The Rounds: Market Talk, Airdrops, Memecoin Madness

Recorded: Jan. 23, 2024 Duration: 1:37:12

Player

Snippets

Yeah, what's up, baby boy, telling them bro, how you doing?
Hey man, it's a great day for a day.
How you doing?
I'm great man.
Just chilling.
It's a very busy day.
So just ready to get on, talk about some meme coins, airdrops, alpha, market talk, news.
Let's do it, man.
Super excited.
All the good things.
All the good things.
How's the nephew doing?
Bro, he's good.
He's good.
He's good.
He's not going to make a guest appearance today because it's his bedtime.
But yeah, he's great.
I've been a bit of a naughty boy today, but if they're not naughty, then there's something
wrong with them.
Oh, of course.
If you're not doing something, not getting into something, something's definitely going
But yeah, as the chief DJ of the rounds, Nips, do you want to go ahead and get started?
It doesn't have to be 45 seconds, just keep on for however long we need until everyone
comes in.
But yeah, just do your thing.
Push over.
Give some time.
People will hop in and engage the situation.
Cool, man.
It's awesome.
Thank you, man.
You're welcome.
Thanks for coming.
We'll see you next time.
Bye, guys.
We've got a large number of people in here now, but yeah, I think we're going to wait for
Honey to come in.
But before we do that, just want to introduce our guest today.
So we've got, first of all, we've got Tensor Sharks who are a great underrated NFC collection
on Solana.
And if you haven't heard of them, they're like one of the big collection in terms of
airdrops.
You know, we love airdrops around here.
They basically farm airdrops for you.
I don't want to give too much away right now because we're going to have a conversation
with them.
It's going to be good.
And secondly, we've got the man himself, T-nut.
He's like, if you guys aren't familiar with T-nut, he's like one of the best accounts
He's crazy for alpha.
Like I've been following this guy for a while now and I know people who've been
following him and just by following him, they're outperforming like a ton of people in the
So T-nut, welcome.
Hope you're doing good, man.
Hey, man.
Yeah, I'm good.
Thank you for having me on.
I'm kind of excited to talk about, well, the various topics we have today.
So yeah, looking forward to it.
And Tensor Sharks, great to have you.
You hope you're good.
Yo, can you guys hear Tensor Sharks?
Yo, what's up?
Yo, how's it going?
Pretty late in my country, but I'm fresh and ready to speak.
Love to hear it.
And we got Honey in as well, our other co-host.
Honey, what's going on?
Hi, everyone.
I can't say sorry in advance for my voice tonight, but at least I can talk.
It's been a while.
At least I can talk.
It's been a week without having my voice.
I'm going to sound like this.
But yeah, other than that, I'm just excited to get back on track and everything.
I got to admit, I haven't been farming anything these days.
I haven't been making any moves.
So hope everyone's been doing better than this.
I love to hear it.
Yeah, I mean, hopefully my voice is better now too, and I just don't randomly start
coughing in the middle of the spaces this time.
But yeah, let's get into it.
So before we sort of get into the main topics of conversation, I don't know if
you guys have seen, but Magic Eden have just done a big announcement right now.
They've introduced, I pinned it in the top of the spaces, but they just
introduced Magic Eden rewards.
You know, there was a lot of speculation about what would be going on, like the
Airdrop and their token.
And obviously we found out that they're going to be open sourcing with
non-fungible DAO who are releasing an NFT token, which is pretty much a
way of them just giving off their RP to non-fungible DAO and releasing
a token through them instead of, you know, getting the heat for it and
landing themselves in hot water since they're US based.
So I think that was pretty bullish.
And now I've seen the rewards where they've talked about diamonds a little bit.
They want to reward OGs and people using the marketplace ever since 2021.
So the majority of you, if you guys have ever bought NFTs on Solana since
like 2021 or 2022, odds are you will probably be a recipient of this.
And they're going to do like a double diamonds thing.
If you have 100% loyalty, I'm pretty sure you can still get time to do that.
So if you don't have 100% loyalty, just separate one of your wallets
from if you are tensor farming or whatever, and just make it to 100%
loyalty real quick and just get double the diamonds there.
And another bit of Alpha, they said they want to make these rewards.
The rewards program crossed chain.
And we all know how big Magic Eden's partnerships and activity is now
going forward into Bitcoin with Ordinals and Ethereum.
They, you know, they launched this pretty cool trailer yesterday
with the board landing and, you know, their marketplace partnership with Yuga.
So very excited for that.
And I think really think now the future is looking a lot brighter for Magic Eden.
We obviously saw a lot of criticism and sort of a big falloff for a little while,
but they really captured the market for Ordinals now.
They still don't have the top market on Solana yet.
That's still heavily in tensor's favor.
But I don't think it matters as much because, you know,
the pie is a lot bigger with stuff like Ordinals.
And, you know, as long as they have this cross chain reputation and presence,
then I think they'll be fine.
But, you know, we have speakers up here.
You know, you guys off the coast, but I'm just curious what you guys all think
of Magic Eden's announcements there and, you know,
what this means for marketplaces and everything.
Man, so they've come a long way, especially from two years ago, right?
I mean, you had Digital Eyes, you had Magic Eden coming out after them.
You had Soul City.
Yep, Digital Art.
So like all these old marketplaces, and they came in and nobody really knew
where they were, right?
And then they started building, really got there, the UI, the UX, the way it needed to be.
And then they've had their different seasons as far as the fuzz that they've encountered.
But every time they just kept at it, kept on building.
And now you have them as a literal hub for cross chain NFTs, right?
So the way I look at it is, okay, they might not have the market share of Solana,
but for me, what they're doing right now is so much bigger because they have all these other coins,
where it's Bitcoin, Avax, probably going to implement suing here soon.
So it's like, would you rather have a bus ticket to one way,
or would you rather be able to go to Grand Central Station and have buses going everywhere?
So for them, I love what they're doing.
I really think that the team as a whole, especially as Charfou, continues to branch out,
and he's just, he's being himself, right?
And so you really want to have people that you can identify and connect with,
because like once you create that connection, people are going to come because of that.
So just as they continue to build, as they continue to add different chains,
I think they're just going to continue to grow.
And the diamonds are definitely the alpha, right?
Like, it would not be a bad idea to every day to go on there and make sure you're claiming those.
And like I said, have a wallet that you strictly use just from Magic Eden.
That way, you can multiply and compound those daily and weekly.
Yeah, good alpha there on the diamonds.
Obviously, it's not explicitly clear what you'll get with the diamonds,
but they're really making a big deal out of it.
So I'm sure it's going to be something pretty incredible.
And they even mentioned the tweet.
They talked about Magic Tickets, which we saw like a huge surge in volume for Magic Tickets
and a lot of speculation based on, you know, okay, so Magic Eden,
Magic Tickets are going to get the airdrop or whatever it's going to be.
And they haven't, again, they haven't explicitly mentioned what the reward is going to be.
But they said that we haven't forgotten about Magic Tickets owners.
More details coming soon.
But still, the best way to get reward is by using Magic Eden daily and not by buying Magic Tickets.
So I think all in all, Magic Tickets holders, I don't know what you guys think.
Do you think they'd be quite disappointed?
Or do you think they're, you know, what's the outlook here for Magic Ticket holders?
I feel like they will be rewarded just like any project that has some NFTs that exist for a really long time.
They will get a really good piece of cake.
Yeah, I can imagine that too, to be honest.
I think they just don't want to like explicitly mention all the details and hype it up really big
because obviously there's still a big like corporation and the US based.
I don't think they can really like, you know, reveal anything too crazy or hype things up
because we've seen with SEC documents about like how they've taken screenshots of, you know,
blockchain founders and literally like monitoring all their tweets.
If they've ever said anything bullish about making holders money or rewarding them,
they're just straight up on that.
And, you know, Magic Kingdom have gone about this in a very clever way, I think.
But, Tina, I want to ask, have you ever bought Solana NFTs or any NFTs?
Because I know you're a big DeFi guy, but have you ever been into NFTs?
And if you have, have you used Magic Eden?
Yeah, so, I mean, I've tried to be into NFTs a few times, but I feel like NFTs aren't really into me.
My performance on them is like definitely a lot more mixed than it has been like trading wise kind of other assets.
So I've been like most of the Solana stuff I've done would be through Tensor
probably over like the last nine months or so.
So ever since they introduced, well, ever since I kind of heard about them,
then obviously they introduced like the rumors of that like first season and things like that
was around the time that I was kind of getting into, I guess, like refreshing myself of the Solana ecosystem kind of post FTX.
I feel like I wasn't really like a Solana native in the last bull run.
And I think it probably took like a little while for a few of us to kind of check it out post FTX.
So, yeah, Tensor was one of the first things I found.
And yes, to be honest there, it's been because I kind of suck at trading them.
It's been more about like doing the market making stuff and then just trying to play around with stuff I liked the look of
and then just sell them higher if I can and cope if I can't and just let them sit in my wallets.
But yeah, obviously I saw this magic healing news.
I've been kind of super busy, so I've kind of not been able to dig into it yet.
But I generally like the idea around like the I guess like the more speculative airdrops.
I think there's as someone who does a lot of airdrop farming as well.
There's obviously been a ton of stuff on the timeline recently kind of criticizing the different approaches
the teams have used around like points farming and things like that.
So, yeah, it's interesting to see how that goes.
I think if I were Magic Eden, my focus would be on rewarding like past and early users.
So that's like my one big thing is like whether you think it's right or wrong, people in crypto,
like if you take chances and play speculative games,
there's like this idea that you feel like you deserve to be rewarded.
And then when things become more public and more known, it's kind of like, oh, well, everyone can do it
and everyone can farm it. So I don't know if it's like this, this strange like,
I don't want to call it entitlement because it's just the way the market is.
But I think like if you're launching this stuff, you need to be really careful of rewarding those long term users in the right way.
So, yeah, it sounds like the little bits I've heard of this, it sounds like, as you guys have said,
and I've used Magic Eden a few times, probably tends to more frequently.
But with the cross-chain stuff you guys mentioned, I might have to check it out a little bit more.
I think I, I'm trying to think what I used it with recently.
I definitely used it like last week, but I don't remember what was.
But yeah, that's probably it really.
I'm probably not like the person to come to for like NFT specific advice.
So yeah, I'll leave it there.
That's a good take though, right? Because I mean, any protocol, any marketplace, you want to reward who is there first.
You want to reward the people that were there supporting you before anybody else was.
Now granted, as you continue to grow, as you continue to build out, you're going to get more volume and more consumers.
And obviously you want to reward them as well with the people that first got you off your feet and gave you your platform.
Those are the ones you should more heavily favor and reward.
And so with what they're saying, at least, obviously we'll see how it plays out. That's what they seem to be doing.
Yeah, I feel like the people who use your platforms early are obviously speculating an upside.
But it means at the very least they were originally paying attention to what you were doing.
They likely cross over with being interested in that sector to begin with, right?
Like someone like myself, who is like mainly a trader, like I've kind of like more like more of like coins and things like that.
I'm not going to be as clued into the NFT game. So I probably am not going to be the earliest user on these platforms.
And when I hear about it, my first thought is going to be, oh, I'm going there to farm your airdrop.
Whereas other people might actually be your early users.
People have more interest in becoming loyal users in the long term.
So there's always that phrase about the best marketing you can do is make your early user base rich.
And I think it's a very strong thing in crypto. So yeah, I would.
I don't know. I'm saying this as like advice, considering I won't get a big airdrop for Magic Eden if they do it this way.
But if it was up to me, that's how I would design things.
But you know, every perspective is valuable, right?
I mean, even though you may not have percent experience with Magic Eden from the very beginning, I think that your perspective is equally as important, you know,
because if we just can surround ourselves with an echo chamber, we're not hearing anything different.
So from you coming from the trading side, from the DeFi side, your opinion is just as important, if not more important,
because you're a consumer that they want that they're not reaching.
And so they want to know how to be able to reach you.
So I ask you this, like what, in your opinion, on the DeFi side, what differentiates a good marketplace from a great marketplace?
Sorry, just to be clear, in terms of like an NFC marketplace, what would I like to see or any?
I mean, so like as Magic Eden continues to grow out and just be this grand central station hub,
obviously they're going to try and implement, I believe, certain DeFi aspects as well.
So just with protocols and deeper projects that you've interacted with, like what makes one good and great, comparatively?
So the obvious issue that we're having with like DEXs and PERP DEXs especially, if we kind of ignore the centralized exchanges for a bit,
like the biggest issue they've had, and I imagine you'll see similar things with NFTs.
I think it's been limited for now just because there's not as many of them, but we obviously saw it with like blur early on.
And I imagine Tensor and Magic Eden will now have this a little bit, is basically there's a lot of incentive farming
and there's only so many incentives you can give out.
And then when you eventually kind of drop your token, those incentives, they don't dry up,
but obviously people start then dumping the token and you have a lot of what I would call like rent seeking capital.
And we've seen that with a ton of like these PERP DEXs that have like copied GMX and things like that,
where they get a ton of volume and then they die off pretty quick.
And the kind of, I guess like the thing I would say around like the big thing for me would be like initially as a user is like really simplified UI.
So for example, like it sounds like really small, but like the PERP DEXs that started doing like one click, no confirmation trading.
So like Hyperliquid has that, so you deposit gas and kind of your token at the same time when you set up an account.
Same with like HMX did that as well.
I think it's more common now, but when that first happened, I got really bullish on those platforms
because as a trader, like not having to wait for like MetaMask or Rabi to like confirm closing a 100x leverage trade is quite a nice thing to have.
And I think like that was the initial thing for me is like simplified UI that allows like it's really easy to understand and then really easy to use.
And if you're a trader, NFTs obviously have a similar thing when it comes to like people trying to very quickly sweep floors and things like that.
Like speed of execution in terms of UI is really important.
And again, it's the same for traders.
And obviously like generally on-chain things have been slower, I would say, and need more steps than centralized solutions.
So kind of minimizing those clicks is really important.
I would then say on the NFT specific side, something that I think like Blur is a really good platform.
But as someone who's not like an NFT native who doesn't like or doesn't need all of the information that they provide, it can be a bit daunting to use.
And I think you can find similar again with PerpDex is where they can give too much information and like having like a simplified and like a pro version is a really, really good approach to me.
And then the final thing that I think people should be focusing on would be similar to the speed in terms of UI execution would be the number of clicks it takes to go from your bank or at the very least from your wallet to the marketplace itself.
So again, centralized exchanges are very easy.
They're not exactly the same as Web2, but they're quite similar with the app and then you can get in.
And it's pretty simple to like set up for someone who's new to crypto, at least like comparatively to the rest of crypto.
So for me, like seeing whether it's DEX is building in like on-chain bank transfers and things like that are getting linked to like P2P markets and stuff like that.
NFT markets can do the same. I think just, yeah, really simplifying that process would be something I'd be focused on.
So like to sum it up, I think like you're going to have the most chance of onboarding new people and retaining them by focusing on like really easy to use simplified UI and UX.
But having the more kind of tailored solutions for people who are kind of your more experienced users.
And then really simplifying the process to onboard people.
And I'd be really clear to say both from like banks and Web2, but also from bridging from other chains.
So again, having built in bridges and really simplifying that process.
So essentially, the more shit you can abstract away from the process for users, the better, in my opinion.
Beyond that, when it comes to like marketplaces, you have the underlying tech in terms of like for like purposes, for example, like if your liquidation engine doesn't work, then yeah, you're not going to retain any users.
But kind of having those things work is really important.
And yeah, I kind of leave it there because the other topic you get into is like the marketing and building the community and things like that.
But I guess in like the specific like product side, that's where I'd be focused.
Well said, right, because in this space, it literally moves at the speed of light and we only have so much time during the day.
And there's always something new, something shiny that we're trying to get our hands on trying to touch.
So any marketplace, any protocol that can save us time on the back end, that's where I'm going to go because I have so many other things that I'm trying to do and trying to implement.
And so I mean, time is money and then data is power.
So I agree with you even more so on having two different sides on a live side and a pro side for the people that are fully engrossed in that trading, whether it's NFTs or the DeFi side.
If you have the data that's right there in front of them that they can utilize, man, I don't have to go anywhere else.
I don't have to pull from two or three aggregators. I can just go to this one hub.
So the marketplaces and protocols that really give us more time and really give us more data right there.
Like you said, they abstract more that way.
We can just get it from that one main hub.
That's who's going to drive the volume.
And I'd be keen to hear anybody else that wants to hop up and speak.
What are your opinions on the marketplaces?
What do you like about them and what do you dislike in addition to what would you like to see being implemented?
Notice how Tensor builds their reputation and user base on bear market.
I guess that's why because they utilize professionals and NFT traders who stayed on the bear market.
And the magic then was getting hype on the Solana bull run where the majority of people were new to the space and they don't need some fancy charts, some bid orders and stuff.
They just need to flip NFTs.
Tensor utilized the need of people to trade NFTs like as if it is some traditional market like exchange or how do you call the stocks.
And I guess that's why they took the initiative.
For now, Tensor is much better than Magicadend in terms of volume and I guess user base for now.
But Magicadend is taking a good step in terms of utilizing other blockchains and trying to onboard Ordinals.
For instance, they took a lot of volume to them from Ordinals.
Yeah, and them adding Ordinal capabilities, I think, was probably the biggest post-delta that they could have done, especially beginning market share.
Because as Bitcoin continues to grow and as Ordinals continues to grow, man, if these are they're going to recruit from that, they're setting themselves up very, very pretty with it.
So I think that that was the first big step that is going to position themselves to be the main hub moving forward.
Okay, moving on from Magicadend because I feel like we've been on this topic for a little bit of time.
Peanut, you mentioned that it's more bullish when a sort of DEX or just a company within the space removes any sort of friction, right?
Are you familiar with Backpack by any chance?
I know of it. I think I've used it once or twice, but it's not like a day-to-day use for me.
If you're about to show me on it, please do because I'd like to use other new stuff.
It's one of those I've heard of and it's on my list, but I'm so busy that I'm just like, I have not used that enough.
So yeah, please educate me.
Okay, cool. Not a shill, but it's more of like an educational thing because I personally like hearing Armani and Tristan speak.
So I'm sure you're aware that it's like the exchange slash wallet of sort of Madlads, I guess you could say.
Madlads is the collection for that exchange, right?
So recently they announced their exchange and at Breakpoint, Armani did like this big speech and keynote where he went through all the steps that it takes from someone being onboarded onto Solana or into crypto and just the sheer number of steps it takes for them to actually complete a task.
Well, Backpack Exchange is sort of aiming towards making it like a one-stop shop for all things crypto.
So initially it started out as just a wallet, just a competitor, the Phantom with XNFTs, NFTs that you can execute and sort of daps you can use within a wallet.
But now it's sort of gone into an exchange, which is quite regulated and heavily backed.
I'm not sure if you know, it was the former Council for FTX or something, and it's very well backed.
And basically what they're doing now is they're sort of making it into one specific place where you can do everything.
So you can put your money into the exchange directly from there.
You can use the wallet without having to go anywhere else.
Recently they announced Tensor integration.
So without having to go anywhere else, you can buy NFTs directly from Backpack, which is pretty crazy.
And they have so many other things lined up where they're trying to remove any possible steps that need to be taken where the user doesn't know where they need to go.
They're just trying to make it so that you can do everything within there.
No, it sounds good. I definitely have to dig into that when I have time.
I think the example I use for what you're saying there, which I throw at anyone, is if anyone questions the power of removing even the tiniest step of friction from a user,
go set up Telegram groups and add topics to them and find out how quickly people do not check that Telegram group anymore.
I don't know what it is, but literally I've had Telegram groups where we add topics in.
You think it will help hugely because it's just like Discord.
Jesus Christ, nobody checks it anymore because there's one more click. It's mental.
I don't know what it is, but the drop-off in people interacting is huge.
And that's just one random example. It's a bit silly, but I think it shows the power of just really, really simplifying things as much as possible in terms of user experience.
That's actually so true, though, because Saga dial for the Solano Saga phones, they have like a ton of channels and topics and stuff.
And simply because of that, I just never check it because, as you mentioned, it's the tiniest bit more friction where you just see so much text and so many channels and you're like, nah, I can't really be bothered.
Like, I'll just check the Twitter group chat every now and then, or I'll just join the Discord.
So I think you're right in that sense, the friction. But yeah, I think moving on, we want to sort of go into the airdrops.
Obviously, we're going to talk about coins and stuff a lot, and especially then talk about USDC later on in the space is very excited to get into that.
And I know how much I know how much you've put into that, you know, your your time, your effort, your money.
I know you've sort of made it into this big thing, like it was about 100K when you sort of took it over, right?
And now it's like about five million, if I'm correct. I've been holding mine since 400K, so I haven't really been looking that much.
But yeah, so I'm not really fully aware. But yeah, we're going to talk about that later on in the spaces.
So excited about that. But for now, I think obviously we've sort of built this community in the spaces around airdrops.
So myself, Nips and Honey, obviously we talk about airdrops a lot, like, especially together, and we farm them a lot.
So I guess what we're going to do this time is we're just going to go through some some airdrops that are going about some news within airdrops.
Just interesting ones to farm now. So I'll get us started.
So Drift announced. Well, they haven't made their announcement yet, but they said they'd make it today.
It's increasingly likely that Drift are going to announce their points program, unfortunately, which is very annoying.
I know people are tired of protocols farming users now, and obviously Drift has pretty much been certain that Drift have been doing airdrops for a long time now.
So I've been hearing like, I'm personally annoyed myself that they're going to announce a points program, because the truth is the OG and earlier users probably aren't going to get rewarded as much, which I'm one of them.
I've been using Drift for a long time. And ultimately, it's just going to be farming volume, even though the founder has said that he doesn't want to do that.
But it looks increasingly likely that that's what they're going to do.
I'm not certain yet, because they haven't made the announcement. So I won't judge too soon.
But that's that's what it's looking like for Drift.
And then obviously, I've been a big advocate for Zeta Market. It's like perps on Solana.
And you can do it for things like Sey, Solana, just anything from Sey, Solana, BTC, Pia, Ethereum, all these different sort of coins in the pipe as well.
I know pipe is a big topic. We'll get into that in a couple of minutes.
So you can sort of like do perps on any of these. And every couple of weeks, they have a bonus week where they give you two extra points on perps for a specific coin.
For example, like last week, I believe it was two points on Bitcoin perps, basically.
And they also have a Zeta Pass, which is about 0.3 or 0.4 Sol right now, which gets you 2x points.
So 2x points for seven days, I believe, if you burn it.
And the alpha on that is if you're going to do perps on Zeta Market, get a Zeta Pass and burn it during a 2x week and do perps on that.
That means that 2x bonus on that specific coin is going to become a 4x with the pass.
And Zeta is like back pretty heavily. Like we all know that jump, like anything jump touches, turns to gold.
We've seen it with pipe. We've seen it with Jito. I'm pretty sure Injective, the blockchain is even backed by pipe.
It's not pipe, sorry, jump. So Zeta is backed by pipe. They raised about eight to nine mil.
I've heard some whispers that they actually raised more than drift and it's super easy to farm.
People are fading it because I've heard a lot of people say that they don't like the platform itself.
I personally haven't had any issues using it. I actually find it quite simple and easy to use.
But because of that, it's quite under farmed. I did 18 trades in season one amounting to 18,000 or a bit less.
But that's obviously with 10x leverage, right? And that put me into the top 10% of farmers for season one.
So I personally think, and 10x leverage, that was about $120 worth I put in with 10x leverage trades.
They did about 18 times. So if you aren't farming Zeta markets, I would highly advise it.
I mean, I'm 2400 rank, I think, and I've only done like three trades so far in season two.
So if you are a bit uncertain and you want to give it a try, I'd recommend just placing a perp trade.
If you know obviously what's going to go on, don't just try not to gamble, you know,
use TA or whatever it is and just try and figure something out or just place a long word short,
just to sort of experiment with it and see how you like the platform.
But I personally feel like their airdrop is going to be a big sleeper. I mentioned it on here multiple times before.
So that's a big one for me. But one sort of sector of airdrops I'm really looking at
is airdrops which are backed by Binance Labs because most likely they're going to be launched on Binance Launchpad.
And we're seeing with the sort of regulation and CZ having to step down,
we're seeing the fact that it's most likely regulators are going to try and clamp down heavily on Binance in the next couple of years.
So I've been hearing whispers from people that Binance are going for like a last hurrah for their coins.
They want to get as many drops on the Binance Launchpad as possible and pump as much as possible.
So it really can't hurt to find Binance Launchpad projects or projects backed by Binance Labs because a lot of them are free anyway.
I've mentioned Web3go quite a lot. It's super easy to do. You just log in once a day, do the quizzes.
You don't have to do any transactions. You have to mint the passport for 15 cents worth of BNB.
You do the quizzes. You get your daily check-in, get your referral codes, whatever it is, and just do that every day and your points will rack up.
And then Mind Network, I don't know if you guys have heard about.
I'm not sure if that's still going, but if it is, I would highly recommend doing it.
So basically the description for Mind Network is that it's a zero trust layer that offers a security and data privacy solution with fully homomorphic encryption.
Honestly, I'm not going to act all smart. I have no clue what that means, but usually when something sounds complicated, it's a good sign for me.
But it's backed by Binance Labs, Chainlink, and other top backers, and they're in testnet at the moment, so it really costs nothing to do.
And if you have the time, I would fully recommend it. I will give an in-depth guide to you if you DM me about it or whatever.
So yeah, if you're interested in that, then go ahead and try and do that.
But yeah, that's what I'll cover right now. But I wanted to ask you guys up here, you know, we've got tens of sharks up here as well.
The founder is big into farming, and they do a lot of farming for other people.
But I wanted to ask, what are you farming right now specifically? That's not really like commonplace.
We have a team of three people. I am basically the guy who does everything besides money.
Two people farming. One is between poor guy, he farms tensor.
Really sad because he spends about 15 hours a day putting beads and moving them up and down in order to make our holders happier.
But yeah, about our founder, he's a DeFi geek.
Our main goal for now is, I guess, Kamino. We switched from margin five to Kamino because they announced the exact point system of Kamino.
By the way, it was announced a long time ago that they were launching points, but we were farming it still when they haven't announced the criteria.
Now we farm Kamino using Delta or no. We farm the margin five using looping. I'll tell you what it is.
Looping is when you supply Solana, borrow B-Sole, for instance, then you swap B-Sole to Solana back and you repeat the cycle.
That's basically the leverage. You can increase your position from $100, for instance, to about $200, $300, just increase the amount of points you get.
And if you do this on LSTs, Solana stablecoins. In other words, you will receive basically points for zero risk.
Just don't overdo it because, as you know, stablecoins in crypto are not really stable. Use DTnpeg.
Recently, we have seen M-Sole, M-Sole, but our positions were safe.
Drift, yeah. We were farming protocols that announced points system long before they did it.
Drift, really cool project. I personally really liked it. I, myself, on my own wallet, farmed DLP, made a huge amount of money here.
It won't give about 4,000%. It's like you deposit $100 and then you have $42,000, just some crazy amount of money.
About it, what we do? Delta neutral farming strategies, you said gold. It's when you open long and short on the same token, on the same size.
You don't lose any money. You don't risk any money. You just farm future points.
And you can do this on several websites, for instance, Zeta Market and Drift at the same time.
Open long on Zeta and short on Drift. Thus, you farm two protocols at the same time with zero risk.
And that's how you can use some advanced DeFi strategies.
And by the way, you can do a looping strategy with multiple websites as well.
We do this on Tamino and Marginify cross looping. It's basically looping, but on two websites at the same time.
Also, yeah, as I said, tensor, our main. We, last time, it's our third, second time, but it's called season three. Just don't ask.
Last time, we only farm tensor, but now we also farm not only tensor, but other protocols.
But still, our main focus is tensor. And we have a special dedicated guy, a cyborg, but not a bot, as he named himself.
Because he farms as if he's a program, but he's the person he drinks energy drinks.
He doesn't sleep, and we really like him because of his work.
Yeah, I guess.
Sounds great. Yeah, I don't.
Sorry, are you still speaking?
No, but I can speak for a long time.
Okay, so you unmute your mic. What's up?
Yeah, I was just going to, if people were down, I was going to hop in with a couple of the AirDrop stuff that I do.
I've been doing, because I mean.
Yeah, because I feel like AirDrop farming is definitely something I do a lot of as well.
In terms of Solana, I kind of was, again, like back, I wasn't super early, but I'd say I was like, I was very early for people who weren't Solana natives.
So I picked up on Solana getting more traction again, probably like nine months ago or so.
And yeah, my original stuff on Solana was doing all the loops where you can kind of go through the Mayan swap bridge,
which would essentially be connected to wormhole, and then going into Margium Phi using Jito at the time.
And then, yeah, going into Drift, depositing there, using that as collateral to trade, and so on.
Similar to what like TensorShark said, using as many steps as possible in like a loop across a number of protocols.
On the Delta Neutral farming, which is something I also do across Perptexes, there's some interesting opportunities for that.
I haven't really noticed that with like Drift and Zeta, but one example would be if people are aware of like Intent X, which is an intent-based trading Perptex.
I think it's on base only at the moment. But yeah, I've been farming points to there, and they've been having zero fees.
And at the same time, Hyperliquid, which is probably my favorite Perptex to trade on at the moment, basically, for whatever reason, their funding rate's always obscenely positive.
So basically, you can long on like Intent X for zero fees, and for at least the last few months, once the market was bullish,
you could short on Hyperliquid with the same size Delta Neutral farm and collect the funding fee, which at times was like 400% APY.
So you're basically farming points for three on two Perptexes whilst collecting the fees, which is something like collecting fees on trades is something I do occasionally on centralized exchanges.
Not often that I've dabbled in it. So yeah, utilizing it for airdrop farming seems like a good thing to look out for if you are aware of how funding rates work on trading.
And yeah, my broad strategy for it is kind of just, I have, yeah, a decent number of wallets I farm on, and I'm kind of like very cross chains it.
And weirdly, I try to find things like early. And so like, for example, Solana, I'm actually farming a lot less these days, just because the amount of competition and funds that like kind of flowed into it.
I mean, like margin five for like six months, I was one of like one of my main wallets was like, top 100 or something on the leaderboard for about six months.
And then like within a week of Jito launching, I was like, 600 or something I was like, okay, some of the ETH wells have come over to play and yeah, my, my size is not size here.
So yeah, it's kind of like, if you're like, capital is limited, especially, I would say like not only focus on where things have been under farmed, but you kind of focus on like, who's backing them.
So as you mentioned jump earlier as an example for kind of things pumping, but like in terms of, do like the VCs associated or Binance Labs, are they associated with people who tend to airdrop and airdrop well?
Are you like early to it and kind of is your relative share going to be good for the capital you're investing, then kind of the safety of these platforms, because if you start going on to wild change, I've definitely got rubbed once or twice.
And then the final thing for me to look at and consider, and this is like a small thing, but I feel people don't think about it too often.
And I'd say it doesn't always pay off because I think sometimes the protocols don't think about it.
But try and think about the things that are really useful to the protocol, and they want to attract people to.
So for example, if like a PerpDEX relies on having like an insurance liquidation fund, if you're giving funding or liquidity to that, there's a chance that will be very well rewarded by an airdrop.
On the flip side, you just say they want to encourage people to trade and get trade volume so they can incentivize that more heavily.
So just try to think about like what the protocol themselves would want to incentivize, and that can be a good way to like work out what type of activity you want to be doing on these protocols.
And the final thing seems to be, this is something I used to do on Cosmos kind of exclusively, is using many smaller wallets for volume rather than like a couple of big ones.
But it seems like a few different protocols more recently, and now like we've seen in the Celestia, for example, as well, are going down the route of like, like kind of capping the rewards for different sizes.
So like, you're getting outsized rewards for your capital if you split it across a number of wallets.
So my approach to that is to have one or two main wallets which drive volumes, like the margin five one that was in like the top 100.
And then the rest of my wallets are kind of very like light touch.
And that way I kind of feel I cover the basis of like, if they really reward the top like thousand or hundred users, it's like a power user, then hopefully I capture that in my top one or two wallets.
And then on the flip side, if they're going to be massively over rewarding like smaller users.
So for example, the Gito kind of airdrop, like you could get away with like literally using like one soul or less through there and get a huge airdrop, which like a return on investments massive there.
Unfortunately, and ironically, that's one I only did on about five wallets, so I actually didn't get the rewards I would have hoped for that.
But yeah, in general, I feel like that is an approach that I use and I like to use.
And it kind of means that, especially if you're a normal person who doesn't like airdrop farm for a living or all your time, you can kind of focus on those main couple of wallets.
And then there's periods of time where you might focus more on airdrop farming, you can pick up the other wallets again, because I think it'd be really overwhelming if people are just like, oh yeah, farm on, I don't know, a couple of dozen fresh wallets.
And that's really hard to maintain. So if you can have one to two that you use daily, and then the rest are kind of, you maybe get to once every like couple of weeks.
That's often still like a good balance for me.
Well, you know, five wallets that on detail, that's five more than I did, man, I knew they were going to do an airdrop as well.
But I just got lazy. And unfortunately, I know of many other people who've been exact same instance.
And, you know, it was like, what, 20k minimum airdrop, I think it was?
Yeah, I mean, I got, it's probably, I think it was my biggest airdrop so far this year.
And it's probably the one that I like interacted. Well, as you know, pyth is probably the one I interacted with, like, indirectly, the least, like, with the least intention.
But yeah, Gito, in terms of like, the size of the reward to the work was clearly very good.
And clearly everyone agreed because the amount of funding that flew into these like, totalist protocols on Sol was pretty crazy.
And that's the other one is, is Meteora, is that the same? Is that like connected to Gito? I think.
Was it? Is it? There's someone behind it. I forget who it is, but there's like, they're connected to another protocol.
Yeah, so Meteora, the team and founders are the same as Jupiter.
That's what I yeah, that's the one.
Yeah, so I think people who held their previous talk like, M.E.R. I think they were going to be incentivized.
So this one's a bit more complicated. I'm not fully sure on this, but I think someone in the audience might know or Nips or Honey might know or Tenzer might know.
But Meteora, like, I think previously they mentioned the discord that Snapshot was taken for M.E.R. holders to have their tokens converted into Met from Meteora token.
But I think, you know, if you provide liquidity and open up pools, I think you'd still be eligible.
I'm pretty sure staking your USDC and stolen vaults won't be eligible for an airdrop.
So but I might need to be corrected on that. I'm not too sure.
Yeah, it doesn't say that in Camino. I've kind of been the two places that I've been using for like LPs and stuff like that and the vaults.
But yeah, Meteora is one I wasn't sure about. So kind of put some capital in it just in case.
But Camino is the main one, I think, at the moment.
Have you been doing a parcel by any chance?
I tried a little bit of parcel. I've not got like deep into it yet.
If crypto is going to kind of continue this way that has been like the last week or two, then, yeah, getting into like I might have to like start laughing as like a real estate investor instead.
So that might be a good option for me so I can kind of like remodel myself as I know, guys, I've always been into real estate.
Trust me, I never I never bought any of those coins as someone else.
But yeah, it's another one that I kind of I've tried.
There's a very distinct like separation in terms of protocols I've used and whether they got a lot of hype in the last like month or so.
And that's basically a cut off with my like involvement with the USDC.
So that's kind of capped most of my time.
Oh, yeah, you've been super busy with that and you've been crushing it.
I mean, it's clearly reflected in the price action that's happened over the past month or so around there.
But I wanted to ask quickly, just obviously because Honey hasn't spoken too much, but I wanted to ask her, Honey, what have you been farming lately?
I know you mentioned in the past week, you haven't really farmed anything new, but like, is there any like new ones like in the past week, two weeks or so where you've sort of looked into it, but you might have not gotten around to it.
I know you mentioned one to me in the DMs like it was called DOP or DAP or something. It was on was it Binance back, I think.
Yeah, glad that is because you're right. I haven't been farming too much these days, but I have been researching, you know, in between slips and naps.
I have been at least researching to know what to do in the next few days and weeks.
So what I want to farm, I've been looking, obviously, as Tina said, I've been looking into perp taxes.
I surely want to get into doing that.
For example, Satori finance, because I feel like not as many people have been trading on Satori as they've been on Hyperlite Liquid.
Hyperliquid also, I should try to, but I feel like everyone's talking about it.
So we'll see. I don't know how to pronounce this one.
I have evil. I don't know. I also have been looking into that. I should start trading on that as well.
What else? Oh, while we're on a discount right now, I want to get to staking some more, like buy more and staking two different protocols.
And you already know what I'm saying same as last time. Injective, more say, osmo.
This because I see more and more protocols that could be doing an air drop.
So it's good to spread where I'm staking. What else?
I've seen an L1 few days ago called Xeon. Xeon, I don't know, burnt.
They've got an 11 million raise, I think. Yeah. And they are backed by Animoca.
So I surely want to look into that because right now it's super easy tasks, like having two referrals and minting a welcome and an FT.
They will for sure have many more tasks to be done. I think it might be worth it.
What else? Oh, I've seen an AVM on Bitcoin called Bitfinity, I think.
They also have like seven million raised. Polychain is backing them and the tasks are not too hard either.
What else? Oh, I've read a few days ago about something called Navi protocol.
I think I just got a lens sway on it. I need to look more into it, but it's gaining some traction.
So surely we're keeping an eye on. I think they will do an air drop.
And other than that, I don't know, these are mostly what I've been researching and probably some more, but I lost count.
Awesome. Those are some new names. I haven't heard of those, so I'll need to ask you about those later for sure.
But thanks for the input there. SWE is one I was actually looking at quite a while ago.
So after Jito dropped and just there was an influx of volume and farming coming to Seoul, I could already tell it was a bit of a crowded trade.
So I sort of like softly predicted that, OK, maybe SWE and Aptos will be the next ones where these air drops will come.
So I'm definitely looking at both of those and SWE protocols to farm.
Right now, one I'm looking at quite a lot is protocols on StarkNet, like Akuba protocols and Nostra Finance and, you know, Jedi swap and stuff like that.
I personally think that they don't cost too much to start farming.
And I haven't been hearing them as much because obviously you've been hearing about the StarkNet air drop and, you know,
but we haven't really been hearing about the protocols on there. So I think that could be some that could be, you know, some good protocols to farm and to look into and learn more about linear as well.
Obviously, I think it's probably too late to farm linear itself.
But again, the protocols on linear because linear parent company, I believe, is the same one that created Metamask and they've raised like a lot of money.
So I think it's definitely worth looking on there and just finding anything on linear you can do.
I mentioned this last week, but since last week, Silo Stake have officially launched their platform.
So if you guys have got funds on Stake or you're looking to mess around on Stake, definitely Stake from Stake on Silo, Stake on Kryptonite as well.
Use Yakka Finance to build up your place on the leaderboard. Obviously, they're going to be doing NFT soon.
And those have a guaranteed air drop allocation attached to them.
So if someone is like, you know, if Jeets and papers are doing their thing, which let's see, once the NFT is out, then I would definitely highly recommend looking into buying one of those NFTs once they launch, if they do start low.
Because look like obviously I've been very active on Stake and probably seven to eight out of ten collections that launched on Stake pretty much go under mint within like the first five minutes.
So you might have some luck there. I highly recommend that.
But Tina, I wanted to ask you about you mentioned that you are in luck additional from PYTE.
So like the word has got has spread around super quickly on PYTE.
But have you been staking PYTE like recently?
Yeah, I don't like a couple of small wallets of it.
I've not, again, because it's just been recent, I've not like added to it.
But I've seen obviously, I think Monad is probably the airdrop most spoken about with like being associated with PYTE.
But yeah, it seems like obviously being like an infrastructure based play that I can definitely seem to be rewarded by like both protocols on Solana itself.
And then also, as I mentioned, things like Monad.
So I think it's a really interesting one. I think PYTE even without the airdrops, I think like PYTE is an interesting play kind of longer term as a as a hold anyway.
So I was trying to pretty content to hold the airdrop on that one.
Or at least what I typically do with airdrops is for whatever reason, I'm quite good at trading them like the first few days after launch.
So yeah, I can typically if they ride up, I typically like Jito, I managed to sell like most of it around about four dollars.
I bought back a little too early, have to admit. I think most of us did at some point.
But yeah, like PYTE, I managed to sell like half of it and then I re-bought some kind of I think, yeah, probably around like the 30 cent level.
But it wasn't the exact bottom, but it was like on the way there.
But yeah, nothing. I haven't got like major exposure. But again, I've just kind of split that across a few wallets.
And for now, because I can't be too active with this stuff, I've kind of picked up on things like that, like Celestia, where I can have a bit more of like passive engagement.
And like similarly, Hyperliquid, which I typically use to trade a decent amount of volume, I've shoved like a big chunk of stables into the Hyperliquid pool on a couple of different accounts.
Because like the APR for that recently was like 200% or something. And yeah, like if I worked it out over the time, I've been using it like the rewards have been really, really good.
So clearly people can't trade on that. So that's always nice.
But yeah, I've been like more passive. So mainly like staking rather than like, yeah, like the example of like the tensor stuff, like all I'm doing on tensor is like market making.
So I just set that up like once a week. And yeah, Python obviously is an easy one to just state.
Yeah, completely understand that. You obviously mentioned tensor. I don't know if you guys know, but they launched yesterday, they launched early access to the new feature where even long and short.
And if he's it's so far in one day, that feature has gotten over 10,000 soul worth of volume, which is pretty insane.
Some people have been fighting tensor for copying sujiko because sujiko have perps on NFTs.
But it turns out it's more of an options based type of contract.
And Tina, I'm not sure if you're aware, but if you provide liquidity on the long and short option, you also get like a good number of points for tensor farming as well.
That could be an interesting avenue to look into as well, like especially considering the popularity is getting and the fact that, you know, as you said earlier, you need to look at which features the protocol, you need to look up the protocol and which features you think they would want to incentivize farming and using.
So new features are typically always like a good one. And that brings me to Jupiters. Well, we obviously know 31st. Well, it's a jupiary right now.
In eight days, we are getting Jupiter juke air drop and they're going to be two or three more rounds, I believe.
And from that, one thing I know is that you need to be using the new Jupiter features, which are perps.
DCA, but I don't know how new that is, but these sort of different features, apart from just trading and swapping on juke, they're probably going to get you a lot of like a favorable allocation.
I heard some stuff about perps being allocated like 70% of the allocation, like perps usage is apparently going to be allocated 70% of the round two Jupiter air drop.
I mean, I can't confirm that. That's something I have heard from someone.
So it's just these new features. And based on that, I don't know if you guys have heard. So we're going to move on to meme points now, but trading, you know, speaking of meme points, obviously, we've had like a bit of a like a bot war going on.
So initially, everyone was using a bonk bot once they realized how bad it was to trade on radium for the new look up.
And now we've sort of seen that people are shifting over to unibot.
There's some people who are using shurikens like early access thing. I know they sent me a link I haven't used it yet so I need to try it out and see.
But the other day, I noticed photon, is it photon bot, I think. Apparently I've heard incredible things about that and they announced that they're doing an airdrops point system.
So I know how we feel about point systems here, but photon apparently is a really like rapid bot which shows you like live activity.
And you know the way on bonk bot there's like a three to four second delay because of the telegram API.
Apparently photon is independent of telegram. It's like a web trading platform and it's like super quick and you can pretty much get on it like straight away.
So if you are actively trading meme coins, I would fully recommend trying out photon.
If you're not really fussed about which bot you're using or you don't want to have like you don't want to show like a weird level of loyalty to a specific bot.
So photon is on eath and it's on soul as well now and they're doing a point system.
Apparently, based on their tweet, it says based on our initial tests, photon hyperspeed is 15x faster than deck screener, 7.5x faster than deck tools and 4.5x faster than bird eye.
Obviously, I don't know how accurate that is. These are crazy claims.
But if it is true, then you're going to be better off using photon just for getting more favorable trades and also at the same time.
You're going to be earning photon points.
So, you know, it's pretty much another airdrop that you can farm while trading and making money on these coins.
So, yeah, I fully recommend that.
But, you know, before we move on to the meme points properly pinned, if you haven't noticed it, it's tensor sharks has sort of pinned a list of spreadsheet of airdrop projects that have a good fundraise.
I fully recommend you check that out. You can obviously see it as well when you replay the spaces after it ends.
But, yeah, so obviously we're going to go to meme coins now.
So obviously meme coin market has been hit a little bit in the last two days because of BGC dumping and, you know, everything going down the red days.
But I don't know. I think obviously on a bounce, the coins will still be looking good.
With the Jupiter up coming soon, there's still a lot of hope that memes are going to carry on and with the ease of how quickly and how easily you can trade them.
I personally don't feel like memes are just going to disappear and just in there.
But, you know, you're obviously sort of the head of USDC upside down cat.
And I've had a lot of people asking me, what will happen to your PFP, man?
Like, have you been an actor or something?
Why is your PFP upside down? Obviously, I have to explain to them, you know, it's like a cult, you know, the USDC upside down cat cult.
And obviously you're now the you've done a takeover of that cult.
So I wanted to ask you a bit about USDC, how this all came about, how you went from, you know, just normal DGN trading meme coins to, you know, being fully in charge of this and actually getting it from sub 100K to I think all time high is 15 mil now.
So yeah, just sort of introduce USDC and tell us like how you sort of how this all came about.
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, upside down cat is a meme token on Solana.
We have precisely zero utility and we never will have any utility. I'm very focused on that.
We're just a meme. And yeah, it's been launched by like a random developer who I wouldn't say like rugged it but like it went up, it got farmed and then it dumped and all his wallet sold as well.
And it was really random to about three weeks ago, I just found it and I found like, I found the meme itself quite funny. And I kind of just went into like this hologram.
And yeah, as you say, it was about 80,000 market cap. So literally basically dead.
And yeah, there's probably about five people in there and kind of chat a little bit messed around and I still kind of have no concept of how it happened.
But within like half a day, I posted like a coordination group in there to be like, okay, let's have some fun with this and see if we can revive it just kind of for a laugh.
And I didn't really have a concept of what it was going to be other than me shitposting because that was like the main utility for me at the time is I just found it as like an outlet for me to make memes and make jokes.
So that's kind of how it started. And yeah, we kind of we got all the access off the original developer kind of bought out any access on that.
And then just kind of it started growing quite quickly. I think like within a day we ran like, again, like exponential growth when your time is super easy, right?
But we went like 20 X in a day and then retraced to 90% as all the people who got wrecked on the initial run up kind of exited.
But yeah, we kind of just like stuck around it grew. A few more people got involved in.
Yeah, within a couple of weeks, we went from kind of maybe like 50 people in the telegram to think we're over about 2000. Now we've got like two and a half thousand holders.
And yeah, we kind of just developed this kind of like cult around. So the ticker being USDC, there's a lot of jokes to be made around like stable coins.
So basically, very early on, I made this like aspirational thing, you're going to repug it to $1, which for reference is an eight and a half billion dollar market cap.
So technically, like realistic, technically, I guess. But yeah, it was kind of like, for me, obviously, I'd come from like terror and Luna as well.
This was like a fun little thing on a personal level to be like, Luna collapsed in here, we're going to like, repug this stable coin.
And it's backed by like memes, vibes and cult. That's like the that's like the Treasury.
But yeah, essentially, 100% of the supply is owned by the community. It's a community takeover. Everyone involved is a volunteer.
We have like no funding. All our growth has been organic. So it's not been like paying people to show or anything like that, particularly.
And like I even made a point of like kind of not directly approaching too many people, because obviously I have a following on Twitter and I'm therefore connected to quite a few like traders in the space.
And I kind of like your friends asked, I talked to them about it, but I kind of was like, quite conscious to not be like, let's onboard or like shill it harder than I would to the public to people behind the scenes.
And I don't know, just like I wanted to feel like quite a natural thing.
And I've kind of described the first few weeks as like a liquidity bootstrapping protocol.
So, you know, the the LPP is the joint at the moment where it's kind of like price discovery before launch. It's kind of felt like that.
And yeah, as you said, within like a few weeks, we went from like 8,000 to I think we tapped out somewhere around like 16 to 18 million.
And with Bitcoin hovering over the weekend, it seems some people decided to derist recently. So good for them. So we're kind of hovering.
I haven't looked today, really, but it was like somewhere around six, seven million last time I did.
In terms of like what we've done, so we're connecting with a number of like protocols on Solana, which has been really positive and really keen to speak to more people in the space.
For example, we're currently like getting ready to launch a Camino Vault of our own, which will be fun. I'm trying to just build those connections in the ecosystem.
And then we've also been building and I'll get on to this because it's kind of my long term thesis around memes.
But we've also been building like relationships with kind of like big layer ones or layer one equivalents, I suppose, like movement labs.
Recently spoken to like Omnifoundation as well. So these are like people who are like the equivalent of like a say or a Celestia or like a Monad.
They're kind of in that kind of realm. So I'm actually going on a spaces, I think, I think, I hope they won't mind me saying this, so they think it's confirmed.
But on Thursday, every larger spaces with movement labs kind of just talked about like meme culture and how they can build it into their chain and things like that.
And like culture. And then, yeah, after two weeks, it was really exciting.
We had I've been pitching it to funds, basically this meme as well, which has been I feel like a meme in terms of itself.
I took over an abandoned cat project and within a couple of weeks I had like funds willing to invest in it, which I just found kind of hilarious.
So I like to think it's a good pitch. But yeah, it's kind of been I suppose it's like a it feels like a high level experiment in like community building from the ground up and has just kind of been a passion project.
So yeah, anyone involved with it probably knows or has found out the crazy little amount of sleep idea and the amount of energy I have day to day.
So yeah, I've been doing like 20 hour days on this for like the last three to four weeks because I guess when you don't launch it, you have like a ton of challenges and problems that other teams don't have to face.
I mean, they have different problems, right? But like on the one hand, we didn't have to organize a launch, so that's helpful.
But on the other hand, it's like, right, what do we need to redesign? Like the website needs redoing.
We don't have any like team funding to begin with. We don't have a team. I just need to bring people in who want to be involved. And that's who we have.
And we didn't have anyone on board prior to launch. So we're just trying to building up from there. So yeah, there's a lot of a lot of challenges.
But that's been what's been, I guess, like engaging for me on a personal level.
And I guess to kind of wrap it up because I'm conscious that I've been speaking for a while on it, like the thought process behind it was essentially I have like a view on memes that I've held for probably like a year or so.
And it actually originally came from first exploring what NFTs were doing around like creating ownership of assets and ownership of ecosystems and kind of more engagement and building within them.
And I found that really fascinating. But I think NFTs obviously with like limited collections and floor prices and so on.
They're kind of like a slightly different market to memes and they're kind of kept. And I don't want to use the word gatekeeping because that sounds like a negative, but they are naturally obviously a kept kind of community in a sense.
And I think they've just gone in a slightly different direction.
But essentially my view on memes is twofold. So I think initially you have them seen as gateways into ecosystems or experience layers.
And I think with so many competing platforms such as Solana, Ethereum, Laertos and all the other things you could name, we're really seeing like this heat up.
And basically memes have always been a good onboarding tool in terms of financial capital.
But I now think you can start to see them blending more as like a cultural tool into the ecosystems themselves.
And they're also a really good on boarder of like human capitals that they bring people in, not just their money.
And if you can retain that, that's really important. And I think we're seeing a number of ecosystems recognize this.
So like Solana Bonk obviously was like infrastructure based originally. We're seeing a number of things on Solana looking to integrate like meme culture directly.
Jupiter obviously has that element themselves. But equally we're seeing protocols and I guess quote unquote more serious kind of projects in crypto wanting to work with memes rather than like memes chasing the other way around.
And we've obviously then seen that more recently with like foundation backed memes like on ZK Singh, Tron Sian and things like that.
And also like the big grants in Avax. So I think we're recognizing that clearly there's an element here that the market's going, okay, there's this like intangible asset around culture that is probably quite hard to value.
But we want to have it on our chain and we want to have it be a part of what we're doing.
And if we see our chain as an experience, which is what it should be for a user, then memes and culture play a big part in that.
So how can the two things intertwine between like serious DeFi products and culture? So I think we're seeing that now.
Obviously I think Solana's been probably the leader of that with memes like the last kind of six months or so.
And then the flip side of that and the second part of it, which I think plays into it, is memes as a gateway for the individual.
So it's very easy to see like speculation as like an ends. So like people speculate on an investment and that's it.
But in my mind, it's as much of like a means to become involved in crypto as anything else.
Like how many of us bought Bitcoin is anything more than slightly kind of a meme investment when you first are involved.
Or alternatively, who bought like a classic at the top in 2017 or XRP at the top in 2017.
And the interesting thing is to people always say, oh, well, people win and lose money in memes.
And it's true. But like how many people lost money on their first investments in crypto, but they're still here and now they're building.
What's interesting about memes for me is first of all, they're really simple, they're really powerful and they're clearly a good tool for retail, as we know.
So unlike something like DeFi, where you need a certain level of like financial literacy to understand like bonds and stating curves and all the different products, these are really user friendly.
And equally, on the ownership and engagement side, they're really easy communities to get involved with because it's like, right, can you make memes?
Can you be creative? Do you want to build something? Do we want to launch NFTs? Do we want to do this? Do we want to do that?
They're really, if they're done well, for me, memes are facilitators.
They're facilitators for ecosystems to onboard and retain users and build a culture.
And they're facilitators to connect individuals within these decentralized communities to allow them to become owners rather than just kind of passive investors in crypto.
And obviously, not everyone's going to do that. But I think you can really onboard a lot of talent that way.
And the way I see it is like when people talk about strong communities, there's often like a weird thing where it's almost about numbers or about how hard you shill on Twitter.
When for me, defining like a strong community is like the value of the individuals within it.
What do they bring? What value do they give to other people within the community?
And what value is like created between those people?
And that would be an area where I think NFTs that have done well have really succeeded.
So that's something I'm trying to like learn from and lean into.
So the overall view for us is obviously I view that as kind of the place where memes will sit in future for crypto.
Obviously, there'll be millions of things around that, thousands that will launch that are just there to bump and dump will be funny.
But memes have a real cultural relevance because they're the first time you can kind of monetize someone else's virality and culture on the Internet.
Like creators have a hard enough time monetizing themselves.
And as a speculator or a sideline, like enjoyer of that content, it was even harder to speculate on it.
Memes kind of facilitate that. So that's really powerful.
And then it ties into the two things I've spoken about where ecosystems are going to want memes, they're going to want to work with them and integrate them.
And then secondly, if you can kind of be that facilitator for your community in the long term, those memes, which stayed incredibly pure on the front, but underneath it add value to their community, are going to be the ones that are there for long term.
So in terms of USDC, I would say that was kind of a happy accident for me.
And I'm now using that as like a supposed like a highbrow experiment of this idea in this vision and kind of pushing it as far as I can.
So to kind of tie back to what we're doing before I show up genuinely, we are essentially a grassroots build up of that 100% organic, as I said.
And we're just seeing how far we can take that to be like building partnerships and collaborations with people. And basically my pitch to like funds, market majors, exchanges, founders, angels, projects, anyone I speak to is like the most important thing is do you want to be part of this journey with us?
Are you down to like vibe with us? Like, for example, like a fund, even if you don't invest, like, do you want to do like a podcast together to talk about this interesting like concept?
Do you want to come talk to people in our community? You can still be a part of it.
Like, you don't have to write a huge check for us. So please do also do that. If anyone with lots of money is listening, please buy lots of USDC.
But yeah, like, that's not really the point. It's more like memes facilitate a million different ways to engage and be involved and bring people together.
So that's what I want to facilitate. And that's kind of what we're focused on.
And then obviously, there's all the normal elements that come along with that, like exchange listings, market majors, yeah, hopefully more funds investing kind of pitching to a number of those still at the moment.
But yeah, the focus is just building out that network and that community. And for me, defining success for this would be like, people who joined early to upside down can look back in a year and go like, fuck, yeah, that was one of the best decisions in my life kind of thing.
That would be like my main takeaway.
There's a long road to get there. And some of these things are out of our control, right?
We can only work as hard as we can work. And sometimes you need to rubber the green. But yeah, it's been really exciting so far.
I would definitely like to sleep a little bit more at some point. But yeah, for now, it's just a really exciting thing to be involved in and to kind of push this vision.
It's always so incredible and insightful to hear you speak clearly based on your experience, taking this over and building it and just your entire thesis and reasoning for it.
I can really tell I have a bit even more like renewed confidence with me because I completely agree with what everything you were saying there.
We're seeing obviously memes facilitate millions of ways for people to come together and be more involved with each other.
And we've been seeing it. We've even seen with blockchains and ecosystems like Stay, which have been out hiring meme lords because memes bring people together.
That's the truth, right?
And as you said, it's a front for onboarding them into even bigger things.
So, you know, I'm very excited just about the future of memes. And I think you guys have sort of gone for like the perfect sort of thing here.
And obviously, I'm very excited to be on the ride myself with USDC, haven't sold a single coin so far and very positive about it so far as well.
And with you obviously at the helm, it makes me even more confident.
And, you know, everything you were saying that reminds me of.
So I know it's a bit of a different case, but a while back, I watched the film Dumb Money.
I'm not sure if any of you guys have seen it, but it was based on the GameStop sort of stock, like short squeeze and stuff, which had gone on during COVID.
GameStop went to an all-time high of like $400 plus per stock.
And like Wall Street Bets was like a big, was at the forefront of this.
I'm sure there was something deeper to it, but it was sort of perceived that Wall Street Bets and the memes was sort of a big, big sort of front to it and like a big part of it.
And, you know, watching that, it just made me realize how many people made incredible decisions about buying in, how much it united people together, how much it apparently stood for as well.
So I could really see memes being something very similar.
Yeah, so that's a really interesting thing because unfortunately, I can't share it because it doxxes me.
I haven't actually seen Dumb Money yet, but when I was working, so I left like my like TradFi job like 18 months ago.
But when I was working there, I worked as like a strategy consultant for like global banking, basically.
But yeah, when the GameStop stuff was happening, I like published a paper on the GameStop kind of situation in Saga as it was ongoing,
which was kind of my view on the cultural component of what it meant, the politics of it, the economics and like the social component and why it was so powerful and why it brought people together.
And that was obviously the same time that crypto was kind of picking up in the Covid situation as well, which I think that like Covid context has a massive role in both crypto and like that GameStop situation and continues to, I think, with the push towards the internet culture.
I think we were heading in that direction, right? But often things like that need a catalyst to push them further.
And I think like Covid lockdowns really provided that, drove us all slightly insane.
And that's just what we needed, apparently. But yeah, I think it's really interesting now that I'm doing this to kind of track that back in my journey because the GameStop stuff is saying I wrote about and I did a couple of like public talks about it a few years ago as well.
Just analyzing the cultural component of that. And then similarly, when I got into crypto, I was like pretty early to terror.
So one by the early community members there. And what got me into that was the idea of like the decentralized stablecoin, which is ironic now with the STC and kind of the mirror and anchor that they were launching.
Whilst I don't think those products themselves were making a political statement, this kind of element of it is what enticed me to kind of reenter crypto and then further to that when NFTs kind of picked up, I really got into the concept of like ownership of assets and identity within kind of not only the internet but also kind of the financialization of the internet and your own.
And the monetization of your own identity. So it feels like, and that's an idea that I actually wrote about at the time. That's really three years ago now.
And I feel like I can now that I'm doing this, I can kind of track that process of what is clear to me is my interests are very much. So again, I studied economics at uni, but then I did all of like my minor topics were kind of in like things around social sciences and culture.
And that's always what's fascinated me. And I think clearly, my like overlapping passion is around like human psychology culture and how that intertwines with this new like financial technology that we're dealing with.
So I think all these things came together and led me down a path where I spent 20 hours a day editing cat memes upside down.
Yeah, I found my calling in life.
Quite the journey there.
But yeah, that honestly, that sounds perfect. It's great to have an insight into your background there and how it's all come together.
Last question, based on the partnerships, just before, you know, I sort of run the spaces, I'm already conscious, you're only on like 20 hours of sleep, I don't want to make it even less.
But I want to ask about, I believe you guys also bought the partnership.
Yeah, so I'm really keen like the word like partnership. So this anyone who's behind the scenes with me, like, when we like the way we work things is really important to me because it's similar to the utility thing, right?
It's like, I'm really keen to be like, guys, we cannot build anything, because I do not want to be reprised as a shitty perp decks on Solana.
Like, if someone launches that in our community, like, I want them to launch it, that's great, like build it.
But like, whatever we make is, like, probably not going to be like, especially if I'm involved, like, it's not going to be like up to scratch with what like people who are actually smart doing.
So it's kind of like, really important to me to be like, really pure, that the meme is the meme, and it's a facilitator.
So like, anything being built by the community, and we do have community members building a ton of stuff, which is super exciting.
And we're supporting it. But it's like, this is from the community. And likewise, with like people we're collaborating with, I feel like when you use the word partnership, like, on the one hand, it can misconstrange through what things mean.
On the second hand, there's like PTSD with like, we're partnering with McDonald's and with like, Amazon web services, and like crypto is full of people like chatting shit about that.
So, like, whether someone like invests in us as a fund, or whether they like, I don't know, literally decide to throw a rave with us in future, which is definitely on the like cards.
That's like, if we did have a roadmap, it basically ends with me wanting to throw live events where we just rave, basically.
And I want to be like the cultural component, like, these like live events for crypto and just basically have us in the corner doing something.
But yeah, like, whatever the work or like collaboration is, the focus is like, is collaborating, is vibes, it can be anything.
So, yeah, that's like a small point, but I'm really like keen to emphasize it, because not only do I think it's good, because often, otherwise people ask like, what are you actually doing is a meme coin, like with a DeFi protocol.
But I think it also leaves the door open to be really flexible in what you do.
And I'm very conscious that I want.
And I don't want to just repeat what other people have done with this, I want it to be like, like the calls I've hopped on with some of these kind of projects and people that we're talking to, we've ended up speaking for two hours and shooting some wild ideas about what we could do.
Like, that's what I want, which is like, let's come up with new stuff, let's come up with fun stuff that rewards people, but is also fun in the space.
So yeah, bit of a tangent there. But I think it's an important thing for memes, in my opinion, because I don't want to build anything. I'm too lazy to build anything.
That's why I pretend that culture is an investable asset class.
Because I'm too dumb and too lazy to actually build. So I'll leave that to other people.
But yeah, like the pal.ai thing is, that's just like, we wanted to integrate that box into our telegram community because I'm really keen that telegram is a really simple platform, right?
But it's important to make things as frictionless and good for your community as possible.
That's kind of an ongoing process for us as we work through different bots and different solutions. But like, yeah, we just integrated how to like answer questions, to summarize things, to offer some like much easier solutions to like buying and selling and getting the contracts and stuff.
They're actually building a custom solution for us at the moment. So like, our thing is like, people will come into the chat and they'll just say like, is the cat still upside down?
So if someone says that, we have like a bot that's going to automatically like AI generate a random upside down cat to answer their question.
And yeah, just fun stuff like that. Like we have a flip bot that we've built that like flipped any picture, and it's going to be gifts as well.
And that's like, obviously, super easy for our community to then like, raid people on Twitter, which we will know is like a big past time for meme coin communities.
And then yeah, there's other stuff. So we're building in hopefully like a cross chain by bot, which, again, to the question of onboarding people from different communities is quite a cool thing.
That's something this is building built by a community member.
And then we've got like some games launching that we utilize you see us DC. I say games like temper expectations like we're not.
I don't know, like I'm not launching like a new, I don't know, Elder Scrolls or something. I don't know why that's the game that came to mind, but it is.
Yeah, some some like, yes.
USDC is going to be the currency.
Exactly. That's exactly what I'm saying is, uh, yeah, we'll be air dropping everyone who buys who buys your CC with GTA copies as well.
But exactly, you just have to dock sure like personal address to me to receive your copy. So I'm hedging my bets on no one doing it.
But yeah, like, yeah, there's a ton of stuff going on, like smaller things like that. And then obviously I've touched on the biggest stuff which I would achieve.
But yeah, that's it. I kind of don't want to keep ranting on because this is basically like turn to my brain to mush over the last three weeks.
So I feel like I'll just spew out everything about it for hours if I can. But yeah, I'll try to stop there.
Amazing, amazing. Thank you so much. Basically what I'm hearing is that I'm going to be seeing you at Breakpoint 2024 in Singapore at USDC Rave.
I hope you said when is Breakpoint?
So yeah, because I'm, I'm moving out to Southeast Asia, the beginning of February. Well, actually, that might be like the end of February by the end of the time it happens.
But I think there's a good chance. So it's really unfortunate. I'm really excited for it. But then I think I'd fly to like Brazil in the summer. So I'll be in Brazil for like six months.
So I'm going to have to fly back across to Singapore, which is super annoying because yeah, I would have left just before like Breakpoint for like a month or so.
So yeah, I can have the hop straight back in order to go. But hopefully you'll see me there.
Not dressed as like a cat or anything weird. But yeah, hopefully, hopefully having a good time.
Sounds great, man. Sounds great. Awesome. Well, honestly, it's been a pleasure to talk to you, man. I'll be speaking to you again in the USDC Telegram and hitting you up with some more cat memes for sure.
But it's been great to have you up here. Great to hear your airdrop strategy and generally just to hear you speak, get your insights on everything that's going on here.
And yeah, tensor sharks as well. Great to have you up here as well. Thank you for all the alphas surrounding the airdrop.
The list as well that you drop us super helpful. I'll be checking that out as well. And yeah, for sure. Yeah, what's up, you know, you have your thing.
Oh, I didn't mean to. Yeah, I'll just say thank you then for having me on. And also, yeah, I've I've already bookmarked that notion airdrop thing because I have no time anymore.
So I'm definitely just kind of like copy tensor. I think seems like a solid strategy based on what they said. So I'm just a copy you guys. I might have to follow Honey as well because she mentioned some stuff I don't know about.
So I just start copy trading everyone, basically. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. It's been great to chat to everyone.
Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Tina. And I'll see you soon. And everyone else, thank you guys for tuning in and staying in. It's been a one hour and a half spaces, which has been pretty long by our standards.
But I hope you all had a great time. Took some notes and learned some crazy alpha up here. And if you guys enjoyed it, then we run the spaces every week on Tuesday at 2pm EST.
Or if you're in UTC like me, it'll be 7pm UTC. So hope to see you guys next week. And thank you guys so much for tuning in. And we'll see you soon.