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The End for pump.fun? Nikita Might Actually Save CT
Recorded: Feb. 18, 2026 Duration: 0:57:34Space Recording
Full Transcription
And everybody's playing
Boys and girls, women, children, me and you
The dice are loaded
And everything's fixed
Even a hobo would tell you this
Welcome to Hard Times a hobo would tell you this welcome to hard times and feeling low do you like sinning no Before you go, we got lots of gambling.
Oh, and we're telling lies.
You're certainly welcome to hard times. Take a look in my eyes, tell me what you see
Tell me what you see
Besides the bright blinking lights
Stretched out in front of me
I wonder if you'll notice
Would you even care
If I told you my life just isn't fair
Welcome to hard times
And feeling low
Do you like sinning? No
Well you will be before you go
We got lots of gambling, oh, and we're telling lies, you're certainly welcome to hard times, yes, hope, yes. Welcome to hard times. Hard times for some. Hard times if you're a shitcoin trader.
A little shit once you're eating losers
get a real job you fucking bum
get a real job bum
fuck off
how are you feeling?
how was your mood?
before we went live
we were doing some tax stuff
crunch those spreadsheets
honestly core work is
fucking fantastic isn't it?
Yeah.
So good.
Yeah,
just good.
It's good for anything.
And it's like putting,
like,
why do you need anything anymore
apart from a Cloud Code
subscription?
Yeah,
some of the way these
robots are moving as well.
Jesus.
I know,
Jesus,
don't even go there.
Right.
Thanks to Yeet,
primary sponsor of the
Blockmates podcast.
Go over there.
If you're geo-blocked in the UK, use your brain.
I'm not going to say things on stream that I shouldn't say,
but, you know, yeet.com, go and play in the casino.
What we're going to talk about today.
So pump.fund is coming under fire,
which has sort of been born out of the whole thing with nikita and um
well i actually think like saving crypto twitter really because of the whole nonsense we've been
seeing about the claim the fees bro and all this kind of stuff uh then we are going to get into
the fact that what's been going on with peter steinberger really which is sort of related to
pump and the problem we've seen with uh fucking hell what's it called now claude but molt bot i keep getting mixed open claw open claw
jesus i keep getting mixed up with all the all the names um apparently that's apparently that's
a final name pivot final name pivot but we'll get into that uh basically going to talk about the
zora move to solana and subsequent pivot, what that means.
And the fact that Dragonfly are,
I've got loads of fucking money.
Loads of money to deploy because it's a bear market, baby.
And the best things are made in bear markets.
So yeah.
How are you feeling about stuff? We've had a couple of uh we've had a couple of
streams this week already haven't we blaze hero commonware and usdai on monday jesus you're being
relentless you've never i've never seen so much of you yeah i've got travis good from ambient on as
well alexander's uh brother what a What a mad family that is
to be able to create
and all the shit that they're up to.
So that's on at 5pm.
I need to go to the garage in between.
So I don't know if I'm going to squeeze that one out.
And me and Sunil are back.
Yeah, I'm sick of this fucking sound of my own voice,
to be honest.
But someone's going to have to cover
what's happening at the forefront of the industry.
God damn it.
Someone's got to do it god damn it
there's a few other people doing it but i don't know how fucking people listen to those fuckers
talk about it so i'll just leave that there i know they're all absolutely shite aren't they
like what what do you listen to like what do you what do you listen to that's like actually a good
pod that isn't ours uh the two the two brads like b2g
podcast
I think that's really good
Lenny's really good
yeah
DeFi dad's
stuff is really good
listen
the USDA
I won the other day
yeah
probably a few others
that I can't think of
stop my struggle
really
are we talking like
crypto specific
yeah even like all in now it's like
just fucking Jason Kalkanis all over the
fucking podcast like just
like did you know it was the earliest
in post renew but like oh fuck off
idiot
I like
Gworts to be fair because I just like
Gworts brilliant yeah
I don't know how we've got here by the way you just said everything was shite and i just agreed so i can sense that
you're in a bad mood so i'm just gonna feed off it i'm not i mean i'm in one of those like wait
if you set team me up i might go on one though right well uh let's let's go on one then um right
so as i said when i did the intro, whatever you want to call it,
Pump Fun have now been through three versions of the Creative E model now. Each one has subsequently
caused drama and what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a little bit of backstory
and then we can talk about the absolute toilet that is the MemeCoin Casino,
if it's even still open.
The MemeCoin Casino feels like a retail park in a battered old UK town
that's like struggling to stay open.
You know, it's like if anyone's still
showing up to that casino,
well, then I don't know what the fuck
you're doing with your life.
Probably you need to be doing something different.
But it's...
Like one of those ones, you know, with the cans,
but the cans are actually stuck down with glue.
You can't actually win.
Yeah.
You're shooting them.
You're talking like theme park, like fun park there, aren't you?
Like fucking players.
But yeah, I mean, so right, backstory.
We're pretty unprepared for this one again this week.
I feel like it's not too frequently, but...
Nothing new.
Yeah, whatever.
You lot keep seeming to show up and tell us you like it so we're not going to change anything
until you tell us it's shit uh right so it started in may last year they introduced a 0.05 percent
creator fee on pump swap um which obviously sounded nice on paper like rewarding creators
and all that but actually what they did was they just slapped an additional fee on top of the
existing trading costs rather than sharing any of their own revenue.
Total swap fees went from 0.25% to 0.3%.
So traders are paying more.
PumpFun keeps everything they were already making
and then they just frame it as they were giving back to the creators
with this whole thing we'd been watching.
Then in September, we got Project Ascend with dynamic fees,
which was a sliding scale where smaller tokens could earn up to 0.95 percent
dropping down to 0.05 percent um i think i said 0.95 yeah once you hit a 20 dollar million market
cap um 20 million dollars 20 million uh creators earned a million in the first 24 hours which is
massive obviously compared to the 198k the day before brought in streamers new builders uh double
bonding curve volumes but the problem was it obviously incentivized people to just deploy
thousands of low effort tokens and farm fees with basically zero risk am i doing a good job of this
screen read here by the way i don't i don't know from not being able to fucking read yeah
ron burgundy but i've done some prep for this so i was like i hope it's still um sort of
paraphrasing um and as i said like
alon then came out and said the model was dangerous because obviously rewarded creation
over trading and the traders are the ones that are actually providing liquidity then in january
they added a fee sharing uh across 10 wallets and then obviously just yesterday they dropped
another row update which is the trader cashback coins so now when you launch a token you have to
choose up front either you keep the creator fees or all of those fees get redirected back to traders as cashback once you choose it's
locked forever and the the backlash is being consistent through all of this essentially the
core criticism being the pump just just keeps repackaging transaction taxes as creator rewards
without ever cutting into their own take and one dev called them extractor fees very typical shit
since the players aren't really creating anything that's using automated tools to launch thousands cutting into their own take and one dev called them extract the fees is very typical shit uh
since the players aren't really creating anything they're just using automated tools to launch
thousands of tokens in a couple of clicks um yeah and everyone's just kind of throwing a load of
stuff at this at the minute today and telling everyone how bad it is and we've got loads of
tweets like uh josh can you pull my screen up and i'll read this one off as like some context essentially uh right so this one as you can see pump fund just killed every coin on
chain and people don't even completely understand the update yet they're giving us cash back on all
transactions not for holding tokens this is something we already get from quite literally
every trading terminal taking away dev fees and giving them to traders sounds cute and all
but what they basically just did was make bundling easier lol so now instead of farming dev fees and giving them to traders sounds cute and all but what they basically just did was make bundling easier lol so now instead of farming dev fees people will farm cash back through more
transactions with more bundled wallets and farm EPA retarded update literally they just took away
dev fees and reworded it to make it look like they're robbing hood taken from the rich and
given to the poor and in reality they just make trading a million times worse reward holding not trading give us fees for holding i'm done with that um you can perhaps tell from my energy i'm
sort of just so fucking sick of talking about this memes and repositioning and all that kind
of thing and you know the whole thing with peter steinberg is what we'll get next is probably
main reason why what do you think ah think people just need to give it up man
yeah
we were saying when we were kind of
talking through it it's
like beyond 6am
like the pump party was two years ago
nearly 18 months ago
they're ringing some dodgy numbers
at 7 o'clock
he's not answering
they are literally licking the numbers at seven o'clock. He's not answering.
They are literally licking the bag at the end of the pie.
Give it up.
Like just go and do something more productive with your time.
You're literally at this point of like the largest inflection,
inflection point in human history, the biggest unlock since the internet.
And people are trying to figure out a way to continue the party on pumped up fun just
go and put the exact amount of time and effort into actually building something like the real pve
is getting caught open clause spun up or cloud code or just speaking into a computer and bringing ideas to life
i guess there's never been a time to do that in human history as easy as now and people are trying
to fucking just trade against each other and like somehow figure out this game that's like
overly one-dimensional it's just like there's only a certain amount of ways you move the pieces
around in the board and it's just it's whack-a-mole you solve one problem another one pops up it's
just give it up man like it's fine good things happen and move on just i don't know i
don't know why people are continuing to actually just like pay attention to this sort of shit so
it just needs to you know everyone needs to get on with their lives it's my takeaway from this
yeah i mean we're giving it oxygen right now i know but it's just it's like people
need to hear it give it up give it i mean i could give you a line couldn't know about why it's
terrible for the industry in incentivized volume overhauling opening the door wash trade and all
this kind of stuff but if you haven't figured it out by now it's like what's the percentage of do
we have like stats on this somewhere i think henry sent me something it was like the percentage of rugs uh
where is it i don't know i probably can't bring it up until i had some actual stats i mean i don't
even need to say it do i it's just like no it's obvious like and like the if we use this as a good
segue for the i don't know if you heard the Peter Steinberger to the Open Claw
creator on Lex
Friedman
just take a
I don't know whether you were going to mention what's on my screen
already so I was going to ask you
go on
but I can take this pretty special guest
to get me to watch a fucking three hour Lex lex friedman podcast but that one was pretty good
but there was like some really juicy bits between like 30 and 45 minutes around the crypto side of
it wasn't there have you got have you got the notes um yeah i do yeah if you if you want to
bring it up josh just briefly on my screen so this is the clip just for context which we're
obviously not going to play it's's like a four-minute clip.
And it's essentially Peter Steinberg on Lex Friedman talking about how absolutely horrendous it was
with people trying to gamify.
So this is AppVenture, Coinist.
I'm sure you'll have seen it on the timeline
if you tune into the blockmates.
Sure, Jesus Christ, it's got 1.2 million views,
so you can drop this now, Josh um but the the crux of what happened here was all about what had gone on with
um with like bags fm and like claiming fees and and the i suppose i'll do the tldr of the tldr is or the TLDR is there was a playbook going around where coin could be launched and then
the most simple way to explain this is possible because I'm going to assume that most people
will understand the context here is that you could have a coin launched on behalf of you and
then the creator of the coin if it was officially attributed to them could essentially then just
claim the fees of whatever that coin was being traded at,
being spat back to them.
So there was an incentivization model
that was working as a flywheel
in which people would be spammed with,
just claim the fees, bro,
because the second that this non-crypto person
who doesn't give a flying fuck about meme coins
or low caps or certainly your bags
acknowledges that there's been a coin launched
on their behalf,
well then in theory it validates the
coin potentially has a positive impact on price action it sounds embarrassing even talking about
this never mind that it's not even a thing anymore so that is what was happening with open claw
when it was malt bot uh why can't i get the fucking name right? My brain's scrambled.
Open claw.
Before they'd rebranded it,
and essentially he's saying on this Lex clip that the levels of harassment that he was getting
from the crypto community were just off the charts.
He wasn't interested in the funds
because he's got enough money,
and he certainly wasn't interested
in all of these spammy little fucking losers telling him to claim the fees on some shitcoin that had been launched in his name that I think had done reasonably well in terms of a pump.
Well, it did do well, didn't it? Let's be honest.
But yeah, it's just a terrible look, isn't it, for the industry?
And there's a part on this, there's a soundbite that lex actually says and he's quite succinct in the way he speaks he he kind of says what a lot of us
who do this for a living and a you know industry participants talk about that crypto is like
along with ai and like this inflection point that we're all nicely chuntering towards at the minute
is some of the most interesting technology that
could probably have like some of the biggest impacts on the financialization of the world
and we're seeing that already in real time aren't we with everything we talked about last week with
their zero tempo everything like that being just completely overshadowed by any time this stuff
gets in the mainstream media like lex friedman It's this guy explaining the shit that he's putting up with
from these, you know, Discord server mules
that are just absolutely desperate to milk anything they can
for their own financial incentives.
It's tiring.
It's embarrassing.
Yeah.
It's because it's on the backdrop of
how impressive a lot of these tools are as well.
Like that's the juxtaposition of it all.
It's just like this,
I don't want to do absolutely anything
or contribute absolutely anything
apart from just buy something
and sit in a fucking telegram or
discord server whilst you go and do the work and now we're going to tie your value and your
contribution as a society to this fucking shit coin that we've got ungodly amounts of the supply
of bundled and make it look like we're doing you a favor. Fucking retarded.
It's fucking stupid.
Like, what are we doing?
Like, what?
Actually, I'm going to rephrase that.
What are we doing is totally wrong.
And it's only a select amount of people.
And to put it into context,
a guy who's building something as impressive as open claw couldn't even change his fucking name
of the product from what's his style cloud bot to malt bot and the reason why there were so many
name changes and it like went through like loads of shit name changes he wanted the domains
across github the website like where like the socials, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And to do that, like atomically, in a sense of doing it all at the same time,
is quite a difficult task to actually do.
Because these people were waiting in the wings,
waiting for any type of update to actually happen. And then they were running scripts and then sniping the names
and the domains of whatever peter was updating it to said he literally there must have been a delay
of like 10 seconds before he clicked confirm on a domain and it got sniped because people were
running these like hyper efficient scripts so let me just put this into context if there are people
going to that length and that extent to snipe a domain name so they can launch a
token that is your counterparty when you're manually just fucking looking at deck screener
and clicking to buy a token so if you believe you've got an edge i'm sorry but you are fucking
stupid so that is the extent that these people will go to and you feel like you've got an edge
can i can i add to that right because we had this conversation ages ago when info fire was still
going on remember we had it was we had mando on and it was when everyone was getting furious about
like the the end of gamification of kaito leaderboards and stuff and we said at the time
just get a job and and put your time and skills and expertise into something worthwhile.
Because I've got some news for you, right,
which is actually quite weirdly positive.
If you're like a deck screen dwelling server sniper, right,
you're probably of high enough agency
and you've made your way around this industry
and you can navigate it well enough.
I guarantee that you have enough skills and agency as a human being to actually do something worthwhile so go and have a go at doing that and contributing not even to the society to society
in general but to this industry a little bit more than sniping domains for some poor ai founder who doesn't want anything to fucking do with crypto
or your bags what is funny though is that there's one of the uh replies to this nikita did reply to
the lex clip that someone had put out and said x moved too slowly and banning one of coordinated
financially incentivized harassment we'll do better next time so they're actively shipping to
improve that which is really really good but then kobe replied and said he blocked me even though i just congratulate
him for the acquisitions i just imagine the head loss like sitting in bed or whatever just going
fuck off like he had all of his notifications turned off and everything and just still couldn't
get rid of people like relentlessly sending him shit yeah mental uh yeah it's um
someone a new type trader here left a comment saying we just we just need to run it back with
let the 3-3 model come back but embedded in meme coin trading somehow not sure there's a so Jaws who was previously at
Olympus
is actually launching
iterative version
on Megareeth
is that public?
I feel like I'm not aware of that
or is that
insider
exclusive stuff?
I think so
I don't know
I never know
what I'm saying
half the time so
yeah we've heard it
I'm the worst person
to tell fucking shit to
because I just say it by accident all the time.
Yeah.
It's just a lifelong grass.
So that leads me into something
that I wanted to talk about as well, right?
In that something else that had kind of cropped up this week
was the price of uh tbtn subscriptions now if you haven't
been online ads ads sorry subscriptions i don't know where that came from so the price of um tbtn
ads now there's a tweet here you can just pull up my screen if you want josh uh this guy's saying
a million a year to get what at most 3 000 views per video tbtn is a total
joke and no one will say say it out loud very very typically a tweet like this as most people do
because everyone just loves a witch hunt um by the way we have no affiliation with tbtn we don't we
don't know those guys like this is just a genuine take on like what i'm watching from an unraveling
point of view here 251k views
uh healthy amount of likes on this again just everyone likes a pile on don't they're in any
industry for that matter let alone tech crypto and then one of the replies is i disagree and
resonate more with john coogan here and john is one of the hosts on tbtn and the there's essentially
a line here it's like embracing anti-scale.
And the crux of this, and I'm not going to read it out fully so we can drop the screen share,
is the argument he's making is that
when we talk about a total addressable market
for anything that we all spend our lives talking about,
whether it's tech, whether it's crypto, whether it's AI,
I guess you're going within a down-down bubble bubble there around your niche within a niche within a niche and like the actual
the actual numbers available none of this stuff is mass market right and this is the whole problem
with like vanity metrics in in general just because something isn't mass market in the it's not
cooking content or it's not sport content
or something like that, doesn't mean that eyeballs are not valuable in terms of needle
movers and the right people and important people watching the right sort of content that makes
sense to them. And that's also like why we've ended up in this cyclical nature at the minute
where just everyone's like desperately scrambling for a clip for something that might go viral on the timeline
of them saying something that is like sensationalist
or just absolute nonsense, garbage, bullshit,
just in an effort to go viral.
Like you don't need to do that.
Like if you've got a loyal, good crowd and an audience
that like your shit and keep coming back for it,
just double down on that and serve that crowd
and if tbtn are getting this level of ad revenue at the size of the show that they are like fucking
good for them do you know do you know what i mean that that's my opinion here and like you can kind
of maybe accuse us of being dick riders here like the way we're saying this but they've kind of dug
the heels in and said if we break out of this, we've pivoted and we don't want to.
Like that isn't the crowd that we're serving here.
Yeah. And the flip side's also true.
It's like how many times have we been in touch with like founders and teams
and we've had a conversation with them and they'll be like,
oh yeah, we've got like 300,000 followers on Twitter.
I was like...
No, you don't.
Are we just like lying to each other now?
Like, is that what we're doing?
Do you truly believe that?
Because you're as deluded as fucking these people
who are trying to still buy shit coins
and pump to fun if that's the case.
All that game is,
and I don't know who's to blame here.
It's like, all that game is,
is let's pump up our social metrics.
Let's make it appear much larger than we actually are.
We're probably actually 5% to 10%
of what we're actually touting on timeline.
And then we're taking those numbers to VCs and angels
and saying, well, look at this organic traction,
which is probably added field of fire
with regards to them running the points campaign
and then like alluding to an airdrop
and all that bullshit.
But there is no
point you're only lying to yourself and it's stupid there's not one single botted follower
across the block made stuff and there never will be because we can't actually gauge like are we
doing things right we do things wrong like are we moving in the right direction if it was a million
followers we'd definitely be doing something wrong.
Like, as to saying what they're actually saying as well there,
that doesn't necessarily make sense.
But I guarantee the 80-odd thousand followers that are on our account
are legit in the needle movers,
and they're probably all six, seven, eight, nine figures,
maybe some even actually more, like if you actually drill down into it.
And they're all founders, builders,
people of really high importance and interest. because maybe some even actually more, like if you actually drill down into it, and they're all founders, builders,
people of really high importance and interest.
If you optimize for that,
not all eyeballs are created equally,
and I think that's exactly what they're saying.
But, and how many times have we seen this?
The problem is,
the people who are spending money on ads and marketing and marketing efforts,
usually, what we've seen, particularly in this industry,
and I guarantee it's exactly the same in AI and tech
and everything that's adjacent to the world that we live in,
marketers will do the bare minimum to not get fired
and anything outside the box they will not try and address
because that runs the risk of them actually getting fired.
So what they can do is say well we
just spent a load of ad budget on someone who's got 10 million followers that's easy to defend and
justify as opposed to oh well tbpn they're only getting 3 000 views like how do you turn around
we're found and say well they're only getting 3 000 views they're really really relevant and all
those eyeballs are really really high like high signal that doesn't really land on the page as well as oh well we just went with
fucking some pound shop mr beast and he's got a million followers but probably all bought it
anyway but i did my job so that's the game that's getting paid here but i think over time with the
way that ai is going i think everything will consolidate for the higher quality of audience
as opposed to quantity yeah of, of course it will.
We will always come back around to this, Romy.
Signal over noise, signal over noise.
You know, Nevin actually replied.
Nevin and me were having a chat about this, actually.
And he'd replied to this, as I've just seen the tweet there,
and it was kind of like aligning with Kevin Kelly's
1,000 true fans theory, basically the founder of like wired um and it's this kind of i say kind of i don't know why i throw that in
there it's this theory that like depth of a breadth it's not even a theory it's just true
um and if you're in media or content creation or whatever it is that you're doing and especially
if you're in niche media content creation always be aware of
and think of your total addressable market like you need to be realistic about that and that comes
with the people that you're working with as well because as grant says it will always come back
and bite you in the ass like the funniest thing is when we went through that period like 18 months
ago we would have teams coming to us with 500,000 followers.
And I would go, I know everyone and everything that moves across this industry.
If I've never heard of you, if someone farts, I'll hear it.
And you've got 500,000 fucking followers.
And you mean to tell me that's more than my football club.
Come on, mate. Yeah, you've got fucking seven Old Traffords. that's more than my football club. Come off it.
Yeah, you've got fucking seven Old Traffords.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm not having it.
It's just, yeah.
I mean, how do you fix that though?
Because like vanity metrics
are not just a tech crypto issue.
I think more people are becoming aware
of what's authentic and what's inauthentic because of
because of like the acceleration of AI.
People have a sixth sense for it and I don't know where
it came from because it's weird that we've never really lived
with these like
beings and these human
machine type things but we just have a really
weird sixth sense
of what is actually human and what's not.
I think people are becoming increasingly
aware of it even like the boomers,
like I know there's still aunties
and uncles getting one-shotted on Facebook,
sharing some absolutely wild AI images.
Yeah, but that'll take some time to play through.
Your uncle sends you a video and we're going,
have you seen what David Beckham said?
Yeah. Did you know Jeffrey have you seen what David Beckham said? Yeah.
Did you know Jeffrey Epstein is with David Beckham on an island now?
They're telling you he's dead.
He's not dead.
He's with David Beckham.
I saw it on Facebook.
I've just seen it.
Yeah.
I've just seen it.
They're both in Israel.
Anyway, so, you know, who's left then?
Real people.
What would be your estimate?
How many real people
do you think are left on
on crypto Twitter
real
real people
70 to 100,000
I think
active
maybe less
yeah
so if you think about
what percentage of that is of,
depending on how you,
I was going to say of value,
depending on how you derive value.
but like an advertiser wants to derive value by,
are they going to active and are they going to like your demographic is
towards high net worth individuals.
If you're going to,
it depends on what the product actually is.
Like if you're going to, depending on what the product actually is like if you're a perpstex you want to be actively pursuing people who are high net worth
and they're active
I guess you need like the tail end of it as well
where you've got quite a lot of smaller power years
because that's dumb
uninformed flow and they're just going to smash a load of fucking
take a bids into the order book
and just get absolutely rinsed but you kind of want like thick high net worth individuals
that's what that's what you want like as it as like someone who's going to spend money on like
a financial product like a purpose and let me be clear by thick grant means unintelligent
thick being local uh local dialect to mean dumb,
dumb, high net worth individuals to translate.
You want people market buying like six, seven,
eight figure fucking buys on their phone while they're having some lunch or something.
Yeah.
Anyway, moving on.
Zora.
Zora's moved to Solana.
I think you did the prep for this one i hope you did because
i have little very little information on this one other than uh my you know opinions which
be them valid or not but we have some notes i just don't know whether they're true or not so um
no i can't you want to plug in the gaps on the whole zara i can drive is there anything to reference yeah so basically um what you what
we're going to see and we can timestamp this i don't know how well it's going to do or how well
it's not going to do but attention markets are going to be the next evolution of prediction
markets that i don't necessarily see them being as big because prediction markets are used as like a hedging instrument for all sorts of kind of things at the minute as well.
But attention markets will be an extension of where memes have came from. A lot of the issue
with what happens with memes is, as we quite rightly say, there are a lot of nefarious actors
that will spin up a million different versions of the same token. So how do you kind of like,
million different versions of the same token so how do you kind of like i suppose categorize and
just bet on an overall theme so attention markets was i think like the early originators of this
were noise which went through mega mafia cohort two one i don't remember which one. Have since said they were going to deploy on base.
So now you've had Noise say they're going to deploy on base
and then you've had Zora go the other way
with their attention markets product,
which has just gone live and deployed on Solana.
And then also, I think there was an article in Forbes recently
that Polymarket and Kito are going to be teaming up
and creating attention markets there as well.
So this is a sector that is probably only going to start
to garner more attention, I think.
I think from a kind of like younger demographic,
it probably makes a ton of sense.
Like if you can tap into viral trends on Instagram and TikTok
and wherever fucking kids hang out these days.
Like that's probably a pretty cool product
to financialize if people are going to pick up on early trends.
Like I looked at the Zora market earlier.
There was some quite funny ones.
Like Open Claw as a attention market was on there.
Peptides were on there.
Clavicular, whatever the fuck he's called called that was like a market you could bet on there
do you want to pull up my screen Josh
so it's like
if you spot an emerging trend
or an emerging
mimetic movement if you're terminally online
it's a more efficient way to
actually bet on the outcome of that market becoming true
so yeah you can see at the top there,
like attention markets is the number one market over there.
There's longevity, dogs, clavicular, open claw.
So you can bet on that as a kind of basketed idea, I suppose.
So I like it in principle.
I don't know how it really plays out,
but again, you've got three pretty strong teams
and I don't think Polymarket would be throwing a load of attention at it
for no good reason either.
Yeah, thanks, Josh.
I think this is interesting, as you say,
because in the same way that I think prediction markets
have found mainstream PMF,
I think if you can get the messaging right on this it could do the same
and and as i say like general prediction markets in general about uh you know just all the insider
tricks and how you can gamify whether your peter delivery guy's going to deliver your
fries in 15 minutes or not and it's on him to get them there faster at that point isn't it
um attention markets could basically be
the same because i love the idea of betting on relevance realize what just came out of my mouth
there but similar to what was happening on noise which i think was like test net whenever whenever
it was before they interestingly moved to base which is also weird how like zora to solana
also pivots yeah well there's something going on there
there's something going on there but we don't know enough about it to comment on it but I think
I remember Brett actually posted something at the time and it was like he was short in uh
soul phone at the time attention wise because it was probably around ETH CAN last year um
you know when like the soul phone guys were doing a shitload of activation stuff
and, like, Brett, I guess, took the other side of the bed
and he was like, I'm going to short attention on this.
Like, the idea of that, I think, is really interesting
as a mainstream concept as well.
Like, even, you know, you look at, like, the Logan Paul Pokemon stuff
at the minute, it's, like, popping off all over the timeline.
at the minute,
that's like popping off all over the timeline.
Like I would be shot in the fuck out of that.
Like, I would be shorting the fuck out of that.
And imagine if you could kind of like break through
the chasm of the mainstream ecosystem for this.
And like,
I'm trying to think of an example of what else could be cool
to like bet on from a...
Peptides.
Peptides.
Granny's peptides.
What else are the normies on Instagram
talking about these days?
Ninja creamies. ninja creamies ninja creamies i've just got one it's absolutely unreal what is that is it
it's an ice ice cream maker at home absolutely banging oh man that's dangerous for the calorie
deficit though no you just smash a load of skimmed milk and protein powder and it's absolutely real. Ah, right.
Fucking hell, genius.
So how do we round off
this Zora one?
I'll tell you what,
I know how we round it off
with this tweet.
Because this is sort of
more of a philosophical
commentary on like
where bass is going
in general,
which is quite interesting.
I know what you're
going to bring up here.
Yeah, it's this kook tweet.
Again, please, fellas, if you could pull this up.
Kook tweeted.
Rumor that Coinbase is shutting down.
Top App's already leaving.
Zora gone to Solana, for example.
No token coming.
Betting on an odds.
Bass token in 2026 got smashed.
Armstrong endlessly dumping coin stock.
Sinking ship ship base sequencer
gets turned off any day i am or then you got emily from hype textbook play on how to hit
monetization targets on this app gg what do you mean
yeah um do you think there's any credence to this like what do you think about the
best thing at the minute i know we've suggested that they might go down one route yeah i think i still think there's there's definitely
opportunity for them to go down the l1 route i think it makes a shit ton of sense if
it just makes sense they're too big to be paying to be paying rent to the ethereum l1 in my opinion
um kook's obviously sensationalizing it, and it's really funny.
But maybe there is a hint of truth in it.
That's why it's so funny.
Yeah, I'm trying to find.
There was another tweet from Brian hitting back at someone.
I wouldn't even say hitting back at them.
I just can't remember where it was.
Maybe it's somewhere
and you could link me in the private chat.
I think it might have been Henry that sent it.
It was about the base app pivot and yeah why that as a he's i think he's
like a coin shareholder and he was a bit like annoyed at the way that it all played out and
basically said that someone needs firing for the direction that it's taken brian replied just saying
well if you want anyone to fire in for that decision on the pivot then you need to fire me because that was my decision to actually push towards that.
But for Coinbase, they've got to recognize that the way that everything's moving
is that business can effectively be fully on-chain and should be...
If you think about how efficient Hyperliquid is
and the revenue that it's actually making for the product that it actually is,
and then you've got tens of thousands of people probably at Coinbase,
well, maybe a couple of four or five figure amount of people there at Coinbase.
You've got to kind of look at that and just be like,
well, either they're doing something really good
or we're doing something really wrong.
And the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
Can you replace people with protocols?
Can you replace people with agents? Can you replace people with agents?
Yes and yes, in my opinion.
They're probably looking at that and recognizing that Coinbase,
similar to what's happening with Google at the minute,
they're going to have to kill their old search model
to push Gemini,
because that's the way that people are operating.
Behaviors have changed online.
They have to recognize that in one sense they have to run
this parallelized rundown
of their centralized business and then
also pour fuel on the
fire with regards to bringing everything on their
own chain. So that's another reason why
I definitely think that
there's less risk if
they have their own L1 as well.
So yeah, it's probably
I really wouldn't want to be doing that.
I think a very, very difficult task
to manage both of those in tandem really.
But I feel like they're kind of getting forced
into the decision themselves.
Yeah.
Okay, moving on to Eap Denver this week,
which is mad.
It was a year since I was last there.
It's a very unproductive week, really.
It's walked around with Brody and 563
and walked in and around bit ends of side events.
It feels like, I saw this tweet from Andy, actually.
Roll up Andy.
And he said,
East Denver so far, no airport sponsorships.
Everyone thinks that's
a terrible idea hyper liquid event had a very solid group of familiar faces and builders plus
good new ones most people are very aware of the ongoing structural changes in the space others
just feel it's cyclical chilly and windy folks continue to be excited about tokenization equity
commodity perps convergence of legacy finance and defy not sure what it is but feels like this
industry is growing up maybe we're just getting older wear less noise feel somber but rooms aren't empty so it's not deep
there yet there's a real community here of people who will just not leave no matter what this is a
good sign that is essentially everything i think in my head about where the industry's at in general
in a tweet that i work on an assumption and i have this theory that anyone who's been here for
long enough right in crypto exists within like this uh it's like a hive mind i think right and
like this is like real crypto people like real crypto natives who like genuinely are logging on
to ct every day it's a collective feeling that we all have where you just know where the sentiments are across the
board and you can just get a total feel and vibe for like where people are generally at mentally
it's like and that's where like edge would always historically come from wouldn't it like when you
were betting against retail especially because you would know that when yeah it was you would
get this sick feeling because you know everybody else was feeling it as
well and it feels and we've already said many many times that this feels very very bare
i think it's felt very bottomed for a while but it feels different bottom and it feels
and does that make sense it feels like different in that it's perhaps going through an element of change that is painful. It's growing pains, painful change, but it feels like overall net positive change for where the industry is heading from an adoption and a technical point of view. Would you agree?
like it's
it's growing pains
it's getting dragged
into maturity
kicking and screaming
I think
but I still
there's so much
like talk and overhang
from
yeah
early
like 2020
2022
rounds of investing
that have still
got a long time
to play out
to be honest
like even the rounds
recently that
were structured
similarly to
of years gone by
that's all still got to play out in the wash
I think people will definitely
it's time
it's the only way
you need better structured
token launches or a lack
a complete lack of token launches
to allow that just to play out
because you can't have new capital coming in
getting set on fire with regard to stupidly structured token launches to allow that just to play out um because you can't have new capital coming in getting set on fire with regard to the stupidly structured token launches so that's it's unfortunately
it is just a time horizon mismatch thing and we're just gonna have to go for it but the other side
will be way better until we fucking forget about the pains of it and just do it all again.
Yeah.
I do, I think, you know,
we are seeing, again, an evolution of what was once crypto Twitter
and like it moving on to something new, by the way.
Like I think the times are long gone
of like new sticky participants coming
and finding this weird corner of the internet
and being pilled enough to stay because i just don't think there's enough interesting things
here happening for people to stay for in terms of the initial people that were attracted to this
space from a genuine like tech curiosity point of view and then what that could maybe lead to
from a financial aspect because because as I say,
like theory would meet price action,
fundamentals would equal up and to the right.
That is long gone as a result of everything we've seen
play out with meme coins over the past 18 months.
So I do think that like CT as a culture
is perhaps dying,
but maybe dying is the wrong word
and maybe is like evolving and will eventually
amalgamate into something bigger and different kind of simpler sort of what we've been talking
about earlier with the tbtn thing like this wider scope and it just like falls into the background
you know like and i think it all just becomes the same thing and um and as the last bit in that tweet says it's i mean it's
a good sign that the i say it's a good sign i don't know what it says about the people that
are still here that people just refuse to go away and do anything else
yeah maybe they've got no options that's that maybe why
that wouldn't surprise me yeah i mean if you're 28 year old
and you've done nothing but trade meme coins up to now yeah maybe you got some good breath
not looking good breath
on the positive note right i think bear markets are better. They're funnier.
The funnier, the more productive.
You meet better people that you end up being friends with
for the longer term.
And interestingly enough,
if you bring up my screen here, Josh,
as Hasib has posted,
Dragonfly have just closed $650 million fund.
Nice.
And I'm going to read some of this.
It's a big milestone, and yet it's a weird time to celebrate.
Spirits are low, fear is extreme, and the gloom of a bear market is setting.
But here's the thing.
We raised almost every single Dragonfly fund into bear markets.
Fund we raised through the 2018 ICO winter,
when almost nobody
believed in this space anymore fund three um we raised right before luna uh collapsed those
were brutal times to deploy capital but they turned out to be our best vintages last week i
caught a lot of heat for arguing that non-financial crypto has failed i meant that but the flip side
of the argument is financial crypto is exploding stable coins are eating the world defy has grown so big it's rivaling c5 financial institutions around the world are
racing to build out their crypto strategies and prediction markets are becoming the most trusted
source of truth on the internet fund four is our biggest yet did well with that roman numeral
and the crypto revolution is still early and it's exponential if you look at our recent bets
polymarket athena
rain mesh the growth speaks for itself not perhaps in price action though uh agentic payments on
chain privacy the tokenization of everything crypto service area is about to explode and we
want to be backing the founders at the center of it now i'm kind of done with that um but interesting
isn't it you know um and i realized that i foolishly this is the problem
with reading off screen which is weirdly more difficult than you ever think it's going to be
um i read it as fund i fund one um yeah fund iv it sounds delusional to say it but it is true
like if you've done enough cycles here the playbook repeats and it yes it
changes every time ever so slightly like new characters emerge other ones fall to the background
and disappear but the same thing will happen like two or three weeks ago now everyone was like
celebrating the absolute death of it like mainstream media this is fucked this is done it's the final
winter for a lot of messages like what's happening wait how's your business gonna go yeah that's what you get um i remember god i remember the ftx crash like i
remember going to the pub with like someone i used to work with and he was like are you okay
like i'm fine and and it feels like if you've got the nuts and the guts and the spirit
to stick around and continue doing what you're doing through this
period and these periods in general it always pays off it it always pays off and it's painful
and it's shit and it's delayed gratification but it always pays off and yes this time it's going
to look a little bit differently it definitely is for a lot of reasons that we've said many many
times on this stream and others tokens are changing it
has to change it's been fucked for a long time but if you are here contributing doing something
actually meaningful it will pay off i promise even if you're not building something even if it's just
like hanging out and meeting the right people and involving yourselves in the right circles i
absolutely guarantee you that you'll come out of it on the positive side because we have enough
evidence and experience to know that that is factually true and has never not been yeah i mean
it's it's it's a perfect time to if you can get that money over the over the line and close the
fund and then actually start deploying it it's the actual perfect time to go ahead and do that because a lot of the 2022 onward funds
just haven't returned capital to their LPs.
So definitely not going to be getting interest
from external capital.
But if you can actually manage to get the fund closing
over the line, drastically reduced competition
for those rounds and to lead those rounds.
Not that Dragonfly would ever really have a problem with that,
but the upper echelons of Crypto VC and Crypto adjacent VC
when they are going kind of toe-to-toe with the paradigms
and founders funds and people like that of the world.
Maybe a few of those deals that you might struggle to lead
you can actually get off the line now.
I think they'll be drastically pushing teams
to think long and very, very, very hard
about what a token does look like
or what the equity structure does look like
if you even need to go get a token
because it's becoming more and more apparent now,
again, put this in the 26th thesis,
that acquisitions are now a viable way
for early investors to actually exit.
So that's another
vehicle of actually getting returns on your capital.
So do you actually need to fuck around launching a token?
People will be looking at companies
that are built to sell and investing
in those very, very early and supporting them to actually
get acquired.
I think it's smart.
Fucking kudos to getting $650 million
closing that round.
It's a hard market, but they're one of the best. I think it's smart like fucking kudos to getting 650 million closing that round because that's
it's a hard market
but like
they're one of the best
like if not
top one
three
in my book
yeah
and it's
it's really good
they're doubling down
if it's going to work
it's going to work
very very well for them
yeah
I'm just laughing at Josh's comment
Alex with the brave heart speech
I don't know where that came from
I wasn't feeling grand totalers last week we were optomaxing and it does feel
a lot better to just be like stupidly optimistic about everything all the time um how could you
not be i mean none of us have got anywhere else to go now anyway you know if you're if you're
sitting on this live right or you're in you're on the train on your way to work and you're listening on Spotify
and we recorded this the other day,
just know you're here forever as well.
So you need to keep believing
because it's too late now.
Yeah.
Your resume is fucked.
There's no going back.
If you're going to jump and panic, panic early.
Yeah.
We've already been down that road
of the PR rebrand to web 3 that everyone
knows that digital assets now
frontier tech so if anyone's got anything else to say because last week we were trying to close
the stream off and then all of a sudden we just started getting battered with comments
so this is your last chance before we close this out.
So while I'm inviting people on for that,
what would your preferred method of investment be going forward?
Take the dragonfly thing here, right?
Bear market, builders, everything we're talking about.
What's the best way to see your return on investment
from a crypto point of view now in the next uh 18 months and onward to two years um
it's very difficult because people are gonna have to realize that
once you look at everything through a lens of would you buy the equity of this token and not the token in and of itself
then a lot of the stuff just doesn't seem investable whatsoever you've got to look at
stuff that is going to be revenue driving cash flow and businesses that may be built to scale
or may be built to sell um does that mean that the average person is going to be able to gain exposure to that?
Probably not.
From a founder and investor perspective,
I couldn't really think of anything worse than having like tens of thousands of people
pretending they're on my cap table and pretending they know what's best for my business.
So you also have to align good investors with good teams.
I think that's what Legion and Echo and people like that are doing quite well.
So I don't really know.
I don't really know what the opportunity is.
I'd be very wary about people just launching tokens for the sake of it.
If someone is going to launch a token,
you want to have a clear, defined way that they are actually going to be
pushing towards getting some form of revenue
driven back to that token i think that's just going to be the way that everything is going
forward i feel like tokens that are just floating in the ether that are just like food coupons that
have some resemblance to pseudo equity that have no ties to the actual company in itself i think
that's i think it's done i think that's over so there's going to be fewer opportunities but the ones that do actually
come to the service i think they're going to be higher quality um they're going to be higher
concentrated and when there is fewer opportunities and they are higher quality i feel like those can
self-sustain so we'll just have to see how it plays out because like launching a token
can literally be the death of a company,
which people don't realize.
It can be the most expensive mistake
any company actually makes.
I mean, when you sort of say the quiet part out loud, right?
Like as you're saying that,
why would you want to buy equity
or have equity or shares in a company
with zero revenue or product market
fit unless it's growth and you can kind of see a path towards that but from as an obvious this
you know discarding but for the most part if you're talking about things that have been out
and open for a long time so it's a changing landscape
comment from Chadwick
our resumes are fucked anyway
as an absolute bar
that's the truth though isn't it
at least you got clawed now
make yourself look better
do a better job of that
than you probably expect
farming farming farming
farming dream cash
with their season one
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Good for you,
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Dreamcash,
pretty cool product.
IP3 markets,
mobile first.
Yeah,
interesting.
Seda,
I believe.
Seda powered.
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Seda line.
Stream there.
Yeah,
one of the sponsors
say the line
are we done
yeah
57 minutes
that's got to be
enough
pick my car up
again
yeah
good luck with it
yeah
go and subscribe
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sideline tomorrow
Grant and Sunil
talking about
I'm back on in an hour's time
as well with Travis
back on in an hour
with Travis
we're probably going to have
some
fun fruity stuff
coming on the AI front
as well
with a man that you may
all be very familiar with
who once used to cover
a forgotten ecosystem
close it there
yeah cheers Grant thanks a forgotten ecosystem close it there yeah
cheers Grant
thanks
