too many users. I mean's probably gonna be like KYC so a lot of people aren't gonna
want to do it on their wallets and they're just gonna complain about that and then I don't know
how Linnea did but it's also by consensus so I'd want to see how generous were they with that airdrop
were people happy or disappointed and it's probably just gonna be the same thing just a
quick heads up seeing some connection issues with
x god bless uh if we do get rock we'll be back asap everybody jump back in please
i'm going to send it over to knock and then to tatted lawyer you know there's a world uh that
i think a lot of people are hoping for where you get an airdrop from metamask and parlay that into
a fat airdrop from openc and it's justlay that into a fat airdrop from OpenSea,
and it's just a double farm for purchasing your OpenSea NFTs
on your MetaMask wallet.
I don't think we're living in that world.
I do think that the MAS token might touch the five-bill mark.
So I'll go over for the sake of not being a coward
and giving you an over.
But I also think
basically everybody is going to be disappointed with this airdrop it's largely almost certainly
going to be based on how much musd liquidity you are providing and how frequently you swap and to
gorilla's point the only time any of us have ever swapped on metamask is when you're too fucking
lazy to go to a bridge or to go to literally anything better than the fee that you pay within the wallet itself dub you can
throw the thumbs down man but you know how you operate that is no surprise to anybody that you
he likes the tech nox he likes the tech i i think it's a good ui i think this ends up being
disappointing and i i feel like we're living in the world where this is a disappointment and we
parlay that into a massive disappointment with the open C airdrop.
And instead of mask and C retiring a bunch of us who probably spent into the
high six figures in NFTs in the COVID era,
we're probably going to all walk out of here with at best a couple thousand
dollars,
which is better than no free money,
but definitely not the retirement that i think people are chasing guys
don't let him don't let his bias fool you he okay he worked for a competing marketplace also i'm
sure knock thinks that if uh you know consensus spun up some shitty llc out of indiana this would
be 10x the value of what it currently is well that's just objectively true but that being said somebody brought up the linea
piece and i think the fact that i think linea airdropped it was nine percent of the initial
supply to like 750 000 eligible wallets or something ridiculous like that metamask is like
many multitudes larger than that it's definitely not going to be based on when you created your seed.
Plenty of people still have seeds from 2017,
2018 and did absolutely fucking nothing
with it. It's not going to be that. They're probably
going to give you some arbitrary cutoff date.
The most volume
swapped from 2021
and it's going to be, of the
30 million active users, there's going
to be 10-15,000 people who get
anything that's worth anything
and that's probably how this is going to end up playing out but we can dream did anybody else
notice recently that metamask like banished itself back into 2022 ui they like took away
portfolio view and it literally just looks like somebody with ms paint like redesigned it it's
like what the fuck is happening to me what dude they are they are the quintessential market leader they shipped the product in 2017 and they're like
here it is and that's it when they released portfolios like wow they're coming into the
21st century and then they they banished it to the shadow realm icc did i see you on mute for a sec
take it away yeah i was gonna say i wasn't even aware they had a portfolio view i've never used
it for anything like that i've just used it to swap or to send uh i didn't know there was even a portfolio product
dude it was it wasn't even a product all my money i literally looked at it and it showed all the
different chains all of the tokens on those chains and then a week later like i thought
all my money was gone because it just disappeared
yeah my favorite part is whenever i need to do literally anything for business with it and it's
like how about instead of seeing the transaction of somebody sending you usdc we send you 174 spam
tokens per day that you have to go through manually in order to find your thing it's
bizarre tad it over to you then we move on yeah uh this one is uh it's too hard in my opinion to call an over-under and i also hate doing that
because i don't know what this token is going to be used for i was just just reading all through
it it's going to be governance token some kind of staking incentive and rewards so we'll see
i'm pretty hyped about it because i did a lot of swapping from like 21, 22.
And even recently when I was in Indonesia, I didn't trust a bridge connection.
So I did some swapping. I was like, you know, screw it. I'm just going to eat the fees.
So I am praying they reward us swappers, Dub. I'm with you, brother.
Let's reward the swappers. We're the ones participating in the ecosystem.
But do I think it's going to be a windfall of money? No.
Am I going to stake the token when they allow us to stake it? Absolutely. Am I hoping for a ton?
Sure. Am I hoping it's based off seed? Absolutely. Because obviously all of us early adopters are
going to get rewarded. But outside of that, it's just a really big company introducing a token.
And it's going to set a precedent for all these other big companies like the open seas of the world, like all these other, you know, expected token launches to see a
what worked, what happened, what did people like, what did people hate.
And it does give me some semblance of some earlier times in the crypto space where everybody
was launching tokens and trying to figure it out.
This to me is the same, except now it's like one of the biggest companies in crypto launch
mid token.
So I can not help but get excited about it,
but I don't have super high expectations, at least in the immediate.
You know, you never know what's going to happen over time.
By the next cycle, mass could be worth a ton.
But overall, tepid, tepid expectations, but still positive.
Well said.
Hands out with a quick word, then we move on.
Yeah, I'm honestly waste uh waiting
for my trust wallet airdrop because i was using that in like 2018 2019 god bless that that one
it probably honestly would be worth more just based on the economics anyway we move on is
aster a crime coin and does it matter matter? Aster Dex, a next generation perp exchange launched by Binance last week,
and its token Aster shortly followed opening in an absurd almost $2 billion fully diluted valuation.
It pumps to over $15 billion, largely thanks to public support of CZ.
And you could have basically made a trade with infinite size as the token ran.
Critics will tell you that Aster basically doesn't even have a real functioning product
and will point to the fact that 96% of the token is owned by just six wallets,
suggesting the price is heavily manipulated.
But does it matter?
And what are your thoughts on Aster going forward?
Let's tag in OG first in this one to go to ICO.
hell yeah brother i'm a i'm a fan of on-chain crime when uh when we get a
Hell yeah, brother.
a slice um i don't know man i think listen there's there's two ways to go about this right
it's either you think the binance cabal that um what they do to peanut didn't like run
like a stupid amount just because they picked it up and listed it on spot out of nowhere.
Wasn't there also, was it Act or some shit?
There was a coin that was just, I think the founder abandoned it and it was just a CTO and then they listed it.
So one thought process is, oh, this is going nowhere.
Binance Cabal will just burn money and CZ will just burn his reputation.
And this is just a waste.
It's a top.
And I think a lot of that maybe comes from like how good Hyperliquid as a product is
and how much money it's made people because now people are just married to their bags.
And it's like, okay, I made all this money on Hyperliquid.
I think it's a much more superior product, which no one argues against, by the way.
But therefore, I think all the beta plays quote unquote are not good enough
and so I'm going to FUD them
and then there's the other thought process
which is like hell yeah brother
like you could have thrown anything at this
like pre-CZ or even post-CZ
and you'd still be up
I'm still significantly up
and so for me it's like
I mean could this go to zero?
sure
are there like worse bets to make in the market? 100% I'm still significantly up. And so for me, it's like, I mean, could this go to zero? Sure.
Are there like worse bets to make in the market?
100%. So like, you know, you play the cards you're dealt.
Yeah, there's a lot of thesis driven stuff.
I would love to hear from people about if you are holding or if you got out or if you
just missed it completely.
The reason why you believe what it is that you believe about Aster, because I've seen
a lot of broad spectrum takes,
especially like you pointed out, OG rightfully,
a lot of people heavily invested into hype and are firm believers in it.
I think it's a little bit spicy to see a competitor pop out of nowhere
and have a lot of support from Darth CZ.
I want to hear from Hustlepedia on this one.
Sorry, I said I would go to ICO.
Let's go to ICO then to Hustle.
Sorry.
Yeah, I was going to say to respond to that question about where we see Astrid going generally, I'm of the opinion that Perp Dex's are like evergreen.
They're just going to keep growing.
Perps are one of the few truly, truly PMF achieving pieces of technology we've built in the last 10 years in
crypto. So I don't see any reason why the market, total addressable market for them can't keep
growing. And so in that sense, you're going to have a few that are ultimately like the winners.
Like it's hyper liquid versus Astra, which is like pretty similar to Coinbase versus Binance,
like both are still huge and continuing to grow.
So I think that's the way that I would look at it.
As far as it being a crime coin, I think it's a really funny question
because there's two kinds of crime coins.
There are bad crime coins and there are good crime coins.
And the bad crime coins, we all know which ones those are.
I won't say which ones they are for various reasons.
The ones I didn't buy which ones they are for various reasons. Rugs.
The ones I didn't buy.
Say that again?
Jerry says the ones he didn't buy.
I'm saying, can we at least classify the bad ones as rugs?
Could we say like... Well, they're not even rugs.
The bad ones still go up.
It's just there's no way you're ever going to win on the bad ones.
The good ones, like Aster, were were on chain for literal weeks to months.
And you could have,
you could have bought it in huge size when it was sitting at like 4 million.
And then just waited for, for the inevitable to happen.
I mean, CZ talked about this thing like three months ago.
And there were people like wrote about Aster as like a,
like an airdrop farm and stuff over the last like three or four months.
So it was out there.
The information was all there.
And the crime happened after people had plenty of opportunity to get in, which is very different than what I call bad crime coins, which is a different subset of coin than this one.
That's actually a great differentiator.
I appreciate that.
Johnny, over to you, brother.
What's the meme? It's like corruption is bad unless I'm involved in it. So it's the good kind
of crime coin, right? A lot of us were able to buy early, so good crime. But no, for the most
part, if you look at Binance's history, if they can't make the leader, they just go buy him. And
we've seen Hyperliquid decline a bunch of things from TradFi companies. So of course, Binance isn't going to be able to go in and acquire something like a Hyperliquid.
So what are they going to do? They're going to try to build a competitor.
And competition is actually very good. We're going to start seeing differing metrics and
which one of their business models long term is going to be the stronger one. I think they're
actually going to both be very good. So for me, I hype i like aster is it a crime coin maybe i mean
obviously they're going to do everything they possibly can to drive the price up but i'm
treating it like the crypto meme we've been seeing a lot like the black and white one with the guy
he's like drooling out of his left side and then he's trying to put the square peg in the round
hole in his head like he's missing a piece of his head. I'm treating this trade like that. So I'm keeping it very simple. And a lot of people on the timeline say it's a
consensus trade. I don't believe that at all. A lot of people said that about hyperliquid in the
early teens and 20s and 30s. But it's actually, a lot of people don't want to go through the effort.
The amount of times I saw on the timeline or in a group chat this weekend, oh, I just didn't want to bridge over.
It's like, brother, they just put out the Project X.
You know, you can swap in one minute.
You can use a hyper liquid native product to go buy the crime decks.
I don't think it's a consensus trade either.
Possible crime, but it's okay.
But it's okay.
Yeah, fantastic point.
Yeah, fantastic point.
It did seem like after the pump, the consensus became either didn't do it
and therefore I'm not going to get into it because it's too hot
or I'm back holding this now because I believe in the future of them competing.
But in between is I think where a lot of people died.
Let's go over to Tad and then to Matthew Buxton.
Yeah, with Aster,
I can't remember who said it first, but I do think there's a difference between good crime coins and bad crime coins. I also think crime is very jurisdictionally prudent in the sense of
a crime here is different than a crime there. So even if it might be considered a crime in the US,
it might not be considered a crime where CZ is right now. So the question is,
what is real crime? And the one thing that I've learned from being in crypto for so long
is when CZ starts pumping coins or pumping anything, it's usually the top uh cz is almost as good as good of a top signal as uh steve aoki buying an
nft so you can take that as you will i'm actually literally preparing to uh to stable up very very
soon now that i see cz pumping bags the same way cz pumped a bunch of stuff in the last cycle
it's it's a good indication that uh you know the walls might be
crumbling down a little bit very soon wow uh that's a that's a prediction for sure i mean
on the flip side uh we have fear and greed that's like still trembling around 50 we haven't really
hit that that spicy breakout in regards to that uh matthew buxton and doc man i mean you know it's it's literally any time that i think
i can potentially make any fucking money in crypto someone probably accurately predicts the top and
just as i have any money to deploy that's when everything drops like a falling fucking knife
and i'm left with yet another bag of fingers um so yeah um fantastic
michael christine absolutely nailed it it was probably the top i definitely missed out on that
one because i was too fucking busy and i just like everyone else watched it go up and said
i am neither for this or against this i'm just glad that my friends are now rich so they can buy me all drinks in um
token 2049 so please buy me drinks because i missed out on asda um yeah and we can celebrate
the top being crowned here and um benormis are already selling for once they used us as exit
liquidity so maybe he's right yeah so surprising to me that this would be the top but i guess uh as a dumb ass bad trader
maybe maybe you know that is the sign knock over to you yeah the the question about whether or not
this is the crime coin a coin that is being you know pumped by cz is hilarious um as i say that
i wrote the fucking topic. But that being said,
CZ literally went to jail for committing crime.
So yes, it is.
But as ICO has mentioned,
there are different types of crime coins.
EZ had a tweet a couple of days ago that I think was a really good tweet
for people who are maybe confused
about what's going on with Aster.
And he sort of mentioned that this is kind of a litmus test for your general understanding
of how crypto markets move and what's happening within this space.
And when it's time to play either side of that bell curve, right?
The guy who is drooling or the gigabrain.
And if you miss this, if you were a little late to it, it was probably time to be the
guy on the left side of that curve who's drooling a little bit and just aped into this as soon as you had the opportunity to see it with literally any size that you want.
I mean, we're talking like over almost $2 billion in 24-hour volume on this token now.
It is absolutely absurd the amount of size that you could have entered this trade, even at $1.20, even at $1.30.
You know, we're sitting at a dollar 55
it doesn't seem like a you know massive 10 15x but if you're entering it with some size this is
effectively as free as it gets in the last little while and uh if there's one thing that cz has
historically been very good at it's being petty and he's being exceptionally petty with this i
mean they just announced that they're allowing you to take out 300x leverage against hype in either direction uh that is the fucking funniest thing in the world
to me and an indication that the pettiness has just begun i don't disagree entirely that cz has
can be a little bit of a top signal when he gets ridiculous but i don't think we're anywhere fucking close to that like we're 300x leverage on hype the pettiness is just starting to ramp up
i still think that this has some room to run um but then again every time i seem to say that much
like matthew bucks and i'm left holding or trying to catch some falling dives so who knows how this
fucking plays out but this is definitely an opportunity like you don't need to believe
it's a better product than hyper liquid you don't need to believe that cz will continue to pump this
you just need to understand that there's a narrative that people can understand and buy
cz has a history of being petty and if he's going to tweet about something like this there's a fairly
good chance that it's going to run and every time people said surely this is the top it just kept
fucking running much like hyper liquid the token that it's meant to be taking a shot at um so i think that there's
some fun to be had with this yeah i mean this seems like the most obvious derivative trade
in the history of derivative trades because they literally have a monopoly on bnb don't they am i
am i crazy here hans how over to you yeah so the reason you're really bad at trading sam is because there
is no top we're in crypto so if you just hold long enough eventually it'll go up right um so
cz is kind of like being in a relationship sometimes it goes really really well right
everything's good you're going on dates. You're watching movies together.
And the other times he liquidates you.
So you kind of get both sides and you don't really have a choice.
You're just kind of along for the ride.
Unfortunately, I didn't get any upside in it because I was busy in meetings,
but somebody did send it to me at like 17 cents or something.
And they told me, she, sorry, told me that, uh, this is a crime coin
and you should get in. And I didn't cause I wasn't paying attention. So congrats to everyone that did
win. Wow. Uh, we need hand towels, group chat that he's ignoring, uh, Johnny over to you.
Yeah, I think, um, one key thing to think about too is I don't think it's just on the top.
It was a few topics ago or like a few speakers ago, but the top conversation to me,
this is so much more of a PVE trade than what Trump was, like a PVP trade that came to the
market, extracted all that money. Only a few people really made out like bandits on that trade.
And then everyone else was left bag holding because of the fall from like 60 bill to wherever it is today.
Like they never had any plans to actually do anything with that product.
Whereas this could actually be a slight market stimulus.
And of course, you have CZ and the biggest, you know, one of the biggest exchanges and businesses in all of crypto looking to derail Hyperliquid.
And we saw what they did to FTX
and Luna over the course of time. So, I mean, it's a bet on corruption and crime, but I
don't think it's a market top signal in my opinion.
Okay. A little pushback from the guys. Let's go over to Jerry and then we'll tag in Doc
again.
Yeah. I'm actually, Sam, in this topic, I'm going to now require people to never fence it on the over and unders and things like that.
I'm going to start keeping score because I think some of these people who call top signals have maybe called top signals recently and they've been wrong.
You know, so I don't know, man.
I just think this can't be a top signal. You have people like, you know, one of my personal idols and heroes, Scaramucci, just announcing today he's going to put, you know, hundreds of millions into the market and everything. I just, this doesn't feel toppy to me. Yeah, I mean, this is CZ. Like, somebody said something about like, is the guy willing to ruin his reputation over something like this? I'm like, the guy ruins his reputation every 15 minutes. And then he just makes people some money back. And then we all forget, like, that's the world
we live in, you know? So yeah, I just don't think I don't think this is a top signal. And then,
you know, I think, I think eventually every ecosystem is going to have like their own
perps platform. And, you know, you're going to see this just come out of like every chain and every
bit of ecosystem, because like to ICO's point, you know, it is one of the things that just
generates a fuckload of money and people actually have an appetite for it. So but I don't know,
man, I've listened to you guys call top signals on on a ton of different things. You know, the
the pump fund pre sales top signal Trump was a top signal, you know, we've done pretty well since
then. Yeah, fair counterpoint. We've done pretty well since then.
Yeah, fair counterpoint.
Let's go to Nock and then Ithio.
Yeah, don't listen to me because I'm an idiot.
But if you were to listen to me, I do think, if anything,
you should feel even better about Piper Liquid right now.
This is as big as it gets,
taking a direct shot at a competitor
that a lot of people were
unsure about whether or not there's a place for it in the market and it's continued to show that
there absolutely is appetite for a product like hyper liquid the token continues to perform well
and continue to make a bunch of fucking money and it's down pretty significantly over the last seven
days you know 12 percent um as almost a direct result as to what's happening with Aster
and some other things that are going on in the market,
it feels like there's an opportunity to play both sides of this coin.
And if anything, I think Aster is actually like validation
to the product that Hyperliquid has built.
If you're not already convinced,
if you're not already bought in on what Hyperliquid is doing,
this to me feels as good of a validating signal as will ever come in this space.
So I do think that there's an opportunity, to Johnny's point, like this doesn't feel as PVP.
It feels like there can be more than one winner here.
And if these two products both do well, Gary's probably right.
You probably see this on a ton of other ecosystems as well.
Or these guys begin to make land grabs.
In either scenarios, there's going to be plenty more opportunities to make money from
products like this in the future. ICO over to you. Yeah, I was just going to push back on this idea
that a bunch of people lost money on the Trump coin. I don't know a single person that lost
money on Trump. I'm not sure like all of my friends, the issue was they sold way too soon yeah instead of instead of buying the 80 billion dollar top uh we had like
two days to buy it while it was just like staircasing to heaven so if if the group of
people that you're hanging out with lost a bunch of money on trump that is 100 000 a skill issue
let's go over to johnny and luckily matt stefanina and i
were on a call till 5 a.m uh absolutely having the best night of our lives on that coin so uh
but regardless i i also think it's funny that binance and hyper liquid the way that they're
going frontward facing like to me the hyperid team doesn't come out and like meme or anything like that. Whereas like day two, Aster tweeted, oh, we're
being called the Timu hyperliquid. So here's a metric of how much money Timu makes every single
day. And I was just absolutely dying. Like if they're going to lean into the culture, like
I'm totally in for the competition. And I hold both, but I thought that was literally so on par with crypto humor.
I'm curious if anybody wants to emote, no pressure, but if anybody wants the thumbs up or thumbs down on the 12% pullback from hype,
if you guys are like, ooh, juicy entry, or if you're like, ah, we got to make it.
Okay, a couple of hands out ICO, giving the thumbs up.
Let's go over to hands out on that note.
Knock and Johnny also with the thumbs up.
Yeah, I don't know which Trump coin you guys were buying,
but World Liberty Finance was like pretty free trade.
I thought I was going to get rugged because in their white paper,
it said the tokens were non-transferable,
but I like aped a little bit in there and turned out to be a great trade.
In terms of Hyperliquid and Aster, I kind of look at it as like Pump and Bonk almost
because like some of the previous panelists said that they're competitors,
but it doesn't mean that they can't both survive.
I sold the bottom on Bonk, but I used it to buy Pump and Pump outperformed it in the short term.
but I used it to buy pump and pump outperformed it in the short term,
but pump is now a new King and bonk went from like 20 cents to like 0.2 to 0.25
or something.
So you can still get wins irregardless of which side you play.
I think it's just about making sure that you get a really good entry and this
market,
like the reason why I thumbs up is because if they're liquidating longs right now, it must be a liquidity grab.
And they're trying to push out more people and trying to get more tokens.
So I think it's a pretty good time to buy.
Not financial advice.
Definitely not financial advice from any of our esteemed guests today, but appreciate the insights on that topic.
Really interesting to see this play out in real time. We're going to move on. Ronin announcing buybacks. Not a lot to this
one. Jiho just was recorded in Korea saying that he was going to be buying back roughly 2% of the
Ronin supply if it was around this price. We saw the token go up 7% to 9%,
depending on kind of when you snapshot it.
Shortly after the announcement,
Ronin been around 50 cents for a while,
slow trickling down from a dollar not too long ago.
And generally people have been pretty unhappy
with the ecosystem
and sort of their losing of mindshare over time.
We've also seen Immutable versus Ronin posts
coming out of the woodwork i'm not
sure really who started drawing that comparison but a lot of people are saying i'm selling my ron
and i'm going to imx as if that was like an obvious swing trade to make uh let's go over
to hands or sorry matthew bucks who has the hand up first curious if anybody else also is
excited by this move if it there was a post going around as well saying that like buybacks are
actually bearish but ygg recently did some buybacks and the token's been performing pretty
fantastically let's go over to matthew i mean buybacks are massively bearish if you're the
person who drunkenly announces that um as opposed to just doing it um because like why would you
announce a buyback only to then cost yourself 50% more when you buy back?
That seems to be a very stupid business decision to do unless you just really, really want to bump the token.
And that's literally why you're doing it.
And that's probably why he's doing it.
Because otherwise, you would just actually fucking do it if you believed in your coin.
And there was underpriced and you'd buy back.
And then everyone's like, oh my god, they did a buyback. And then they would bump the coin. But no,
you have to be the person to say, we're going to do a big old buyback. Maybe it's crime if you do,
maybe it's crime if you don't, who knows? All I'm saying is it's not exactly bullish or bearish.
All of these companies generally have enough money to continue making massive mistakes for
the next three or four years and still producing terrible subpar games and pivoting into whatever latest matters they do
they still have plenty of time i mean there are free trades like asta maybe you got massively
in on that and you can run the company for another four years at the end of the day it's
just a merry-go-round it means sweet fuck all sweet fuck all let's go over to hentau who's been uh an active participant
running for a long time also uh a critic of it at times hence how curious your thoughts on this
yeah matthew are you sidelined what i'm sidelined on everything now i'm a fucking founder
on ron um okay so i have been fighting ron price like three months ago and i've had conversations
with the running team about why i think their tech performance has been the way it is and i think
they're making some changes now the reason why i believe they're making some changes is because
you don't say that you're going to do a buyback and it's your first quiver or the first step if
you don't have other things planned. So I can only assume that they're going to get some more money
somewhere and they'll probably have more money or more ways to buy back tokens that they're building
out. So I don't think that this is necessarily the end of the buyback and that there's more planned. But the issue that I
have with it is just more fundamentals because chains, especially layer twos, actually don't
make a crazy amount of money from sequencer fees, especially if they set the gas price lower. So I'm
interested to see how much money they can actually make switching to an L2.
But they're definitely going to reduce inflation for Ron as a token.
So yeah, overall, I think it's a good short-term trade, at least,
to get some exposure and to buy into some of the narratives.
Interesting perspective.
Let's go over to Peyton, the founder of The Wolves.
Peyton, what do you make of this buyback campaign here?
Yeah, I think in terms of, I sitting between like hantau and uh matthew here
is like i think ronin's like a strong ecosystem i think attention wise like i think they knowing
jiho he just doesn't sit still so he to hantau's point i know that they're probably scheming
um in a lot of ways to be able to to kind of get back into the attention type of thing, probably going into a narrative.
Because Jiho, like a lot of people don't know this maybe about him because maybe they just see him as like a, you know, Axie or Ronin.
But like he's somebody that's extremely involved in terms of DeFi.
And so, you know, maybe like the migration and all that stuff um to l2 there was some
money in that aspect of things and then also for the ronan buybacks i'm not like a huge i guess
this is where i like swing to matthew's side i'm not a big fan of like i guess signaling
that because then there's like a whole bunch of people that that have it and this is what's also me not sideline hands out because i i've been buying some ron um but at the same time i i think
uh they're just a team that i i bet on and i don't ever count them out because every single
time that you would count ronan out they always come back um and i just i think the biggest issue
that i've had with ronan in this kind of like last few months uh is mostly because i think they lost
their biggest edge which was curation.
And I thought they were really good at that.
And so I'll be really excited
if they do something with this run
with some type of curation.
You and me both, brother.
Let's go to Jerry then to not...
Yeah, I think just to the point right now,
if people are like, why would you announce it now?
I think it's if you're playing like a really long game, right?
Because once you start to talk to project founders or anything like that,
what they'll say is like, I'm going to go get money from somewhere,
but I don't want to do that until the token price does well,
especially at a time like this.
Like almost every founder is probably thinking this way, right?
So, you know, if you announce it now, you can get a little bit of a, you know, short-term,
like price action pumped, then you can go get the money from whatever means, whether it's like,
you're going to a wrap, opening up a round, or you find somebody to open up like a DAT or something,
right? Like the, it's just a longer game, I think, than being than being like hey we're going to announce and we're going to start it tomorrow
so sell your tokens on my face
right? I think it's just
a little bit of a longer term play
to get that money
that Hantau's talking about
Yeah I believe he said they would be
starting September 29th
somebody can fact check me on that
and then was indescript about how long
it would take for
him to potentially buy these tokens uh hands out giving me the thumbs up knock over to you then
yeah um buybacks are interesting um i think the biggest question that people ask is one why
two what happens now um and i think that this is where basically every team that has announced
buybacks sort of fall apart. The why is typically we have some extra cash. We don't really know what
to do with it. So surely the best use of that cash is to just remove some supply from the open
market and build up our treasury. The what happens afterwards really only can be two answers it's either you burn the token and
remove it from circulation entirely which almost never happens or it's you hold that token to then
sell it otc somewhere down the line to somebody who needs to sell it back into the open market
in order to capitalize on the otc trade that they've used to purchase so anybody's unaware
a lot of the one of the ways
that blockchain makes money or brings in new capital after it's already gone live with the
token is OTC deals for the token that they have within their treasury. Right now, Ronin has, I
think, 13% of the total Ronin supply as part of their treasury. This additional 2% will bring them
to 15%. The only way out of that situation is for them to then sell OTC
somewhere down the line after presumably the token price moves. I think people get
worried with buybacks because it feels like there's a lot more that can be done with
revenue that is being generated than just purchasing a token and holding and sitting
on it, right? A lot of people want to see that revenue being used to stimulate more growth within the ecosystem. They want to see that revenue being used to maybe build a better
game or build better products on the Ronin blockchain. When you make money and you immediately
turn it into just acquiring more of your own token, I think people get a little concern because
the health of the ecosystem is also then entirely tied to the price of that token because you're
holding so much of it. And the only way you can bring in more money is by selling that token otc i think in most scenarios
it's just messier than it needs to be and i think that there are other things especially with the
migration happening with them announcing where they're going to be moving the chain to the new
direction they want to take these you can look at it in the way is that you know jiho knows what they're about to do and he feels really good about the position
that they're in so they want to lock up more of the token supply so somewhere down the line they
can sell it or there's some concern that the migration is negatively affecting token price
and they think that scooping up a bunch of it can alleviate some of that sell pressure
in either scenario i think it's just so muddy.
And that's part of the reason why people don't really like these buyback programs.
I don't know that it helps token price in the short term.
It probably doesn't help token price in the long term.
If anything, it just gives the Ronin Treasury more ammunition somewhere down the line if that token price begins to recover.
Yeah, maybe he's trying to get Vitae synced up
that gas credits offer, right, Nock?
No comment there, Jerry.
But Hanzo, over to you.
Yeah, so I wanted to add the details of the buyback.
So they said that they were going to start in like a week
and they're going to be buying throughout a month.
And they would be utilizing their treasury to do so. treasury is worth about four to five million dollars now my my problem with this is
that if you look at the daily volume on ron it's actually not a lot of capital to be buying back
with considering the daily volume uh so it might not even impact the chart that much at all, because there's $15 million
of volume every single day. And $5 million over 30 days, like 60 grand a day, it's not going to
do anything, right? But as Luca said, your imperative as a token owner is to buy back as many of the tokens as possible for as cheap as you can. So I think
they know that it's probably near a bottom. Like, dude, I was seeing posts on my timeline
of people selling Ron for 50 cents and buying IMX and 90 cents. IMX is 68 cents now. There's
no fundamentals to that token. Okay. That's the type of crime that ICO talks about
that has no fundamentals and no value accrual. So that's the shit that just market makers trying
to extract as much money from you as possible. So at the end of the day, when I see that type
of signal of people just capitulating, selling out, and the token price is not even moving that
much, it means they don't have anything to sell and they're still fudding.
It's usually a good potential way to enter.
And irregardless of this dump that happened recently,
I've been buying just based on that fact.
Fair take.
OG and then the dub.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think there's a lot to unpack um it's funny that we're talking about this after
the hyper liquid conversation since you know the kind of the one of the main reasons hype is uh 50
whatever the it's at right now is essentially buybacks so a lot of the money if not all of the
money all the revenue technically um is going back into the token and that's why it's gone you know
i remember when i was buying Hypo, like $6,
and people were like, oh, this is definitely the top.
And it's still going up,
and people are still making crazy projections.
So A, there is an argument for,
okay, buyback equal, price go up equal,
I need to buy more because I can dump on the team,
which is a very linear, simple, silly way to look at it,
but it's still valid.
On the burn side of things,
I don't know what Gio's plan is.
From an announcement standpoint,
I think, again, I'm just assuming and I don't know anything,
but if he announced it first,
my assumption would be, or the play would be,
that you already held a bunch of Ron,
you announced it, Ron pumped, you sold into the pump ron dumped again essentially you're now just going to
buy with more ammo if anything um so it's not like oh shit he's so silly that's what a silly
koji that's just market making hanta we were talking about crying today um but yeah essentially like
i i like is it a good thing that he announced it first maybe not maybe yes i'm not sure um is is
buying back ron going to send it to the ten dollars that kagi promised me or that hantao
promised me when i staked all my ron with moco like i don't know i don't think so but i think
the reality of the situation is today, like the market is just so
different. And I think everyone's struggling to figure out how to get more liquidity. And it seems
like no matter what you throw at the wall, if it's like big announcements, like big games,
big whatever, it doesn't really manage to do anything. And so I think people are going back
to like core quote unquote principles where if you remember like ages ago, it used to all like
it was all about buying back and burning. Like think about bnb freaking like merit circle which
is now beam that was like what like they bought back and burnt 40 or something of the token and
that's why it was just on a never-ending um upwards ladder but i again i don't know like
there's no right or wrong answer i just i don't think it's a silly move i don't think it's a
desperate move i'm not sure it's the smartest move but it's a move right like it's it's something like geo's trying to do
something whether or not it works we'll find out later like it you know ron could go to i don't
know five bucks in a couple of months or less and you'd be like oh he's such a genius like he bought
back and the announcement was so bullish and now it's up 5x or more or it could just you know stick around here and you'd be like oh what a silly announcement should have never made that
should just you know kept the money buybacks always suck when the outcome isn't met like i
can confidently tell you everyone that's launched the token that makes revenue in the space has done
some form of buybacks in one way or another like whether it's official announced public whatever
or if it's just like okay here's some money go throw it in the chart but again it's just like
the outcome is what people remember in the end of the day you could put a million in your chart and
if it doesn't budge then like no one really cares delve with the last word then we move on and talk
about pirate nation yeah i was i was at the event it was super interesting talking to some of
the validators um before uh geo had announced that and then after and they they all seemed like
really excited and uh supported the decision that geo made it of course it's their bags and they love
to see that palm so you know take that with as you. But I'm looking at this whole thing as just a big marketing play overall.
And the things to remember is that,
like, we'll probably get answers
to what is coming next with this in Singapore
because you pre-announce things at Korea
and then you reveal the big plans at Singapore
is kind of like the meta that happens right now.
And it's important to not forget that they also have the Axie MMO coming up that they're
going to want to be pumping and bringing into.
So this is a great way to get Mindshare back and get attention back on Ronin as they have
a key product release coming in the gaming segment as well.
All right, it's time to talk about one it hits a little bit close to home if you've been
in web3 gaming for a while pirate nation buyback sparking some heavy criticism the flagship title
from proof of play has previously announced that it'll sunset uh as part of proof of sunset
basically this this game and the associated nfts as they begin to focus on more profitable parts of the business.
I'm not sure who said this, if this was an official statement from the company or speculation,
but somebody said it was costing about $100,000 a month to continue operating this.
With the original announcement came assurance that the founders pirate NFT holders would be
taken care of. I'm not sure exactly what the verbiage of if they said taken
care of, or I believe it was something about like, we will give you one last reward cycle
in exchange for your NFTs. It was announced last week that Proof of Play would be offering people
$50 per NFT that they chose to burn, or they could keep it for sentimental reasons. And this
was received poorly. Mega Whale Grail, who is never shy about putting his opinion out there,
posted a pretty scathing review of what he calls rapid torching
of an entire NFT ecosystem.
He did, though, acknowledge the tricky spot the proof of play was in,
but believes this was completely mishandled.
My question, you guys, what's the reaction to the finale of Founders Pirates?
One more quick note is, you know,
these were originally very cheap.
It seems to suffer from the same kind of expectation debt
of people buying over an ETH.
And then the founders of Proof of Play
basically being beholden to delivering on the expectations
off the back of that.
Matthew Buxton, I'll go to you.
Okay, I'll preface this by saying look i played
um the game i even went up to the arbitram booth at gdc i think it was one or two it was two years
ago or something and played it and it's like it's not fantastic game it's not a terrible game i i have no fucking clue why anyone would think that these
nnts and the rest of them in a roblox-esque pirate game i just it boggles my mind that people thought
these things in that world and the rest of it would be so valuable. I think because I never really got on with the whole premise of Web3 Gaming being like
everyone has to have an 80 grand NFT to participate and everything you touch turns to gold and
everyone who wasn't in at the start is excluded.
None of that made fucking sense to me.
So, I mean, it's an absolute tragedy for the people who got in there.
But if you look at the majority of the most successful NFTs, the majority of them started off cheap and then they went high.
And then, you know, whatever happened after that, it's how NFTs work.
They start off cheap enough that real regular people can get them.
Then they go up expensive enough that everyone who got them when they were cheap believes that they were some sort of genius for getting them.
And then they either stay high or they crash after a time um and utility is is very very rarely delivered
and the amount of utility that is delivered is is basically proportional to how much money was made
and what they needed to do with that money um i think it's it's it's just it's sad because this
was so fucking inevitable.
Like, having seen the game, having played the game,
having looked at what they were doing,
and there is no way in hell that game should have cost them 100k a month.
Like, unless they were giving everyone on staff,
like, four times, five times what they were paying.
Unless they were like, there is absolutely,
that is financial mismanagement
of the highest order i think it was the chain sorry sorry i don't want to cut you off i think
probably the cost of that was mostly the chain i mean well that's even just that's terrible because
no one was playing the fucking game so how was it worth how was it taking 100k a month to run it
when no one's playing that just, yeah, no,
all of that seems really bad.
Like the game itself was cute.
It was nice.
The Voxel art.
It's something that they outsourced probably could have got it made for a
couple of hundred grand tops.
Yeah.
It's just a tragedy all round.
And for anyone to say that it's anything other than utter mismanagement and
people not knowing what the fuck they invest into. It's's just the classic they shouldn't have got money for it they shouldn't have done
what they did with it and they shouldn't have ended that that way it's all wrong all counts
damn uh let's tag in peyton then we'll go to knock yeah i think it's like uh damn if you do
damn if you don't type of thing i've been on the receiving end of some of this and i've seen like this pretty much just play out uh every single nft uh pretty much
from 2021 and i think the issue here is that like because of the long game dev cycles and everything
like that we just have our blowups like very late comparatively to everybody else but pirate nation
was kind of that safe haze for a lot of people,
like great team, right?
Be able to like do that, man.
And like, I think just a lot of people really just migrated to Pirate
because it was like one of those like last hopes.
So I'm just putting in context here that there's a lot of people that just
like put their like last hope in Pirate.
If that makes sense, like Pirate nation was like that one uh community that
like hey these are the last stands and now it's kind of transferred over to gigaverse and all that
stuff i saw a lot of comments around dith um but like i've been also on like the expectation debt
side you know you look at like azure champions like shrapnel or uh like you know if you look at
it over uh overworld incarnas, right? Like there is
like a literally a designated thread for incarnas inside of wolves, you know, and you could just see
the decay from, if you just scroll away from the top, it's hilarious. It's like a time capsule,
how excited people were down to where they're at now of like, should I just sell it for 10 cents?
down to where they're at now of like, should I just sell it for 10 cents?
Right.
So like there's, there's this feeling that like you can never satisfy everybody.
I think the issue was, was just the expectation debt that was kind of
announced or kind of like, you know, founders pirates.
And then the secondary market kind of taking it on and being like, oh shoot,
like these guys are like are right or die. And then the only issue is that like the teams also don't try to quell that,
right? I think Sammy had a really good quote like two years ago, it's like all about height
management. And I think once you know, you use it whenever it's, it's good, but it's a double
edged sword, it cuts you on the way down i've i've been cut many times on the expectation that for game studios and nfts and i think the issue with primarily game studios
doing nfts and tokens and all that stuff is that the token chart as well as the nft like kind of
share kind of has to be put in with everybody else that That's VCs. That's the large team that it takes to produce a game.
And now they're like pretty much focused on infrastructure, right?
You look at proof of play from an infrastructure standpoint of like this fully on chain specific
infra, like that is definitely the moneymaker for them B2B.
And I think, unfortunately, for B2C, they're like, yeah, it might take a few hits, but
how many founders are actually tracking X right now on if they're going to use proof of play in the future? Probably no
one, to be honest. Like any founder that's heads down working and they look at proof of play and
seeing this as like, oh, this is actually really good infra. And you guys did a lot of work. Cool.
Like you have all this like, you know, big experience of actually launching it and you've
done all this and all these other companies have done proof of play there's just like a lot there for them to sell
on top of this um but yeah i think i for me i was just like you know they pretty much just gave
150 severance package to their community and that's like really hurts you know in a lot in a
lot of ways but hey i i got that severance too. It always hurts, but you move on.
And the space will move on in like two weeks.
Nature is healing.
Jerry, over to you.
Yeah, first of all, shout out Peyton for mentioning Gen Chat too.
That's the greatest Discord time capsule of all time.
I'm sorry, Gen Chat too, for exposing you guys.
Yeah, we've been exposed. It is discord. Yeah. I'm sorry. For exposing you guys.
Yeah.
We've been exposed.
I want to maybe just look at like a brief window in the whole pirate nation saga, which is the, when they announced that they're sunsetting the chain and the game that exists now to,
to now.
Right.
And they just did the thing that I always tell people not to do,
which is they set
expectations for people.
And they said, hey,
all these NFTs
aren't going to mean something for the game
that is Pirate Nation because it's being sunset, but they will
matter. And what did
people do? Some people were like, well, they're down
and we like this team and we know they're building
some infrastructure products. Maybe it's an investment that I should take.
And I can maybe get a really high, you know, there's some risk in it, but there's some high
upside return. And then you find out that that return is $50 to come at a later date. And I just
think and I asked myself when I read something like that, I'm like, why did you do that to
yourself? Like, why did you set yourself up? We talked about this all the time, you know, to listeners
that are out there. You know, these people are all talking as if they're traders on hype and
Aster, but we all come from video games, right? So I think like, why did you set yourself up for
having these expectations when you didn't really know what these things were
going to amount to. So we all come up here and we all say like, oh, they're building infrastructure
and they're a really good team and they have some really good products for that. And that's a way
that the team can make a lot of money. And a bunch of people that matter go and then defend these
people and say that there could be a high upside play for them in leaning more into infrastructure and not being distracted.
But they didn't have to go say that, right?
So it just tells me that they didn't really have a plan for what the asset was going to do when they said that,
but they probably wanted to do something.
And as they've beat their heads against the wall, they don't know what that thing is.
They don't know what that thing is.
So the best that they can then offer is $50, right?
And it just, it bugs me, man, when people put the expectation debt upon themselves.
And, you know, they go out and say that, you know, these things are going to matter.
But then they come back, you know, six weeks later or whatever.
And they say, enjoy this $50.
You know, sorry, didn't work out.
And, you know, again, it's just like, this is, you know, they kind of cheddar bob themselves. And they shot themselves when they didn't work out. And, you know, again, it's just like this is, you know, they kind of cheddar bob themselves and they shot themselves when they didn't need to.
You know, I was talking to one of the guys from the Pirate Nation team and there was the vibe that maybe they were sort of not the perpetrators, or that's not the right word, but they weren't necessarily the
ones putting this expectation on the NFTs. They felt like the community had sort of taken the
narrative and ran with it. And then the expectation builds off of the back of that.
And whenever you're a founder in that position, you can't really tamper it once the community
has run with it. And I think that's something that founders feel quite often is, look, we released these for, you know, a hundred bucks.
I'm not sure. I can't remember what Pirates minted with and for and how much.
They were free men.
They were free men.
Yeah.
Yeah. The expectation that you expectation debt that you accrue off the back of people buying over secondary and sort of telling
this narrative to each other is maybe a little bit unfair or maybe extremely unfair to the actual
founding team that's now expected to deliver, you know, 1.5 worth of value to this asset that also
between minting and today has actually had royalties sort of rugged from the founding team too uh so i'm
curious if people have any adjusted thoughts i guess with that perspective let's go over to
hands out and then to og yeah i think you guys are making some really valid points because at
the end of the day the community like knows nothing they're just kind of along for the ride and they can speculate on some things
whether they're bullish or bearish you as a founder are the one always setting expectations
with the community and keep in mind you can literally tell them this thing is worthless
and that you can have no expectations uh but the fact that they went out there and was like yeah these are the core asset to our ecosystem and
then they just buy it all back it is kind of just showing me that they might be capitulating a little
bit about not sure not being sure what their actual business model is i mean running a chain
on orbit is pretty expensive right that's who they're using. Web3 gaming is not doing that hot. Most of it, any, most of any
of the spend in Web3 gaming right now is incentive driven, much like the general Web3 space. But like
the reason they're making money in abstract through their arcade is because of XP. They shut
down their Arbitrum stuff, all the other chains as well. And I think they're just trying to figure
out how to make money as a business right now.
And they're going back to the fundamentals.
It kind of sucks seeing it happen to their community
and the fact that they just didn't know
what they wanted to do.
But they should have just took some more time
and figured it out instead of trying to
screw everybody over.
It kind of tells me that they like
might be running out of money
if that's the case.
But yeah, that's just an assumption though
let's go over to knock
yeah counterpoint way better to eat shit now than it is to eat shit later um i listen
fuck man i i singin calls me a dirty papilist all the time on gamified and i tried really hard to form an
opinion that wouldn't make me sound like one for this topic uh that i failed um listen you bought
an asset that was tied to a game that was tied to an infrastructure company that was very explicit
about the fact that they were building technology and using the game as a proof of concept for that technology
and if the game worked great and if it didn't that's also okay and what ended up happening was
game didn't work and they decided to cut a part of the business that didn't make any sense to them
and your asset was associated to the game not to proof of play now i say that as somebody who lost an unfortunate amount of money on those assets because I decided to make the assumption for myself that those assets would then tie into the greater proof of play ecosystem, something that was maybe hinted at but never explicitly communicated, and I was willing to take that risk but it was a risk and the idea that i'm seeing on the timeline and
a lot of the frustration that i'm seeing from a ton of people was that it wasn't a risk and you
shouldn't have taken a risk or it shouldn't have been a risk because you're purchasing a proof of
play asset by proxy and you know it's a pirate nation founders past sure but it's also tied to
proof of play so if the business is doing well the the NFTs should be doing well also. And that's
just not how any of this works. Like this is a company that made a financial decision that said,
hey, we are going to move in this direction, which is some of the technology that we've built has
actual real world applications. It seems like they have some B2B partners, people who want to
use the technology. They're making money with that technology. They wouldn't have brought in ICO
if they didn't already believe in that
particular path. They brought him in with the explicit intention of taking that path. And he
just so happened to his own admission, get headhunted while all this is happening. It feels
like a series of really unfortunate events from a public perception of what went down with this
business. And I think that there was a misaligned understanding from buyers of what it is that you were purchasing and a lot of people felt like they were purchasing
ownership in proof of play and not an asset tied to one of proof of play's games and i think that
that's where the misalignment starts all of that being said and all of the ways that i can defend
proof of play for making this decision because i do believe that it's their best business decision. I think that they royally fucked up the communication on how this
was going to be resolved. And I also feel like they were probably in a really shitty position
to begin with. Anyway, their choices really were make a decision that makes everybody mad at us
today or make a decision that makes every matter, everybody mad at us downstream and hangs over the fact that
maybe proof of play as a business is doing well. I think a lot of the ways that people were
suggesting this be resolved instead of just a $50 credit was, hey, give them proof of play
tokens somewhere down the line. Well, that's a whole nother set of expectation debt that can get
even worse than the expectation that was set here, right? If they wait a year until they're ready for a proof of play token,
they launch that token,
they give you your allocation towards the pirate nation founders past.
That allocation is no longer up to par.
That thought is now directed at the proof of play business and the proof of
play token, not at the resolution of what happened with pirate nation.
And I think that the route that they're taking,
even though it's shitty is probably the best route for them. It just could have been communicated so much
better. To Hantau's point, you can't say things that are genuinely ambiguous. You can't say things
as a way to appease concern and frustration in the short term until you know exactly how you're
going to make this resolution. And again, we're operating with information asymmetry. We don't know if they had these conversations. It's very possible that they
had this exact conversation in mind. And the way that they decided to resolve all of this was
take $50 and burn the NFT or keep it and get absolutely nothing. And if that's pisses people
off, then it pisses people off, but it's better to get this out of the way right now. It's just
a problem of managing expectations on both sides.
As a consumer, it's important to understand that when you're purchasing an NFT or you're
purchasing a token, you are not purchasing equity in a company.
And the amount of people who use the phrase I invested in proof of play is fucking like
sickening.
And it's, it's dangerous for other founders in the space it's dangerous for
the people who are speculating on these tokens because you completely misunderstanding what it
is that you're purchasing you're buying a speculative vehicle that has no ties to the
business their obligation legally is to shareholders you are an nft holder it is fundamentally different
you didn't understand what you were buying.
They didn't explain how to resolve this in a way that sounded good to the community. And they're eating shit for it.
Doesn't mean it's an all bad thing.
It doesn't mean that it was a poor decision.
And this idea that they should have put proof of plays life in the hands of pirate nation,
NFT founders, holders is fucking ridiculous.
You're an idiot. Don't purchase NFs if that's the way that you think damn uh bars for the simplified audience important for
everybody to understand what it is that they're getting themselves into anytime they buy anything
in this wild west that we're in hands out they're throwing some thumbs down so what's the counter
argument here and top yeah knock again I don't like your opinion.
If you still worked at Magic Eden and you told me the Magic Eden pass was the core of the ecosystem,
I would buy every single fucking pass to try to farm an airdrop, right?
It is not the consumer's fault for somebody purchasing something
when the literal owners of the company are telling them
the fact that those assets are good
and the core of the ecosystem,
they're the best assets you can own
to get exposure to anything they're doing.
Like, dude, you're a founder.
Just tell people the truth.
You don't need to fucking lie about stuff.
Wait, okay, hold on.
Listen, I agree with the sentiment there, but I also believe that as
a founder, you, you hentile have the right to say, Hey, today, this particular asset is the key to
this ecosystem. If the plans for that ecosystem change, and you no longer believe that that
existing plan is a fundamentally good thing for your business. The idea that you're beholden to something that you said
a year prior or six months prior or a month prior
that is no longer true for the overall health of your business,
but you have to move forward with it
simply because you said,
hey, this is a pass for this particular ecosystem,
is stupidity.
We already have such an issue with people
and businesses in this space
dying because of expectation debt,
punishing teams for making business decisions that are better for the overall health of their
business, regardless of whether or not it hurts speculators, because that's what you are,
not a stakeholder, a speculator, to me is crazy. I think as the founder of everything that you're
building, you have the absolute right to say tomorrow, these NFTs no longer matter in the
future plan of this business. That doesn't mean that it's going to be well received it doesn't
mean that people aren't going to fucking hate you for it but if you believe that it means that your
business exists in six months and you can continue to pay the people that you're paying and you hope
somewhere down the line you can continue to return value to this ecosystem then fucking go for it
like i think that that's absolutely fair this idea that like
founders are beholden to the the assets that they sell and none of the responsibility ever falls onto
asset holders is crazy and to your point the best thing about me no longer being at magic eden
is i have three and a half years worth of shit that i probably couldn't have shouldn't have said
then that i feel good and easy it's easy enough to say now there's a lot of people
who are fucking stupid who are purchasing these things and they have no idea what they're buying
and i think that there should be expectations and and both sides should be held to the same
standard here yes they did a shitty thing about saying that this is this is the thing and moving
on from it but like that's life what was the time
difference between them saying it was a core asset and them offering a buyback with no apology
or no communication with the community light paper to my point june 2020 yeah
right and then they didn't comment anything they were just like hey we're gonna do a buyback
right yeah something like that i would say that there's also like nuance to the take as well like
obviously the light paper fact i think it's it's dated at least the pdf that i have is june 2024
um and so there's it says here i'll just read it for everyone to have like a good context
is founders pirates are the premier asset of the pirate nation and proof of play ecosystem
they can be thought of as premier collectible carry benefits both in Pirate Nation,
such as exclusive quests and bounties
and our wider ecosystem,
such as early access to future games.
But as of everyone,
kind of like Nock and Hanzo, you know this too,
you know, there's a lot of things that have it in Pivot.
I think there's a lot of communication
that can be had in those.
And I think what I guess hurts me the most around this
is that both the
community and also the team were like good people and I think that's like
what's hard about the the gate and I'm sorry Jerry because like I'm definitely
like it hurts me because like I love a myth and I love I've been with those
guys for such a long time but I also know people that have been part of the
pirate nation ecosystem that literally just feel like they got Spartan like
kicked in the chest so it goes beyond not just the, I guess the payment side of things and the
expectation of their one of them within wolves, because I asked the question, I don't want to
name them because I don't think they want to be public about it. But like, it's like to make
things worse in their announcement about founders, they said it would stick around for a community
PFP, but founder chat and Discord was shut down
and replaced with a 100K token gate.
And a lot of those guys didn't even have like,
you know, the, just like give them the,
give them at least like a Discord or something.
So it just seems like they're trying
to really consolidate a lot of their,
like, and it makes sense.
Like I can see it from a business decision.
I like, I've been in those specific rooms
that people have those communications.
Like, Hey, we should do this X, Y, and Z.
It's just like consolidate all of this.
Like, let's just drive this specific asset for ours.
So we can drive all the value there.
Because like, they probably just had too much crap, right?
They just had so much junk out there.
They had the Pirate Nation token.
They had the pirates.
They had also all of the specific major burn game assets that had it because there were a lot of them were on chain.
And then you have like the proof of play token that's going to come out later.
So I think just a lot of them knock goes beyond just, I guess, financial, but they just feel as if they were like, I went to bat for you guys.
And now I feel like we're getting stripped of even just our community badge title.
Let's go back to a hand out and we'll tag in og yeah i mean like peyton put it perfectly knock it's not like you cannot
blame the community in this situation when the whole team is telling the community what they
should expect like the community doesn't know
shit they know nothing right and if you fuck over your customers obviously they're going to be mad
and saying that like people don't understand what they're doing in this space specifically people
who spend money i think is a wrong take because dude we know what space we're operating in we know the type of people that are here and
the fact that you can't just say like hey we're working out ways to bring value to these nfts
okay we've done a huge discussion here's what the options are we don't really like these options
but we're gonna go with this one like they could have done a million things and they chose
to put out a tweet that says we're buying back for 50 bucks and i think that's why people are
disappointed hence how in a perfect world what do you think a better announcement would have been
like because i what i'm hearing is that there is like you don't want to be vague but then whenever
you're direct but people don't like the answer, it's also bad.
So like, how do you, was it that they already fucked up for the last two years in building expectation debt and it like their story was kind of already written?
Or if you're a founder in that situation today, I guess, what, what do you think people could maybe do?
Just tell them what the fuck you're doing.
We literally built three different products we turned off two of the products and all of those products had different types of value
accrual for our holders i don't think it's a product issue i think it's literally just a
communication issue they just didn't take the effort to talk to their community and tell them
like hey i know that you're not getting
a lot of value from being a pirate holder right now. We're going to explore some options. One
option is a buyback. One option is burning your assets to get something new that's for the
pop ecosystem instead, or X, Y, Z. They could have done a variety of other things and they just
chose not to communicate any of that with their audience and was just like raw dogging them when they've already been through that type of shit and yeah i mean
the outcome is expected yeah i appreciate you diving a little deeper on that let's go to og
then about you buxton boy boy boy um before i i say what i want to say i have a question for
the more educated on the topic uh what's happening with the pirate token? Does anyone know?
I will try to look that up for you.
No, that's actually a question. I don't know why you're laughing at it.
Okay, cool. Because I have a bunch of opinions. One of them is I totally agree with Nock on a few uh points meaning sometimes you just got to
make the best decision for the business sometimes that's painful sometimes you you know you'll you'll
just have a bad rep you'll make people hate you etc etc etc but at the end of the day
like you have to make some tough decisions i do however agree a lot more with hantau because
okay so i i i use our platform to keep up with like gain shutting down and stuff because I
can't be bothered to keep up on Twitter and I have never I would never have imagined that I'd
read pirate nation as one of the names shutting down because a there's there's a bigger play here
infrastructure 33 million raised a16z yada yada yada yada. It was always meant to be, I think Matthew Buxton was talking about this earlier,
it was always meant to be a proof of concept, right?
Like, I don't think Pyronation was the ultimate endgame for proof of play,
but it was always just meant to be a proof of concept.
However, I just really don't understand why you would play the game one way,
but then, like, get surprised when not doing the
right thing as a consequence is like oh you know these guys are just hating or whatever like
in my opinion again when you go down the path of um and this is why i'm asking the question
about the pirate token so payton please feel free to educate me but when you go down the path of like
so it's at 24 cents now as of sept September 17th, it was sitting around 32.
No, I don't mean price.
I don't care about price.
I'm just talking about, like, are they sunsetting the token?
Oh, I don't believe they are.
In ICOB's tweet, he said that Pirate is still the token or something along those lines.
You could look at the exact tweet.
And then I think they've had comms around.
I don't know if they're going to adopt Pirate as the proof of play token, just not release the second one or not, but they have shown support for the token in some way.
I can jump in real quick too, Sam, before you carry on OG.
But yeah, I would say, I'm just looking through the community stuff.
We had a whole thread on it in Wolves, and it was talking about Pirate and proof of play.
The main, a lot of it was like talking about Pirate and Proof of Play. The main,
and a lot of it was like staked, right? And whenever you were doing Pirate and like you had like your founders and you got your Pirate, like you could have like an X multiple or something
like that was very like, you know, free to play type of mechanism. And like you can stake your
Pirate. And that was the main utility for pirate there was some inside
of the game most likely those are going away because they're shutting down the game um and
no specific uh utility is going from uh or i guess the founder's pirate to the uh abstract
type of thing so there's a pretty clean cut there so really the only utility right now for pirate
og is to stake it for proof of play so
kind of reading between the lines it looks like they're trying to consolidate everything into the
proof of play token and not for uh pirate okay gotcha thanks thanks for that um so i mean there's
there's multiple ways this this works it's either you rebrand pirate into proof of play which i
highly doubt did want to do but i mean it's an option um and that would maybe be your way of like saying okay pirate was the ticker we now just
changed it but it's the same token so everyone that spent money on pirate is not going to lose
that money um going back to my point though i just i don't think it makes any sense to go out there
talk about like pirate being the ticker talk about like the asset being like it's not that long ago
that we were talking about oh it, it's the premier asset.
Like this is, this is just the,
the best way to get access to proof of play and all the products that they're
building is to buy a pirate or to buy, you know, and stake pirate tokens.
And now all of a sudden it's like, actually,
and I think I, the part that I dislike the most,
cause we've spoken to so many teams that have shut down.
We speak to teams now that have shut down and haven't even announced it
publicly. Like the way you do it i think is what
matters and it's like going down the path of play to earn doesn't work web3 gaming isn't there yet
um we need to focus on cooler shit anyways we're shutting down because this costs too much money
anyways we're also going to give you like 50 bucks if you buy the nft it's like you could
there are a hundred ways that you could have done this where people would be less salty like to hantao's point you could have literally just said
you know this is a struggle we're thinking about it one two three like and this is the outcome that
we thought of or like you know run it run it with the holders and the community whatever whatever
you want to do but i just think the way that it was communicated is probably the worst part about
it and that's probably why people are really salty. Because if you're like,
I'm sure you guys know the Pirate Nation fans
were like hardcore devoted fans.
Like they would argue with anyone.
It was the best game ever.
It was the best casual game,
best browser game,
best this game, best get.
Like they were very, very, very devoted.
And people like Murdoch and so on,
I just think they feel undone
because of the way it happened.
It was like, yes, this is a great asset.
Yes, we're hiring, you know, ICO so we can focus more on Twitter
and build the brand a bit more.
Don't worry about it.
Don't worry about it.
And all of a sudden, it's like, actually, by the way, guys, shutting down.
But don't worry.
The asset will still be okay.
Actually, guys, it's $50 a piece.
But don't worry about it.
Proof of play is still going to be successful.
So you can come back and we love you.
It's okay.
I agree.
Again, like I said, I agree with Noc knock there are some hard business decisions you have to make
but i also agree with hantau like you just have to make those decisions the right way in my opinion
like especially if the community is what got you this far i think at least you like you don't even
owe them i would say you would have it should have been one of those things where it's like
instead of insulting you with 50 bucks i'll just like not give you anything i'll just tell you like hey this is the plan and if you want to be part of the
plan like come burn the asset and we'll give you like an sbt or some shit like that would have been
more like mindful i think of everyone in the ecosystem than like hey guys um so you know all
the loyalty that you guys had yeah like sick 50 bucks yeah they literally could have just they've
already accrued so much debt by making it the primer asset they could have just kept that debt going
and they could have found a solution once they modeled their actual business over it but they
were just like nope we're cutting this fuck all you guys isn't that most likely the point though
was that they they didn't want to continue the expectation debt, and they're making the conscious choice of cutting off.
You give them a soulbound token, and now whenever Proof of Play comes out, it's all about how much of the soulbound token holder is getting airdropped.
Oh, we only got 2%? Oh my god, fud, fud, fud.
And in this case, at least they can move on, they can have a clean break.
Jerry, what do you think
um no i would say sam that i disagree with that to to an extent because i think what
they've now backed the corner that they've backed themselves into is that the right thing to do
would actually be go and take a snapshot. And now all these people that kind of got fucked with the $50 deal,
now you kind of need to wrap them into the proof of play token or whatever,
if that launches, right?
That would be the right thing to do.
Is that what they end up doing?
I don't know.
And I'm not going to pretend to know.
But if it's me, that's what I would do, right?
Because I think you kind of owe it to those people
because you've gotten to where you're at because of, in large part what I would do, right? Because I think you kind of owe it to those people because you've gotten to where you're
at because of the, in part, in large part, because of them, right?
So I would say, you know, having that clean break or whatever, I think most people would
have been fine with like, if they come out and say, hey guys, we're building some on-chain
tools, like VRNG, you know, on-chain automations, that stuff's actually expensive as fuck to
run,
right? So if you say like, we'll share a percentage of profits to the people who have
pirates or whatever, you know, it's not a guarantee, but I'm saying like the market
could at least price that in of what that value might be if they continue to show success.
And, you know, and let the market speak for what that value is, you know, but when when you declare like the value of your community to you is $50 per NFT.
I just think that that's like, that's setting yourself up for whatever you do in the future.
People ask the question, like, hey, what about founders pirates? What about founders pirates? Right?
So I and I think they are a team that generally does hear the community sentiment.
So I think that they will probably
you know take care of those people you know down the road but you know i i think that they just
backed themselves into a corner where you know i make the analogy sometimes it's like would you
rather get punched in the face or kicked in the balls and i think they just signed up for themselves
to to do like to be on the receiving end of both you know it's just going to be a matter of time matthew buxton tagging you in yeah so i mean it's obviously a fucking tragedy for people who got the
nft cheap and even worse for the people who bought it a second hand and i think we we do we do like
to say a lot about hard business decisions made.
But I mean, at the end of the day, if you've taken $33 million, that is a stupendous amount of money to make a casual game.
I mean, you can make something as big as an Angry Birds style game over a couple of years with an expensive ass team in the first world nation.
And you can spend $ three million dollars on that and you can just interject matt like they have always been
just to kind of defend the team here because i've not met them for a long time is that like it wasn't
the it's been very vocal about it wasn't just it's not just going to be a casual game it is like a
test subject i think knock you you made a um a good point earlier it's just this was just like always just a test like pirate nation as like the voxels
everything that you mentioned they've always said like hey this is just the way for us to be able to
build the info that we really do care about for proof of play so just just as a as a heads up i
don't want them to be thought as like this this is Pirate Nation is the only thing that they were going to do. No, I mean, and that's not at all. What I'm saying is that what I'm saying
is that with that amount of money, you could make way more smaller tests. You could have done this
in an entirely different way. You didn't have to sell that test game that is a test on one hand
as having premier assets assets having its own token
having its own ecosystem being something that sounds like for all intents and purposes it's
a test to some people and it's not a test to the people who bought into it to the community that
believed in it i mean they should have never really you know made comments on like, this is a test.
It has always been a test.
These assets are way too high.
We think you do it.
I remember lauded on this space and others for how they launched Pirate to do,
that they did some big news afterwards and the Pirate token went up.
For all intents and purposes, test or not,
this was run like a
real web 3 project that was meant to stand the test of time like that's how it was communicated
and that's why the holders are so pissed um because if this had always been a test if this
had always been a for fun thing and that had been like oh here's the other tests and here's what
pirate nation's proving um it's not for profit it's not meant to go anywhere we wanted to have a test token like
that's they could have given away more stuff for free they could have made it the whole thing
cheaper um and it just it's a stupendous amount of money to build a test game and then build your
infrastructure and to be honest you probably don't even need to build a test game to build your infrastructure or at least it's just not a lot of this from someone
who's built games for the last 20 years not a lot of this and infrastructure and being there
with all of this kind of stuff not a lot of this makes sense to anyone who is outside of this crazy
world of web 3 where 33 million dollars is given ostensibly for not for pirate
nation but for proof of play you have to make pirate nation to make that happen doesn't make
any sense to anyone with a like thread of industry insider knowledge and how these things actually
perform and how they should have known from very early that a casual game like this wasn't gonna
make it so for me it's just massive misalignment all around.
And I think the founders, as was mentioned,
did back themselves into a corner.
And I do feel sorry for the holders.
But again, there's a reason why I've never bought a games NFT
in this space because I have not seen one.
I have not seen a single NFT for a single game
that I would say, this is a store of value and
this is going to be worth me buying and so i think you do have to have your wits about you but
i i mean the team could be the most well-intentioned people in the world but 33 million dollars is a
huge fucking moat and you can literally give someone that and let them thrash around for five
years and they will hit a hyper liquidquid or they'll hit something.
Now, if they burn people along the way and we're okay with that, that's fine.
Then they just got to get their communication better.
But that's what I'm saying.
This is a space where if you give someone that amount of money, they will eventually
find a way to make money.
If you look at, say, all those guilds that pivoted from one thing to one thing to one
thing to one thing, and then they hit it big.
They did that because they had the treasury to survive and the wits about them to pick up on
the next new thing they managed those transfers like very well compared to others i get what
you're saying but like that's like then that's stardust right like if you don't have something
that you're building and you're building alongside it like you're not eating your own dog food in some
capacity again i'm not like defending pirate nation here. It's just like, I know that, you know, it, it's also like where,
what they were trying to build at the time back in 2021 was pretty, I don't know, they started
off in very like small scale and it's kind of grown to where it is. So like I've, and I guess
I've, and I guess maybe it's just more of a bias of being in the space for a long time.
maybe it's just more of a bias of being in the space for a long time. It just seems very,
It just seems very, um, they seemed like builders that were here and are still here to be able
to continue going.
And maybe it's just like, uh, I guess Stockholm syndrome or something like that.
I don't know.
Uh, but like, it definitely is.
Look, look at beam, look at beam merit circles.
They were a guild.
They pivoted into something else.
They tried to become a publisher and now they're doing something else with hyper liquid.
Like if you give people enough money and they're smart enough they will eventually find the thing that hits it's about communication management along the way it's really about the
teams that got the most money in 21 and then can continue to keep that mindshare pivoting into
different things they don't need to make different companies they just need to continue to pivot and
build on the mindshare they have like i don't think they're bad for doing it um because you've got to make the right business
decisions but at the end of the day this space is really they have we have a short memory for stuff
and i'm sure if they find something with proof of play that hits or even if it's the next iteration
of that everyone's going to lord them as the greatest team that's ever lived but you know
people learn hard lessons the hard way so um
but yeah just from the outside it just seems it seems a very bizarre way to actually try to make
something or anything in that way i'm gonna go back to og
um yeah i mean peyton i'm with you i i feel the same way most of the time when you know things
go wrong and people shut down.
And I'm like, yeah, but I've known this person for like three or four years.
My only gripe with this whole situation is I'm going to draw on some comparisons that maybe make sense,
maybe don't make sense to you.
It depends on who you are and what you know about these projects.
But look at something like BigTime and OpenLoot.
And it's kind of similar maybe slightly
different where big time came first open loot is now i'm not saying it's at the same scale of what
proof of play wants to be but it's essentially infrastructure it's a marketplace it's a place
where you can you know go and buy and sell and trade assets etc etc but the way people on crypto
twitter talk about like big time and open loot as like the devil
right like all you know these those guys like big yeah big time they shrug them off
whereas i i can guarantee you if if open loot decided to shut down big time tomorrow
everyone would be like oh my god why didn't they do this why didn't they do that and it will be
there was there would be just consensus across the board that open loot as a company is just terrible they raise a lot
of money they shouldn't have wasted it they should have done better etc etc etc on the flip side you
look at something like shrapnel and i i know dubs here i love you dub um as soon as dub left and
tony left and like we didn't have as many friends in shrapnel anymore everything started getting
ridiculed it was like why the fuck would you do this why would you do that now they're
going to gala like oh the Chinese government is getting involved and we don't talk about it in
the same way of like they're just trying to survive you got to make tough business decisions
like sometimes you just gotta you know ignore the noise and just do the thing that you don't
you need to do I think with with Pirate, there's a lot of that. Stockholm Syndrome, maybe. Because, again, we all know the team. We love them on different levels.
I just think we have to be fair. Just in general. I think we just have to be fair. We have to look
at everything almost in the same light, where it's like, there's a way, as sad as it sounds,
but there's a way about winding things down and shutting down and moving on. And I just don't think this was the way. So again, just going back to Hantau's
point, the best thing you could probably do was nothing. Like you could have just sat
on your hands, maybe like winded down things, said like,
oh, season X, whatever season they were on of Pirate Nation is like, now we're just going to pause a little
bit because we want to make some improvements, whatever it was. Like there could have been a hundred different ways
that don't lead to a path where it's like 50 a pirate nation nft and like
speculation on the token and i think it's just they're unlucky i think timing like i don't blame
them for that and you know it's sad to see like things just worked out in a terrible way with the
ico hire with everything else but yeah i just think we have to be fair and if we're being fair
like if we gave shrapnel shit for going to gala like we might as well give these guys shit for winding down the whole
ecosystem of pirate nation which was supposed to be a test game and then saying like oh anyways
this wasn't the point we've always been building this cool infrastructure vrng thing so wait for
that token to launch i think it's a little bit of revisionist history on the shrapnel stuff because
a lot of the decisions that people are critical of happened after their departure, not that they were
happening during their tenure and then everybody was critical after they left and they would no
longer be insulting their friends. But at the same time, you know, there was some validity there.
Peyton, I see the hand up. Yeah, I was, I think I can just let it die um i well maybe i won't so like in terms of like
og and hantel i actually agree with you i guess what i was i guess what i was speaking up for
the team was kind of what like matthew buxton was kind of talking about with which is it wasn't like
i felt like it's just being formed as a game but like whenever i read their white paper three years
ago it was and again this was like three years ago and obviously just being formed as a game. But like whenever I read the white paper three years ago,
it was,
and again,
this was like three years ago.
And obviously there's probably been a lot of revisions and expectation
debt that's built along the way.
But just from somebody that picked him up like three years ago,
it was like,
oh yeah,
this was always proof of play,
you know,
and pirate nation was kind of that stuff,
but it excursion.
And I,
I think to,
to Matthew's point,
I think it was like,
I think you're just
like oversimplifying the 33 million of just being like a game, right? It wasn't like a game. It was
always just something. And I think 33 million to build an infrastructure product for like on-chain
tech that hasn't been there. I don't think we should like put it in the same bracket as like
a lot of money that was sent to a lot of founders back in the day which was just a lot
you know and these guys are still here versus like the 15 million the 20 million that were sent to
other teams that are no longer with us they're no longer in the room right so that's the only
thing i was saying but i agree with you og and hantau i just disagreed with some some elements
of matthew but i agree with most of his take og OG, back to you.
Yeah, no, I love you, brother.
I agree as well.
I think $33 million is not a lot of money to build an infrastructure layer.
It is a lot of money to build a game,
so maybe that's what Matthew's talking about.
But yeah, like the $33 million was raised
for proof of play.
It was not raised for Pirate Nation.
My only issue with that is, I think, I think,
again, this is maybe like hindsight 2020.
If you, from the very get-go,
say it's a proof of concept, this is not really meant to be the final product
surely you should be a lot more careful about the language when it comes to assets right because
like you decided to launch a nft collection you decided to launch a token like they're all
publicly traded there's been conversations about this will go to x value or that will go to x value
whether it's like for fun or serious whatever it is like the best case scenario if it's actually just a proof
concept would have been like free mint or some shit um play the game try it out give us some
feedback we'll look at the product and then we'll like sunset it completely and then we'll just move
on to the next thing i think everyone would have been happy everyone would be satisfied the the the
logic would have always been there and everyone would be in consensus that like okay
this is what's going to happen i think the fact that it kind of then spiraled into okay it's its
entire ecosystem pirate is like the token you also have the nfts people are like buying the nfts
they're staking the token etc etc like it became its own thing and i think just like pulling the
plug on that is not as simple as like a tweet
and like an announcement of 50 bucks a piece.
Like that's my main thing.
Like I love the guys.
I hope Proof of Play becomes the biggest thing in the world.
I hope the next Pirate Nation game
or whatever they end up making is like 10 times better.
I just don't think you can go down that path
and then like stop halfway and be like,
oh, oopsie, but like I never said this was the main thing.
Like you just can't do that matthew buxton i just i just take slight issue with with people
sort of characterizing this as it was 33 million to build a game it's it is the infrastructure
obviously and it's it's definitely but the the game that actually crippled where they are
financially because you can't say that you know if you're running something for over a year and it's costing 100k a month, that is not something you should do for a test.
Like just logically, if it's costing you 100k a month and you've raised 33 million, you do not keep that in operation for like 12 to 24 months.
Like you literally are meant to do tests to find results quickly
wait that's what it's not you're not testing your own blockchain yeah you're testing your
own blockchain but you you are testing your own blockchain with something that is clearly a test
right you can test your own blockchain with something that isn't its own thing with an
ecosystem where you tell people this has an ecosystem and these are
the premier assets of that ecosystem. Then you launch a token for that ecosystem and all the
way in the back of your head, it's still a test because the community are not going to understand
that. So if you're going to do a test, that test shouldn't be that percentage of your budget is
what I'm saying. You can do a test for your own blockchain um you can make your own blockchain you could have built in silence you didn't need to make
such an obvious test and and spend all of that money doing it and then be there in the arbitrum
gaming instead if it's a test why do you take that particular game to gdc and you tell people
it's our game it's this we make this kind of game and it's a game. It's this. We make this kind of game. And it's a fantastic game.
It's a test.
Like, none of the things that they did, like, after saying it's a test, like, were borne out by how they acted about it, by the fact that they released a token for it, by the fact that they doubled down on a lot of the stuff that they've done for it.
Like, you can't keep saying that these guys like
were genuinely believing that this was this at some point there must have been a decision that
said we're going to go for this it's going to be more than a test we're going to try and build on
it and see how far we get because they must have seen the initial attraction they must have seen
how good the community was and how rabid they were it could have at any time at any time during that process
said wait a minute guys this is just a test for our blockchain but don't go crazy we're gonna
oh sorry matthew isn't there also like testing monetization testing user acquisition testing
onboarding web two people into web three like i don't think all of it was just testing the
blockchain technology right it's so many different things yeah but i mean but dude i've been doing this for the last 20 years you don't need to build
one game for that long to test that much stuff you test that kind of thing in the first three
months of building a new game if you want to test that you build it in the first three months of
building a game that's what you literally do you can incentivize a community and work out the
numbers and then when you have the numbers you go to build the next bar there i mean game that's what you literally do you can incentivize a community and work out the numbers and then when you have the numbers you go to build the next part of it i mean that that's
literally how you build and test games for those particular things and that was not done clearly
i mean this is going back to the old standard approach and people who've never built games
who potentially have then this sort of the triple a approach which is you build it you beta it then you gold
master it which is not at all what you do for lives of it sorry my cat's just destroying the
house um like you know i think the thing is like as much as people are friends with the team as
much as they're fantastic individuals or whatever like this got way out of hand for a test like in
considering how much it costs how much emphasis was put on it
how they took it to a fucking game show at least once um you don't do that for a test like we've
run up tests with fake companies with different names and shut them down when they don't get the
numbers and we've done that multiple times in two to three months and then when they do get the
numbers then you can spin up something bigger and then you can shut that down in four to six months when it doesn't make it out of software launch. There's
numerous ways to do that. And still that being a test. I mean, in web two, we don't give people
shit, which is bad. But if you believe in an ecosystem, if you believe people are testers
for your ecosystem, which is basically what this is saying, then you should fucking grandfather
their assets into your ecosystem.
They are your testers. They are your proof of play. They have literally given you the proof
of their fucking playing and paying, and you should grandfather them over. That's just easy.
If this money for Pirate Nation wasn't that much, and it didn't actually cost them that much,
and they've still got plenty of money left to build the um infrastructure which is going to kick ass then fucking grandfather them um it's as simple as that
for any of our listeners as well not uh familiar with matthew buxton and his history worked at king
worked at rovio worked at jagex has a lot of experience in this realm so really appreciate
his perspective on this hands out i'll go to you and then we'll start to wrap up the show. Yeah, so I'm not hard stuck as much as Matthew on the test usage of the wording. I think like,
so Fern's been super responsive every time I've messaged him. So if that says anything about their
team, I think they operate at such a level. And for me, I think the disappointment comes because
of that expectation.
It's like these guys have been building the space for a very long time. They were one of the first
people to embrace fully on-chain games. They were one of the first people to get a game onto Coinbase
and get over and go up and to the right as a token, right? Like these guys experimented and pushed the space forward.
And I think the disappointment comes more so from the fact that like they have
these experiences and they still executed that buyback in such a poor manner
that it's like we're working in the same space, right?
You guys have been here also for the last four years, five years building.
Yeah. It's just that like misalignment between those expectations and like what they did which is i think the core issue yeah i think that's a fair point i do i said this to fern in
dms as well i do think the response has been uh maybe harsher than it would have been for other
teams because so many people put their faith of web3
gaming on them specifically which is not necessarily fair but it does maybe speak to
some of the emotionality around it also again anytime somebody has financially invested in
anything and it turns out that thing does not perform well they're obviously going to be quite
emotional as well but like a like a few others said definitely rooting for proof of play, still going beyond this.
I think them being successful would uplift the entire Web3 gaming space.
And I know that they've been making some headway with VRNG.
So fingers crossed that they're able to right the ship, pun not intended, and still rooting for them as individuals.
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Go to Remix.gg to learn more about the official AI studio of Simplified and become your very own solo dev. Amazing panel today. Really
appreciate each and every one of our panelists. Hands out Peyton, Matthew Buxton, Knockdub, Jerry,
Tatted Lawyer. Earlier we had Hustlepedia, ICO Beast, Crypto Gorilla, and more. Really appreciate
each and every one of you taking a bunch of time out of your schedule to come and chop it up with us. We'll also be live on Gamified in about 46 hours, 4 p.m. Eastern every single Wednesday.
Love you guys.
We'll see you same time, same place next week.
Take care. Thank you.
