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Value Extractooors in Web3 ☠️ The Aggregated Ep. 121
Recorded: July 18, 2025 Duration: 3:05:13Space Recording
Short Summary
The crypto community is witnessing significant growth and trends, highlighted by Javier Milei's economic reforms in Argentina, which have drastically reduced inflation and garnered high approval ratings. The conversation also emphasized the importance of integrity in business practices, the rise of decentralized finance, and the need for self-regulation in the industry as more projects emerge and gain traction.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Music Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. Shall we get started?
So we are trying to actually make the show a little more fast paced. So getting started at
six minutes after, too slow already. But one of the things we're going to be doing actually with the show
to make it a little more fast-paced in terms of like how we're booking guests
and going through topics is we're going to,
instead of having the show be three hours and it sometimes goes four hours,
we're going to do two hours that'll sometimes go three hours
and try to kind of pack the
guests a little more tightly and uh like make the show a little more fast-paced we're gonna
experiment with this but uh good morning everyone how you all doing how you doing aztec gm gm guys
just rolled out of bed to be honest it's been a a busy, busy week. It's early morning for me, but I'm ready to roll. Episode 121. Excited to talk with all my friends today. How are you doing, Rob? doing well doing well uh was just uh doing uh having a discussion with some uh colleagues about
javier mille and argentina before coming on here one of my one of my favorite topics
the libertarian experiment one of your favorite topics, but Bitcoin and Michael Saylor are probably your top.
I know that's hard to pinpoint.
What's my favorite topic?
But what would you say?
Look, Saylor's great, but it's not something something yeah elon uh but sailor's just i
don't know i've like listened to so much of his interviews and stuff that i'm
a little bored with him i guess um
actually i did listen to a belagi sailor interview yesterday so maybe i'm lying but
um your husband must be so fun and they'll be like
hey what do you want for dinner and you're like well have you seen argentina erupts oh yeah oh
yeah she gets the like you know bi-weekly uh javier mille argentina update
date. That's fun, man. Well, I, I, you didn't exactly pick, but I think I have a good idea
of your top right now, right now, the most, the most interesting experiment being played out in
the world is Javier Millet in Argentina. He's cut, he's cut, uh, inflation down from 250% to 30%.
And if you go by month to month, it will drop to...
It's weird because there's a lag if you do month over month or year over year.
But basically, he's at 1.5% per month, which is like 18% a year.
And it was at 250 when he came in.
Poverty is down from 52% to between 31 and 35%. His approval
rating has stayed consistently high, which is not normal for presidents. Normally they get into
office and their approval goes down over time. Him and Bukele, interestingly, are the only two
presidents in Latin America that have had either the same or higher approval ratings over time.
A bunch of things.
Unemployment going down, lots of investment coming into the country.
And basically they just got rid of half the government instantly right when he got in office,
which I thought was too aggressive
but i was wrong it's working so anyways how's everyone doing though let's see we got uh why
don't we do some introductions we got uh joel from dash how you doing i'm doing pretty well thanks
um not sure if i could be here for very long, but I thought I would stop in just in case.
So, yeah, hey, everyone.
My name is Joel.
I run business development and marketing for Dash,
which is fantastic digital cash you can use for everyday payments.
And if you have an Android phone, download the Dash Pay wallet.
If you have an iPhone, download the Dash wallet,
which will turn into Dash Pay before you know it.
And then friend me at the desert links there,
and I might send you some corns.
Much love.
We've got Darcy Donovan.
Would you like to introduce yourself?
Hi, everybody.
How are you doing this morning?
Well, I don't know.
Where is it for everybody?
I'm in L.A. Puerto Rico it for everybody? I'm in LA.
Puerto Rico for me, but I'm from LA. I'm a neighbor.
Awesome. Well, I usually tell people to just Google me, but I'm a film and television actress,
a producer. You may have seen me in the movie Anchorman, Modern Family,
Parks and Rec. My name is Earl Entourage, Nip Tuck, Bones, Westworld, just to name a few. But
I'm a former Miss National Tennessee. Crypto Queen is what they call me in the space for my work in web three. As I own the NFT project,
star dogs,
which is Hollywood meets tech.
And I also am the co-owner of income Island,
which is a,
which is one of the biggest and to me,
the best metaverses out there and it's our photorealistic
metaverse and I know that was a mouthful so I hope that answers your question.
Perfect.
But now I have so much questions.
We'll have to come back and ask a little bit more.
Sure.
Absolutely.
Nice to meet you.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Great to see people from other walks of life coming into our weird little
industry.
Not so little anymore, man.
Yeah.
You're right.
It's, it's, it's definitely a growing space.
I remember we were talking yesterday about some topic.
I don't remember.
I think maybe with you, Joel, but on one of the spaces we were on, either Dash or BitAngels.
But I was talking about how when I first was in this industry, I mean, if I was lucky one in 10 people, I probably it took maybe I started in 2015.
10 people. I probably it took maybe I started in 2015. So maybe in like 2016, or early 2017,
you might have hit like one out of 10 people had heard the word Bitcoin didn't know what it was
necessarily, but at least had heard it. Now it's crazy. Now, you know, 99 out of 100 people probably
know what Bitcoin is. Did you ever go to any of the uh bitcoin conferences in 15 or 16
um maybe meetups no i think my first meetup was probably like 2016 probably like earlier mid-2016
2015 i was like more of just a lone wolf i was just like reading you know stuff like the white
paper or listening to andreas it wasn't until 2017 that i started working professionally in the
industry when we when we started lunar digital assets but uh 16 i would go to like some small
very small meetups and stuff yeah i, I was in the industry since 16.
I don't think I even went to a conference or anything until maybe 2020.
So I was alone for a while.
Yeah, I just wanted to ask see what uh what it was like
back in 15 and 16 but good times all right we should probably do a real blast from the past
yeah yeah tell us joel 2014 june at the porcupine freedom festival in new hampshire
i was there at the campground the entire week. The libertarian one?
Yep.
I think I've seen videos from that.
You should come.
It's still a crypto hotbed.
It's picking up again, despite being a freedom festival up in the mountains.
But yeah, so 2014, I could already spend Bitcoin on literally everything there. It was pretty super early for the crypto movement.
New Hampshire is where the roots of the crypto movement are pretty much.
When's the next one?
June.
We just got over this last one there.
I know XANA was there, the Kwai Network.
There was a Monero tent there too.
Edge Wallet had a tent as well. And next year, it's probably going to be allwall had a tent as well and next year it's probably
all that plus a few more so yeah it's pretty nice it's hard hard ish to get to because
it's like three and a half hours drive from the boston airport if that's where you're going into
or two and a half from the small manchester new hampshire airport so you gotta you kind of got
to figure out get rent a car to get up there, but it's a fun drive to the White Mountains.
That's fun.
That's fun and beautiful.
But, yeah, we should probably pass the mic and keep introducing all of our friends here today.
Much love for everyone that is here hanging out with us on Friday.
We'll go ahead and pass the mic on over to Change Now.
Pass the mic on over to Change Now.
Welcome back.
Welcome back.
Hey, guys.
Thank you so much for having me.
Hey, Rock.
Hey, Joelle.
Hey, Adstack.
Hey, Darcy.
Hey, Darren.
Super stoked to be here.
Very excited to talk about extraction value.
I've been going to spaces all week, and I might be a little bit raspy.
So yeah, my name is Pauline and I am Chief Strategy Officer over at the
famous cryptocurrency exchange service called ChangeNow.
You can check our bio to see who we are.
I'm sorry, I just saw our bio after
two weeks of kind of like not noticing it and going to spaces and it will seem
really funny to me so that's one other reason why I sound a little bit raspy
and congested because I've been laughing for like 10 minutes non-stop but yeah
super excited to see everyone.
Super excited to take part in the space.
Yes, much love and great to talk with you again, Pauline.
And yeah, this is going to be an interesting conversation.
I don't know where this one's going to go today.
I'm hoping that it's positive,
but I think there's some interesting things that we've got to work out. Nerd Girl,
please introduce yourself. Welcome back. Hey, so and I do work for lunar digital assets. Now, I feel like my view on KOLs and market makers and, you know, VCs is a little bit nuanced, because I think that there are people who definitely add value to the space with what they do,
but there are others who make it look like they add value and sort of subtract.
So I wrote an article a few years ago about sort of the various ways that market makers
make it look like they add value without actually doing so,
and that's more or less what I'm here to talk about.
Good times.
So we got some alpha.
Can't wait to pick your brain, of course.
And great to have you here as well.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for having me.
Definitely.
All right, let's go ahead and pass the mic on over to Scott.
You help organize the show, Nicole.
So I don't know if it's us having you or you having us.
Right.
I just announced when I'm going to be here and show up.
So thanks for allowing me.
Rock and Anastasia just show up.
They wake up on a Friday morning and they're like,
hey, what are we going to talk about today?
We used to be real.
Yeah.
To some extent, yeah.
The real.
Go ahead, Aston. I do make some of, yeah. The real... Go ahead, Aston.
I do make some of the meetings,
and I try to help out with inviting friends.
And I used to be a lot more involved,
but now with everything going on,
yeah, it's definitely hard to keep up,
and much love to the team.
You know, Darren, Marshall, and Nicole.
You guys are all stars.
And, yeah,
I think, like,
you're,
you know,
we're,
how do I
say this? Like,
I guess I'm nothing without my team. You know, like,
the team is so important
and I love my team. The team is so important. And I love my team.
Anyways.
Yeah.
Darren, Nicole Marshall, crushing it, crushing it in the background,
putting everything together.
There's a lot of time that goes into making this show happen.
And I mostly just come and complain when I don't like a topic.
That's the extent of my production value.
And Two Cent Timmy helps quite a bit, too, from the Polygon side.
Yeah, much love for us.
Two Cent Timmy's the man.
Why don't we go to Two Cent Timmy now?
You want to introduce brother?
Yes, GM.
I am Two Cent Timmy.
I am on the marketing team at Polygon.
And, yeah, I spend time planning this show too
so i know how much goes into it so yes thank you for having me again it'll be fun to talk to you
guys we love you i do love him timmy's a man we need to change his name to two dollar timmy
yeah how high does bitcoin need to go before your $2, Timmy? Yeah, I'm
loving the markets right now. I will say
this is kind of fun too. I love that
I mean, you guys said it earlier, but
seeing crypto go
bigger and Darcy being here
is really cool, where it's like, oh, it's
not a little niche bubble
anymore. It's really fun to talk to people
from all walks of life that
are getting into blockchain for
very different reasons.
It's fun. And you guys do a great job
just bringing aliens
and actors and politicians.
It's fun.
On that last
note, I did remember the other day
that Rock actually has an open bet
with AK.
And the point of rock winning said bet is
bitcoin above i think 147 500 um ak did say it would hit 120 then dump um this is like from like
almost a year ago uh at what time what was the timeline uh cycle oh the whole cycle i'm i'm putting my money on on me
on that one should we make a second bet just kidding i i'm i'm guessing 147 uh he he said
peak 120 or at the end of the cycle or what does that I don't know how he... He said it would hit, like, in relatively short term, it would hit 120, then dump.
And then peak of the cycle would be less than 147, 500.
So he just said less than 147, and I'm...
It's under...
I'm over.
Anywhere above, yeah.
Okay, cool.
You're on track.
I think I might win that one we'll see guys i i
mean honestly i i wouldn't be i think conservatively 150 175 seems nice but i also would not be
surprised if we do something nuts like go to 300 or something uh or 500 even i mean there's like you have to understand there's some
incredibly like global implications to bitcoin's rise it either happens slowly over time or
you know you are gonna have at some point i don't think now but you will have at some point
I don't think now, but you will have at some point countries' currencies collapse and they move fully into Bitcoin as it's collapsing as a life raft.
So and other, you know, cryptocurrencies and stable coins, et cetera.
I mean, they may essentially like dollarize, U.S. dollarize like El Salvador has done and like Milay is discussing in Argentina
and many other countries, smaller countries have done. So, you know, when their currency collapses,
it's kind of a perfect time for them to, like dual currency, dollar and Bitcoin and dollar
through stable coins. So I think we will see a lot of these events
over the next, call it 20 years,
but it wouldn't surprise me
if these events accelerate sooner.
I did analysis and research
in the depths of the bear market,
this recent bear market,
and I'm sticking to my analysis. I think conservatively
we're going to, I think if I remember right, like $215,000. And I made a caveat saying like if
the ETFs went through, which, you know, I thought they were going to go through before they went
through and positive regulation in this cycle, which I thought we were going to go through before they went through and positive regulation in this cycle
which I you know thought we were going to get positive regulation in this cycle which it looks
like now that's also rolling through so that caveat was I think higher in like 230 or 240.
I have to go back to that that analysis but I still think we're going above $200,000.
to that analysis, but
I still think we're going above
$200,000.
It could be a scenario
just like in 2017
where Bitcoin
essentially doubles
and everything
goes up.
I don't know if we're allowed to talk about
Pol. I know Timmy can't.
I'm on the grants board, but I'm not technically a Polygon Labs employee. I don't know if we're allowed to talk about poll. I know Timmy can't. I'm on the grants board, but I'm not technically a Polygon Labs employee.
I don't know the legality there of me talking about price,
so I'll just avoid it for now.
But let's go safe.
What does everyone think about ETH?
Where's ETH going?
I mean, this is a crazy little run we're on right now.
Are we looking for like a thumb up, thumb down?
Sure, yeah. If people want to give thumbs up or thumbs down for their bullishness on it i would pull thumbs up i am
pretty bullish yeah i am pretty bullish on east uh especially with what vitalik has been doing recently like implementing gas fee caps and it appears he actually is listening to
people like listening to what people are saying to him because I did talk to him in Berlin about
a month ago and there was like this thing Builder Nights event that MetaMask is doing on pretty much every major event in Berlin.
They actually brought in the man himself.
And I was talking, like he did a talk about Pectra and about all the recent upgrades that ETH has been doing.
been doing and I asked him like how are you going to make sure that ETH actually has longevity
on the market as both like a store of value and as like a remittance tool like a payments
chain because that's the chain that is one of the most adopted in services across the market, both like fringe web three web two services like crypto cards and whatnot, and exchanges and things. Because Tron transactions are like super expensive. And ETH has fairly affordable yet slow transactions. And I think a couple weeks later, he brought forward like a new EIP, which actually
kept the gas fee for Ethereum even further than what it is right now, which I thought was pretty
exciting. And I think that probably we are going to go even higher than what it is right now. Like, what is it? How much is it?
Let me check.
Yeah, it's 3,500 at the moment.
I do believe that if Bitcoin goes to further like to 150,
I believe we have every chance to see like 5k Ethereum this year,
but don't take it as financial advice as and as my bio states review
risks before swapping because that's what the legal team asked me to do yes i love that
i think it's nice i think it's interesting how like when eth was at 2200 and we saw all the
people saying you know what's eth now oh it's a stable coin now everybody's
because price is up now all of a sudden the utility of eth seems more more relevant and i think price
always is interesting as how it makes people think about a token again so um yeah i think it's really
interesting i i got into buying eth back in in, you know, however long ago, because I thought it was going to be the Visa MasterCard network of crypto. And so if it can, if it can do that, I mean, who knows how much a calculation of how much volume flowing through it, like how much ETH itself would need to hold of that value, I think would be an interesting calculation for someone to run if, you know,
a certain percentage of that transaction volume
had to run through the token.
But yeah, curious to hear what other people
have to say on that.
Great take.
Yeah, anyone, please jump in if you want to.
Wait, we'll do, oh, actually, Kevin,
you were just talking, quick interview,
maybe, or just tell us about yourself for 20 seconds.
Oh, yeah, sir.
Kevin Oakeson, I'm the CEO of Hummingbird, a marketing and data network platform, and
recently also joined the Vtopia team, working in their finance and product department as
well, that just launched a new token launcher with awesome creator rev share opportunities
to make launching tokens not such a cringe thing to do anymore.
Very cool, man. Very cool. Much love. And you know what, let's do this.
Jared also 20 seconds, bro. Let us know what you're doing in this space.
Welcome back. Also tell us what's your prediction on ETH.
GM everybody. great to be
on this space once again long time listener um and uh i guess i'm the only person who's not not
based in north america i am a value extractor and i'm here to educate you all on the ways of
extracting value and uh this is this is the perfect uh platform for me to
for me to yeah jared extracts my value through my time on twitter because i'm always seeing him
everywhere on twitter and replying to him he does have some good threads so if you're if you're here
today yeah i like the katana stuff keeps me up to date
um but yeah much love jared great to have you here and then uh what's your uh
you could you could say your prediction for whatever coins
um talking about eth i think uh it really depends on you know like if you look at Solana, like how did Solana get to its all-time high, right?
It's with all those, with that Trump coin that went,
that sent everybody buying Sol to buy that derivative of Sol.
And so I think Ethereum has a chance. If Ethereum has a product that is exclusively on Ethereum,
what I'm seeing right now is RWAs and all that.
But RWAs don't necessarily peg themselves to Ethereum.
They will probably most likely peg themselves to stablecoins.
So we shall see.
We shall see.
But I'm really liking the price movement. I'm really liking people accumulating Ethereum like it is Bitcoin. And I'm also liking the news that BlackRock as well as other ETFs applying for staking of the Ethereum, which is going to make it a very interesting, productive asset.
And maybe through that way, we will see people actually, institutions,
hodling Ethereum as well as Bitcoin.
And then we can all have our GameStop moment.
But you know what?
That's going to render the Ethereum chain itself unusable.
that's going to render the ethereum chain itself unusable um i stake pole today and it cost me
fifteen dollars when i i don't know a few months ago it was just like not even four dollars to stake
pole so uh i don't know whether ethereum is going to be used if the price goes up but then again
that's what all the l2s and side chains and and all those chains on top of Ethereum are for. And I think that's where all the transactions will take
place. That's where all the RWAs and everything will be based on.
It's a great take. And on this show, we don't judge. I love that every time there's a very
diverse type of conversation that comes up you
know that everyone has their own opinion and we all just talk it out this is a good take jared and
yeah let me let me go ahead and just go uh introduce star dogs real quick and then we're
going to jump into the meat of the conversation where we can all just you know talk like we're
around a big table starbugs
uh tell us a little bit about yourself and then also what's your prediction
am i rugged or star rugs you might i think our dogs is darcy
I think Stardogs is Darcy.
No, I'm actually her business manager.
Sorry about that.
I wasn't able to hit the speaker button.
Yeah, so my name's Dylan.
I'm actually Darcy's business manager and business partner with Stardogs.
And I work with her with Income Island as well.
When she got into the space back in 2017, you know, as her business manager, it was my job to learn as much as I could about the industry as well.
And so, you know, I started doing my research and, you know, as with all of us and with everything that's, you know, constantly evolving, you know, it's just a learning process continually within Web3, whether it's, you know, NFTs, metaverse, crypto, you know, blockchain,
you know, all of it, you know, it's just, it's always evolving and there's new businesses and
you're finding new ways to work with each other. So yeah, that's just a little bit about me. You
know, I've worked with her for years now. Our parent company, Real Vision Entertainment,
now our parent company real vision entertainment um is uh for the film and television side and
uh star dogs is a subsidiary of that so um and darcy's the founder of real vision entertainment
as well yeah much love and do you have any predictions on bitcoin uh ethereum litecoin solana any major uh you know i think you know kind of just like everybody it's
you know hard to say um i i think during this cycle um i think you know listening to what you
were saying you know in those low to mid 200s for bitcoin i think is very possible. You know, if we start to see, you know, countries
like as Rock was saying, you know, countries, you know, taking it on as their main currency
more and more, you know, could that go even higher? Absolutely. In regards to Ethereum,
I mean, who knows? I mean, I think we're still very early there. You know, we're seeing a
nice run, but who knows? You know, maybe somewhere between 10 and 20 we could see is just kind of my
thoughts. But, you know, we'll see where it goes. You know, it's exciting to see. And more than
anything, I really feel like everybody finding ways of working
together and building together is what um is really going to move this market more and more
we actually joel has uh his hand up but what were you did you uh have something you want to say
there estic i was just gonna say i love his attitude you know working together that's a
that's our ethos as well you We've been connecting people and working together
with and synergizing wherever we can
throughout the industry.
It's always good to pay things forward.
And I love that about the decentralized
or Web3 community.
I also wanna just say real quick,
I'll go ahead and give my thoughts.
I think ETH 10K, bitcoin already gave that uh litecoin i i think
we could see that above 6k or sorry above 5k um conservatively this cycle especially if bitcoin
gets those higher levels and then um yeah bullish what i'll I'll say. Litecoin 5K?
Yes.
Man, that's fucking bullish.
I have a reason for this.
I'm a little less bullish, but I do think there's a ton of stuff happening with Litecoin.
And it does seem like a Litecoin meta is coming, but Jesus, 50X?
Litecoin meta is already here, bro.
It's already here.
You can tell. but Jesus 50 X. I like when that is already here, bro. It's already here.
If you're paying attention,
watch what you are,
what you are,
but I'm more speaking just like everyone else.
I mean, you're,
you're a little better.
Oh yeah.
That would be fun.
Yeah.
Let's do something for charity.
I don't want to bet on that.
That's too,
yeah.
Cause then you'll be known as the bear, bro.
Because I'm going to...
My take is going to be way more bearish than yours.
Not bearish.
I'm definitely bullish.
And I do...
I'm giving it...
Okay, if you would have asked me six months ago,
I would have said there's a 5% to 10% chance of a Litecoin meta happening.
At this point, I'm at, I don't know, 60% that we will have a specific Litecoin meta that people will all be talking about.
And just disclaimer, in a way, we're shilling our own bags here because we're building LitVM, which will use Polygon Ag Layer
and will use Bitcoin OS's ZK proof-of-work technology, UTXO technology,
to build a layer, too, on Litecoin that's being endorsed by, you know,
the Foundation and Charlie Lee and Polygon and et cetera.
But we have noticed, so we're a bit in the, we're drinking
the Kool-Aid and we're in the, in the weeds there seeing like between, I think it's a combination
of things between the intern who took over the Litecoin account, like call it, um, I don't know,
nine months ago, that, that account just started getting really exciting and fun and lots of people engaging with it.
And then Litecoin Summit just happened.
Now you have multiple Litecoin ETFs coming.
You have our LitVM coming.
Bitcoin Computer is now doing Litecoin Computer after our announcement.
The drive chain creators or the white paper and proposal people from Bitcoin are now doing a Litecoin drive chain thing.
Armor Solutions is doing some dev stuff.
There's like all of a sudden all these people are talking about Litecoin.
You know, Altcoin Daily tweeted out in caps Litecoin the other day.
Cryptolark was posting charts saying he's bullish on Litecoin.
All of a sudden, I don't know if I'm getting in an echo chamber or something, but all of
a sudden I'm seeing all this stuff happening.
You know, Luxfolio with their Litecoin reserve strategy, like basically a micro strategy
for Litecoin.
And there's just like all this crazy stuff happening.
So I think there's going to be a Litecoin meta like we saw with Bitcoin and like, you
know, ecosystem DeFi Lile twos that kind of stuff
definitely definitely going to happen this season but if you don't want to and polygon
polygon plugs it in plugs litecoin into all of ethereum which is pretty cool but yeah go ahead
no no just just uh yeah i agree with you yeah definitely Yeah, definitely. Let's go to Joel.
Yeah, I was going to say something about the ETH stuff because I do have to leave in like five minutes.
So I'm just going to get my little swan song, get out of there.
But also, I guess it might be fun to chime in on the Litecoin thing too.
Ethereum, I was relatively bearish on Ethereum up until recently
because basically the heavy l2 scaling roadmap
ended up sort of creating the solana monster where it's like well we can't use this chain so let's
use other chains and one of the other chains the the top other chain ended up being a something
that's not called an l2 but acts acts as an L2. So basically sold users
and customers off to Solana. And I think that the bullish case for Ethereum is the, the pivot,
right? The, what we have seen some, um, improvements of the L1 scaling, the, was at the risk five vm stuff the actual uh we'll see if the eth first eth for eth first kind of
roadmap uh is kind of actually coming back if it is then i would be more bullish on eth um whereas
before not necessarily as much um and the the thing about i like i have no for a long time like as in up until 2022 or so maybe i didn't really have
very much bullish sentiment on litecoin but then a couple things i noticed will be first of all
the actual like putting transactions on chain that are for real payments according to real
sources is something you just can't deny that everyone needs to be doing and almost no one is doing except litecoin so that's a big thing that made that was a turnaround but
also like the the litecoin in bitcoin shadow thing i think was a big detriment for a while
where just like well let's be a test that for bitcoin but let literally all the money flow to
bitcoin and all the users flow to get Bitcoin.
We were happy to be second fiddle.
And now like MWeb was the first thing that kind of did something different as far as,
well, this isn't on Bitcoin.
We don't want it on Bitcoin necessarily.
This is for us.
This will work for us and we will actually get users and innovate and build something
actually unique.
I mean, Mimblewimble itself isn't unique, but Mweb is. And then with some of these other things like,
again, LitVM and drive chains, yes, this kind of stuff has been talked about and proposed for
Bitcoin, but rather than let's test it on Litecoin, so Bitcoiners feel safe using it,
it's more like, no, this is going here.
We're using it.
I don't want to say screw Bitcoin, but kind of like, yeah, screw Bitcoin.
We're kind of doing that.
And I think that, you know, I guess I would say I'm cautiously optimistic based on a lot of those developments that Litecoin is actually going to focus on growing and innovating and
getting users, which every project needs to do
and i guess i like how i'm seeing so far so bullish on litecoin
yeah i love your sentiment and uh really good takes um on on all of it
rock do you have anything you want to throw in no No, I'm just like, the payment stuff is crazy.
To be honest, I actually, until the last probably nine months or so, since we've been more deeply exploring with LitVM, just so everyone understands.
So I'm the CEO of Lunar Digital Assets.
We're a venture studio.
We incubate projects, right?
So we incubated Polygon and QuickSwap, et cetera.
And so now we're
incubating LitVM. And also, this is the first time I'm being an actual co-founder in like,
I don't know, five or six years since I co-founded QuickSwap. So Aztec and I are actually co-founding
LitVM along with some others. And yeah, so once we started diving in more into Litecoin,
which I've been a Litecoin holder since like 2016.
My parents are Litecoin holders, etc.
Or at least my mom.
I know my mom is.
I don't know if my dad still is.
But anyways, diving into it, looking at it more, it's crazy to see in terms of payments on some payment sites and some payment platforms and point of sale and stuff. Litecoin has
more payments than Bitcoin, which is
mind-boggling to me.
Yeah,
pretty wild. It's
massively used in payments.
Definitely.
I don't know.
Bitcoin has stopped
being used as payment, like as a specifically payment
chain in a very long while.
I think like the heyday of payments when they were still trying to push like Bitcoin as
a payment layer was when Lightning Network was active, which was like six to seven years ago uh because nobody
nobody loves that anymore like uh we actually had a space two days ago with joelle and it was
uh dedicated to bitcoin and we kind of discussed the fact that um nobody really likes paying with Bitcoin unless specifically directed to,
because it is very slow.
It is a behemoth.
Like right now, the only thing that like we could use Bitcoin for is an asset class for
investments and not much else honestly because even lightning network which
was more or less fast and easy to use and not super pricey uh it wasn't being used by like
anyone aside from some geeks on twitter i think
yeah it's a good point because that's bitcoin and i don't know i don't know what rock's gonna
say because rock might be offended at this point that we're just talking about bitcoin in this way
but yeah i i not no not at all i i think this is kind of the natural no this was like during the
block size wars we all kind of agreed or the people the the side that end up kind of
winning the block size wars the the majority of the public in my opinion uh agreed that using
payments on bitcoin's l1 just wasn't the the way it was gonna wasn't the the proper like way to focus, I suppose. And that, you know.
It's going to become more of a store of value.
I mean, in many ways.
Yeah.
Taking off.
I mean, in many ways, store of value is a much larger,
to me, a much larger value proposition
or addressable market than payments.
But payments is still massive.
But if you're good, if you would have
to choose one, which I think a lot of people think you don't have to choose, I think in the case,
in the, in the like nuanced situation Bitcoin is in because of the nature of the L1 and scaling
and all this, I think that choice kind of did need to be made. Or at least the choice was don't change anything, just leave it as is.
And the market is kind of deciding it once store value is how I look at it.
But that's okay.
There's others like Litecoin and Dash and Polygon, et cetera, that it on payments. Yeah, that can do payments and Bitcoin can, you know, just be the thing that countries and banks and, you know, high net worth individuals and corporations store their value in.
I'm happy with that.
I'm okay with that.
And I do think that, like, through innovations over time, as Lightning Network continues to be developed and it's still
very actively being developed. And then other technologies like ZK rollups on top of Bitcoin,
et cetera, and all kinds of, there's so many different things, right? BitVM and there's like
a million different ways you can potentially build payments on Bitcoin,
just not on the L1.
That'll never happen.
Like we know that won't happen.
That's not, we're not trying to do that anymore.
No one is really trying to do that.
So I think someday some payments will come to Bitcoin,
but it'll be through other like means, other technological innovations on top of Bitcoin.
But for now, you know, others will win payments, and maybe forever.
Who knows?
Maybe Bitcoin will always just be a store of value.
I think there's a decent chance of that, actually.
Definitely.
But in the meantime, there's people that are teams and projects that are really just taking over the payment space.
Maybe we should jump into value extractors because, I mean, we have people to talk about it here today.
And I'm interested to see where this goes.
I'm hesitant because this could get spicy.
But, you know, that's what we get.
That's what we do here.
So, Jared, do you want to piggyback off something Rock said before we dive in?
Yeah, I just wanted to say that Bitcoin had that big debate because people were still not sure what it was.
You can use it for payments, right?
Just like how you can use gold for payments.
But eventually it settled as a store of value.
It became hard money.
I don't want to spend my Bitcoin.
I want to hold it because I believe it's going to go parabolic over the long term.
I'm willing to spend the lower value tokens like stable coins
that will lose value over time uh or like low
conviction tokens that i have in my bag i'm willing to spend those but not not those uh hard money
like like bitcoin is becoming and becoming even more so and we're seeing ethereum uh starting to
emerge as as a kind of hard money as well.
Although that narrative is not new,
it was ultrasound money last cycle and we sort of forgotten that
and abandoned it for meme coin money.
And now it's coming back,
which is beautiful to see.
Yeah, I just wanted to add that
hard money and soft money difference.
What you said is this is called Gresham's Law or Gresham's Law has like more pieces to it.
But basically what you're saying is when I'm spending stuff, I want to spend the thing that I think will not last as long or kind of a hot potato or it's just not as valuable to me.
You said like lower value kind of risky altcoins or stuff like that.
Like for me, if I ever have stable coins in my wallets and I have to make payments,
I always spend the stable coins before I spend my Bitcoin, ETH, pole, whatever, right?
Because those to me are like, you know, losing value over time.
value over time why would I want to hold the thing that's losing value and that's
Why would I want to hold the thing that's losing value?
essentially like a big part of Gresham's laws that bad is it bad money I always
get this it's like bad money drives out good so basically what it is saying but
that I was can I actually misinterpreted the the technical meaning of that for a long time what what it means
is that if you have okay like when governments first started debasing currencies and you had
like let's say you had silver coins and then they start putting a little bit of copper in the in the
new coins that they meant and so the public if you know this you go well okay that's obviously a
less valuable coin i'm going to spend those
copper diluted coins. I'm going to hold the real silver, the real gold. And so over time,
you actually push the bad money or you push the good money out of circulation because people are
transacting. They're trying to hand each other the hot potato. They're trying to hand each other
the thing that goes down in value and they're holding, they're hoarding the thing that goes up
in value. And so what that does is it actually, in a weird way, makes hard money, not currency.
It's like inversely almost proportional to currency. Now now i think i don't think that's like a hard
rule that is like always good money can't be a currency i don't think that but uh it's just like
an interesting concept and i and i think that that in bitcoin's case not trying to hate or anything, but it's also, it's hard money and it's also hard to spend. Like I can spend other, other currencies easier. So there's got to be a law there as well.
But yeah, let's jump, let's jump into this topic. So value extractors in web three.
in web 3 what does extraction actually mean in crypto is it just everyone trying to milk everyone
else what do you guys think guys so here um on the aggregated all you have to do you just jump in
we like a free-flowing dynamic conversation you don't have to raise your hand just jump in it's
like we're all around a big
table what's what's your guys's thoughts on value extraction i think i mean i have a pretty strong
opinion on this where it's value extraction is kind of simple where it's you come to crypto
you take money and then you trade it for call it excluding stable coins but like you cash out and
you convert it back to stables,
right?
So someone that comes in says,
Ooh,
I have this really good product.
I'm going to raise all of these funds.
Let's say they ICO with soul or Ethereum or whatever,
and people send them all of these native assets on chain,
and then they just convert it to a stable coin and then leave the ecosystem
forever.
And then basically what they did was they just made people within crypto poor.
Essentially, like they took their money, they ran,
and then now their value is somewhere else
wherever that person chose to spend their money.
And like, that's really what value extraction is to me.
It's not, they're not trying to play the crypto game.
They don't believe in the technology.
They don't want a trustless, permissionless future.
They just want to get rich
and basically fuck everyone else
that, like, is playing.
Yeah, that's a good take.
Anyone else want to piggyback off that?
Sounds like this bullshit.
Oh, you gotta give him that hook.
And spit all that stuff.
Yeah.
Was this from this call?
This person.
Exactly what Timmy described.
That was definitely a value extractor there.
Right?
That was a lot of extraction.
But she was sleeping though, guys.
She didn't even know.
The best value extractors always spit on that thing.
Yeah, but I think when you go into a, I don't care what it is.
If you don't know and you're going into something, then, you know, it doesn't make it any better than somebody that does know.
You know, if they know what they're doing, yes, that's bad.
But if you go in and you don't know,
you need to educate yourself in whatever business you're in,
whatever you're doing.
It's no different than any other business life.
business life you have people that come into your life um and take value um so i mean that it
You have people that come into your life and take value.
whether she knew or didn't know she still did take value from the space yeah i think i think you're
right oh thanks yeah i think you're right i i just i honestly i didn't dive too deep into that
whole situation but i from my take it seemed like she kind of got used
in the same way and and people probably disagree with this but I think uh maybe I'm saying this
wrong but I think Malay got taken advantage of as well by it was wasn't it Malay like that he was
part of some coin and got they extracted a bunch of value as well and so i i
don't know i don't i do his sister i think somebody fooled his sister into um kind of uh you know
placing it uh with melee and then melee kind of didn't know what he was promoting and then and
that's i think what happened and it was the kid the kid that he he fooled the sister he fooled his sister by giving her money and also doing
yeah yeah what's up i mean look going back so like huck to a girl i i see your point about like
she should know better but let's be real if you're not in this industry and someone comes to you and says
look here look at our wallets we've got hundreds of millions of dollars because the people that
did that with her were these were regular cabal people they were making tons of money on solana
doing this stuff already right and all they have to do is cherry pick a bunch of coins that did
very well that they launched show them the show her the evidence be good
salesman and convince her that this is going to be great uh and and who knows how much she knew
or didn't know maybe she knew that a lot of these dump maybe she didn't i don't know that i'm not
like you know i'm not the jury here i'm just saying that i won't i disagree that if she was
ignorant or just didn't understand this stuff, because like we're in this space.
I've been in space 10 years. I spent tens of thousands of hours. Right.
And I even I don't fully understand all the situations of the space.
But if she didn't know, I don't think it's as bad as if she did know and just, you know, went along with it.
Now, Millay, I'm not going to give him as much as I love Millay.
I started the show talking about how much I love Millaye i'm not giving him as much of an excuse he's a fucking president
and he's a smart guy he's he teaches economics and he to some extent understands crypto or bitcoin
at least we've heard him talk about very briefly but uh i'm giving him less of a pass he should
have done his due diligence before putting his name on something like that. But dang, he's running a country, man.
Yeah, he's busy.
He probably looked at the pitch deck.
Yeah, no, go jump in.
I've done quite a lot of research.
Oh, sorry, sorry, Astrid.
No, no, Pauline.
I've done quite a lot of research on the hug to a girl situation,
because I am extremely online.
I am fascinated
by pop culture and I have been in crypto for like eight years now.
And from what I was able to gather, like I read a lot of articles and a lot of like
independent journalism on it, she didn't know because again like she didn't even have any social media accounts before
the talk to what thing happened
and uh
yeah i think what happened was like her podcast started first they
flew her to los angeles and
she started appearing on media i think she was even like
on a bit with donald trump and she was becoming like this sort of like right-wing icon
so I think people from um might have like might have even been people from pom.fun they approached
her and they were like yo want to make even more money than you're making right now and she was
like yeah sure why not and uh yeah this is what it's all led to. And the most
fascinating thing to me that came out of this whole Hawk to a
meme coin situation was that she didn't even like lose anything
reputation wise, like her podcast is so long the talk to one one.
It still has decent listen like
listenership uh she's still getting brand deals so i think she was like talk about this on her
podcast get away with it and walk away scot-free i don't think i don't think uh she's ever brought
it up um i don't even think she was super involved with
the creation and promotion
of the meme coin. She was just promised.
They just wanted to
offer her to use her
face in the promotion,
maybe get a few
social media posts
that were probably agreed upon
with her management team and things.
So I don't even think she quite understands
what happened with regard to the meme coin.
So yeah, she's still doing a podcast.
She's doing pretty well from what I've seen.
That's interesting.
And these kinds of deals do happen.
Like you even see like the Donald Trump cards on Polygon, you know they just
the deal that uses likeness and I don't
I don't even know how much
he knows about it
I know he does but like you know
how deep does it go I don't know
Darcy, you don't have to
you said Trump?
I don't know that Trump legally
is allowed to know about it
I think all of his business dealings have to go through either a trust or his family.
Now, does he know about it?
Is he talking to his sons about it?
Who knows?
But it's like they're at the beach, no phones around.
Is he like, hey, so what's going on with this?
But technically, legally, he's not allowed to hit to ask about any
I think any of their business dealings as a president
It has to go through his like family or trusts or whoever he's put in charge of his kind of business empire, I suppose
I've written an article recently about the like Trump dinner
And it turned out that like Trump Trump was doing a little speech there, he was talking
about how we're going to make America great again from his speech.
It didn't really sound like he was fully aware what he was supposed to be talking about and
what the entire Mean Coin thing was supposed to be, which is also very fascinating.
I'm sorry, Darcy, go on.
Oh, sorry. I was trying to get it. No, I just, if my mother was in the space,
she's probably smacked me because from the South, it's like, I don't want to interrupt anybody.
anybody.
Just throw an elbow in.
Oh, okay.
Well, if you're cool with that, I've got three brothers, so I can elbow all day long.
Well, I just want to say I've been listening to everything, what everybody's been saying,
and I really love it, but what everybody's opinions is and thank
you for having me here I really appreciate everybody in the space today
but to me you know talking about you know all the people that you know I've
come in and out especially other celebrities that I'm not going to
mention their names but to me it's just not about the money. It's about, you know, your legacy.
You know, I feel like that Hak Tui girl, getting back to that, I don't think she really, you know, cared about her name.
She didn't. Obviously, she did not care about, you know, her legacy.
And, you know, I don't like to call other celebrities out, but, you know, a lot of people have gotten into the space and couldn't last
in here, you know, and I've been in here building since 2017 with, you know, my, you know,
Star Dogs project and adding utilities, you know, because, you know, to me, it's about building
and creating a business. And that's what my brand and what I preach every time, you know,
we're in our spaces on Saturdays. I always talk about that. To me, you know, what you build
and your reputation is everything. What you bring in terms of value, that's to me what is the most
important because, you know, my grandfather always says there's no luggage racks in a hearse and I believe that because your your name is
you know everything and you know if there's brand dilution it's it's in the
worst it's rep it's gonna ruin everything because you know you've got
to have people need to see what you're doing in the space and they need to
see that you know you're giving advice mentorship you know what are the opportunities what's going
on you know to me a value extractor is is you know can be you know one or two things but you
know you need to protect you know your energy protect your
empire things that you're building and you know one thing that I've just noticed is that people
come in here and they they don't care about other people and they just kind of you know I've seen
projects come and go and they just want to like uh you know, take, take, take. And they're like, hey, what's in it for me?
And, you know, the people taking, the value is they're hurting the community for the future of
mass adoption. And so my thing is, is that I just believe that, you know, when you have people that
come in here like this Haktui girl, I mean, let's really, I mean, think about it.
What is that representing?
That's just, you know, like what was said earlier.
It's, I mean, she's trying to do it for a quick buck. And that's what I see people sometimes do.
Oh, let me put this project up.
Let me not really think about it.
It's kind of like putting up a foundation for a house and not really having a good foundation.
You're just, you know, don't care. You know, the wind could come along and just knock it out. So, you know, when you're building
in a space, it's the people that have been in here that are building, that care about their community
and want to, you know, take care of their investors.
And that, to me, is the most important thing because in this day and age,
we need people that care about people,
but that also are making things a business.
And anyway, that's all I had to say.
I love it.
I love that.
I fully resonate with that.
I think paying things forward is a great way to start and building and providing a lot of value and utility
and doing due diligence to make sure that when you're building, you know, you're building with
the right people and you're building something that's going to be solid. Yeah, I love all of
that, Darcy. Well, I mean, you understand. I mean, everybody in here, you know, if you don't have a right people and you're building something that's going to be solid yeah i love all of that darcy
so well i mean and you you understand i mean everybody in here you know if you don't have a
good core team you're nothing i mean think about the nfl teams that you know do the best i mean
they've got the best offensive and defensive uh you know teams that play with them and that's the
one thing you know because my dad was a professional
you know football coach so usually when I'm in with my marketing teams or you know when we're
having our meetings I always do everything like you know sports I do a sports theme and I'm like
you know this is what we got to think about there's no I in team and that's the thing you
you've really got to you've really got to go what am I building here? But if you're going to be a leader and you're going to lead a community, you can't be scared either.
at the forefront in the future and you know I'm always thinking about okay what
do we need to do how can we make everybody happy I'm looking to the
future and you also have to be able to pivot and you know my big thing is
diversify diversify that's why like with our and if our NFT project it's not some
just mean coin and I and I don't get that i mean listen i i understand
you know listen there's some cool art out there that i saw i was like oh yeah
but to me it's like does anybody know about the pet rock do y'all remember that
yeah it's still one of the co-hosts that That's what Cindy calls me, her pet rock.
Her pet rock.
Well, you know, see, there you go.
You know, the thing is, is we've got to look at it as the pet rock.
You know, that was a fad.
It was a fad.
We've all seen fads.
We've all had those bad haircuts. We've all had clothes that were like, what the hell is still in the closet?
And you're like, oh, my God, I can't believe it was a fad.
And so, you know, but at the same time you need to go, what is the core?
And I always give these analogies, but you got to think like, what's your, what's the core in your closet?
It's the one that you always go back to.
It's the one that, you know, it's like that suit that you're, or that, you know, women up here know, like, you know, that black skirt or some, that cute black cocktail dress.
It's the same thing with anything you do, you have to have a core foundation. And I just think that, you know,
in business, people don't realize that behind like every PFP in here, there's a human body.
And that's what I've seen a lot of business people and, and other celebrities. Like I was just,
you know, at a movie premiere, you know, last night and,
you know, talking to producers and, you know, talking to other people in the business. And
it's like, they don't build these core foundations and they don't take care of the people on their
teams. And, you know, people then feel devalued and there is there. Okay. This is a perfect analogy
right now about what I'm going to tell y'all. Okay.
So I don't know if anybody in here, I mean, I'm sure people have Netflix, correct?
In here or on the speaker panel.
Okay.
How many people have heard the Bridger about Bridgerton on here?
Okay.
So I see a bunch of thumbs up and stuff.
So Bridgerton is actually, you know, like one of the number one shows on,
on Netflix. Well, Shonda Rhimes, she's huge. She's like a huge producer, huge writer. I mean,
the list of what Shonda has done in terms of writing is, is incredible. So she's, she's working
alongside like Disney and was, you know was doing stuff for them.
And then her sister came in town, right?
Now, you've got to think, she's made them tons of money with all the shows that she's done with Disney.
And they were negotiating her contract at that time.
And so, you've got to think that she's probably made them I mean I
did I'd probably say hundreds of millions of dollars hundreds of
millions and so her sister comes in town to visit her and she's like hey you know
my sister's in town and we want to go to we want to go to Disneyland and you know
I can I just want to get her some tickets to go to Disneyland. And then we have,
you know, a deal. And they were like, no, we're not going to get your sister tickets.
And she basically gave them, you know, at that point, she's like, she gave him the finger
and she's like, all right, see ya. Bye. And so, I mean, she basically then, um, uh,
I mean, she basically then went to Netflix.
And now, you know, Netflix is like, hey, you can have free reign.
You can do whatever you want.
We'll, you know, pay you whatever you want, you know.
And she's making hundreds of millions of dollars for them now.
And, you know, and for herself.
So the bottom line is that because they they did not I mean that's perfect on
value extractors I mean they did not see her um worth they did not treat her well and because of
it I mean they lost I mean they're basically watching all her shows on Netflix and that's
the the point I'm trying to make is that you, you've got to value everybody on your team and know their worth.
And it's the same thing in the community.
Like I see people in here that are in the space like we have.
There's a person, Corey, I see you in here.
I mean, we we have people in communities.
They come in every Saturday.
We've been in.
I mean, every single we're like the postman or postman and women. Every Saturday, 3 p.m. PST, we are always for, you know, about three and a half to four years. We do not miss one Saturday, even on holidays. And we are in there every single Saturday.
in there every single Saturday and we love our community there's people that
have had you know situations where someone's died or this or you know
they're having a hard time and you know we'll help them out financially or we'll
do something for them or send them a package I mean we care and it's just
wait you've got a huge business you've got to care about these people because they're the ones that are going to help you rise up.
And I mean, the whole Shonda story why I told it is because tickets.
Can you imagine right now you lose one of your biggest moneymakers of all time just over a pair of Disney tickets?
all time just over a pair of Disney tickets. It's ridiculous. And so, you know, that's,
It's ridiculous.
that's the whole point is that, you know, people need to think more about, uh, legacy
and about building a business and the people that are around then, um, you know, the short
term goal. That's, that's all. Yeah. I love it. We, Brock and I fully align with this and this,
this is why people like us survive for so long.
You were talking about being around for a long time.
Brock and I have been in the space for a long time because we have these same
values and we think and build for the longterm.
We do what's right in the space, you know, community first, all of that.
So yeah, fully agree.
I love that.
I love that.
That just shows me how amazing you guys are.
That's awesome.
Yeah, much love and much love back to you.
Props to you.
I love your story.
And we've had a lot of really great points here,
you know, Pauline and Jared earlier, some interesting takes here.
I want to dive into, for some people that might be newer, maybe, you know, where is the value extraction happening right now?
And how can people be cautious I think from Dorothy's story you know you you can probably
tell that when you're looking into a project you know that that there's uh or um you know whatever
type of loop strategy or whatever it is you're looking at, where there's red flags.
But yeah, what do you guys think?
Jared, do you want to jump in?
I think you had some alpha.
Also, NerdGirl, I'd love to, Nicole,
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this as well.
I think for the past one year,
all this value extraction was happening on meme coins.
Celebrity meme coins especially.
You see celebrities coming in, pumping that coin, and then immediately rugging afterwards, extracting millions.
And that money disappears completely.
that money disappears completely.
And you have cabals using infrastructure
like pump fund to extract from people
and selling them a dream.
Like, oh yeah, you can turn $1 into $100,000.
When if you actually look at the statistics
on pump fund itself,
like what?
Less than how many percent i can't remember
exactly but a very small at some point it was it was like below one percent i think we're in profit
over a period of time yeah that's also i don't know i don't know if that's like a cherry number
or what that's also because 99 of the wallets are being used by sniper bot systems
too so there's a lot more people making money than the one percent that they're saying there are
because it's just using wallets that basically were creating volume and a lot of those would
like buy and sell for three uh percent lower so definitely like a project like pump fund did
and people did use it but it wasn't really as bad as people make it out to
because i just personally know people like i mean lots of people more than i can count on my hands
and feet that make money from from that ecosystem and they're not the big extractors themselves and
so i think i think people may have jumped too quick i mean we don't know what pump is going
to do with all that money um they could be bringing it all back to the ecosystem.
We just don't know.
I mean,
I'm not like a huge pump supporter.
Right.
That's my,
I'm not betting on that personally,
but they're going to give it all back.
I mean,
they just announced like a huge buyback of their token that they're going to
do that.
I think was like literally two thirds of the cash that people said they
extracted.
Yeah.
You are money.
What was it?
Your money or was it a,
and again,
I'm not supporting them,
but was it a fee that people paid?
It was a fee that people paid.
You know,
it's like we get mad at businesses for making money in web three.
Like we get mad about it.
And so I just,
and again,
I'm not condoning all the other stuff that's bad
about pump fun, but when you take it back a level, it's like, if a company makes something
that makes a half a percent on all this activity, we get mad about it, but yet we try and make
businesses that do the same thing. So I just, I just think it's really interesting that, you know,
and like the whole mean point meta, it's like people wanted it if people like they
built a product people want it i i'm gonna push back to on that though because i think there's a
very clear distinction between pump fun and like what i'll call the shitter launchers uh versus
other real product being built in web 3 and that is uh longevity and like the ability to iterate the game over a long period of
time in a way that consistently adds value uh versus um zero value or in the case of pump vomit
it was literally a net negative because people went to gamble and they paid swap fees meaning
like there was no new money being created no no new efficiencies, no new anything.
Apart from maybe you could say PumpFun made it easier to launch a token.
So maybe there's a little bit of value in people just being able to bootstrap right away.
But I would argue that we have way, way better product out there right now as far as like bonding curves and like real value to investors and across the ecosystem.
But if you can't play the game forever, then it's extracting value.
That's what we're building at Vtopia. So I'm not going to shill that because that's not why I'm
here, but I agree with you. But I'm saying you can always do something better. And that's like,
just go check out Vtopia just launched a new launchpad platform. It exactly does that. It
gives most of the bonding fee curve, bonding curve fees and the LP fees back to the token
creators and stuff like that. But I agree with it. But I think the narrative is that
we throw out these businesses, even though we have in real life businesses that do the same thing.
We have casinos and like casinos get built all over the place. Like what's the difference?
Like we don't get mad that a casino operates and provides that value to people,
but because someone came to it first and made a bunch of money from it,
we're like mad that they took that money out of Solana.
I just think it's argue that the casino is personally,
like I can't speak for other people,
but I would argue that casinos are also value extraction.
And now I think it's different if you have willing people willing to have value extracted from them and call it entertainment or whatever.
Like there could be some value derived there.
But I think there's I mean, when if a casino went up in a call it like a affluent well to do area, you bet that there would be a whole bunch of people petitioning to not bring the
casino to them, because there's something that they fundamentally don't like about it. So I think
they're just different. Yeah, they don't they don't like they don't like what goes with it,
right? They don't like the drugs, the prostitution, all that kind of stuff. But like a lot of wealthy
people go to casinos, and they don't mind losing their money because they know they know what the
they know what the game is, right?
Like they don't, they're not playing 21.
And then there's like literally no Kings and Aces in the deck that can get drawn, right?
And so I think it's the, it's the, it's the trend.
That kind of, that's the sad thing is, and I actually agree with you.
I, look, I am not a meme coin.
Like I like community meme coins.
I like, you know know fun meme coins where we
can gather around and do stuff but we're just not not blaming pump fun for this they created a great
product with great product market fit and they made a ton of money and people voluntarily used
it i i agree with you on that but just that whole like environment of of okay so one of the different system play play on this it was the rigged system
to where people didn't know what was actually happening and that's the crypto problem right
like you don't know that these 20 wallets were all the same person unless you're uh you know in
zach xbt or you know you're doing all this stuff like and that's where people get mad because like
this system is rigged because i don't have the money to pump my own token, or I get on a token
looking at, you know, a TA analysis. And I think the chart's going to go this way,
but the ball behind it is like, well, we're even better chart technicians and we're going to make
the chart look exactly how you want it to look. So again, like, is the problem, the technology
and the experience? No, the problem is that it's not an evil.
It's not a level playing field.
And that's what people really get mad about.
And so I'd love.
Oh, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
No, I'm good.
I'm good.
I was ranting a little bit too much anyway.
I love what you had to say.
I absolutely agree.
I mean, someone who jumps into projects purely to take and not build, they ride the hype, they drain the momentum, and then they leave the communities in the dust the moment they have their personal profit.
You know, I call them, I personally call them energy vampires with digital wallets.
You know, Web3 is about empowerment, innovation, and like unity.
Web3 is about empowerment, innovation, and unity.
So if you're not contributing, whether through creation, education, or some genuine engagement,
you're just making noise.
And unfortunately, it's like the drug trade in the Middle East, right?
I read a stat that it was like, we tried to solve a drug problem in the Middle East
that was generating $ billion dollars of revenue for
the people making and selling the drugs and we put a 400 million dollar budget behind it well do you
think people are going to jump to get rid of a 40 billion no so like same thing in web 3 we can say
about all those other things but if people can make if if a kid in their basement can run a
bot sniping machine and make 10 grand a day extracting from people, how are you going to convince them not to do it when the other opportunity is to try and go get funding or make a big project that will be very hard to get traction or go work at McDonald's?
That's the opportunity.
You can't fault people for wanting to make money above where they're kind of stationed in life or their access to networks.
And people are using it voluntarily, just like casinos.
Right.
But you have to think of the long term.
That's the thing that you can't think of short term because you've got to think of longevity in anything.
I mean, you know, I know people.
Okay, let's just let's break it down into an analogy
of like a car salesperson. There's a car salesman, you know, I have, I have a friend that, you know,
he's an amazing car salesman and, but yet he's a one-off. It's like, he's so hard to sell a car,
but nobody wants to come back to him. Then I have another friend who, you know, he started out to
where now he owns, you know, a Ford dealership where now he owns, you know, a Ford dealership.
And he basically, you know, started out as somebody that people like to come to and they trust.
So you've got to think of your projects in terms of that and even any business that you build.
But you've got to think of, you know, I have some very good friends that are doctors and they're like, they just tell me they're like, think about big pharma for that matter. I mean, if everybody got well, then they can't treat you
anymore. So a lot of times, you know, you got to think in terms of, I mean, with everything,
does that make sense? No, it totally does. I mean, that's, that's, it's hard to, it's hard to,
it's hard to convince someone not to make money when there's an easy way to make money right in front of them.
It's very hard to do that.
Real quick, I want to add also, hold on.
One thing to also say is there's also value in the value extractors because there's an educational aspect that comes from that also. You look at those people who come in, I guarantee probably 90% of the people
that are in here have dealt with those projects that either they didn't know how to run their
business, they didn't care about the people, they've been rugged, whatever. It comes with
the space. But what did we all get out of it? We gained a ton of knowledge by learning through that.
Dylan, it's like having a bad boyfriend or being in a bad relationship.
You're like, yeah, I'm not going to do that again.
But still, yeah, there is a learning curve.
I agree.
But at the same time, you know, I mean, do you want to, you're going to, you're going
to tell people, I mean, and that's what I think we, as, as a community, what people
don't realize is that we have to stick together.
And, and also i it's it's
it's the same thing with the entertainment business harvey weinstein i can't tell you how many like
huge other a-listers that they base that they they took that he took down that he did horrible
things to but nobody said anything because they didn't wanna be,
they didn't wanna like, do anything wrong
or shake the, what do you call it?
Shake the tree or whatever.
And it's the same thing with web three, I see it.
People don't speak up, they don't say,
hey, there's something wrong with this project
or this-
You don't wanna be wrong, right? You don't wanna be the person that says, hey, there's something wrong with this project or this.
You don't want to be wrong, right?
You don't want to be the person that says,
hey, this technology or this calculation isn't really how things should be done.
And then the token price goes up 9,000%.
And people are like, dude, you're a boomer.
You don't know what you're talking about.
And then two months later, it crashes back down.
And then still nobody likes you because they're like, oh, you're the guy that you're the guy that pointed out how shitty we all were.
Yeah.
Or they don't, I don't, or they don't want to dox themselves.
I don't understand.
I've had people come into, you know, our space and go, oh, I went into the space and they wouldn't answer my questions.
And I'm like, what?
Why would you, why? Oh, they got upset when I asked them questions. And I'm like, why would
you do that? To me, that's a red flag. That's like, you know, I mean, we all know we've dated
somebody and you're like, wait a minute, you're not telling me where you live or, you know,
you're not going to tell me about your job. It's the same thing. You're like, what? What the hell is wrong with you?
So it's the same thing, I think, as, you know, any kind of, you know,
leader of a community or a business owner.
You have to be very transparent.
And also, you know, when things, sometimes when the shit hit the fan,
you got to say, hey, listen, we're dealing with this, but we're going to fix it.
And, you know, we have, you know, this
and this happened, but you just have to, I feel like you just have to lead with integrity and
honesty and then people will follow. But at the same time, you know, we've got to understand that
we all need to come together because everybody in here that's listening, and there's quite a few
people listening, everybody in here has a chance to be a billionaire.
I didn't say millionaire.
I said a billionaire.
Because that is how Web3 right now is so small still.
We're only in like 5% or 6%.
Isn't that nuts?
yeah but like i mean guys if i can jump in like one of the one of the things we said there a
minute ago was you know uh basically the value that people gain from being in these situations
and see that's where i kind of had this hard disagreement it's you know similar as you said
it's like having a shitty boyfriend or whatever but it's more like you know you just got robbed
in the street and somebody's telling you hey uh you know you learn from it you know not to go down that alleyway again and it's like well should
should you really get robbed just for going down the wrong alleyway no now i think uh pump fun in
general like yeah it's an extractive platform heavily extractive a lot of other launch pads
appeared which did this you know pretty much the same thing. It is.
What's up?
I've been talking to you forever.
Okay, sorry.
Sorry.
Been in crunch with Imagine AI, a lot of dev work.
But yeah, just to wrap that kind of thought.
Yeah, there's been a lot of launch pads that were built that pretty much got rid
of the extraction, really cool stuff.
But nobody really uses it because the mindshare is all on PompFund.
Now, Bonk has gotten a little bit of that runway now, but they're going to treat it pretty
much the same way.
It tends to be that people tend to talk about how we need to build a better space.
It's not extractive.
But the people who rise to the top tend to be the ones who are extractive.
I wouldn't say to ever sit there and say,
just learn from it and stuff like that.
I've always been one, for better or worse,
to, I guess, pull people up on it,
to actually have that argument.
And God knows a lot of people have come to hate me
as a result of it.
I am that dickhead who will sit there and say, yeah, that's not right.
And even if something does start pumping afterwards, you know, I'll still turn around and say, like, fair enough, it pumped.
And that's awesome.
Really happy that people made money out of it.
But at the same time, the odds, like the RR you took here was just absolutely garbage.
Can I ask you a question?
Yeah.
I'm so sorry.
Go ahead. Why did people get mad at you again why were they
angry at you well you're footing their bags this is a reality nobody wants you to fund their bags
yeah and it doesn't matter how right you are like people don't want you to be right they want you to
be bullish i mean i try to you know have a little bit of a cut in between on it
where I'll have a lot of benefit of the doubt
and stuff like that.
It does take a while for me to get to the point
where I'll actually say, you know, that's really wrong.
And the only time I'm ever very direct on it
is when there's something really wrong in their code base.
Like last cycle, we had a lot of reflective projects
and a lot of them essentially cheated their reflections
to mint the supply rather than reflect the supply and people just weren't aware of the
fact that you know this is increasing the supply you're diluting everyone and all of the new supply
is being minted to the deployer who is dumping it on top of you automatically from a contract
but nobody wanted to hear it because during the summer when all these projects were you know screaming upwards
going to you know 50 to 100 million plus and great wins are made out of it like that would have been
about you know 700 million if you didn't have this extraction built into the smart contract
now at the time nobody wanted to hear it and now you know i get people contacting me saying oh i
wish i listened to you back then and it doesn't really matter because you know they will shit on you at the time because you said something that they didn't
want to hear because you know i'm glad you did see that's my thing i speak i'm very direct i mean
i'm a southern woman at heart but i got three brothers my dad's a coach so it's like i have
no filter when it comes to that but that i'm glad you did do that. And you know what? They can poo poo all day out there. I wouldn't care. I mean,
you know, the thing that you spoke up, people should really like, uh,
look up to you for that. That's a lot of integrity. And for people to do that,
that's, I mean, my, my hat goes off to you because you know,
you've got to be careful. But again, it's,
it's the people that you have on your team because I've seen projects that come to me and say, hey, Darcy, can you help me?
Because I'm really good at what I do when it comes to businesses, you know, helping people with their other businesses and making them great.
And I have done that time and time again. But I have seen people in the space.
They trust the wrong person. People were telling them, don't do it.
wrong person. People were telling them, don't do it. And then, you know, a dev makes like an exit,
you know, strategy to where they're extracting money into, you know, from the smart contract
and all kinds of stuff was going on, you know, that they didn't know about and they're draining,
you know, money behind the scenes financially. And so, you know, people spoke up and if somebody
doesn't listen, you know, then that's on them, but good for you.
I think it also added value to you now because people can now look at you over time have added
value to those people. You've warned them. Now they come back and they trust you where before,
maybe they didn't know you that well. So they didn't have a reason to trust you or not trust you.
But now because of that longevity that you've built and that trust and really looking out
for people, now they go, wow, you know, maybe I should listen to him moving forward.
So you just added value back into the space.
You added value to what you're doing because of your integrity that you carry. And I think, you know, Darcy's
talked about that. A lot of people in here today have talked about, you know, coming from a place
of integrity and you have to build from that place. You know, without that, you've got nothing.
So, you know, when you're looking at how can this benefit the space, how can it benefit
the people within it?
Then you're building for the right reasons.
If you're sitting there and you're just looking at the me
in the whole thing, yeah, you might have a quick run up.
You might have a, you know,
but is it really worth it in the long run?
I've heard Darcy talk about in spaces where
she'll sit there and say, you know,
people around here live all over the place. You know, there and say, you know, people around here live all over the place.
You know, here in L.A., you know, some of these projects rug for, you know, several hundred thousand, maybe a few million.
A few million doesn't go that far in Los Angeles.
It just doesn't.
You couldn't even buy like a box house on Crackville for $100,000.
I mean, you couldn't.
I want to ask the Imagine ai guy question though so what when we talk about value extraction what is the difference
between and again not a supporter of pump fun but i just think they're a great example what is the
difference between a launch pad making fees off of that and a dex or a centralized exchange that makes a fraction of a thing on every trade
and probably doesn't put that money back in the ecosystem. Where are we saying it's value
extraction versus we're creating a pick and shovel business of this gold rush?
Yeah, 100%. And just to finish the thought I was on there and the guys nearly kind of touched on it as well. Like I've been in crypto since, you know, 2013, 2014.
And I found like, and that's developing since that time.
And I found that the people I know who did really, really well, as in, you know, money
that they've made money that doesn't even make sense in numbers anymore, that kind of
thing.
Like those were people who acted decently in the business.
There is more money to be made when you
actually act with that integrity and it's something that you know i've kind of always kind of helped
that's my own mantra that you'll you'll just simply make more money if you're a good actor
for the long term in the space for the short term yes everybody does get blinded by people who do
rogue 100 grand or a million and buy their crack house in LA, stuff like
that, give the life. But yeah, the general extraction from it, what's the difference
between them and a DEX, things like that. So here's actually the truth of it, that when
you go to a CEX or a DEX or anything like that, they're a lot more of a third party.
Now, they still make their fees, they still extract them. And I do actually have big issues
with Uniswap's new fee system particularly as they rolled out on base where
you know they will even basically scrape little bits of you know your 3k liquidity shitcoin and
they'll automatically sell it because you know that's their fee stuff like that now i think that
one of the larger issues that it comes down to with pump fun is that there has been a culture developed around it where it's okay,
not only for the platform to do that,
but also for the people who are just fully utilizing the platform to do that.
Now this went to extremes when they had the webcams on there.
That was so awful.
Yeah,
dude,
the,
that was dark web level shit. the clear net it was it was insane
but like the see when you see uniswap uniswap i wouldn't say are net extractors because of the
sheer amount that they've contributed to the developer ecosystem like in particular like v2
pools yeah that was one thing. So it was still revolutionary.
We have to remember they were also the first one to do V3 pools where essentially you're getting CEX level, you know, liquidity management
and liquidity efficiency just straight from a DEX, which is incredible.
So what I don't agree with their automated fees on, you know, shit coins and things like that,
I don't have an issue with them doing it with, you know, and wrapped bitcoin ethereum stuff like that because they're very liquid the little ones
yeah i think that is quite extractive but overall outside of that you don't think you don't think
they should collect a fee on smaller coins so the fee that they collect um on so it used to be that
when it's a smaller coin they still took their their fee from the Ethereum side or the general wrap token side.
And it was much smaller than it was on base at the moment.
The fee that they're collecting right now is quite high and it's taken directly from that shitcoin liquidity.
What they did beforehand on Ethereum was they had their standard fee,
which was absolutely tiny, but then they had, I think it was a 1% or as a 0.25 or 0.3%.
And additional, they put on top of blue chip pairs.
Now the problem on Ethereum or the problem on base is that...
On blue chip pairs, are you talking about through the front end fee?
So that's what I was about to jump onto, the front end fee.
It used to be a front end fee, and it still is on mainnet and some other networks.
But on base, it goes through directly on the contract itself.
Now, you can muck about with the contract and get rid of that fee.
get rid of that fee but on the actual front end on uh uniswap on a mainnet it's simply not going
to take from your low liquidity shit coin it never will like it doesn't care about it like
the front end fees that they voted to turn on were ones on blue chip pairs like pre-approved pairs
over on base it's just yeah take it from, which is why I'm quite excited for QuickSwap coming to base.
Now, I know there's Aerodrome on there as well, which, you know, that's much less extractive.
But I find that QuickSwap, like, I mean, you do token burns, token buybacks, things like that.
So there's kind of a greater ecosystem incentive to take from it then.
Like, I think we can all get behind the idea of you know if there are fees but they
are being you know mostly re-injected back into an ecosystem and by mostly i mean god 50 percent
like 51 percent would count as mostly in my mind and i think that's what do you see is injecting
i just want you to elaborate on this what do you see is injecting back into the ecosystem because
like they have salaries that have to be paid they have devs that have to be paid they have marketing expenses could i jump in here
so i think the devil's in the details on these things like uh on a literal kind of sense i agree
with you and i'm a libertarian and i i like well i hate casinos and i hate cigarettes and i hate
this pump fund shit i will defend everyone's right to do it and i believe in free market
capitalism and i actually don't think we should like regulate these things away we should let
it play out itself in a free market people will agree people will learn or we will self-regulate
in the industry or we'll build better products or margins will contract over time and consumers
will get a better experience and we see this at all you got
it you know you hit it on the head self-regulation and that's what i was saying can't wait for a quick
swap to arrive on base because that's going to be my name the same thing happened with the internet
you know think about all the the companies over time you know yes is there still um you know
brands and websites and all that stuff that you, would you would say pulled liquidity out of the space or, you know, scared people, you know, from getting involved with the internet way back?
You know, yeah.
Is it always going to be there?
Sure.
But the cream, you know, most of us are sitting there going, you know, we're hoping that the cream rises to the
top, your big businesses are going to build within this space, and add more value than than is taken
out. And we see, you know, that mass adoption happened through through all of that, you know,
I don't think we'll ever see the the scams will ever see the people pulling liquidity out go away you know there's just going
to be more use cases more businesses using blockchain using crypto using you know nft
technology and other aspects of of where tech is going it's going to be more used widely um and so
you're not going to sit there and focus on it you know you can sit there
and say oh yeah banks are are great or banks are i mean look how many times do you know banks get
you know hacked and and scammed i so like i'm so what my original point was is at first i'm playing
the devil's advocate side and i'm i'm defending these things and then i want to explain the other
the nuance of it and like for banks, for example,
I will defend banks to some extent
that there was a time where they were useful.
I would argue they also are...
So generally, on the short term,
value extraction happens in capitalism.
There are bad actors.
In the long term, you have to provide more value than you take out of the system. And that's just how you that's how you make money. You have to provide value. You get a little piece of the value that you provide. And there's all kinds of studies you could go into that, like break down the numbers and show like, like, for example, with Elon, like him, Elon, if you measure out value, there's lots of ways to do it.
Like, you know, the pleasure of driving the cars, the money that you save in gas and the shareholder value and all these things.
Elon makes like less than 1% of the value that he creates.
So in general, in capitalism, you have to create value.
You get a little piece of that value.
That's how you do all that elon companies did all that the 50 000 people that work at tesla do that elon extracts
value from his employees and that's not a bad thing i don't want to get in i don't want to i
don't i don't want to get in i i don't know i don't see this is where i'll disagree
oh come on hold on i just want to about how you hate communism. Let's go.
Hold on.
I just want to get to the original point of what you asked about,
Dex versus PumpFun and this stuff.
But in general, I do not think capitalism is extractive.
You don't make money by extracting.
You make money by providing value.
That's a philosophical, I will argue that for hours,
but we don't need to now because I don't think we need to waste the audience's time so much on that.
Maybe we'll get into it in a bit.
But, okay, on the original question, what is the difference between a DEX or a lending platform that takes fees and offers a service?
You know, generally, there is no difference.
generally there is no difference but the devil is in the details so if you look at you know some
But the devil is in the details.
platforms that charge one percent or two percent and are and are purposely catering to people that
are unsophisticated gamblers with an addiction or people that are desperate and in this bad
situation in life and are hoping that this could change their life but on you know mathematically
it's the wrong decision for them.
So that's one part. And two is, yeah, what do you do with the money? Do you give some back to the
community? How much do you take? How much do you scrape off of the surface of the value that you
provide? And so let's use Quickswap as an example. I'm one of the co-founders of Quickswap, and I've
never taken a single dollar from Quickswap. And I've been working on it for six years. We generated 100 million in revenue in our first
year. I've never taken a dollar. And Quickswap gave 97% of the tokens to the community.
Quickswap did no token sale, no ICO, had no investors. And we had around, I don't know, 30 or 40 million of investors wanting to
come in, Sequoia, Coinbase Ventures, Mark Cuban, et cetera. We ended up deciding not to do the
round. Now, Mark Cuban did invest and bought on the open market because we didn't do the round.
And so in all these ways, we try to give the value back to the community through
either staking rewards from revenue or burning we're now the the first in history uh deflationary decks in the world we're
burning like i don't know darren can give numbers but it's something like one percent of our supply
a month we're burning right now it's insane uh but we gave everything to the community so i i think
the devil is in the details um rock also i think everyone's discussing this from like a mathematical standpoint.
And there is a philosophical component as well, I think, that's not really being brought up.
We should start talking about...
The whole point is this is all subjective.
It's all a person's opinion on whether the group that is adding the value is the same as the amount that's being taken
out. And that's what each person has to decide on which businesses they integrate with or which
ones they work with. You know what I mean? But you could maybe, yeah, kind of, but there are
some things in life that we'll all agree are purely or, you know, majority extractive or whatever,
you know, hackers, right? These are like,
you could argue, Oh, well, code is law. If they can break the contract,
there's no providing to anybody, right? Like a thief is an extractor. They're not,
they're not thieving someone or robbing someone and people are enjoying watching it and like
having fun. You know what I mean? Like, sure. It gets, it gets more murky than that though.
Let's use rent extractors who are backed by government, you know, call it banks, where you have to use a bank or you have to use the dollar.
People that, you know, oh, well, these are businesses, but they have some, you know, artificial moat and they are there to seek, you know, rent seek.
They're there to just scrape off of people over time.
And there are like tons of examples of this in the world.
Generally, that's not what capitalism is to me, but there are lots of cases of that. Typically when the
government gets involved in every business in the United States that has any type of licenses like
that, like the whole, the accounting field, the mental field, there's, there's a ton,
there's a massive amount of it. Everything that you need a license to do is that way.
It purposely, I'm not a big fan of licenses. It makes a bunch of,
but then if you don't have it, you would have every Tom, Dick and Harry performing a surgery
in their backyard. No, you wouldn't, but you, and you could have some level of licensure and you
could have voluntary licensure. You could have, you know, a private entity make a rating system
or make a certification system that doesn't have
to be the government and in many cases they are uh but anyways i i think we have way too much
licensing in the united states i think that's why medical is one of the reasons it's so fucking
expensive i mean that was my career path before i found bitcoin in 2015 was to become a surgeon. And, uh, I spent like 10 years on that. And,
uh, and it's, it's, I think it's too much. I think, um, anyways, like let's use medallions
as, uh, in taxis. Yeah. What was the medallion system? That was an extra, that was a, that was
a, like a moat that was purposely built by the people at the top in the taxis and the government who got a part of it
so what happened we uber had to come around and find a way in some sly or roundabout way in the
words of friedrich hayek to uh circumvent that system and now the medallion system has greatly
been removed i mean like it's they've reduced a lot of the requirements it's not as expensive
because they couldn't compete. Like, so...
You know who lobbies?
You know who lobbies?
Uber's just an extractor?
I mean, Uber's just a bunch of...
No, they provide a value.
No, the drivers do.
Like, why can't they just...
Can I just...
Can we set the stage here?
So, are you...
It sounds like you're anti-capitalism.
I'm not sure.
I love capitalism.
I'm a full-blown...
But you think capitalism is purely extractive
you think that the way people make money is by extracting from them i'm saying the definition
of extractive is very hard to determine because someone is always making money off of someone
else and it's just you're okay if i sell if i grow some oranges if i grow some oranges in my backyard
and i sell them to you i'm extracting your your dollars by... Maybe you're extracting my oranges.
It's a volunteer...
Maybe it's because you're charging me $6
and you should have charged me $5.
Well, did you pay the $6?
Then I should have charged you $6.
Rock.
Let's do this.
Good points on both sides.
I want to hear Pauline's take take just to add another uh another voice yeah thank you aztec i'm sorry guys i i'm like um i think you are both
kind of right in a way like in the way that capitalism is conversive um it extracts value from like from in in a form of
labor from workers and converts it into value which is then distributed to the users of
products that capitalism creates i don't think that it is good or bad it depends on the business practices of the entrepreneur
it is just the reality that we kind of have to live with and pump that fun if we're talking
about it it also kind of provides value like it extracts value, obviously, from people who are trading on it. But it also like
any gambling outlet, it provides dopamine to people who are taking part in the game.
The only problem I think that PumpFun actually has is that they need to kind of be more upfront about what their
platform actually constitutes so like if they were like hey yo this is pumped up
fun we are an online casino which is web3 themed you may win or you may lose you will have fun because there is fun in the URL I guess then
everything would have been fun and dandy aside from the livestream feature where like babies
were beat up dogs were threatened to be killed and some other like purely heinous shit but um my take here is that when we're
talking about capitalism um something is like labor is being converted into value
it's always been like that like you can read any theory in capitalism and like any book that you
might read i don't want to
reference anything right now because you might think my takes are bad. But it's always been
like that. And that's like one of the key tenets of capitalism.
I, you know, just piggybacking on what she says, you know, I agree at its core, capitalism
is about value creation. You know, you create create something meaningful like a product, a service, a solution,
and the market rewards you for it.
So it's supposed to be a merit-based system that encourages innovation
and ownership and opportunity.
But not everyone in capitalism is a creator.
Not everyone in capitalism is a creator, you know, again, some are value extractors.
Again, some are value extractors.
So these people are like entities that kind of manipulate systems to take value without giving anything meaningful in return.
Can you give an example of that?
Like, who would you say is a business that just does not provide any service to anybody else, but they still make money somehow?
Doesn't provide any service to anybody else but they still make money somehow doesn't provide any service to anybody like they just extract like who is literally just extracting
and not because i think the devil is here it's an opinion of what value they're providing
like people hate banks but a lot of people need banks because they're not cryptally they don't
know how to use technology and all this stuff. They just need a place to deposit their paycheck, pay their bills and whatever.
So what's an example of a company that's purely extractive that is not providing a value or service to someone else in exchange for that?
Like, man, I think I get your point.
I really do.
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
Like, so here's kind of, yeah, that's kind of the thing with it.
We could sit here and say that pump fun is extractive and stuff like that.
But if somebody is getting dopamine at the end of the day or any level of entertainment, even if it's essentially true.
What's the word for it? Like rage baiting yourself, as in like you're doing something that you don't even like.
There is still some level of service being provided. Now that's kind of the issue I have
with the nuance of saying extractors, because if you want, yeah, if you want to really get pedantic
about it, you could essentially, like, as you said, you could turn the rock and say, hey, you sold me
orange juice for $6 and I bought it, but I wanted to pay for five like you could yeah very pedantically
make the argument that's extraction but we all know it's not really like the nuance like the
devil is in the details why did you pay six why didn't you because i didn't have another option
you were the only orange producer then then i am providing value like so that is not
if my option is the best option that is the free market rate that is not supporting pump funds. If my option is the best option, that is the free market rate.
That is the market signaling.
I did not mean to kick that back off.
No, no, no, no.
Can I add something real quick to that?
This is better for the world on the whole.
Hold on.
On a whole.
No, hold on.
On the whole, it is better for the world.
It is better for the world for,
and I'm going to give a few examples,
for someone selling something to sell it
for as much as they can get
and for the person buying it
to pay as little as they can pay.
That is the free market in action.
That is a language.
That is a signal.
That is the market telling you
that is a price discovery mechanism. The same thing with an employee is a signal. That is the market telling you what the, that is a price discovery
mechanism. The same thing with an employee and a boss, a boss, and I'm CEO and I have, I don't,
at all of our companies, over a hundred people working for me. And if you ask any of them,
some of them are here. And I, even if you ask them behind closed doors, is Rock a nice boss or not?
I mean, I've never taken a dollar at quick swap and everybody else gets paid. So, uh, I'm like
the 15th highest paid person at lunar digital assets, but I will defend that a CEO's job,
a company's job is to pay as little as they can to get, to create the most value for the consumer.
They can't just pay people arbitrarily large amounts of money because then they can't create
value for the consumer or for the shareholders, which do matter too. So it is a, it is a, it is a CEO or a company or executive's job to pay the
smallest they can pay. And it is the employee's job to try to get as much as they can get.
And if the boss is not paying enough, guess what? You go somewhere else. You go to another company
that will treat you quote unquote, right. If you think you are worth more money, go to the other company.
Don't stay at the company where you're not making enough.
I think everybody should be very flexible and think about that.
Rocky, you're making a point about PumpFun.
PumpFun was the only platform where people could go launch meme coins and get visibility.
If people didn't want to launch there, don't go launch there.
So why do we pull PumpFun? Okay, I agree. I mean, on the principle, I agree.
Hold on, real quick. I want to add on to like the whole thing about the orange. So
the statement was made that that was my only option. Well, it really wasn't your only option.
You could have negotiated. You could have, if he said it's six, you could have come back and said,
you know, I'm only willing to pay five. And and if he says no go find somebody who's willing to you know sell you the
orange for five dollars what if he's the only seller what if he's the only then i should charge
fucking twenty dollars exactly but then you would be but but you're not the only you're not the only
orange buyer you are not the only orange drugs so so are not the only orange buyer. Make your own drugs.
So if I have other people who want to pay $10 for it, why would I sell it to you for five?
Exactly.
Wait a minute.
What about real estate, folks?
If Pump Fund has a person willing to pay one percent to trade a token, why would they lower their fee down or give it back when there's a whole community of people that love it? And I'm not supporting pump fund, but we're basically
if there's competition, what's a good business and what's not.
Of course, the reason is just if there's competition and I agree with their right
to charge whatever they can get. And they, to some extent should, I think if, you know,
there's the phrase, you know, uh, pigs pigs get fat hogs get slaughtered i think in
business you have to think about that so there are lots of times where lunar digital assets as a
company i know i could get a higher rate for or a more token supply from a project we incubate but
i i'm not greedy because i'm trying to build a long-term reputation i'm trying to build you know
i want people to trust us that we're going to do the right thing. That is business, right?
So you want to, you, you got to think about the long-term of it, you know, also.
And I think pump fun, like anything else, like look at Dexas.
Uniswap used to charge high fees too, but, you know, and then they started contracting
as there was more competition and the fees got as low as 0.01, one BIP.
and the fees got as low as 0.01, one BIP.
Actually, at QuickSwap on stablecoins,
we charged like 0.0000001.
And there was a recent study that Darren was talking about
internally at one of our team meetings where,
or we charged, no, sorry, we charged 0.001, I think.
And then, but there's a pool, I think, Darren,
on Ethereum on Uniswap that charges 0.00001.
And you would think, how the hell could that make any money?
But they just took all the volume.
And so this is capitalism.
If someone charges too much, if I'm charging you too much for oranges, guess what?
My neighbor is going to go, shit, I'm going to start growing oranges.
This guy's making a killing.
And now you get a better, now you get a better price.
Exactly.
And so again, that's what the project that I'm helping, we're building a launch pad, and it's launched already.
We did a big live stream on it yesterday, debuting the initial token.
And that's the same thing.
We saw the money that was being generated, and we said we can come out and build something better that gives more back to the community.
And so I agree with everything you're saying.
Like, that's like I'm happy to go through the employee-employer relationship, all that I a hundred percent agree with.
I just think when we determine extraction, it's very subjective because you might think that
someone is making too much money, but it's their job to make money. Like it's literally what they're
being paid to do by other people. And so then it's our job as the ecosystem to say, damn, like you guys were making this
much money and not even providing kind of the best product.
Let's go build something else that does it different.
Exactly.
Now there's an opportunity for someone else to come in and provide more value and take
less of the margin, right?
Yep.
This is the free market at work.
We should encourage this.
Now I would, let me, something we we haven't mentioned and i think we should actually get on to some other
topics because we've been talking about memes forever and the show's only supposed to run
two hours and it's two hours because jared and two cent timmy have their hands up
yeah what uh oh shit what was i just talking about but But okay, let's just go ahead. Jared, what's up?
Yeah, I just wanted to share a story about something besides meme coins that extracted from users of crypto.
I don't know if we're going to...
Yeah, let's see.
Timmy, do you have anything else on meme coins?
And then we can move on because there's a bunch of things I want to talk about. All the extractors, market makers, KOLs, centralized exchanges, launch pads.
There's a bunch of them.
Yeah, not necessarily meme coins, but about kind of what we were talking about where we were saying there's better options.
And call it the market self-regulating.
I think what's really cool is what we're getting now, too we're seeing uh reputation-based platforms to come out
so like there's ethos network which um i love what they're doing and i would say they're not
value extracting at all because they're like literally not even looking to monetize the
platform but you can have decentralized reviews of people where you can say like this person's
value extractor this this person's not this person's trustworthy this person's not um and
to kevin's point about like uh how do you determine like that's for each individual
person to decide well when you let the market decide you take a whole bunch of people and say
more people say this person is trustworthy or everyone says this person is trustworthy versus
a lot of people are saying this person is untrustworthy and like you look at ethos and you go like the most untrustworthy people are like sam bankman freed
and do kwan and all of these people who everyone's like yes we kind of universally agree that they did
extract value and they were bad actors and i think it's cool when you have this free market where
people can build i will say I think a lot of people
probably value their reputation more than money.
And we don't necessarily realize that,
especially in Web3, because it was,
it's an industry where there's so much anonymity
that people like separate their reputation
and it's easier to deal with.
But once you start putting reputation to people,
I think you actually do get a little bit more self-policing, if nothing else.
But I'll let us go on.
And if the government stays out of it, we will build those tools.
If the government comes and holds your hand and tells you what's allowed and not, you handicap the free market from finding solutions itself oh yeah i agree i i'm
just super bullish on like it's coming right now and it's almost like building it without the
government's permission and whatever shakes out shakes out but it is exciting that like
i am thankful for web 3 that people literally can just build things and then you can access it it
just takes time to catch up
to, uh, it's really of that rat race. Yeah. We've been talking about, uh, you know,
self-regulation free markets. There's also a component that we, that we didn't get into that.
We're probably not going to dive into because we're going to change the subject, but you know,
there's a philosophical side of things. And if you don't like, for instance,
gambling, if you're against it, or, you know, like you think it's extractive because you have
this opinion about gambling and, and this side, like how it acts on people's psychological or
traumas or whatever, whatever it may be, you, you can build, uh, other fun freedom technologies
that are more philosophically aligned with what you want in the space. And that's a whole other
way to kind of self-regulate, you know, just go out and build something that isn't gambling.
But anyways, I don't want to dive too deep into the philosophical stuff. Cause that would just, self-regulate you know just go out and build something that isn't gambling but anyways i
don't want to dive too deep into the philosophical stuff because that would just uh open up another
can of worms uh does uh i think jared you were going to tell a story
yeah i was uh i was going to double click on what timmy said about ethos and this social wave, social-fi wave that we're seeing in crypto.
It's famously said that the people in crypto have short memory.
And it's very true because there was this protocol that basically rugged its community.
It took 8 million handprints.
Like people actually had to like scan their hands and send it to the protocol.
It took 8 million of those,
bombed the community for 13 months,
and then in the end,
gave them a very small allocation of airdrop
and then gave influencers who have never posted about them
a huge allocation of airdrop.
And so people were really pissed.
And then they started a Kaido campaign
and everybody started to say nice things about them.
So this is the weird thing about crypto.
People can extract value from you now.
And if tomorrow you give them back value,
they'll be like, hey, you're the best.
And with this social fi technology that we built,
it's not the government, right?
The people in crypto builders, they built their own solution.
So ethos is pretty awesome.
Like I didn't get it when I first started using it.
I downloaded the extension on my browser
and I attend a lot of spaces.
And that was when I discovered holy moly
this ethos thing actually has some use
because a lot of the biggest scammers
they host the biggest spaces
and people are willing to pay
to slash their reputations on ethos
so that these people have like a red tag
around their name around their profile picture
and basically just warns everybody like you this profile is a bad actor whatever they shill to you
do not get involved and i think crypto is healing we have mechanisms now to remember people who have
done bad things yeah 100 and just to kind
of touch on what i was saying even though you know i spoke about how there's a lot of extraction the
space is pumped fun and that you know although i think uniswap contributed massively with their
tech side that they're going a little bit more towards extractive now i'm not saying that anybody
should come in and shut down these spaces i definitely don't want to see anything like that.
When it comes to crypto, I think that you should be 100% free to lose your money any way that you see fit.
The main point that I'm making on it is that there are a lot of actors out there with, you know, a lot of integrity that they build for the long term.
And you can look at that and say, you know, we have established histories of people that are in the industry, you know, years now or a decade and longer, et cetera.
Like similar with us, we were building for about three years now.
We raised 1.6 million from HackVC.
We built out a huge data center, essentially, just to ensure that, you know, we're building product.
We're not looking to, you know, get our quick cash and get out the door or anything.
looking to, you know, get our quick cash and get out the door or anything.
Like the argument I'm making is that when it comes to all of the platforms that are out there,
it's on you and everybody else that when we actually band together and use our brains to say,
you know, this is a better platform, we should use this, promote it, et cetera, et cetera. It's
better for the space. That's how you get through self-regulation in the industry. You're never
going to get rid of people like,
you know, Sam Bankman-Fried or stuff like that. But people, like the industry is mature enough
at this point that people can kind of understand by looking at something and saying, perhaps this
is too good to be true. Or even in the case of pump funds saying, this is shit. Everybody loses
their money. Like, I think that we all have our own responsibility to play in that and it's
the responsibility of ourselves as well to even though it can be very unpopular at times
use your voice about it and actually you know pipe up and say hey i think that is pretty shit
or you know i think that this is doing something they shouldn't be doing like speak up don't be
afraid of essentially getting you know the the backlash that does come with
speaking against somebody's bags and stuff like that that's look in the long run in the long run
we're only going to make the industry stronger by actually having a spine have a bit of backbone
and especially when it comes to builders and stuff like that as well like we build a non-extractive
platform and imagine ai we have a a huge web two startup that's running
on top of it as well.
We built for value.
And yes, we didn't run off to billions in valuation,
but we have this steady income stream
that's now allowing us to start looking at doing
token buybacks and burns, revenue shares, stuff like that.
Takes a bit longer to get there
when you don't build for that kind
of extractive mindset but i think there's a massive like there's a massive amount more money
and value to be made by just acting with integrity and of course sitting there and calling out that
you know other groups that do stuff if they're being extractive just call them out like well
that is what you're doing with your business is you are, you're building for the long term.
You're not looking for that, you know, short term mindset for a business. You're really,
I mean, you're building those. Yeah, you've said, okay, you know, is it gone up to 100 million
valuation or a billion dollar valuation? No. Does it mean that
it won't get there? No, it doesn't, you know, because you're building for the longterm. And,
you know, Darcy mentioned this earlier was the, um, building that foundation. You've built a
strong foundation for your business. You're bringing in outside money into the web three
space, into the company, which allows you to build and do other things that benefit the brand
within the blockchain space, but also, you know, benefit the holders and the investors
with what you're doing. You know, when you can do that, it's your sustainability is going to be
much longer. You're going to be able to withstand, you know, whether it's a bull market or a bear
market, you know, how many businesses didn't plan for this last bear market and they're gone,
you know, and it wasn't that they were necessarily, you know, trying to scam their communities or
whatever. Granted, you know, there was a bunch that were, but a lot of them just didn't understand
business. They were just like, oh, this is going to be a great way. And oh, I think I have an idea of how I can do this. But they really didn't know how to build a sustainable
business. And so it collapsed. And then they left, you know, all those people in the wake that
believed in them, you know, with, you know, nothing to show for it. So that's the other
thing is, is you just got to have that mentality of it might take
a while. You know, depending on, you know, are you pulling out outside investors? You know, are you,
are you bringing in outside, you know, resources in, you know, like what we're doing with what
we're doing with the movies, we're bringing in outside investors for our films.
We're not relying on, you know, the mint of our NFTs to fund our films.
We had seven movies in the last year and a half that we did that none, we haven't even minted.
We didn't, you know, use any money from the space to make our films.
It's all been done through your typical investment strategies for films,
whether it's tax incentives based off of where we film or it's based off of outside investors,
we get that done. But we've been able to give our private sale holders opportunities within
those movies. Now, we've got plans for a much, you know, larger ecosystem
that we've been building out, but it takes time. It's been five years of building this.
Yeah. But we've also got the piggyback off what you said, Dylan, is that we're also thinking
long-term. We're, you know, like what was said earlier, it's just, you know, you have to think
about that, but we're thinking in terms of business, it's not just a one-off. We're thinking
we've already got 30 years. So that's going to be, you know, each with each NFT project,
there is a movie attached to it. And, you know, the holders are going to be able to, you know,
make profits off of it and you know other all
these other utilities that we have attached to it as well so the thing is
is that I think at the beginning of the space we talked about you know value
extractors and people coming in and out and and you know there's been people
that come in and they've built things other you know even sport is famous you know sports uh men have come in and
or you know people have come in yeah athletes have come in i need my coffee sorry but they've come in
and uh they've come in and they've they they just they're not building it as a business they're
they're just coming in and they're like, oh, let me just figure this out.
Or this is what, you know, my business manager says is the end thing.
I mean, listen, and I, and I do love Kevin Hart.
I love him.
I think he's amazing.
But, you know, Kevin came in and he thought, oh, I can just, you know, put, put this project
together and boom, you know, it's like, because of my name, because I've done all these movies you know oh it's gonna sell out well it
didn't it tanked it was you know and then he you know ran between this with
his tail between his legs and it's just like I see that happen a lot I mean I've
been in the space again you know since 2016 So it's like, I've wanted to do things, you know,
I'm a perfectionist. So it's like, I want the NFTs to be something that's never been done.
I want to make sure that, you know, we, we make our, we kind of jump. I listen to what people say,
but we, I wanted, I wanted to do things before we even minted.
We had a huge red carpet event for our holders and also for people in the community.
And for Holly's celebrities were there.
And we had this just huge event, Hollywood Meets Deck.
And it's like we did that before we even minted out.
Because I wanted to show people we're here to stay. And I'm not just, you know, flapping my
gums and saying, Hey, you know, we're, we're just going to do this for a year and then we're out of
here. No, that's not how I feel like people in the space need to be because you've got to go back to
1991, 92 there that nobody knew about really about the internet. The internet was coming out and then you had
people that made hundreds of millions and billions of dollars and they built a business.
That's exactly what's happening right now. This is a pioneering of web two but web 3 so it's like people would need to realize that you have to
build a business have an amazing foundation and then build upon that but
you've got to look to the future and I mean I'll tell y'all right now a great
example is Blockbuster you know Blockbuster was like hey you know I'm
the end-all be-all like rock rock was saying some things earlier that I was really like, oh, my God, him and I think just alike because, you know, Blockbuster was like they were like the end all be all, you know, oh, you know, we're not thinking about the future because we're so powerful.
And they were the hog that got slaughtered.
Exactly. That's exactly what I was just about to
say. And I got to tell you, I love that so much. I got to use that in one of my meetings. I just
loved it, what you said, but that's exactly what they did. And then Netflix came to them and they're
like, Hey, this is what's going to be happening. And you know, Blockbuster kind of gave them the
fingers like, Hey, I don't, I don't. Yeah, they basically were wanting to get bought for 50 million dollars, which was nothing to Blockbuster at that time.
And now Blockbuster's gone.
And, you know, you've got Netflix that makes what, 300 some odd billion dollars every year.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's crazy.
But even like with what's happening now, like with, you know, my metaverse and
everything that we're building, like we're building shopping malls. We've got, I mean,
we've got universities that we're building in the metaverse. We are always, our technology is
advancing more and more every day. And know I wanted to I mean I know
Zuckerberg's gonna be giving me a call here very soon because all the things
that you know we're doing because I was like you know I don't see what Facebook's
doing I don't see what they're they're putting all this you know billions of
dollars into this metaverse but what are they doing with it and it's like you've
got to look at the future and look at where and where everything is going is what we're doing now folks I mean
everybody that's in here give yourself a pat on the back because you being in this space right now
that shows me that you know hey I know I know this is going to be something it's going to be huge but you know again let's swoosh back to
you know 1991 and you've got to think of all there were bad players in 1991
you know there were companies coming out that you know were doing nefarious
actions but you've got to also think of where we've come because you used to
could not buy anything you had to call 1-800 number
talk to an operator give them your credit card you know now look at how things are different so
you know where everything's going is digital and especially I mean with what I'm seeing because
I'm so heavily involved in like the production end of it and movies and films and television
shows and everything I mean mean, you know,
we're making our metaverse right now, like it's going to be to where, you know, you're not even
going to leave your house. You're just going to be with your family. And let's say you have somebody
that's a, that's lives in London and, uh, you know, you're in Kansas or you're in New York and
you want to watch a movie with them, well, guess what?
You can.
And that's what's, that's where the future is headed now.
And, you know, we're on the precipice of, I mean, we're, we're going to be in the books
here, folks.
I mean, it's, it's, it's going to go down in history with what we're doing because things
are becoming so advanced, but you've got to keep up with it because Netflix, there's,
there's things changing now too. And Netflix is going to have to like, you know, realize that
the platform is changing. So, you know, they're trying to figure out how to incorporate what
they're doing, but they're so behind the eight ball when it comes to it. Sorry, everybody. I
apologize. Darcy, we do have another meeting we've got to get into. So I want to just say thank you for having us in the space today. It
was awesome. Yeah, it was an absolute pleasure to have both of you guys. Thanks so much for coming.
I love your take. And I really appreciate it. And I just want to say everybody here,
you know, that spoke today, I've just, my hat's off to to you I really respect each and every one
of you and you know just if you ever need anything or you know just let me
know because I always am a believer about you know community and helping
people and you know you don't make excuse me you don't make your light brighter by dimming somebody else's
light and that's what i've uh that's what i've always believed so darcy do you still act by the
way or are you more on the like production side now oh yeah no i still i still do acting and stuff
i'm i'm kind of like uh uh you know i don't, a Dwayne Johnson, but a female.
I do it all.
Nice.
Yeah, so Cindy, my girlfriend, is in casting.
She actually is in L.A. right now.
I live in Puerto Rico now from L.A., but she's just from L.A. to meet up with a bunch of colleagues and stuff.
But she just finished Hunger Games, and she was working on a new Zelda movie before that, and she did Tron 3 and Planet of the Apes and all kinds of stuff.
But, yeah, I'll talk to her about it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely, because we're, you know, we've got, we're going to be,
we're casting, actually, you know, we're talking to, like,
Joan Cusack's people and Channing Tatum's people about this,
our rom-com movie that's tied to the NFT project.
But yeah, we've got an amazing casting director,
but I would love, we're always looking to definitely work with great people.
Yeah, she does cast, she does, it depends on the project,
but, you know, casting associate director, et cetera.
But actually she just finished Hunger Games.
So, yeah, I'll link her up with you.
Maybe there's something there.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, my door is always open.
I tell people, you know, we, you know, I know Adam Sandler and, you know, how he works.
And if you ever watch any of his movies, you'll see how he uses a lot of the same
people because he trusts them and he and i'm the same way you know there's i mean i'll tell y'all
i've worked on some films and some movies and there's i'm not i'm not going to mention names
but it's like i would have rather gotten 10 proctology exams than work with these people
again oh my god i've i've heard stories from Cindy that there are certain
actors that they just
won't cast because they don't
want to, because that hurts their reputation
if they cast someone
and then that person is shitty on set
to everyone, people are mad at the casting
director now.
Yeah, it can, yeah,
it definitely can go both
ways, but you know, I just want to say that I definitely agree with, you know, what what a lot of what you were thinking earlier about.
You know, it's also the way you treat people, but your reputation, you know, is everything.
And I think that's what Imagine AI said earlier, you know, that really hit a point with me because it is, you know, integrity is everything.
But especially like in my world and television and film, I mean, you get a bad reputation on set, it will stay with you.
And, you know, and listen, it's like you never know who somebody is going to be.
And that's what I keep telling people.
Like, you know, people ask me for advice. And I said, listen, you know, I'm from the South,
like, you know, and, and I grew up where it's like, your mother would hit you. You get spanked. I mean, there wasn't like, you know, let's just put you in timeout. Oh, heck no. So, I mean,
my mother, you know, she's all for, you know, being gracious. When you go to someone's house, you bring a gift.
You know, you, yes, ma'am, no, ma'am.
Yes, sir.
No, sir.
I mean, it's, I grew up with those kinds of values.
And I feel like, you know, we even just as a society have just lost that.
But I'm like, listen, when you're on set, it's a, it's a job, but you, at the same time,
you treat everybody with respect and And listen, you can disagree.
There's people in here might listen to this talking.
They're like, I don't agree with you.
And that's fine.
But there's a respectful way to, you know, not agree with someone.
You know what I'm saying?
And I just feel like I want to bring that back to Hollywood.
And that's what I'm doing with the Web3 community.
You know, we'll have our own built-in
audience, but at the same time, we're going to be able to, I mean, I'm telling y'all, we're going to
really be making a difference in Hollywood with, you know, everything going on. So I'm really
excited and definitely rock whatever you ever need. Let me know. And, you know, if anybody, you know, we're going to be looking for other people for work and jobs, because I got to tell you, we got 30 movies already down the pipeline.
So I'm really excited to meet new people.
And thank you for having me and Dylan in.
We really, really appreciate you. We really do.
It's great having you here, Darcy.
Well, thank you. God bless you all.
And I wish everybody in here so much love and success and I'll be y'all's
biggest cheerleader.
Thank you. Take care, everybody. Have an amazing, amazing weekend.
Hey, Aztec, we do have a couple people.
Do you want to introduce the new people?
Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to do as well.
Let's see.
So I just want to shout out Crypto News.
Definitely have to hear from you today.
And Crypto Chick, welcome back to the show.
and crypto chick welcome back to the show
do you guys want to give like a 10 20 30 second interview uh introduction on what you do
who you are sure hi hi everybody um i'm from crypto news.net with the dash in between we cover
uh news breaking news in crypto we try to do our best we're often late so sometimes
we do follow-up stories that's it
awesome and crypto chick good to have you back want to introduce yourself
hey guys oh sorry about that I'm rugging a little bit. So I'm going to do, I'm going to
reset. I'm going to come back on.
Sounds good. So I do want to, we don't have a lot of time left. We're actually already
30 minutes over the two hours, which we kind of expected, but I do have a hard cutoff in 35 minutes,
actual hard cut off for another call
but um i i do want to just like point out so the there are i think extractors in this industry and
a lot of the time they do it either through their kind of because they're like just like we talked
about pump fun they're kind of the only game in town or they obfuscate what they're doing. So I'll use one example that I
think is the most clear or obvious that I personally have a big problem with is market makers.
I don't know if I've ever worked with a market maker that I was happy with or trusted that they
were doing the right thing behind the scenes because there's so much obfuscation and it's
very hard to tell what they're doing. In many it basically almost in most cases you can't tell what they're doing
so for example you give them like there's different types of market making deals in the
industry there's the two main kind of broad categories are retainer and loan model so loan
model is the project lends them some x amount of tokens. Now they are supposed to pair those tokens with stable coins and then make the markets on centralized exchanges.
That basically means that they're going to create a better trading environment by providing liquidity, decreasing spreads, increasing depth both ways. They're not really
supposed to be trading the token. That's not actually what their job is. And actually,
it's illegal in traditional market making, like regulated equities markets. They're supposed to
just make the books and be like a neutral bookmaker. In our industry, it's not like that. There's a lot more like trading,
even wash trading, manipulation, and like a lot of projects like are looking for a market maker
who will help them do that stuff. But that in, I mean, that's arguably illegal, but it happens a
lot in this industry. The part where the market makers are extracting now from the users and the project is by doing things like trading against them, or they have all kinds of
weird things they do. For example, they do a loan model, they sell the tokens right away,
they then put out FUD or short the project, or I've even heard of market makers hacking a project
that they are on on purpose because they sold the tokens, they open a short, and then they
want to rebuy the tokens at a cheaper price to pay back to the project. There's crazy, I mean,
there's a hundred methods that these people use. And I'm not saying all market makers are evil,
And I'm not saying all market makers are evil, but I'm saying market makers, I would argue most market makers are more in the business of extraction than value creation.
Now, that may be an argument for we should have the government come in and regulate because then there's rules and they can't do that as much, kind of.
But they still can do stuff like counter trading in the background.
And I think that by
making those rules, again, it hinders the free market from finding solutions. There's lots of
solutions we could have here. And there are people building these things. Actually, Owen probably
can give some information. I've been meaning to get on another call with him to talk more about
this. But because these market makers are very extractive, there's some of the things
you could do is try to work with ones you trust there, or you could use the, uh, the other model
that I didn't mention yet, which is the retainer model, which is where you give that you create
account or a sub account on finance or whatever. Sometimes you want to use a sub account because
they get like no maker taker fees and you want to take advantage of that. But you basically have this account or sub account.
You put the project tokens, you put the stables and then they make the markets for you and you can see everything that they're doing.
Asterisk. The asterisk is they can still counter trade you.
is they can still counter trade you. So they, for example, sell a bunch of your token because,
and then they just tell you, oh, well, that's what the market was like dictating at the time.
And it was just the traders. But in reality, it's them on one of their personal accounts. Now,
when you're selling down and pushing the price down, they're buying on the other side,
then they buy with project stables, push the price back up, and then they sell on the other side. So there's all these
things they can do with both loan and retainer model. I believe that the retainer model,
because there's more transparency, is harder for them to extract. And on bigger projects that are
more liquid, it's also harder for them to extract, but still very possible. And they do do it.
And they've been caught a million times. So, so other options you can do is, uh,
and this is something I'm discussing with, uh, AK who was on earlier and, um, Waheed chairman of
IBCC Jan and Mario's kind of, uh, empire is, you know, potentially buying a market maker so that
we could start using, doing self-market making on our projects. So acquiring a market maker,
there are also software you can use for self-market
making. You could just avoid sexes in general and use DEXes because they're automated market makers.
Be careful when it comes to the software side of it. I was just about to say, so
yeah, I know you were saying I've dealt with a lot of them over the past year.
I built out my own software then to allow for that non-extractive market making.
Because market making is really something that like it should be like your decks it should essentially be it's just
book making and that's it there you know any profit should simply be from the fee that's
attached to any trades that go through it or from a very minor spread like you know 0.1 spread is
essentially like a 0.2 fee and that And that's what, in my opinion,
is non-extractive market making.
We are not actively harming the project in order to make a profit.
But when it comes to the software that's out there,
there's a lot of new market makers that have appeared.
And from what I've seen,
and all of them that have spoken with or worked with,
they're all essentially using HummingBot.
And HummingBot is amazing software
if you really know what you're doing.
But for the
most part this has been developed for extremely liquid pairs like say you know Bitcoin or Ethereum
or you know you could even go down into the top 10 you can get down you know XRP, Dogecoin, stuff
like that, Solana, like all of that can be done through Hummingbot. Really good forward, you can
figure out a good mid and it can just hold a decent price in line to what the market is kind of, you know, moving towards. When you use this software for anything
that is really outside of the top 10 on any sort of, you know, default setting or anything you're
going to learn in the first kind of couple of months of using it, like this is trying to set
a mid for, you know, your token might have, like, let's say you're doing pretty well, your token is worth, let's say 100 million right now.
That software is absolutely not meant
for anything near that kind of level of liquidity.
If you've got 100 million in there,
like let's be very generous to say
you've got maybe 2 million in liquidity
on the exchange at any one time.
It's still not enough.
Like this is designed for stuff like bitcoin like when it's trying to
figure out a new mid price to actually work off it goes all over the place you wind up getting gaps
that just are essentially arbitraged back out of the exchange like we have a couple of charts
on our side that we've gotten from essentially handing over market making to uh you know a
decently known third party and just you know let them work on it for a month.
Tell them that we want non-extractive market making.
We just want good market conditions that encourage volume to come through the token, stuff like
that.
And they will add, just to be clear, because when we talk about extraction, there's like
different ways that it could happen.
It could happen from the market maker to the project. It could happen from the market maker to the project.
It could happen from the market maker to the users. It could happen from the project to the users.
So yeah, but continue. Yeah. So the main one that I'm actually talking about here is actually more
along the lines of accidental extraction. It's kind of like the road to hell is paved with good
intentions. I don't believe that the market makers that we reached out to, to run, sorry,
just to be clear, this was not on Imagine AI. It was on some other projects I consulted with.
But when we allowed other market makers to come in and basically take over operations on that side
for a month and compare them as to how they worked with our in-house market making software,
all of the extraction was essentially through arbitrage now there were arguments made that it is possible that you know maybe they are malicious and they are deliberately
creating these bad conditions so that they can arbitrage out themselves to extract we obviously
can't prove that but from what we're seeing with it you know if it's not malicious it is a massive
oversight that they didn't at least spot the level of extractive arbitrage
happening. Now, arbitrage is a good thing, but extractive arbitrage is where they quite literally
are not pinning or pegging any sort of price on the exchange. And there's like a 40% discrepancy
between one exchange and what's available on your decentralized platforms or even on other
exchanges that you might be managing. We go in and check the balance on it and it's not like they're massively misbalanced on one side. It's either their
software is not accounting for the fact that this is the level of liquidity available for the token
overall, as something that's at 100 million or less, or they have deliberately put in settings
to allow for these conditions, which allows them to arbitrage
out of it very heavily so we can't sit here and say you know if it was malicious or not but either
way it is something that simply shouldn't have been happening now i'm still playing devil's
advocate and saying they just don't know what they're doing and this is the case with a lot
of market makers that experience is quite low you get people who
essentially they found hummingbot they've spun it up they've gotten used to using it for bitcoin
stuff like that and they think hey this is easy i'm gonna start rolling this out now and selling
it to people because it comes with all inbuilt reports and you know it's professional outputs
and stuff like that you can give clients and everything looks fine unless you actually know
what you're looking for and you can sit there and see you know where are the gaps appearing on this
chart and where should they not be appearing you know how much of this volume is just purely this
is being arbitraged at like a 50 you know discount to getting dumped into the dex pair stuff like
that so yeah market making is something i think right now is actually one of the biggest problems in crypto. And whether it's through malice or just through sheer not knowing what you're doing. And this is why I've always said to a lot of people who've kind of asked about CEXs and things like that.
of your real volume is going to come through a dex anyway especially at this point in the cycle
we just don't have a lot of retail flooding into cex's right now we have to be using cex's for
perps futures stuff like that most people like phantom has become ubiquitous because because
of pump fun but that's a value add from pump fun phantom became ubiquitous i think metamask was
kind of keeping people out of the industry for a while
as the software has just gone so bad but yeah now we have phantom we have rainbow wallet uh we have
the new coinbase wallet there's a lot of other wallets out there and people have gotten used to
using them like a lot of your volume is going to come through a dex if you don't know what you're
doing and you don't have a well-trusted market maker that somebody can vouch for somebody who's used them like a lot for big projects just stick with your dex pairs if you do well on your dex
pair exchanges tend to pick up tokens themselves and list you and at that point you know the
exchange yes they are going to take their profits from that but it's going to be much different to
a big exchange getting their profits off fee pairs and minor arbitrage etc then what you're going to get from you know perhaps a company that maybe has
three clients and they're trying to pay for eight staff of you know three coins that are under a
million dollars that kind of thing so yeah uh be wary when it comes to anything like that but yeah
i agree with rock that i'm only talking about the side where maybe they're
just idiots and then you decide that rock's talking about where they are deliberately
malicious and that is much more harmful and also unfortunately i think most of them are
deliberately malicious personally i know you're giving them the benefit of the doubt i have tried
to give them the benefit of the doubt for too too too, too many years. And, you know, I've used so many of them.
And, like, you know, the best projects we've ever launched didn't use market makers outside of Polygon.
Polygon, you know, did very well and was using large market makers.
But, like, QuickSwap, for example, you know, we did 2000X with no market maker.
I'll give you guys a story. We,
um, when, uh, Coinbase wanted to list us, um, you know, they were setting up all the, um,
uh, the launch of the Coinbase listing and, um, they, uh, came to us, you know, like I think
the day before, or I think they had already put us on the,
they have like phases.
So you first, you get this like view only
or deposit only kind of time
where people are able to deposit the quick onto Coinbase,
but no one can trade it yet.
And then once it gets to some certain level
of like liquidity or something, then it goes live.
And they came to us and we're like, hey, who's your market maker?
And we said, we don't have one.
We don't really want to use one.
And they said, what are you talking about?
You have to have a market maker.
And we were like, well, we really don't want to use one.
Is this like a requirement?
Do we have to do this?
And they basically said, yeah, you need to get a market maker.
It's probably not going to go well.
And so we were like, okay, we'll re-engage with some of the market makers we were talking to. And then while we're
talking to these market makers, trying to negotiate, Coinbase got back to us and said,
hey, your books are super organic, super deep. You don't need a market maker. We take it back.
That was kind of crazy to hear from Coinbase. And so it went live. We didn't need a market maker. We take it back. That was kind of crazy to hear
from Coinbase. And so it went live. We didn't use a market maker for many years. I think four years.
We never used a market maker. Then we did hire a market maker after like four years.
And, you know, I don't want to I'm debating. Should I name the name? They're one of the big market makers. Name names. Name names.
I didn't name names, by the way.
I read an article.
It's public anyway.
I read an article, and this story is in there, though no names are named, but you should
name names.
It is public anyway.
Yeah, it is public.
That's true.
Yeah, so I'll just say I'm not going to go too into details here.
They are still our market maker and would not want them to try to hurt us.
But yeah, DWF, to be honest, haven't seen much value.
And yeah, you see, this is like the type of space where, you know, Owen was talking about, you know, you have to have kind of the courage to call out people in this industry.
And look, it's very hard for us to tell whether DWF is doing a good job or not.
But the fact is, like, we get reports from Binance about their activity and Binance basically telling us they're not doing their job. And when we go to them, they basically tell us, we are doing it, they just don't see it. We're doing it on other accounts or
some bullshit. And unfortunately, going to legal, it's a whole rigmarole. We discussed with our
legal team what to do. And look, it's hard to say, maybe they really are doing what they say.
So maybe give them a little benefit of the doubt, but to me has not been worth,
uh, worth the, the money that were, we, or the, it was a loan.
So we lent them a quick token. So they have to give those back, but yeah,
to me, not really worth it, to be honest, sorry, DWF, but, uh, uh you know we've had this discussion with you guys
many times if you're listening yeah man like i mean when you said there when they responded with
oh we are doing it but they don't see it because we're doing it off different accounts
why the fuck are you doing it off different accounts
like if somebody says something like that it's like okay so you're trying to deliberately obscure
some sort of information from binance or i know you're getting shocked that they are not seeing
it like what are you actually doing but yeah this is why i've said like you know self-run market
making where you just have non-extractive software running it and look there's a simple enough kind
of algorithm you can apply on this one now don't run straight with it i found myself that there's a simple enough kind of algorithm you can apply on this one now don't run straight
with it i found myself that there's you know a couple of things that you need to be adjusted but
as a baseline if anybody's you know listening on this one essentially like copy the model of a v3
pair which begins with the basically the ratio that you have in your actual dex pair like if
your dex pair is that, let's call it three
cent a token, like your DEX pair probably has about 90% of your liquidity. So if you start with
that and then just put V3 logic on top of it on your CEX, where you're essentially within, you
know, you start at that level, but you have a range that you can go between. That's in people
buy and the price goes up on it. If the price up on the cex but it does not go up on
the actual dex pool then that's you know a valid arbitrage opportunity for anybody like it's a cool
then go and buy it from dex and sell it into the cex you've leveled at the prices and both of them
are still up like this is like it's a very basic kind of way of doing it but it's extremely effective
especially when like people try to market make with you know five grand liquidity in an exchange and they've got you
know 250k in their small coin pair on you know quick swap or uni swap or what have you like just
use that as your starting point for source of truth and then run a v3 balancer in your own code
that manages your cex pair like You don't need rocket science or checking
for mids or anything like that. If you do it this way, you're automatically falling in line with
any paired price drops or jumps. Ether goes up 10%. Your token will go up 10% if it's in pair with
that. But if you're on a CEX and you're in a USDT pair it will just sit there until essentially
the books are reshuffled which you know stuff like hummingbot will rely on buys which is just
you know you get a full arbitrage at that point where you know you don't want that you're basically
giving it to people at this ludicrous discount and especially when we get into what I hope is
now this stage in a market where alts showing strength against them, the blue chip pairs, like we're going to see a lot of volatility. They're already kind of seeing it
where, you know, we saw 5% spike in Ethereum and then we saw a drop by like 1.5%. A lot of people
are screaming that, you know, it's dumping because they were in 400X leverage and they're liquidated.
But this is what happens at this stage in the market. And it is actually another market maker action
that they're seeing people that are going in 100x or 20x
on their perps and their futures and stuff like that.
Their job, as they consider it,
is also to wipe you out from those positions.
So you're going to see the blue chips
are going to have major volatility.
They'll hopefully keep trending up in a big way,
but there's going to be little shocks every now and then, which is just to deleverage people that
are on the wrong side of a trade. So when you're looking at stuff like that, if you want to make
sure that you are protected from additional volatility on top of it, where those big shocks
don't result in you taking an extra 10% dip on top of whatever your pair token went down,
like it's pretty much just you know target
doing a v3 style pair on your cex which uses your dex pair as a level of source of truth
and like this is essentially your non-extractive market making and it's i mean it's a way to keep
people like certain market makers away from your project. It's yeah.
So I'd recommend stuff like that.
But again,
if that's not your cup of tea and you're looking at just random market makers,
please just consider a stick with the decks for a while.
Tokens can't survive if they're just being extracted from every,
you know,
every day,
essentially like you're just going to always be facing downward pressure.
Yeah.
Quick swap wasn't
on any sex uh when we did 2000x by the way or we weren't or maybe like that part of it you know
that the binance and coinbase and everyone started listing us but we were uh just on quick swap and
uh you know i think it was really helpful that we didn't you know do token sale we had no vcs that
could dump the team had no tokens to dump. And so it was just
pure community kind of getting the value. It was a beautiful thing. I think it was one of the most
fair launches in the last decade. But I want to get to, we have only 12 minutes and I do want to
touch quickly on some other topics. I think the market will solve the market making problem over time. I think
people are already working on it now. Things like HummingBot, self-market making, other kinds of
software, market makers that are just coming in and doing a better job because there's more of
them and there's the spaces like maturing. It's not as nascent, but I want to get to the few other
areas where I see what you might call extraction, and that's centralized exchanges have been very aggressive. There is a trend happening over the last, I don't know, year where people are, projects are so desperate gone, you know, kind of out of business, if they're a business or, you know, their foundation has run out of money.
And because people have been so desperate for liquidity events, they're willing to give the exchanges kind of whatever they ask for.
And so many of these exchanges are asking for four to eight percent of the token supply with no vesting.
And so they're saying a lot of time, we're going to give this to the community through
an airdrop or marketing.
In reality, most of the time, they're just dumping it, is my thinking and most insiders
belief.
And so, yeah, it's a problem.
And we need more exchanges to be strong so that the top know, the top ones can't have like these kind
of monopolies where they're just extracting. Now that look, the reason people are going to
these exchanges, cause they're getting value out of it, right? The projects are not stupid. They're
not, they're not like, Oh, I just give my money and I don't get anything out of it. They, they
want the volume. There's not a lot of retail and these exchanges do have, some of them have great amount of like still some amount of retail like love or usage. But a lot of them, they just don't.
I think it's in a lot of cases, it's just not worth it. You're better off either delaying your
launch till conditions are better or doing like decks only, building out your product more.
or doing like decks only, building out your product more.
One unfortunate thing about the industry is that it's gotten very hard for small startup or founder teams,
like, you know, one or two founders or small teams to actually build really great stuff.
It still happens here and there, but the industry has been like largely kind of corporatized in a lot of ways, or at least you have to have
big backers, big incubators, like our Lunar Digital Assets. You have to have big support
from the right people to actually succeed. You could have a great startup, two founder, dev team,
but if they don't have the right business people, the right investors, the right investors the right sales whatever it is that they're doing
um you know these are businesses in a lot of ways right they're like hybrids between
dows businesses foundations protocols and most of the projects we see that succeed these days
do have like a pretty good backing and and you can start from like zero and get there by building
great stuff but i think a project that has like, we'll just make up arbitrary, you know,
if a project has 10 points of awesome product and they have no backing,
a project with seven points of awesome tech or whatever can still beat them
and get to the top.
And then over time they might build out that 10 points of dev, you know,
you know, development.
But it's sad, but yeah, you know, development. But it's sad.
But yeah, you kind of really do need a backing these days.
Someone push back there if you'd like.
But that's what I see from my side.
I'm definitely seeing something similar on my end.
And I wanted to make a call out to the commercialization of the industry, because I've definitely seen that over the course of my decade plus in crypto.
because I've definitely seen that over the course of my decade plus in crypto.
And I think that the ERC-20, you know, look how easy it is, waves.
Affiliate and recruitment business that creates a pipeline of vulnerable parties who reach exchanges and really don't know how they're getting got.
I receive offers on a regular basis to say, hey, don't worry about needing a market maker. We see that you're like a DEX oriented project. We'll do this for you. Just provide $20,000 to $50,000 of liquidity sight unseen without really any paperwork vesting or any kind of commitments. And we'll be your partner. We'll be your market maker. It's going to be so great.
Like, after being in the industry for many years, it's easy for me to catch this and recognize this stuff as, you know, sometimes predatory.
But even if it's not predatory, it usually lacks the, you know, kinds of underpinnings that you need, whether that's a legal relationship or an extra legal relationship on chain.
And, you know, this relationship, it's almost always a, hey, I'm trusting you.
Don't worry about it.
Everything's going to be fine. We're the big man with the big money. You need to trust us anyway. The industry of recruitment around that, of getting new listings that are easier than that, I think that's a really unhealthy and strong indicator of the commercialization of the
industry. At the same time, you have other projects that are staying very DEX oriented,
like Dog on Bitcoin, that have been very happy to get on Kraken and be on a centralized exchange.
Hey, that's great. But they shopped around to many, many centralized exchanges and said,
hey, this doesn't fit. You have, you have to be willing to say no.
If you get into that environment and you're working on a cool product and it
just doesn't make sense to you to, you know, trust a centralized exchange,
you, you really can't. If you're, if you're, you know,
on the edge there and you're seeing that moment where you're uncertain and it's
like, Hey, this seems like a good deal, but I have to trust them a lot.
Like slow down, take your time. I'm not saying get legal counsel, but, you know, don't rush it because they'll know that you're in that mode to soak up the opportunity.
Elijah John Baudray, or Chairman Baudray of the Miami-Dade County Cryptocurrency Task Force.
I'm also the Executive Director for the Miami-Dade Digital Commission, and it is truly an honor and a pleasure to be on this call.
And I really, really appreciate what you guys are explicating and bringing it to the forefront, to the light, about some of the not-so-pos positive developments of the industry.
And when you spoke about the centralized exchange
and how they're kind of having a tendency to follow an old playbook
that we see in society time and time again,
even though the promise of the blockchain and Bitcoin was for something different.
I don't even know. I'll announce it here because I could crypto chicken.
Shout out to crypto chicken bite. But Miami, the next phase of Miami is our municipal applications pilot.
And there's going to be a blockchain, crypto and cyber. But one of the main infrastructure products of it is a municipal exchange right and originally we'd author that
to be something a little different like kind of internal tokens and coins for a program that i
wrote about three years ago that we finally i'm going to see the light of day um to um to make
the internal um systems more efficient on a blockchain, what have you.
But hearing what you guys are talking about, not to make it like, oh, government's going to have the answer, but the government may speak about myself.
And when I speak about myself, I speak about all of us.
So this portion of crypto for regulating or not even regulating, but helping to to keep everyone acting on the best behavior. So would ask for your help to the community to help us here in Miami make the strongest policies and programs so that we can make it a strong model for the rest of the country.
Because as Miami goes, Mar-a-Lago goes.
And as Mar-a-Lago goes, America goes.
So I really need your help and thank you guys.
Yeah, we've met before, guys.
Yeah, we've met before, actually. We'll definitely catch up offline.
Go ahead.
Yeah, interesting stuff.
I wish you were on a little earlier.
There's a ton we can talk about here.
But unfortunately, we will be ending here
in just a couple minutes,
unless Aztec or others want to keep the space going
when I have to go for this call
in two minutes. Okay. Yeah. Do you want to come on another time and we can chat?
I'd love to see states, cities, and countries adopting crypto. It's a beautiful thing.
I don't know about a municipal exchange. I'm not a big fan
of government-owned, like, kind of means of production. I'm a lot more open to it at the
city level than I am at the state level than I am at the country level, right? But, yeah,
it's interesting. Now, let me ask you a question. See, see, see, see, let me ask you a question,
because that is actually one of the prevailing sentiments that I hear from a lot of our community members all over.
And so one of my main personal professional themes that I really try to endear to us is to say, what is the government?
Who is the government?
The government is a system, policies, offices, and personnel.
It just operates different from regular logic that us developers and crypto people like to operate in.
And so, you know, I'm not a government person. I mean, I am the currency chair. I wrote the state bill for Florida. I was on Senator Loomis' group, but we have to make ourselves into government people to integrate.
I think it is the right word. We do need to infiltrate. I mean, many people here know.
We do need to infiltrate the government.
I mean, many people here know.
It's funny.
I'm a libertarian, and I talk so much trash on big government.
But my main life goal probably outside of, like, Bitcoin is to go into government to push libertarianism to reduce the size of government.
It's kind of like a, I don't know, a Parks and Rec kind of mentality.
But anyways, which actually funny that Darcy was on. But
anyways, yeah, so we just don't have time to go into this topic. But I will say, look,
government is a construct of the people, right? So the government in many ways is the people,
of the people, right?
So the government in many ways is the people, right?
And that's what the United States Constitution is, right?
The U.S. government is a government of the people,
by the people, for the people.
So there's an argument for that,
but means of production, dangerous.
It's like the candidate right now in New York that wants to build state-owned grocery stores.
That's fucking scary.
We've seen how that went for many communist countries.
Anyways.
Well, I'll say this.
I'll say this.
I'll say this.
How I always like to say this is like this.
I've been in – I'm at Bitcoin December 8th, 2012 in a city called
Wenzhou in China. I lived in China for nine years. And it changed my life, right? For
me to be, to going through everything I'm going through, the story up, down, and I'm
sure everybody has a similar story. But to be here, right, we just had three major landmark historical events happen.
All right. Finally, the glint of regulatory clarity is shimmering across the landscape of America and now infiltrating the homes and the boats of the rest of the globe. August 25th and for Bitcoin Asia. But I'm also going as a delegation from Miami-Dade County to go in exchange with the Hong Kong government as well as their cyber port.
What I'm saying is that I've been Robin Hood. Now it's like the sheriff of Nottingham.
I'm turning it back to you all to say I'm staying in the door as a servant.
Right. It's not me. Right. It's about all of us. So even when I tell Miami, I let people know, hey, we're just opening the door.
You know, Miami is going to pierce the municipal mesh of the legislative veil of this country.
of this country, right? And once we're able to implement a pilot program that we run,
that we can implement, that we can hold the hand, make the policies, and educate the government,
excuse me, the government on what's appropriate. Think of the government like a toddler with a
gun, right? You wouldn't ignore that toddler and say, oh, that toddler's going to do whatever it
wants because he's got a gun. And you wouldn't yell at that toddler. Toddler, hey, come on.
You'd make any type of mechanism or, hey, hi, hey, you want a toy?
You want money?
Give me the gun in my hands, and I'm going to turn it over to our community who knows
what to do with this to make it better for everyone.
Think of it like that.
Think of it like that. They don't know. They don't know. They're not even aware of what they're not even aware of.
They don't know.
They don't know.
They're not even aware of what they're not even aware of.
We have a very fine chance to make something that never could been imagined.
And that is take not just a hold of the crypto portion or the tech portions of government, but initiate the policy.
Use our technology. Use our community to implement the programs before they even realize what's happening.
Trojan horse, right?
I've always been trying to Trojan horse crypto into government and politics and macro.
Amen.
I'm at your service, man.
Hey, let's connect offline.
Who invited you to the show, by the way?
Crypto Chick.
Awesome.
I have to Crypto Chick and Crypt crypto chicken crypto magazine awesome she's amazing uh okay guys i think we're gonna close it out here um i will
connect with you though i'll dm you right now and uh would love to yeah we need good people
yeah i i like a gentleman
What was that, Aztec?
I was just saying I have another call right now,
so I just want to make sure I didn't need to be on that call.
We have a couple of calls.
I got a drop as well.
No, you're good.
Thank you so much, guys.
So, yeah, good to see you.
Thanks, everyone, for coming.
Chairman Boudry, I can't good to see you uh thanks everyone for coming uh chairman bowdry i can't seem to
message you so i think you either need to follow me or dm me yes sir okay awesome cheers guys thanks
everyone for coming uh thank you uh nicole jared who are still here crypto news we didn't hear
enough from you crypto news um sorry it was a pretty rambunctious space and you came a little bit later,
but, but if you come again,
we'll try to get some more takes from you.
Thank you so much.
I fully agree.
You know,
sexes should burn and keep it all Dexy.
Keep it Dexy guys.
I think Dexes will fully take over at some point.
That's my take.
It'll take some time, though.
Also, shout out to Omniti Network and Imagine AI.
Great to talk with you again, Owen.
Yeah, 100%. It's my pleasure to be on here.
Great talking to you all.
All right, guys.
Bye-bye. to be on here great talking to you all all right guys bye bye
