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Vitalik to L2s “Adapt or Die” on Coffee with Captain #1,089
Recorded: Feb. 4, 2026 Duration: 2:11:25Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, key insights emerged around the evolving landscape of crypto, emphasizing the importance of adaptability for L2s, the potential for AI to disrupt traditional applications, and the growing significance of user experience in driving adoption. As projects like Base and Arbitrum navigate these changes, the focus shifts towards innovative solutions and the integration of AI in enhancing user engagement and operational efficiency.
Full Transcription
Last by Bungie, blah blah blah Topping the machines, I'm telling you I'll sell you a percentage on Nebula Shout out to Vince, yo, set it up
Surfing on the web and I'm shooting at three
I've been golden when I got my T
I'm an alien, boy
From a different planet, yeah
So I got my drink, I'm riding in the 1920s
Model T, Ford, car, era, law
Call me Levi, playing on the keys, boy
Then I'm about to put my gloves on
If I said it, then I meant that
Yeah, I like that one.
I'm about to get that.
Crash that whip for the drumsticks.
Whiplash.
I'm about to get them all.
Are you with that?
In a white boat.
Surrounded by blue.
I want one, but I got a cop turned.
I want to fly high in the sky.
Arms out wide.
Trying to soar.
I'm a bird's eye view.
I'm on fire.
Ricky, Bobby.
Cracking the pavement.
Whitney, Bobby.
I'm a bird's eye view. I'm on fire. Ricky, Ricky Crackin' the pavement, Whitney, Bobby I'm a bird, Saki, bomb, hero
I'm on fire, Ricky, Saki
Bruce Wayne been a dog, and I keep it 101
Cause I'm feelin' kinda spotty
Sippin' on some rock and I'm sippin' on octane
The only thing around my neck is the black team
Now I got coin, I see where y'all goin'
Poppa since web 1, hella hooked on web 2
I was livin' the dream
Now I'm on web 3, and it ends with the seams, I was living the dream, now I'm on web three.
And it ends with the seams, top in the pyramid schemes, I'm telling you, I'll sell you a percentage on Nibkula.
Shout out to Vince, yo, set it up.
NFT, Twitter, blockchain, TM with the ghosts and we balling like a bronze day.
Crypto, crypto, we can make a trade, get the memos, but feels not falling for the FOMO.
Listening to Coffee with Captain, you know we worldwide, they loco. I'm on web three And it is what it seems
Toppin' the pyramid schemes, I'm tellin' ya
I'll sell you a percentage on Nebula
Shout out to Vince, yo, set it up
Breaking them all to choose one
But they got knowledge to move, son
I'm shakin' in shades with my brother in suits
Yeah, them blues is comin'
Even though it's hard to pick, eeny, mighty, moe.
Soda on the mix, no biting lips, it's time to go.
Index number one, no thumbs up, you gotta scroll.
Looking at the ghosts in studio, it's time to go.
Had a helmet on by myself until I met a mask that wanted to have a face off.
Had to bring my chainsaw, full ticket gas in the bribes when my brakes off.
I'm 8-1, but a different kind of steak sauce.
Welcome to Coffee with Captain, powered by ApeCoin, where we dive into
all things crypto, NFTs,
web-free, and cutting-edge technology.
Remember, nothing here is
financial advice. Early-stage tech
can be exceptionally volatile and risky.
So grab your coffee and join
Cap and Steve for today's conversation.
Welcome to the future.
Welcome to the future. So if you've not already done so and you'd like to be like teacher Katie and cash out some ape or whatever goodies we might have in store, head over there and give us a like, a follow, a sub.
All are greatly appreciated.
Going to be doing some new things with chat, the discord, with YouTube, potentially YouTube members, all of the above here in the near future.
Our grind to a thousand subs continues and appreciate everyone who's already gotten on board over there.
Interesting day in the markets.
We're going to talk a little bit about markets today.
Nothing great to report.
Sold below $100 once again.
Bitcoin down, eat down, gold rips back up.
And the title here, I actually need to change the title on spaces.
We may go a deeper technical dive next Tuesday.
I think Divide might be able to join us for a little bit.
And so probably go deeper on the technical side.
But worth commenting at least, hitting on a little bit this morning is Vitalik's, uh, post yesterday's long
form post. I, you know, they, I don't know another way to put it, but, uh,
adapt or die to the L2s I think is, uh, is Vitalik's message. Um,
simply being faster than ETH, but slower than Solana, not going to cut it.
And, um, ETH is scaling just fine.
ETH is, I mean, you just think about it.
I mean, look right now, GUI, gas, is 0.4.
What do you, like, and it's, again, I know maybe as everything comes on chain
and more things get tokenized, that could potentially change.
But I think very specialized L2s make sense, as Vitalik said.
Extremely performant L2s make sense.
But being marginally better than ETH,
if you're not faster than Solana, pivot hard and fast
because those days, I do believe, are numbered
unless they have something extremely unique,
extremely differentiating a core product, a flagship DAP. I think that that alone could potentially
continue, you know, give those L2s life. But at the, it's simply just being faster than mainnet.
I mean, it's cheaper than mainnet. You're talking at this point. I mean, cheaper than mainnet.
You're talking at this point, I think, fractions of pennies.
And that's not going to cut it.
So we'll go through his post here in a bit.
A couple other cold open items.
And then I saw Joey jumped up.
Big shout out to BZ.
I just saw that news.
February, massive month.
BZ continues.
Speaking of L2s, BZ going multi-chain i i think in hindsight proved
to be a good move as uh joey am i right we'll maybe dive deep here in a second but is was
was i saw 10 million in total volume um 70 000 claw pulls were those all record months or have
you beat those numbers as bz beat those numbers in the past no january was january was uh full of
records for us going multi-chain and being on base so i'm not trying to pry or put you on the
spot but how much would you attribute that to the multi-chain approach uh i guess do you is it
public how much of the volume was base versus flow yeah it's I believe somebody has built, uh, doing analytics, uh, for us, but yes, it's, uh, it's all public information. And I believe we have some more data coming out soon on like base what we've, what we've done actually on base specifically.
I came up to talk about the Vitalik L2 thing whenever you're ready to talk about it.
But I think accessibility is one of the biggest reasons for success for any business, whether it's Web 2 or Web 3.
And being on base and being in the base app and the ease of onboarding with base has helped us hit new highs.
Daily highs, daily highs,
weekly highs,
monthly highs.
That's awesome,
man.
Well,
congrats,
congrats to the team.
Congrats to,
Andrea and critique and yourself and everyone over there.
I do.
I do agree.
I think base is you very uniquely positioned in the,
in the world of L twos in the sense that they do have that top of funnel advantage
that we've talked about.
They do have the base app.
They do have massive distribution,
and that is a differentiator.
There's no other L2s that have the distribution
and the existing customer base that does base,
at least today.
Things may change with Robinhood and others coming online.
Although, interesting news, like good and bad,
just quick flyover, I do want to hit on a couple other quote opens
and then we'll come back to this article.
Like, good news and bad news all in the same week
from the Robinhood front.
They, I saw they tapped
Adam Fern
previously with
Pirate Nation and a few others
and Big in the DeFi. I saw they tapped him
to basically lead their blockchain efforts,
which I felt was a good hire.
And then I was not familiar with this individual, but they, well, that was one good one.
It was almost canceled out by, and I'm looking because I don't want to name someone that's
the wrong name.
And I wasn't familiar with the individual, but they essentially funded someone that got dismissed from their last role due to sexual misconduct. Whether they didn't know or didn't care, I really don't know. But yeah, anyways, I think it's probably something that will blow over and I don't want to make a bigger deal out of it than it is, especially not being familiar with the individual.
And I'm not one. I don't want to just spread hearsay.
It came from a credible source, but I say that now I'm not finding it.
It came from a credible source, but I say that now I'm not finding it.
I do think that both Robinhood and Coinbase are both positioned very well to be a big part of this next wave of finance, right?
Like I think about when I was in college.
Dude, I don't even – it's kind of embarrassing to look back now.
Like I was, you know, I was making good, you know, I dropped out of school in my last quarter.
So I was, you know, I was making good money.
I, you know, I, it's not what it was then, but yeah, I was making six figures as a young college kid.
And it was, I was off to the races and I did have investments and, but it was maybe an E-Trade account.
I'm trying to think that my first like trading account,
investing account was probably E-Trade, which is not, it's user friendly.
It's modern-esque, but I had nothing like Robinhood or Coinbase.
You know, I wasn't for as bad as like people like to,
to say like how the, you know,
how bad the economy is and how broke the younger generation is and other
bunch of degenerates. I don't know, man.
I think a lot of kids in their early twenties are far ahead of where I was in
terms of investing and setting myself up for shoot.
Now are they making all the right decisions in terms of their buckets and
their long-term plans? I don't know, but they're at least there.
They're at least getting started. And I think that's a big deal. I think that's important.
And I think it does set them up for future success. Part of them growing and evolving as
an investor, as a speculator, I think part of it, the take some L's and learn what not to do is probably as important as what to do.
So I did just pin up top the post from Adam Fern.
I'm not, I didn't find the other one.
I'm not even going to go there.
It's not that important.
But I saw some people kind of flooding it pretty hard.
Oh, it's deleted now.
So maybe they did already.
Yeah. oh it's deleted now so maybe they did already yeah um so i don't know what it was uh so here i was in my search
proof of play yes thank you thank you alok uh better better uh better background on adam than
than just pirate nation proof of Play did some pretty cool stuff.
So this was, here's like a glimpse.
Robinhood going to zero.
They do less due diligence than I do, throwing 10,000 checks.
This is from Deez.
The post was from Vlad, their CEO.
And Joey, do you know what GSVM even means?
This is, I guess I'm too old.
What did you say, GS? GSVm was d's first comment no i don't
know i don't know what it means um this is this is i'm dating myself here i'm sure he might be
marism uh it says loved it loved to see he deleted it after reading replies absolutely f nil um so
not only deleted it maybe they they went back or did something different.
Anyways, it's not that important.
They, um, not, won't be the first, won't be the last bad hire or bad.
I just Googled GSVM and it's some guy's initials.
It's not shorthand for anything.
So maybe we're just making stuff up on the fly now.
Could be, maybe it's, maybe we're talking in stuff up on the fly now could be maybe it's maybe
we're talking in agentic language and uh you know not all humans have caught up yet um so i thank
you very much for the uh the youtube sub chris boy greatly appreciate it kater katie i the week
snuck up i mean i can't believe it's already the fourth of february yes halfway through the week and uh
looking forward to this weekend we got first uh first lacrosse tournament preseason tournament
but still excited for that a daughter senior year so excited to uh uh to see her get out uh on
the field do they call it i should know this by now is it i know it's a pitch in soccer is lacrosse
just a field does it have a specific name is it also a pitch i soccer. Is lacrosse just a field? Does it have a specific name?
Is it also a pitch?
I don't know.
Two other really quick cold opens.
Field or pitch, apparently.
The one thing I wanted to highlight was CT winning again,
this time the form of a $1 million article.
The contest that we're x-raying recently,
Beaver of M'Lady fame won the million dollars with the article on Deloitte,
a $74 billion cancer metastasized across America.
Beaver is also the one that has started the Somali scan
where he's basically helping uncover fraud.
And it's not, this is like. I don't know if this
was a shit post or real,
but after he wins his million bucks, he posts
this screenshot.
I shouldn't assume Beaver's a he.
They
posted
this NVIDIA
GPU bundle that's
$229,000, nearly
a quarter million dollars for some GPUs, says,
going to catch so many corrupt politicians with this bad boy.
This first comment is, what color Lambo you can get?
I don't know, man.
I really like the ones that come with 640 gigs of VRAM at 1,500 TOK per second.
I don't know what that means.
Anyways, congrats to Beaver and everyone who,
did well in the article competition.
Runner up was co.
I don't even say this.
Cobasi letter,
not exactly CT,
but they,
they're,
they're very much so into markets.
And,
and then Dan Coe,
the one that kind of kicked,
I think was the inspiration behind the million dollar contest,
uh, posted the article.
It was the most viewed article of all time on X.
They went ahead and gave him a quarter million as well for, I guess, a pretty nice participation trophy.
And there's a few others that also got honorable mentions with 100K.
I know X doesn't have the greatest
rap right now, and
I complain about spaces.
Following up on
yesterday's conversation regarding delusional
optimism, I still believe
that
X is
a good place for creators. It's different,
and there is
certainly platform risk. I think
the best answer is all platforms. But I do think they're doing things differently. I also, I think
it is maybe not a small deal, this whole XAI and SpaceX merger, you're talking the most valuable
privately held company ever that's going to IPO.
What does that mean for X and creators on X?
I don't know exactly, but I remain optimistic they'll figure it out.
And they clearly are incentivizing, rewarding creators.
Is it as good as other platforms?
Depends on who you ask.
If you go ask Beaver or Dan dan co they'd probably say yes uh you know i you know i would love to see them prioritize video better and
spaces better not just written text or articles but you know i also know the game that i'm playing
or not playing and that that's a me problem, not an X problem.
Anyways, just wanted to highlight that.
And then before we jump into Vitalik, the other, speaking of X, is the ticker X has just become available.
We need a prediction mark on how much Elon will end up paying for that.
You want to talk about FU money?
I think he's now worth more than the next
three or four wealthiest people in the world.
If you add up
Bezos and Sergey
and Larry Page, I think he's now
at least paper net worth worth more than
all of them.
$850 billion.
I think it's a lot for a trillion this year
and I would
be surprised if he doesn't buy the X ticker at this point.
But we will see.
Maybe more important is in the world of AI.
I shared this previously.
Claude, full porting my chat to Claude.
I don't think it's close right now.
Also, by the way, somewhat breaking news,
is Claude taking firing shots directly at OpenAI.
OpenAI came out and said, we're going to be introducing ads.
Just this morning, a half hour ago, 45 minutes ago, Claude had this to say, while they don't name ChatGPT or OpenAI, direct shot over the bow here.
Claude is built to be a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.
Advertising would be incompatible with that vision.
Read why Claude will remain ad-free.
ad-free?
It's early, but I think, and you're talking giants, you know, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI
are just three.
And right now, I think for what they, different, but to me, Google and Google has an immense
lead on data.
You've got, Claude just works better, just more efficient,
it's more effective. ChatGPT, I feel, is regressing. And then I think the sleeper is
Grok. Personally, my personal rankings, even though ChatGPT was my daily driver for too long,
I would put it probably fourth at best right now behind Claude, Gemini, and Grok in terms of what those LLMs are capable of, both free and premium versions.
And although I have not used the Google premium version, just seeing, we'll talk a little bit later.
We'll talk about the Nuko Rays and what they're doing in the AI space.
and what they're doing in the AI space.
We'll also talk a little bit about Project Genie from Google
and how AI is, how quickly they're killing some companies.
And I don't remember who,
someone in crypto posted something about the,
like almost feeling sorry for some of these,
might've been bread, I'll go find it.
So feeling sorry for these brands
that might've raised in 21, 22,
built big teams, and then
a couple years later,
AI is just
like, they can't build that way anymore.
Like, you gotta, especially if you're a startup,
like, it's like some of the big,
you know, Fortune 500, some of the big publicly traded
companies, they might be able to
turn like a Titanic, but
these startups, like like they just you
can't compete with that kind of cash burn when you know a single person can go build something
over a weekend that's going to be as good or better than what you're trying to build
with your massive teams and it really is shaking some things up i'm going to be curious and excited
to see uh how things shape out katie who who, in the abstract chat, Katie says he
talks on spaces a lot. Who are you referencing about talking on spaces? I'm curious. I did not
catch what that might be in reference to, but do appreciate all of our chat participants.
DeFi addicts has once Grok version 4.0 drops,
DeFi addicts says once Grok version 4.0 drops, it will be the number one AI. Maybe.
it will be the number one AI.
Maybe.
The other thing I don't think we've ever talked about
on the show is Grokipedia,
I think is pretty cool.
I could see that continuing to grow
and eventually overtaking Wikipedia.
I think this is just an example of many areas
where AI is just going to be better
than human counterparts.
It just is. You don't have to like it, but I think it is just an example of many areas where AI is just going to be better than human counterparts. It just is.
You don't have to like it, but I think it's not something you want to put your head in the sand.
Oh, Matthew, thank you for the, I get it now.
This is, I did a quick digression and we will get into this article from Vitalik.
There was the Breaking Bad House is on the market.
It's been on the market for a while.
I think it was initially listed at 4 million million. Now it's down to $400,000. I said, if this was 21, 22, a Dow would
already own this thing and the Breaking Bad museum would be live. He mentioned that a family member
lives in the neighborhood and used to go by and there'd always be people throwing pizzas on the
roof. I'd forgotten the scene where Walter White throws a pizza on the roof, even a gift for it.
where Walter White throws a pizza on the roof,
even a gift for it.
So yeah, if you,
he later admitted that this was all improvised
and the crew was astonished
that he just left it there for continuity.
It was there for like two or three more episodes afterwards.
That's hilarious.
And so beloved that the local community
and fans of the show would go throw pizzas
on this roof of this house.
So if you do buy a Breaking Bad house,
know that there is a good probability
that you'll walk out one day
and find pizza on your roof.
Market-wise, I actually, I don't know.
Maybe we circle back to it later.
It's just, it's rough out there right now.
I remain optimistic.
I don't know where the bottom's at
other than CryptoPunks.
I'm still hopeful it's 50k
i think the floor is about 60k right now i do usd obviously i saw one last night sold for 54k
and historically we've seen that floor somewhat protected at at that 50k mark so i'm hopeful we
hit 50k and then we just we rip from there But in the last 24 hours, Bitcoin down another 3%. It's 75K.
ETH down 3%.
We'll set up our Vitality conversation in a second.
And Solana, the biggest loser on the day, down 7% to $95.
I didn't think we'd see $100, sub $100 Solana, but yet here we are.
It's not long ago.
I remember talking about Cardano and they like pegged in that 80, 85 cent range.
It's 29 cents. Like Doge is almost below 10 cents. Just getting, getting rough out there.
Fear and greed and crypto at 14, extreme fear. And relative to the, uh, TradFi fear and greed,
it is, um, it is in fear now. So I don't know if it was Monday or last week, we talked about it was in greed.
This is how quickly things are moving, how volatile these moves are.
Both, I mean, unfortunately, most of the volatile moves have been to the downside.
But just last week, it was 64.
Again, this isn't crypto.
This is TradFi, Fear, and Greed.
Just last week, it was 64. It just like it skipped neutral and went all the way to 41, where it was a month ago. Just a really confusing market at this time. And it's confusing, not just for crypto. I think you see even Wall Street being somewhat confused as well. Oh, she was talking about
Beaver.
Comments keeps getting removed. That's funny.
I wonder, does it abstract moderate
Beaver?
That would be something. Ping great.
Thank you very much for the ping-do tip over there. Greatly appreciate
it. I've never heard Beaver speak, so
it is a he. Thank you for clarifying
that. He does speak on Spaces.
I will see if I can catch him on one here soon. And clearly big, big brain when it comes roof. Gifts are flooding the chat. Shout out Matthew and Machabelli. Now that we've got all that out of the way, GM also to Sean GoMining, I think a relatively new listener slash community member out there.
to go up at some point. We just don't know when yet. And getting some, oh, we got a mint tonight.
Human resources claim for Mibits and VFriend holders, one mint per wallet. It's a free mint,
first come, first serve. No idea what this is, but Sasso tagged Jesus, an idiot, and myself
from Solos. So do your own research. No idea. I'm just seeing it for the first time getting tagged
here. But a free mint and the last freeement or close to freement that caught some motion uh did pretty well uh
we're looking talking about del mundo's here i think it's still trading around the 0.03 e floor
joe are you still in del mundo's i do i still have 10 i thought about selling at 0.03, but I was like, I paid so little. Let's see what happens.
It's been dropping bullet like to 0.02 and then back up and then down.
And so it's like, I think it's at like 0.022 right now.
Yeah. I mean, it's not the only thing dumping down. I mean,
punks I mentioned down a couple of percent of the day below 27.
Now pudgies down to 4.2 down 3% of the day. Apes were flat actually at 5.37.
Not sure. Last time we had a little over one ETH gap in those two, uh, new birds flat at 1.17
after the two, I don't know. I'm guessing Adam Weitzman's deal. We didn't talk about that
yesterday, but the day before he bought 200 moon birds, I'm assuming that was OTC and not,
that I don't think he did a floor suite,
but I could be wrong there.
If anyone is familiar,
let me know.
Little punches,
0.48 mutants,
0.76 good vibes club up again to 0.87 and,
azuki 0.72 grifters,
15 each cyber calm is the big winner on the day.
Anyone know what happened there?
They're up 61% to two ETH.
was this a, I have no idea.
It's 2 ETH and super, super thin floor for CyberKong.
If you don't remember, this is one of the OG collections from the 21 era.
And they've had several subsequent secondary collections.
There's only a thousand of these.
So the supply is small. 2.8 listed so not you know not many
listed floor again two east but it goes to two eight and three four and four seven then five
east so floor runs up in a hurry it does appear to be a sweep we had someone here sold like five
or six of them about 1.24 and um yeah some some looks like some rare sold in there as well but that's the biggest
there's a video i just went to their x there's a video pinned from 22 hours ago that's a minute
and a half a minute and a half long maybe it has something to do what's in that video
about like what what's happening with their project, maybe? Yeah. It says the weaponization of opportunity.
I'll pin it up top if anyone wants to take a watch
and let us know what it's all about.
I'd be curious.
They're one of the ones that I remember them
for the banana token.
This project mended in April of 21,
basically same time as BoardApes, shortly
before.
They were one of the first ones
to launch a fungible token. It was the banana.
I remember at one point, it was
one of the first where people were talking,
I made $4,000 staking my
cyber calling yesterday. I'm
retiring because I'm going to make this
every day for the next year.
Anytime you see that, that's your telltale sign to, uh, to take some profits. Um, I've got this
pulled up here on screen. It, they, they leaned into the star Wars, uh, a galaxy long time ago,
uh, theme here with, uh, with the video and, uh, calling it the death star. Oh,
I bet it's a strategy token. do they not have a strategy token yet they don't have a strategy token but they but they have i i don't understand
why they would do a strategy token when they have don't they have two tokens don't they have two
tokens and a rune already or did they convert the banana at some point recently last year they converted bananas to
something else and then they also launched the rune right and yeah there's a lot in that ecosystem
kind of i'm just not i've never been in the community they kind of lost me with the the
so many secondary collections and whatnot but i think they have four four collections right they
have kongs and they have baby kongs and then they are and then they have the collections, right? They have Kongs, then they have Baby Kongs,
and then they have the Voxels,
and then they have the anime ones too, right?
They have like four collections.
So, I mean, I guess from a price action standpoint,
I can see making sense because it is such a small supply.
So I think some of these collections, when they go into strategy and then you put it in that fly
wheel, it's just easier for things to pump when supply is low, listings are low. So that fully
makes sense why you see some floor sweeps and some people try to front run that. It'll be
interesting to see how it plays out. I think it's very challenging for those that have already their existing native tokens and that then they also
support a strategy token i don't think it's a coincidence that that good vibes club and
chimpers are some of the more successful ones because it's their own it's their only token
and they've really their only fungible token i should say and they've really leaned into
supporting that and um you know doing the burn fungible token, I should say, and they've really leaned into supporting that and
doing the burn, the buys,
the burns with royalties and whatnot.
It's just, it's really hard to support
multiple products,
specifically tokenized
products. And
we'll see.
I'm certainly not running out to buy a Cyber
Kong at 2 ETH, but
because, again, the floor is so thin,
could be some opportunities there for flippers.
You can also play at the strategy route.
I mentioned thinking about starting this one trade a day segment here on the show.
I didn't buy Vibester.
If Vibester was actually down, as this chart was showing me,
I would have bought it, but it was kind of flat in the day,
so I wasn't getting the discount I thought I first was when I first looked
at it. But yeah, I think there's some opportunity to trade inside that, that realm. The other thing
that I am going to look at real quick, and then I saw Jack flew up. We'll see if Jack has any
comments on this. If not, we'll roll into the Vitalik blog post. Last week, I said it looked to me
that the Burb market makers were protecting the 200 million FDD floor. And then yesterday,
after the big run-up, I said, it looks like they're protecting the 300 million FDD floor.
So this just kept bouncing every time it hit there. I just don't think
there's that many. In fact, I know there's not that many new buyers because the holder
account hasn't changed. It's basically been at like 14,700 since launch, I think maybe a couple
days after. And how do you explain a pump like that if it's not a bunch of new net new buyers,
unless, unless this sex buyers, unless upbit buyers
aren't counted, I guess would be the explanation. If there really is, in fact, a lot of retail
buyers, I think the chart is being held up now by whales and some market makers. And you could
short it. Although I don't think I'm not, again, I'm not going, I don't have a MEX account, so I don't have the ability to short it right now.
But I don't even think I would do that.
I think it probably holds this line between $290 million and $300 million and possibly could do channel trade, swing trade it.
It's just, it's not even moving that much.
It's just, it's not even moving that much.
I mean, obviously I had a huge run up.
Had you longed it at 200 million when I caught it last week and then closed that long at 450 million, it would have been a massive win.
But it's, you take out the big, the big God candles and, and then, and then the subsequent sell-offs, people, people cashing out, taking liquidity.
It's just kind of bouncing between, you know, first it was like 200 million to 220 million. Now it's bouncing from 290 to
310 ish. So it's just, it's not moving a lot. Uh, I don't know. It's, it's, I'm going to keep
an eye on it. Probably not going to get into a trade today. Uh, but if it does go on lighter
or hyper liquid, potentially, um, I might look to trade it aggressively short term.
I won't be walking away because I don't think it just doesn't appear like this is organic
retail buyers or any real retail demand for this thing. And there is going to be sell pressure as
the unlocks come with the burp game and the nesting. But I'll give Spencer and team credit for a good-looking chart coming out of the gates.
And you can like how the chart looks.
You can dislike it.
But it is a heck of a lot better when it looks like this than when it is down only.
So playing the game well, whether you like the game or not, you've got to play the game sometimes.
And that they are indeed doing.
Jack GM, we're going to go to vitalik uh blog here in a second but did i saw you flow up anything uh you wanted to get in on on the whether it was the x creator million dollar prize to a
member of ct or any of the other uh any of the other ramblings this morning before we move on thanks cap um yeah look i think
i it just makes it does give me a little faith in ct you know like this was up for anyone for
any industry for any niche the fact that we got this the idea that there isn't attention here
like yeah it just definitively proves that, you know, regardless of what the sentiment is, there are a lot of people watching this space.
So I really like that.
Onto Moonbirds and if they're playing a game or not.
I've been semi-vocal on this, but it's only crime if I'm down on money.
You know, like if the retail are winning and everyone else is winning, like I'm winning, I'm not concerned about that side.
I think realistically, yeah, there's probably some market makers in here.
Probably is ridiculous to even say as a statement.
But yeah, look, I think we will have to see because obviously this only succeeds whilst there are people in here.
And these market makers, they're not charity.
They aren't there for retail to get money out.
So what have they been sold on?
That's a thing.
You oversell a market maker and they withdraw.
And then that's a lot of people down money as well.
So I think Spencer
is an incredibly intelligent person. He's one of the top five most intelligent people I've spoken
to in the crypto space. He also knows the trading side better than any founder that I'm aware of.
So yeah, he's playing the game that he's playing to his strengths. I think that's my overall
thought on this.
And whilst people are up, fantastic.
But I'm not going to sit here and pretend I know the, you know, the end results or that.
It's great because my bags are up because I haven't exited any of those bags.
So, yeah, there's a little hesitation from me, I guess, would be the most transparent way to put that.
Yeah, I've not exited any either, but I'm also not,
I'm not a buyer.
I might trade it,
but I'm not buying to hold here
because I do think once the market maker,
I'm convinced that market makers
are supporting this chart
and right they should be.
To your point, Spencer knows
the token game as good
or better than potentially any of the,
especially the NFT,
PFP founders or team leads.
And you got, you gotta,
you gotta do this properly.
Part of the,
part of launching a token properly is you gotta have market makers in place.
Once they take their ball and go home,
I just,
I think there's much more sellers than,
than buyers at this time.
Things could change.
By the way,
if anyone's looking for a bling burp,
I've got one of,
one of 144 sitting back there.
It could be taken. Everything has a number, including that fine-looking burb sitting on
the top, sitting perched up on top there. What's not for sale is the Super Bowl tickets or the
World Series tickets. Game six of 2011, greatest World Series game of all time.
Now that I've got that out, let's talk a little bit about Vitalik and his shot over the bow at L2s. Not even really a shot. He didn't take a shot directly, but it's
just, I mean, kind of, I think what many have been thinking and just came out. I think hearing
it come from Vitalik is a pretty big deal. And it's not the death of L2s, but it's going to be the death of some L2s.
And I think if nothing else, I think we see very, very few generalized L2s launch in the future.
I think we'll see very specific use case L2s.
I think we'll see some launch with very specific products or dApps. But I think a
general use L2, because it's, oh, it's faster than mainnet, not going to fly anymore. There's just
like those teams. I get it. Infra was an easy way to raise a lot of capital and drop a token,
and it worked really well for some. But I do have this article pulled up on screen here. I'll pin it up top if you missed it.
It's kind of long.
I'm not going to read the whole thing,
but we'll summarize and then have some conversation around it.
We do have, after we get through this,
a few other things I want to talk about.
One is not just Euphoria,
but there's some up-and-coming MegaEth contests
and activations that this is now,
if mega ETH has even a sliver of the success, I think they might. Now's the time to be paying
attention and get registered for this stuff. I'm not saying it's, it is like a NFT mania season
where you need to get on your allow list and everything and be scanning discords all
day every day but there's some things that maybe they all go to zero maybe some pump if they pump
I think now you just you're not going to be sidelined if you had the ability to get access
so we'll talk about that a little bit we may talk about groceries and free groceries in New York
depending on how the time goes and have have some agent conversation as well, including, speaking of agents,
Nuko closed their pre-seed round
of over a million dollars.
We'll probably hit on that
before we wrap up today as well.
Congrats to Austin and the team there.
But back to the conversation at hand here,
the trending topic of the day.
Vitalik says,
there has recently been some discussion
on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts.
One, L2's progress to stage two and secondarily on interoperability has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected.
has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected.
I'm not the one to peel back that onion,
but I am curious what were the expectations
and why has it been slower and more difficult.
Second bullet point, L1 itself is scaling.
Fees are very low and gas limits are projected to increase greatly in 2026. I mentioned
earlier, gas was 0.4.
It's 0.6 right now.
If your old thesis
was an L2 for scaling
because it's going to be marginally faster and marginally
less expensive than ETH,
it just doesn't
hold anymore.
Maybe
even that exceeded their expectation because ETH users are up,
ETH wallets are up, tokenized assets are up. So the usage is there. Is it all at the same time,
like highly anticipated NFT mints back in 21, 22. No, but usage is there.
Like ETH is growing and the network is holding firm.
Like even in crazy, like get liquidation cascades,
gas might pump to like, I don't know, 30, 40 GUE.
The other day I had a gas, I had a transaction.
I didn't process because it was going to be like $12 in gas.
And I'm like $12 in gas. And that would have been like,
we would have killed to get a transaction through for $12 in gas. And that would have been like, we would have killed to get a transaction
through for $12 in gas back in the day. So I think the mainnet has done a great job in their upgrades.
And part of the value prop of ETH is they're able to pull these, these upgrades off in real time.
They've had a hundred percent uptime since the network went live. Like it's just really good
tech and the L2s aren't better tech.
So anyways, both of these facts for their own separate reasons mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in the Ethereum no longer makes sense.
We need a new path.
First, let us recap the original vision.
Ethereum means the scale.
The definition of Ethereum scaling is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum.
That is, block space where if you do things, including with ETH, inside the block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions.
If you create a 10,000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multi-sig bridge, you are not scaling Ethereum.
This vision no longer makes sense.
L1 does not need L2s to be branded shards because L1 itself is scaling.
And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true branded shard would require.
I've even seen at least one explicitly say that they may never want to go beyond stage one, not just for technical reasons around ZKEVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control.
This may be doing the right thing for your customers, but it should be obvious that if you're doing this, then you're not scaling Ethereum in the sense meant by roll-up-centric roadmap. But that's fine. It's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1
with large planned increases
to its gas limit this year
and the years ahead.
We should stop thinking about L2s
as being branded shards of Ethereum
with the social status and responsibility
that this entails.
Instead, we can think of L2s
as being a full spectrum,
which includes both chains
backed by full faith and creditably
with various unique properties, not just EBM, as well as a whole array of options at different
levels of connection to Ethereum that each person or bot, that's, I think, although it's in parentheses,
I think that's a key one to come back to, is free to care about or not care about depending on their
needs. He goes on to say, and this is where we're going to wrap and then we'll get to Joey and Jack. If anyone else wants to get in this conversation, feel free
to drop your comments, your questions in the chat, or throw a request to come up on stage.
As always, open space, open stage here on Coffee with Captain. I would love any,
especially any big brains. I mentioned, I think Divide will be joining us next Tuesday to talk
a little more technical here, but if anyone wants to get in, let us know. He goes on to say what I
would do today if I were an L2. Identify a value add other than scaling. Examples, one, non-EVM
specialized features, virtual machines around privacy. Two, efficiency specialized around a
particular application. Three, truly extreme levels of scaling that not even a greatly expanded L1 will not do.
Four, a totally different design for non-financial applications, example, social, identity, AI, or very, and then five, ultra low latency and other sequencing properties.
other sequencing properties.
Six, maybe built-in oracles
or decentralized dispute resolutions
or other non-computationable, verifiable features.
Be stage one at minimum.
Otherwise, you're really just a separate L1 with a bridge
and you should just call yourself that
if you're doing things with ETH
or other Ethereum-issued assets.
And then lastly, support maximum interoperability
with Ethereum,
though this will differ for each one. What if you're not EVM or even not financial?
I'm very bullish MegaEth, been bullish MegaEth. I do hold a Fluffle. We actually have a Fluffle in the Coffee with Captain Kitty as well. And I got in their last echo round,
not the first, but I did get in the last echo round.
So I'm financially biased.
I do have bags, but the reason I'm biased
and one of the bigger bets I'm making this cycle
is not just with my capital, but also my time
and wanting to explore this ecosystem
because of how they're building.
They do have not only a lot of unique dApps
and novel dApps and how they've been working with the builders.
In my perspective, it's far different than most of the other L2s.
They check most of these boxes, specifically ultra low latency,
specifically truly extreme levels of scaling that not even a greatly expanded L1 could do.
Like very different design than the other L2s.
And it can do things at extreme levels
that main net won't be able to do.
So not only does this make me more bullish,
MegaEath seeing this,
I think because MegaEath is checking these boxes
and a lot of the other L2s simply don't,
I think it stands to reason that you could see
even more builders flock to MegaEath.
Whether they leave their existing L2s or they go multi-chain,
I think because of how MegaEath is positioned
and differentiating themselves from the other L2s
and checking these boxes that Vitalik lays out,
the people matter. Liquidity matters, but builders also matter. Having cold apps on your,
on your chain also matters. And I'll, I'll pull up a, we'll get our, we'll get our guests in here
in a second. I'll pull up a post from Garga who had something to say about this, was specifically talking about
Ape Chain and other side. And he says, he remembers in 2022, in July 22, when people in the ApeCoin DAO voted to prohibit Ape from building an L1,
charge led by a lot of people who left crypto and Ethereum years ago now.
This isn't death for ApeChain because one of the things that Ape, the thing that ApeChain
has going for it, the biggest thing ApeChain has going for it, is they have a novel DAP.
They have a flagship DAP that is other side.
He goes on to say, I wrote a long post on L1s versus L2s a while back, can't find it right now, but everything I said there still stands.
You need to have a very opinionated design in order for it to be worth having your own L2.
The generalized just faster L2 thesis is pointless and dead.
I wholeheartedly agree.
He goes on to say, Ape ape success is tied directly to other side that's the platform that we have
that no one else does and we're going to create a unique symbiosis between chain and platform
wholeheartedly agree and um actually it looks like rahim found the original one how many new
chains you think are going to be launched in the next six to 12 months talking with people who have
deal flow sounds like between 50 to 100 that have raised serious money, which makes sense,
easiest thing to raise money for since forever has been a new chain or infrastructure. I think
that's over. I think you could debate whether this is a death nail for L2s that don't have any
real differentiating factors over being marginally faster and marginally less expensive than mainnet.
really faster and marginally less expensive than mainnet. I think what is really over is this. I
cannot imagine a... I'm trying not to make it PVP, but I'll just use it because it was recent.
Can't imagine a Monad raising anything remotely close to what they raised
now going forward. It's just, it's marginally better. They don't have anything unique. They
don't check any of those boxes that Vitalik was just talking about. And while this was easier for builders to
raise funds with new infra, I think it's over. Unless they go their own L1 route, or they do
something that is extreme, like MegaEath, or they first find a dApp that has product market fit,
and then they build a chain around that. I think we'll see that.
But this era of just launching L2s to create,
and go look at their performance.
Like the user base isn't there.
The fees aren't there.
The volume isn't there.
This happened well, but this wasn't Vitalik just making this stuff up.
Part of the reason he's saying that, it's just it's based in fact.
Like the stuff is not no one's using it.
They're ghost chains.
And he Garga said this June of 2024, over a year and a half ago.
I think we see the pendulum swings back.
It'll leave a lot more ghost chains in this week.
And he was right.
He was right.
So now while I think garga and the ape team
probably would have preferred an l1 uh they went the route of not even an l2 but an l3 uh leveraging
arbitrum i think they're fine it's but again ape chain it's and this is me saying this is garga
saying this their success or or failure will be directly tied to other side if other side's a
massive success ape chain is going to be relevant to success if other side. If other side's a massive success,
ApeChain is going to be relevant to success. If other side doesn't make it or maybe even
makes it, but not at major massive scale, they may, I'm not, they're not saying this,
I'm saying this, they may look to, I don't know, move away from ApeChain. Maybe they do spend,
I don't know what that holds. I do know they are part of the Arbitrum ecosystem and Arbitrum funded a lot of their build out, their development. I'm sure that I know there was initial contractual agreements. I wouldn't be surprised to know that there's even commitments beyond whatever the initial, I think it was 18 months that Arbitrum was paying for all the fees. I'm not exactly sure on that, but I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon.
that Arbitrum was paying for all the fees.
I'm not exactly sure on that,
but I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon.
And maybe they never do, but Garga nailed it.
I mean, his thesis is basically,
he was a lot of what he said in this post in June of 24
was just effectively co-signed by Vitalik.
I'm going to take a breath there.
I will pin this one up top as well.
Let's go back to Joey first, then we'll go to Jack.
Yeah, I don't want to say that
we we all saw this coming
but I I can remember conversations
we've had on this stage
for years now
about our
criticisms of L2s and like
why do we need so many and what's
the point and what's going to be the
differentiator and
you know it's it's interesting now that
finally vitalik is coming out and talking about it because i i don't and i'm not saying we're the
only ones that have been saying this but i think a lot of people have been asking these questions
for years on why do we need so many l2s and what's the point and what's the differentiator
between them all?
I mean, it's clear the bigger, you know, like you mentioned base as an example, it's clear
what base is doing, right? Their connection to Coinbase, their ability to onboard
individuals like retail is, is their, is their differentiator mega ETH.
Their differentiator is, as you mentioned, their speed.
Um, and then all of the stuff that they're building, but when you look at some of these
other ones, like, and I don't think polygon is going to go anywhere.
Cause they've been here a long time, but you look at things like polygon and you look at
things like abstract and you maybe, you know, maybe abstracts unique is, you know, the fact that they're tied
to the pudgy penguins. I don't know, but there's a lot of these L2s out there that they're just,
they're just existing. And, but I will say, I do think what's really cool about Vitalik's article
is what you mentioned at the end, which is where he literally told people, like, if you want to be
successful, here are ways to be successful successful because he could have very easily just
left the whole article been like doom and gloom about l2s without providing a clear path on how
l2s can be successful if they want to survive so i thought that was really cool of him but
um i do find it interesting that there have been a lot of very smart people in this space
talking about um why do we need so many L2s and why should
I use this one over that one? And now it's finally coming out from the man himself.
Yeah, I agree. And it may hurt the feelings of some of these L2 teams, but it's probably better
that they hear it now as opposed to keep going forward with something that's not working.
Now I'm curious what space or what, excuse me, what face I had on.
I've become a maker of memes with my facial expressions on this show.
I need to become more cognizant, more consciously aware of my facial expressions.
I know it's not great video or, or maybe you enjoy it, but yeah,
I get deep in thought of multitasking and have no idea what face I'm making. Sometimes if I make a
funny face, it's often not because something that a guest speaker is saying, it's probably something
I'm reading on the timeline or in the chat somewhere. So please, if you're Jack or Joey,
if I made some ridiculous face, uh, it was not directed at you, uh, Jack, or Joey, if I made some ridiculous face, it was not directed at you.
Jack, now if I make him...
I'm sure you roll your eyes at me many times throughout the day.
Joey, you took the words right out of my mouth.
About me, not about Joey.
That could have been super aggressive.
Look, yeah, I'm with Joey.
I'm with you here.
I think, look, if the audience is like, yeah, no, we know.
We get it.
I think for me, look, you've just got to frame this in a way
where the product is the product.
The same way any point system token would be the product.
And if there is no differentiator to that product
and there is no competitive edge within
the team who are building that product then don't touch it like i i think it really is that simple i
you know we we another conversation we have quite frequently on on shows like this is eventually
nobody is going to know about the individual blockchain you know and just nobody's going to
say that the same way we don't talk about what server or a website is on like i think that's you know definitively coming within
the next honestly in the next two years with the way ai is just eradicating everything now um i i
just i don't think we will be speaking about these chains hot as much as we do right now. And it will just be like,
hey, what is the product
and where does it best fit?
And if there is a chain that suits a product
better than any other chain,
because this is just the internet, people.
We are just building, we call it web-free,
people fucking hate it, but that's what it is.
It's a better version of the current internet
with a lot of support rails
that actually realistically are the only things i can see that would support ai not just completely
eradicating the internet as it's now known you know being able to believe what you see digitally
not only that but pause pause on that for a second. Yeah, yeah. What do you think is easier for an AI to transact with?
Open up a PayPal and a fiat checking account or on-chain?
I know I'm saying that rhetorical question because it's close, right?
They're all going to transact on-chain.
Maybe some will open bank accounts and PayPal.
I don't know how they can't open a bank account in the US,
but maybe they'll get PayPal accounts and stuff.
But that's just friction. I don't know how they can't open a bank account in the US, but maybe they'll get PayPal accounts and stuff. But that's just, that's friction.
I doubt it.
And it's so clear and obvious to me
that not only will we use blockchain tech
to validate and confirm authenticity,
and is this human or is this a robot,
it's how, it's,
like if you believe this thesis that there's going to be, that AI is going to continue to proliferate almost every year of our
life and there's going to be more AI agents a year from now than there is today, probably tenfold,
where are they going to, where are they going to operate? It's going to be on chain. And I think
the acknowledgement of Vitalik of
bots in that post is, while it was like a throwaway statement in parentheses, I think it's a really
big deal. And maybe we see some L2 that's specifically built for bots, but I don't
understand. My brain's not big enough to even understand what the need or the use case would be.
It's like they can transact, interact just like humans can on these blockchains.
They're doing it right now. I mean, right now, part of the, I didn't have it as a news item today,
but one of the trending topics is we went from ClodBot and everyone getting their open call machines running
to now AI agents are renting humans. Like can get gig work from yes well how are they
going to pay it they're going to pay you with tokens on chain and there's cap you're stepping
all over my really genius take go for it no no no you keep cooking but I'm sat here like damn it he
front ran me to this my apologies thank you I'm sorry that that came across way more aggressive again i'm super aggressive today
apparently i like look we got high tea jack on stage today uh high tea maybe it is i have been
eating a bit better maybe my testosterone testosterone's come back to base or you know
for me high tea is probably like still way way below base but you know for me that could be super high
we need a uh we need a doodle of high t zach or high t jack versus low t jack uh if you can
commission that if you can get that commission i'd appreciate oh shit yeah i forgot that was
even a thing um it was like alpha beta jack remember um but anyway look i think you're
dead right one thing i didn't foresee and this is really exciting to me,
but also kind of really weird,
you're not just going to have to verify when it's an actual person
or when it's AI generated.
The reverse of that's also going to be true.
You just referenced the Malt book or the open claw, is it now? now i don't know but whatever it is called at this
point in time i think it's changed its name more times than i've changed my pfp um this thing is
now being used to scare people you know like ai is doing this mold book thing and people like oh
my god they're talking to each other oh my god they're
talking in their own language and it's a it's fear-mongering yep b it's also potentially
manipulative in terms of investment vehicle standpoint we saw this with deep seek for sure
like a year or two ago no for sure like some of it it's like it's really cool tech is real
at the same time there's also a lot of manipulation and a lot of psyops going on right now that people are claiming.
It's like it's real.
It's really good.
It is a next evolution of what AI can do and these agents can do at the same time.
Like take everything you see with a grain of salt.
It's not all real.
real and there are people i mean some of the one i saw recently this is absurd is there's a human
And there are people.
that's got its ai agent basically claiming that it's going to dox the human it's got its uh
fuzzy picture of its passport and if the token doesn't hit 100 million he's gonna get like
it's just stuff like that that that's i'm 99 certain that's a psyop, right? It's already been proven, Cap.
Cook already posted about it,
but the back end, it's proven that they've just injected that prompt to make these things say this stuff.
So yeah, we have it right now.
So that's a world I didn't foresee.
And if we extrapolate on that world,
where now we don't need to just prove,
hey, this wasn't a human being it was
ai but the reverse also being true of hey this was actually a human being ai isn't this far ahead
like just just for a second as an audience and obviously everyone here on stage try and perceive
a world where real true authentication that cannot be disrupted manipulated like what am i talking
about right now i'm talking about crypto like so for everybody who is talking about ai and saying
it's going to disrupt the world it definitively seems to be at this point that crypto has to go
along with that because there's no other solution and why would you try and even build one if the technology is perfect and it is here now that's
where you know if we want to go back to the you know the l2s etc this is again where use case
really does matter i can see the idea of like basically being incorruptible and ethereum
obviously has a big run up here also Also, the ability to evolve quickly.
You know, we talk about quantum computing.
One of the biggest concerns about Bitcoin isn't the fact that it can't, it wouldn't be susceptible to quantum computing.
It's the fact that it needs consensus before they can update it.
And if quantum computing goes on the leaps and bounds that it could go on, then maybe, you know know that bureaucracy almost could stall it where you
know that's that's a big big concern ethereum it's just going to happen so yeah i think this
is what i'm now thinking about i'm thinking in what i feel is 10 years but is actually probably
two and that's me done sorry for the rant um no no apologies needed and i i want to give it
another uh oh i was, I was trying to
comment on Diabolito. Maybe he, he deleted his, uh, his gnarly hand. I didn't want anyone else
to see it, but, uh, sending, sending my best for speedy recovery there. A quick shout out here to
opportunist sharing this post from Bloomberg. Then I'm going to go to Joey. Then I'm going to go
refill the coffee. So Joey and Jack can, can riff for 60 to 90 seconds before I get back. But
this just in, speaking of AI, and I guess it came out January 29th, but I did not see it.
Shout out to Opportunist for bringing it to my attention. Apple had acquired an Israeli-based
artificial intelligence startup, Q.ai, which develops technology for reading facial movements
and understanding silent communication. So about time Apple started making some acquisitions in the AI space to level up their existing AI Siri,
which has fallen far, far, far behind.
And it's just like at first, like if you would have told me last year, like, oh, we're going to we're going to be able to translate animals.
Like you're going to be able to know what your dog is actually saying in the near future.
I would have told you you're crazy.
Now I'd probably say it's 50-50.
Like it's just the rate of advancement is so mind-blowing.
Payne, I thought about – I actually did consciously think about doing the the reset video um
maybe i'll do that if i have another break i will do that one
we producer pain has been working extremely hard behind the scenes and has done some cool stuff to
where i'm not even gonna have to you know i'll have some awesome some some fine like whole music
for y'all and in uh some cool videos if i do need to uh take the mobile screen drop or or refill the coffee every time i say this and think about it my brain goes to how
superhuman that scott hansen is the the host of nfl red zone the guy talks on screen for seven
consecutive hours and he either is unhuman and doesn't take a pee break because he's got to be
drinking water. Like, I don't know how you could talk for seven straight hours and not like do that
without water or not losing your voice. Uh, I obviously drink a ton of coffee and you know,
I'm, I'm very well hydrated throughout the show, but I, as I say this, I probably do for like some
sort of an exam. That's not enjoyable because, um, I enjoyable because I do pee a lot, but I also drink a lot.
So that's my way more too much information this morning.
Blame Payne in the chat for not letting me go pee and refill my coffee in peace.
But I kid, I am excited about some of the new, the jingles are in high demand.
We've had a lot of requests for bring the jingles back.
Boy, oh boy, do we have more than just jingles coming soon. So all that to be said,
we're going to,
I'm going to hand it back to Joey and then Joey,
Jack,
feel free to,
to man the mic for 60 to 90 seconds.
I'll be right back.
Joey.
Yeah.
Back on the L2 conversation.
I'm not,
I'm not a dev.
Don't claim to be a dev.
I don't understand all the technical aspects of these chains, but like for,
for if you're having a conversation with someone, it's like, oh,
why should I launch on optimism?
Why should I launch on arbitra?
Why should I launch on polygon?
Why should I write like most of those conversations center around?
Well, who's going to give you the most money?
Who's going to, you know, who's going to support you.
Right.
Like, and again, from a dev perspective, maybe there are technical differences that make,
that make those decisions easier. But I've, every conversation I've ever seen about like where
somebody is going to launch typically centers around who's got some kind of grant program or
who's funding or whatever. And that that's and that's probably the same conversation
and that ties into this thing with vitalik it's like what is the difference you want to why would
anybody want to launch on why would anybody want to launch on arbitrum versus optimism versus
polygon versus seller versus if if it's not just for the money and if somebody can answer that for me maybe that's why
that l2 will survive and be successful but if it really just always comes down to the grants and
the money then i don't know how any of them are going to be successful
yeah look i'm with you on this joey i think you know we i think at least for me and maybe this is just naivety but i became
aware like how much money is at play when d gods moved over to polygon or the youths for d gods
moved over to polygon and it turned out the reason they did that was because there's like three
million dollars on the table for them to make that move to bring attention to the chain to hopefully you know
basically bring nft buyers to the chain and i think again ai is just going to mitigate so much
of this like i think you know you're not going to be able to market yourself as a chain in the
future it will be about the tech because the reason you market is for attention and ai is basically going
to eradicate the need for people to be aware of your product they will just ask ai this is what
i'm building this is what i need it to do by the way ai if you think of any other criteria that
i need to consider please inject that to what chain should i
use and then obviously we're already seeing the fact that ai needs tokens to generate we already
are seeing the fact that you know there is use case for these chains to have tokens and to be
able to function this way data all of these things um obviously compute is a big big issue right now
like the actual just moving of
this data like the cost to run this we keep here in terms of like you know basically using more
water than x and um you know it's basically it's the it's the new oil um just being able to move
this data around in terms of damage to the environment or at least this is what is being
spread i don't know if that's
true or not i haven't paid enough attention to it to try and pretend i'm an expert on it but i i think
yeah that's that's something that i would probably be asking myself as an l2 right now but also
as a project looking for what chain to go on.
It's like AI is going to be able to tell me this fairly conclusively.
If not today, then not far away from now.
It will also be able to tell people where to go for the product itself.
So if I'm choosing money over efficiency of the chain
or I'm choosing a cash injection over the best possible product for my
user that is going to hurt you faster than you can solve for it with the money that you're going to
get at this point that would be my best guess with just how quickly this stuff is moving the same way
i think basically anybody who has taken an unpaid chill is screwed at this point
like your reputation will be so much more visible than it is today so will every business and so
will basically every step every movement if you are looking for some version of reputational reward
as in the reputation that you build as a business as a brand as an ip as a
creator you you really got to play by the rules at this point i think you'd be stupid not to
um because ai will be very very quick in determining your reputation score based on your
actual actions um so yeah that's that's that's where my head's at i rambled a little bit there
just waiting for cap to come back but jared i don't know if you want to come back yeah i think oh sorry go ahead
cap no i was just saying i'm back good good looking on the uh appreciate it and uh we will
you know what if we don't get to if i don't need another break before we play the outro we'll at
least we'll at least tease one of the uh one of the reset videos produced by the producer Payne. Go ahead, Joey.
Yeah, I think to your point, Jack, which you talked about before is,
if you're building in this space with this technology, what are you building for?
If you're building for retail, like, so let's talk mega ETH, right? Mega ETH,
one of the things they boast about is
this is, or the biggest thing they boast about is, right. Is their speed of transaction, right?
Rivaling credit cards and credit card payments, things like that. I don't know what their,
their retail onboarding is going to look like. Um, but if that's, if that's what their,
their biggest differentiator, not their biggest differentiator, but what makes them attractive is, hey, listen, we can process payments as fast or faster than
tapping the back of your phone or your card.
If you're building for retail in mass payment processing, you're going to go to MegaE.
So I think that's the biggest
thing when choosing, as we go through these L2s and some of them start to fall off is,
if I'm building something, to your point, Jack, what am I building for? And right now,
there's only a few L2s, and I don't know every L2 that exists, and again, not a dev,
but there's only a few L2s that I, that I can think of right now
that exists that if you're trying to build something for the masses that have what it
takes to do that. And if you want to grow beyond this space, you have to think about the people
outside of this space. So, you know, again, Meg ETH and their speed base with, you know again mega eth and their speed base with you know their attachment to coinbase
and their mass you know already massive community you know so it's just going to be interesting to
see how do these do these other chains pivot based on what vitalik said do they have the
ability to pivot or they just keep going until they disappear i I've got a bold take that's not even mine.
I'm repurposing.
I'll co-sign a take here that is a bold take.
This comes from Alex, the CEO of Nansen,
says, quote tweeted to Alex's post and says,
now base has the justification needed to become an L1
and launch its own token.
We know the base token's coming,
at least it's been teased by Jesse and Brian, and pretty sure we get a base token at some point.
Probably makes more sense to drop a token for an L1 than it does another L2. Yes, base is
differentiated in the sense of their customer base, their retail path. At the same time,
their customer base, their retail path.
At the same time, it's marginally faster than ETH,
marginally cheaper than ETH, and not as good as Solana.
It doesn't check many of those boxes.
Other than having a large base of customers,
it doesn't check many of those boxes.
Aguanas DeFi followed that up, commented, says,
this is his thought too, yet he posted that they would stick to Ethereum alignment and push for stage two.
This came out from Jesse, who said, it's great to see Ethereum scaling L1.
This is a win for the entire ecosystem.
Going forward, L2s can't just be Ethereum but cheaper.
Everyone agrees on that, right?
Some of us have been saying that for a while.
I think even it's funny because Dort may be the comment of the day.
Not that, yeah, coffee with Captain, full-length album coming soon.
Forget coffee mugs.
We need the full-length rap and hip-hop slash lo-fi album.
Combine all those genres in one and we'll make it the coffee album.
Forget coffee table books.
It's time for a coffee album.
But the serious take was interesting to see every L2 founder come out of the woodwork now and try to justify their importance.
Everyone is kind of agreeing that, or not kind of, everyone is agreeing that an L2 can't just be Ethereum but cheaper and a little bit faster.
That's why from the beginning of base, we've shown up every day to onboard new users, developers, and apps, push the technology forward, and do it in a symbiotic way that grows the entire ecosystem.
Could debate that, but I'm not going to right now.
We've benefited deeply from building with Ethereum by leveraging its security and infrastructure.
We've been able to focus on building the best products and unlocking new real use cases across trading, social gaming, creators, predictions,
and so much more. We reached stage one last year and are accelerating towards solving the technical
complexities of safely reaching stage two. Base is going to keep driving hard towards our mission,
building a global economy that increases innovation, creativity, and freedom to do that.
We're already leaning into the kind of differentiation that Metallica's talking about.
I just, and then this is me commentating here,
I don't, it's not clear to me.
When I see Jesse say that, I'm great that he says that,
it's just not clear to me what they're doing
to differentiate themselves.
I'm not clear to me what boxes they're checking,
whereas I think about MegaEath, again,
not making this PvP, please don't take it out of context. It's very clear to me to see what boxes MegaEth checks in
terms of how they're differentiating themselves. Jesse goes on to say, and we've been supported by
the Ethereum Foundation in doing so, building the best apps, native account abstraction, privacy,
scaling, and more, excited with Ethereum to build the on-chain future we all believe in.
more excited with Ethereum to build the on-chain future we all believe in. I will say this.
Sounds like base is committed to an L2. I think they're one of the few that has
a customer base and the ability to do it. And they also have history. They also have,
they do have dApps. I think at the highest level, I think the biggest shift, my biggest takeaway from Vitalik's post and what does crypto look like going forward?
What do we see from blockchains going forward?
What do we see from new raises going forward?
So few going forward, far less blockchains, especially L2s, and far more investments in products, in applications.
That's what's been lacking.
You could probably rattle off a list of new blockchains and get to 100 faster.
You can list novel dApps that have been funded in the last couple of years.
I really do think that because that's been such a, I don't want to say cheat code, but such an easier path to finding, I don't want to say product market fit, but it was an easy path to
hitting a multiple on your investment. It seemed almost risk-free for some of these investors,
knowing if they got in at an early round, it was highly likely that they were going to have
at least a small win. They may not hit 100x, but if they got in an early round,
the chances are there's going to be a token.
And even if they never realized any equity,
their tokens themselves would 2, 3 to 10x
their initial investment.
I think those days are gone,
especially as it relates to L2s.
And I think as a result of that,
the downstream effect will be builders
focusing on building
dApps, consumer dApps and financial dApps instead of blockchains. And second to that is investors
are going to be funding a lot more dApps than blockchains. We don't need more infra.
We did need a lot of this infra, some of the social sign-on and the account abstraction a lot
of the the tech that has been funded and built in the last couple years was necessary now that
that's built and we don't need more l2s i think what a great time to be a builder that's app
focused i say this all at the same time it'll go back back to Joey here in a second, that while I do think we'll see more crypto dApps, it's not lost.
I mean, one of the other trending topics is an article or post, or it's just X summarizing.
AI agents could end traditional apps in five to 10 years.
in traditional apps in five to 10 years.
It was a bit of DC investor
predicting consumer apps will fade
as personal AI agents directly access APIs
for tasks like rides or food delivery.
Global app downloads fell 2.7% to 106 billion in 2025.
Even as spending hit 155 billion,
signaling user fatigue with icons and notifications.
I'm there.
In fact, I'm so fatigued with apps.
One of the things I appreciate about Apple
that we don't really talk about
is how it offloads apps that I'm not using
because I don't go through and delete apps
that I don't use or might use once a year.
I get a GameRoy guy, Bunchu credit.
Bunchu has been, of all my friends,
I'm not just saying this because he's a friend,
I've got a lot of really smart friends, a lot of really intelligent friends, a lot of friends
that have done really well in financial markets, a lot of friends that have done really well as
entrepreneurs. I can't think of another person that has been so early to so many major trends
as Bunchu has been. And it wasn't just, oh, he was early to crypto. He was early to NFTs.
The guy has emailed proof that he was
early to NFT marketplaces.
He had the OpenSea idea before
OpenSea became a thing, before NFT mania
hit. He was very early
to prediction markets, and he's leaning into that now
with Billy Betts and all that they're doing
on the AI agent
side. He was
beating this AI agent drum. He was beating this AI agent drum.
He was working with AI and building with AI
before the chat GPT boom
and everyone now becoming an AI agent expert.
He's been so early,
and in some cases,
arguably too early to some of these things
before they hit critical mass.
And I think he's probably got an article or a thread on this
somewhere.
If not, I know he's talked about it on this show about ephemeral software and the error
of the apps is coming to an end.
And while I do agree with that to some degree, I still think it may be apps and dApps is
I still think, and maybe apps and daps is the wrong way to verbalize it, but my overarching point is less infra, more things for humans and agents to do on these chains, especially novel stuff.
the wrong way to verbalize it.
Stuff that's not just a copy pasta or a fork of something that exists on another chain.
That stuff's just not going to matter.
And we're rapidly heading
to a future where the chain just doesn't matter.
Do you have a cool app like
Beezy that people want to use and play
and vault their collectibles and do
claw pulls?
While it does matter
today, they're showing
the results. They had a record month
after they went multi-chain and expanded from just flow to flow in base.
I think if you fast forward even six months, let alone six years, no one's going to care what chain they're on.
A lot of people won't even know BZ's on chain.
It's just going to be how people collect things.
And I think while maybe BZ doesn't fall under the dApp thing, it's a product. And I do think
products will still exist. SaaS businesses and dApps
like in the App Store, like we know them to be, those days are numbered.
Because, kind of what we were talking about earlier,
there's some of the most popular dApps, there's some of the most popular SaaS systems
that literally a 14-year-old kid could code a copy of it over the weekend as long as they have access to the internet and some AI credits.
This stuff is just – it is so far evolved from where it was even a few years ago that this world is changing.
This is my first time actually seeing DC Investors post, so I'll pin the whole thing up there.
I'm going to go – I think Joey was up first.
I'm going to go to Jack.
But he starts to say, Vibe Coders should understand something.
He loves how easy AI is making it for people to build their own apps, push them into production, and start businesses.
But let's be clear, the future is not humans building consumer-facing apps.
The future is everything becomes an API, which your personal AI agent can interact with in ways which suit your specific needs and lifestyle down to the specific needs of you as an individual. The fact that you can use machines to build your
apps is just an intermediate step to the machines creating apps for you live as you need them.
Think about world building and Project Genie. That's going to be many things, if not majority of things, that when we think of like apps or software today, the world is changing very rapidly.
He goes on to say, so the value of you learning how to build apps now really lies in you learning how to create a business model behind the app, not in creating a piece of software that is the app itself.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Sure, there will be some templates for how you can interact with those APIs and apps,
but your personal AI will pick one and tailor it even further for you.
And a lot of the time, you won't even need to act with the UI beyond speaking to your AI assistant.
Again, I agree.
I still don't think we've hit the final form factor of how we'll be talking to these AI
assistants.
I saw Von Fronten recently shared like a ring as the next, I don't, I hope it's not
a ring.
I'm not a ring guy, but I don't know if it's going to be rings or glasses.
I don't think it's going to be the phone.
I don't think it's going to be a desktop.
I'm not saying the phone and the desktop goes away, but I do think there's going to be some
new piece of hardware that will become the primary.
I don't think it's going to be a pendant.
I don't know.
Maybe it potentially becomes so small.
And this is really futuristic, but it's like contact lenses or an AirPod would be really.
I think that's – I don't see enough people talking about the AirPod or a small device you put in your ear becomes also the listening device, live translation.
That's your personal assistant in your ear becomes also the listening device, live translation, and that's your personal assistant in your ear. For me, and I know to all the naysayers out there,
I shouldn't have a Bluetooth device in my head all day long. I would much rather wear an AirPod
than I would a ring to interact with my AI assistant. Back to DC's piece here, and then
Jack, you're up in like 10 seconds. It says, let me go on to give you an example. Would you rather
use an app like Uber or Uber Eats or would you rather just ask your AI
assistant to get your ride somewhere and show you the menus for the type of food you might be
interested in and pick one? Perfect example is in the Tesla. Like I could say,
Grok, I need to drive to, I saw BT Duane's driving to Austin. Grok, I need to drive to Austin to meet BT Dwayne,
route up my course, and oh, by the way,
pick a restaurant for us there.
We'd like some barbecue.
Give me the best, you know, I know it's Terry Blacks,
but give me the best barbecue in Austin.
And I can't get a reservation, but just take me there.
It will map all this stuff out for you.
It'll do everything that apps do for us today.
That exists today in a car.
You can just tell Grok what you want to do, and it'll do the whole thing for you.
We're rapidly heading to this.
I just don't think not a lot of people, especially those that are leaning into the vibe coding era of apps, are fully embracing this massive shift.
So I think it's going to happen fast.
Finishing the statement here, he goes on to say,
it's in the back-end business model,
which connects the customers with the products.
And the personal AI assistants
actually opened the door
to being able to seamlessly
use multiple business APIs
without worrying in the slightest
about which app
or intermediate provider
they come from.
There's a decent chance
apps that you know
will be mostly dead
in five to 10 years.
And yes, there are some
apps in which will still require deep optimization. And that's where the hardcore coders may still be
needed. But machines will get better at that too. And if you take one look at a AAA gaming landscape,
you should understand that hyper-optimized code isn't as valuable as it used to be.
But what will be valuable is owning the APIs with the most use and liquidity. And yes, a lot of those
will use public blockchains.
Things are going to accelerate and get very weird very quickly from here. And quickly isn't decades.
Things are going to look very, very different in December of 26 than they do in February of 26.
And I don't even know how to describe that. But I'm convinced this might be a year of evolution that most of us haven't
experienced yet. And potentially we might see more evolution in terms of just how rapidly this stuff
evolves throughout the rest of this year, the next 12 to 18 months, than we've seen in the last 10
to 20 years combined. Joey, go ahead. Appreciate your patience. Yeah. I'll be super quick because
I'm about to get to the gym, but I'm a little bit of a base homer now that we're on base.
And I think there's quite a few, the deeper you dive into base, the more you understand there's quite a few differentiators.
The base app alone is a major differentiator from all the other L2s and how accessible it makes all of their dApps, their social aspect, trading,
et cetera. Obviously the connection to Coinbase with the ability to on and off ramp funds very
easily through Coinbase and directly into your bank account where a lot of these other L2s don't
have that. I mean, when we were on Flow, if you hit a big card and you swapped it for $8,000,
in order to get your money off,
you had to export your private key, import it into a MetaMask or a Rabi, then send it to,
you know, then, then transfer that money into like USDC, you know, on ETH or base,
and then send it to an exchange and then withdraw it to your bank. And so I, I think,
yes. Is it as fast as Solana solana no is it slightly faster than ethel
one yes but when you go deeper into what base has built an ecosystem that they've built the
differentiators are exponential compared to all the other l2s and i challenge you cap if you don't
have the base app yet to download the base app and explore like you can you can
go right on bz and play the claw in the base app anywhere anytime in the world so i i did download
it um i think i might have been waiting for a invite code or something i think i now do have
access i kid you not that is one of the apps on my iphone that is i had to re-download because i
didn't access it frequently enough and it already off boarded it or I don't know the correct terminology there anyways I'll redownload it I think that matters I also think connecting these dots abstract their portal good. I don't think it's enough.
And talking L2s,
I really, like,
it's really struggling.
I really don't want to make this stuff PvP,
but it's just, it's hard to even tell a story
without comparing things that we know
that are in the wild today.
I was talking Ape Chain.
It has other side.
Abstract doesn't have its other side yet.
A portal can be replicated.
Others are going to have portals.
I've also heard some rumors that Abstract might be looking to sell.
I wouldn't be surprised.
I just don't know who's the buyer.
Who's going to buy that L2 right now?
Where what is Abstract, if not the home of pudgy penguins?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm sure someone can make something with it.
I'm not funding.
I'm not making it PVP.
Just call it like I see it.
And I don't know of those boxes
from the vitalik post i don't know what boxes abstract checks and to your point like the base
app being powerful i agree the portal for abstract could be that but they don't have the huge
customer base that does coinbase jack go ahead
might have lost jack no no my bad couldn't find the unmute um yeah look where where was i going
with this oh okay so ai and the eradication of apps like i've got the new meta glasses it's it's
kind of already here now the meta ai is nowhere near know, Opus 4.5 or whatever we're calling it, the
anthropology AI. It doesn't work anywhere near as well as Claudebot, which I now actually am using.
So for those worried about my boomer tendencies never getting me to Claudebot, I have figured it
out for the most part. And yeah, it's doing some pretty cool stuff at this point in time so yeah look i i think it's
here i do think it's glasses at least to begin with there is a movie or tv series on apple cap
that you should check out i will dm you it because i can't think it off the top of my head
but is exactly what you've just described in terms of like the contact lenses and the
headphones and it's so obviously where it's going to go if someone can build that product.
And obviously it does feel like our imagination is the only thing stopping the product from being built at this point.
And so,
yeah,
I will send you,
send you that when I can.
But yeah,
look,
I think again,
like what,
what are we doing here for like,
what,
what is the purpose of having these conversations?
I think
if you're thinking about on-chain, if you're thinking about the eradication of L2s and
where the future is going, I think you've really only got a handful of projects that have an
opportunity to take advantage of this type of future. I i can see jonah next to me i think clipping is one
of those for for like quite some time i think you know how people consume content is going to
continue to evolve um and i've put my money where my mouth is on this i am an investor in life frame
and i think for me one of the big reasons for that is because I've seen multiple big creators who have been way,
way before their time talk about how you're not going to watch your podcast like you do today.
You're going to watch your podcast from the perspective of what you want to see. And it
will just, AI will automatically just condense that podcast for you. It won't be clippable. It'll
just be like, here's all the things you would possibly be interested in and here's the things that you would learn from um and then yeah like short form
you can imagine doing exactly the same thing like it actually goes more to an improvement standpoint
so that's that's what sort of projects i'm looking at now in the discord in our um in our discord for the dgens the guys have just posted about jesse from base saying that
they imagine feeling like you're 25 years old forever that's what we're building like i think
when we are thinking about crypto at this point the connection to ai and the future is so vast that if you see a product that isn't going to
launch anytime soon and they're not talking in those terms, be very skeptical. Because also,
we've seen ICOs, you know, Whale posted about that today. ICOs have fallen off a cliff right now
in terms of actually rewarding somebody who is an early investor and the opportunity and the chance is so so minimal
right now a lot of these guys don't even get to ICO you know there's there's a bunch of NFT
projects from the 2021-2022 era and a bunch of metaverse and other different projects that I
think it was bred from Megatef saying like he feels sorry for those guys now because ai has come in you
basically have to fire half your staff um and you've actually got a disadvantage you're bloated
even with those funds um and you've spent a lot of those funds so yeah i i think you know if i know
this conversation is everything but if you are if people are thinking from like an investment vehicle
standpoint in
terms of look i want to get involved in things that are going to make me money in crypto i just
think you've got to be looking so much further into the future than you think you do right now
i think your mindset really has to change compared to 21 2022 era yeah i wholeheartedly agree and this And this may sound insensitive or if you're employed by one of these, you may not like to hear it, but I agree with Brett.
Like, it's just, it's better sooner than later.
Rip off the bandaid now.
I actually think if there is one of these companies that is, I'm quoting Brett here.
He says, more nimble teams can produce the same output, about the same output, or even greater,
with a fraction of the human tech overhead,
thanks to rapidly improving AI tooling.
You're either left with more bodies that you have to fire,
or having to break down and rebuild your entire internal workflow and tooling.
Basically everything that Austin Hurwitz saw in saying,
and this was a quote tweet of Jaws,
who said, raise 50 50 million you quote tweeted
burnt toast test flight says the test flight's cool it's not it's not a bad test flight not a
bad demo but jaws points on point says raise 50 million for something a roblox kid can build for
100 in 24 hours it's not wrong like i i for what we've, there could be a lot more to this space doodles than the preview,
not taking a shot at burnt toast or doodles, but DreamNet was an AI platform. Credit to the team for, I guess, sunsetting that before they even went live with it. And Austin went on and built
something with a smaller nimble team with Nuco because I'm guessing saw the writing on the wall.
team with NUCO because I'm guessing it's all the writing on the wall.
And back to the point of like, if you're employed by one of these organizations and you're sweating
right now, or you're a founder or leading one of those teams and you feel bad, like you've got
the runway and you've got the ability to continue to keep all these people on payroll and you're
just good. I encourage you to have the hard conversation or the hard thought about doing it sooner than later
for a couple of reasons. One, you might need that runway to reimagine how you're building things.
And two, it sucks to fire people. At least it was my least favorite thing to do. Even when people
deserved it, I never liked getting rid of someone. I didn't like firing people. I've employed and fired hundreds of people, probably over a thousand
people if I really add it all up for my, not just the businesses I've owned, but for my management
career. I was a multi-unit retail owner and turnovers, you know, very real in that industry.
It sucked. It was really hard, especially earlier in my career. And then someone shared something
that was pretty profound and it stuck with me. And I started feeling it once I determined,
or once I recognized that someone wasn't the right fit. And sometimes it was, they weren't
the right fit. Sometimes we weren't the right fit for them. As soon as I recognized that, I really did look to accelerate that offboarding because someone got in my head that I'm doing them an injustice.
While it may suck to fire someone and you may feel bad about it or even sometimes they deserve it.
By not firing them, by delaying the inevitable, all I was doing was delaying the next door from opening for them.
Had I fired someone as soon as I knew, maybe the next week they find their dream job or dream career.
Whereas by waiting and going the traditional HR corporate area, oh, you need to write them up three times and then give them a final warning and then part ways with them after you've given them every second, third, fifth chance.
final warning and then part ways with them after you've given them every second, third, fifth chance,
even though you knew deep down that they weren't going to work,
you might have prevented them from finding their next opportunity.
They may never find it.
And so I think the whole one door closes, another door opens, it is real.
It might be a cheesy cliche, but it's a cliche that's stuck for decades because it is real.
And I think in this era of rapid change and like not just rapid change, but extreme change
in how our society works, how businesses are being built. If you know that you're going to
have to make changes like at some point this year, do it now. Because by keeping those people on your payroll now,
you may be helping pay their bills,
but you very well could be preventing them
from opening their next door.
Whether it's they're vibe coding some API tooling
or they go work with a smaller nimble team,
like businesses have to think and operate very differently
in 2026 moving forward than they
have for the last 20, 30 years. And it's not that you're a bad person. It's not that you failed or
your idea didn't work or you didn't find like, maybe that that was the case, but it's like,
our world's evolving fast. And this isn't just for like funded startups. This goes for all. Like I
have shared a few times, I was fan of the corporate American environment I worked in because it was just very inefficient.
It was so bloated and so many stakeholders that would have an opinion on something.
It's just hard to get things done.
You're at such a competitive disadvantage now. That's how you're operating. You're slowing down humans from getting stuff done while your competitors have a fleet of AI agents that are working. One agent's 10 times more productive than a human.
You're at such a competitive disadvantage now.
That's how you're operating.
a deeper hole and the inevitable is likely still to happen though you're going to have to
restructure do layoffs fire these people do it sooner than later so they can maybe catch this
wave as opposed to trying to to swim back to shore when when you left them out and you know
to drown in the ocean i'm reaching for analogies here but jack go ahead and i see simple farmer joined us yeah look uh i i think for me
also you need to take some accountability yourself if you feel like you're not like
right for the role um and i i think if people are hearing this and maybe feel seen right now
because they they might be on the other side of this not the fire but the potential fiery um we keep i get this gut feel of like it's
just getting harder and harder to find a job like i think we've all seen those articles we've all
seen the ai hires compared to actual hires at this point but i also think like it's not going to get
any easier so if you're in a job role that doesn't suit you, and also you're thinking,
but where's my next role going to come from?
It's just not getting easier.
And I think, you know, I made that call
about three years ago now,
and it was the best call for me.
Like I had to make it.
You know, a new manager came in.
He was really old school we were remote after covid and wanted you know basically me to do four hours of driving every day
um there and back even though i was on a completely remote contract i could see it going in a way where
he was basically trying to do that you know well free strikes
and you're out i just i decided okay that's my sign like i'm gonna go full hog into web free
i was really fortunate i got the role the next day hosting spaces and you know haven't really
looked back it's not easy you know when markets are down people aren't doing spaces like let me
ask you this quick interjection yeah yeah if you didn't
do that do you like maybe you don't take the role is that even i mean would that have been a possible
outcome like absolutely yeah it was i didn't i didn't have anything to go into i don't think
maybe maybe you're looking for 12 months right like that's exactly my my you know driving home
my point or my example there is you we don't know the
employer doesn't know they oftentimes the individual doesn't know when the next door
is going to open but i think a lot of us can agree may not like to admit it but a lot of us
can agree doors are closing for organization structure and guys get to irl events get to like
like as if ai needs to give you any more reason to just show somebody that
you're an actual human being. I think if you are looking to jump ship and you want to jump ship
here into crypto, and I don't know why you wouldn't, if you're listening to a show like this,
get to IRL events. That's how I got my role. I had no opportunity. My whole thing was I was just
going to create content and try and monetize as a
creator the next day i just put out the fact that i was full-time web free and kermit who was a guy
and he's now by chabelle but basically was a guy that i had met one time in amsterdam
on a breakpoint event for solana that i was really unsure about going to we had a conversation for like six hours that
day with a couple other creators and he was immediately like yeah Jack we need somebody
else to host spaces and my life changed forever for the better so yeah I think yes you know I'm
not saying jump ship immediately if you don't have anything but if you've been putting in the work
and you've been showing your value in this space, sometimes you do just have to make the jump and cart back over to you.
Yeah, no, it is.
Not only does sometimes you need to make the jump, as Jack just described his own personal
journey there, that he made a jump.
I don't say prematurely.
It sounds like the perfect timing.
But had he just wrote out his, you know, the inevitability of this isn't going to work out.
This is not my long-term role. And he just wrote that out for another few months.
He may still be looking for that opportunity. Like that, that door could have closed that he
had an opportunity to take. And it's, it's Steve Jobs says, you know, it's very hard,
if not impossible to connect the dots looking forward. It's, it's easy to connect the dots looking backwards on our life. And it's just,
sometimes you need to make tough short-term decisions that ultimately help you start seeking where your next home may be, your next thing may be. And while we're talking here from
the quote-unquote employee viewpoint, it goes the same thing for the founders, the CEOs,
the team leads. You're not doing, if you know this division of employees or these individuals,
if their time is numbered and they're not going to be around long-term, they're not going to be
around this time next year, they're not going to be around in six months. And you think you're doing a favor by keeping them on payroll for
another six months. You're not. You're doing them an injustice. You're preventing the next door from
opening. If you feel bad about it, offer them a cushy severance package and let them go.
Like it's just too many. And I say this from personal experience. I felt bad. I kept people
around too long. And I don't know what doors might have opened for them
had I just pulled the rug when the time when the writing was on the wall. I do know it's had
negative impacts on my business, especially at a store level, because they know too. And all of a
sudden, you got someone who's got one foot out the door, and everyone's just putting a smile on
their face to keep them getting a paycheck. And's just, it's, it, and I say this now because it's happening so fast.
And I don't know if there's a company on the planet that's not impacted by this
directly or indirectly. Simple Farmer GM, always a pleasure. What do we owe?
What do we owe the pleasure this morning? What brought you up today?
Hey GM, just saw a lot of things in the conversation.
I think it was important to touch on listening earlier to the talk about
Vitalik. I think it was mentioned recently about people's occupations, making a living in this
industry. Obviously, a lot of people are losing jobs, especially as development skills and product
to idea. Pipeline is really easy now. But I think BD now is potentially even more valuable with more
products coming out,
people who are good at making relationships and getting protocol deals done at a high level.
Without good BD, you don't have probably 99% of the things you've seen over the past couple weeks,
especially with other side. We did the MetaMask avatar that you can claim on the MetaMask mobile app. That's a BD thing that happened.
AI didn't build that.
Now the page where the avatar is claimed on, that was built by an LLM.
But the relationship was made by humans.
Yeah.
I appreciate you being here.
I'm not trying to put you on the spot either.
We were talking ApeCh Chain a little while ago.
We shared Garga's thesis from June of 24 about L2s.
And I was, I do feel Ape Chain checked some of those boxes that Vitalik was mentioning.
In particular, it's other side.
Like you have a flagship product.
You have a reason for other side to exist.
I didn't know Gargis said this.
Can I ask like what has been,
I'm assuming that the Vitalik post
has been maybe circulated through Slack.
There's been some internal conversations.
Is there anything you can share in regards to ApeChain?
Or, you know, does,
maybe the answer is the path doesn't change at all because
we were already building this way, but does Vitalik's stance, does it, has it, does it,
do you think it changed anything? Has there been discussion like, okay, we need to lean
a little harder into this or that as a result, or is it status quo because you, you were
already, you know, Garga at least was already, you know, seeing this happen?
Yeah, I mean,
Apeco follows the direction of the leader
of the club, Garga, and Cam as well.
I think that was already within the ethos
pushing forward towards the other side stuff,
focusing more on that. So nothing changed.
But on a personal level,
I could give a shit what Vitalik Beteran
thinks. I don't think every
brilliant genius who's an inventor
of things is also a great person.
I think he has a lot of good reasons to not support L2s.
Probably hundreds of millions of dollars worth of reasons.
I thought the tweet that he put out was weird.
I think he probably lacks emotional empathy.
To an extent, he probably doesn't understand a lot of people working really fucking hard to build things. And I could care less because blockchain is permissionless.
That's why I'm in this industry. Because you can build whatever you want,
whatever you want. You don't need anybody's permission.
Well said.
Similar question, but I know you came from that
Arbitrum ecosystem. We spent a lot of time talking base.
We spent some time talking, you know, A-chain, a little bit of abstract.
Where do you think Arbitrum fits in in the L2 landscape moving forward?
Do they need to double down or pivot in any degree?
Or do you think they, or again, I respect the opinion, you could just
disagree with Vitalik's post. What do you think that means for Arbitrum from your perspective?
Not holding you to it, again, not trying to put you on the spot. I'm genuinely curious,
what do you think it means for Arbitrum? Yeah, I sent you the post this morning.
I can pin it if you don't mind. Go for it. And it just talked about inflows and outflows over the last 24 hours.
And, you know, Arbitrum 1, $53 million worth of net inflows.
Ethereum Hyperliquid, $36.1 net outflows.
So, you know, people don't realize, but what matters is the products.
It really doesn't matter where they're built.
People can care less what chain something is built on
if it's an exceptionally good product.
Polymarket is probably
the best product in our industry.
It's built on Polygon,
which is an ag layer on Ethereum.
People don't care
that it's on Polygon.
And so I think that's the thing.
Products are the priority.
So for Arbitrum One,
they have a thesis
that they want to be the backbone
for the future of the world of finance and banking and stablecoins and lending and
tokenized stocks is what they're doing with Robinhood. And I think they're absolutely killing
it. They've even found ways that now, you know, chain transactions that happen on their blockchain,
people can essentially pay and bid to have their transactions happen faster so that people can
capture arbitrage
faster or financial opportunities and gain, especially when it's a whale game that matters.
And they've monetized that to the tune of millions of dollars. I think arbitrage is on a great path.
I think they're kind of killing it. I think base is kind of killing it too. I don't think they need
to do anything differently. What are those net inflows primarily going to? Is it DeFi?
Is it stables?
I mean, it's a big number. What do you think, without going too granular on the exact where it's flowing at the highest level?
I mean, it's a really impressive chart.
53 million, and then let me pull it up on screen so those that are watching video can see.
But where do you think or where do you know it's flowing into?
Yeah, so obviously the richest people in crypto are probably the ones dictating everything.
And those people hold massive amounts of ETH, massive amounts of stablecoins,
and they want great yield on their tokens.
So that gets pushed into these yield-bearing protocols.
You got things like GMX that runs high levels of perps. It's the highest revenue generating protocol in Arbitrum 1. It can rival Hyperliquid
in a lot of ways. Aave, Pendle, so DeFi, essentially. And then you have RWAs through Robinhood. So
Robinhood is tokenizing all their stocks and that's happening on Arbitrum 1. And, you know,
ERPs as well. So, DeFi,
RWA's, ERPs,
which are DeFi as well.
The thing is, I think people assume
that the price of a token reflects
how well a chain is doing
a lot of times, and I don't think that
correlation has been necessarily true lately.
What would you,
off the top of your head, what would you say are like three or a couple
of the most important metrics?
Wallets, TVL, what do you think is more important than token price?
If we're evaluating, if we're looking at KPIs for this success or how well a blockchain
is doing?
I guess, do you mean from the standpoint of the chain or from the standpoint of a developer?
I guess both.
I was referring to the chain's success, but I could ask the same question for developers, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think from a founder, like the little guys, those are what I would consider myself.
Users matter the most.
That's the number one.
That's like the gold standard.
While for chains,
liquidity matters,
TXs,
and then how they can monetize,
you know,
all the revenue streams
and all the things
that are happening on their chain
to essentially scale
to become something
that's profitable.
I think everybody's looking
to be profitable long term.
And, you know,
that comes with adoption.
So for me, those are the most important.
I think token price is probably not even top five,
to be honest with you.
One more question,
and then maybe another headline or two
I want to hit on before we let everyone get out of here.
Help me understand, educate me on,
how can BASE be on this chart I've got pulled up here?
BASE was number two in the last 24 hours
in terms
of net inflows how can base be positive net inflows by a pretty decent margin call it 10
million dollars give or take and well at the same time optimism is negative I guess it's just main
net so no one's going to optimism main net they're just going to you know the orbit chains like base is that
is that answering the question well i think you know for base for example they have a lot of
really interesting products they've been able to capture mindshare really well with the clodbot
phenomenon which has been i actually think not too different than kind of the agentic um you know
phenomenon we had happen
during like the AI 16Z era. I think some things are slightly more interesting, but
things you can do with Cloud, like giving it skills and stuff and automation, you can do a
lot of that stuff with cursor as well. And you can already link all of your AI, AIs without
having to purchase, you know, the separate API keys for all of them. So honestly, I think CloudBot is super cool.
Massive respect to them.
But I think they made something that's pretty cool
seem like massively cool,
which is just really, really good marketing.
And I think they're great.
They're really good at sales.
But again, the question they're back to is,
when I'm looking at these numbers,
those base net inflows aren't being counted
towards optimism inflows
because it's not hitting main net.
It's basically bypassing optimism main net and going directly to base.
Am I understanding that correctly?
Yeah, I'm not sure how exactly this chart with Cointelegraph,
and I'm not sure if it's fully just obviously liquidity that has come from one chain to another
or liquidity that has flown in externally,
right, directly to that blockchain.
I'm sure there's both.
Yeah.
We appreciate you jumping up.
As always, love to hear your insight.
We do have a, we've got a question in the chat
if there is a poly market or a prediction market rather
on is Simple Farmer wearing a shirt today?
Yes or no?
Tank top, tank top only.
I made a video and I made the mistake
of keeping my shirt on
and I realized right now
I'm pretty much the Burt Kreischer of devs.
People come to see me only
so I can take off my shirt at this point.
I don't even know where to go with that one.
Burt Kreischer mentioned here today on Coffee.
It's all serious.
I appreciate you jumping up and adding to the combo.
Same with you,
Jack,
Joey enjoyed the chat.
We went a little longer on the tallics post than,
than I was thinking.
I do want to hit a couple of fly over.
We may do a deeper dive on this.
We've got a little bit of,
a little bit of,
you know,
evergreen on,
on these topics,
but I at least want to hit on at a high level,
call some attention. Cause I, there is a call to action. There is, you know, Igreen on these topics, but I at least want to hit on at a high level, call some attention,
because there is a call to action.
There is, you know,
I was speaking earlier about
a mega ETH launching next week.
Don't wait.
There's some things you might want to do now.
One is, you know,
Euphoria just announced their Tapathon.
It's going to be a two-week contest
that kicks off February 16th,
but they're only inviting 5,000 traders
to compete in this first one.
And I think my read is this how a lot of the early stuff on mega ETH is going
to go is it's going to be limited.
You're not going to be able to participate just for being on mega ETH.
You're going to need to be in a discord or in this case,
the,
you know,
who can participate is they're giving out access codes to early supporters.
They did a snapshot on July 31st.
Codes are being allocated to most acting community members across Discord, Twitter, and Telegram.
Top 1,000 users are on a wait list.
And then investors and close community partners, the people,
MegaMathia communities, BadBuns holders, Redstone community, Athena community, Privy, and more.
And then examples would be the people would include like MegaEth, Echo Investors, and Fluffles.
So I'm also speaking to myself here.
If you hold a Fluffle or if you're in those rounds, start paying attention now.
Don't wait until some of this stuff starts popping.
Maybe this doesn't matter.
Maybe Euphoria is, it fizzles and dies.
It's unique.
The UI is different.
And we'll probably have the team on here at some point
in the future but they are giving away an all-expense paid trip to London and a Rolex
for first prize thousand bucks second prize 500 bucks third prize and then 10 additional winners
throughout the contest yeah we'll talk more about mega eat apps and what what might be paying you
worth paying attention to uh in the early days there. But I just, the, the overarching point is don't wait, don't wait until things start popping off and you see people printing
on Meggie. Maybe it doesn't hit, but I think there's things you can be doing now to position
yourself that is either low or no capital. And you might, you might catch a, might catch a winner
or two, uh, the other flyover topics. and I don't really have much to add other than
it was, I found it humorous, the Polymarket and Kalshi free groceries in New York. This post here,
this quote tweet is not accurate. It is just a pop-up. It's a five-day, I think a five-day,
maybe five weeks. It's not going to run forever. The Polymarket supermarket where they're giving away free groceries. Koushi must have caught wind of it because they front ran it. And the day before
Polymarket announced that, they gave away free groceries to thousands of New Yorkers.
It's good marketing. The current mayor of New York, part of his platform was free groceries.
And so we have two prediction markets that
leaned into this and it's not, they're not going to be free groceries forever, but it's,
it's a way for them to get catch some virility on the timeline and probably convert some customers
in there. I share because I do think I, and this isn't like an original thought. I've seen some
others say this as well. So I'm really just parroting the thesis that I do think prediction markets could start playing a bigger role in our everyday life.
And it kind of ties into the ephemeral software and the end of the app era and more agentic API workflows.
I do think there's a world where the simplest example I could give is like you order a burrito from Chipotle and simultaneously you open a polymarket on will it be here in 30 minutes, yes or no.
And essentially hedge or build a double down, like double or nothing.
Either I'm going to get this burrito for free or I'm going to pay double for it. I think we could start seeing more
into some of that silly and maybe you say pointless and it's not going to stick.
Sure. Maybe it's a bad example. My favorite point being is I do think we'll start seeing
prediction markets integrated into more aspects of our day-to-day life beyond just watching the
Super Bowl and seeing, you know,
a Polymarket or a Calci ad every commercial break and the scores at the bottom and the
commentators picking their favorite markets, pre-show, et cetera, et cetera. I think we could
start seeing this stuff integrated into more daily aspects of our lives. And the groceries are just maybe a little,
the free grocery bit or campaign
is I think maybe a little bit of a glimpse into that.
Simple Farm right now,
you know, thinking too about prediction markets as well.
Thoughts on that?
Yeah, I thought it was incredible.
So this morning I was listening to
one of the Ringer podcasts.
It was called The Mismatch with Jacoby,
the one who's on Jalen Jacoby previously on ESPN.
And they were talking about the trade market,
the prospect of trades that might happen.
And they referenced Polymarket, you know,
and the Polymarket odds coming up for these trades in a non-ad.
Like, it wasn't an ad read.
It was part of their content.
And I just think it's incredible how well they've kind of created that hack
with Polymarket.
It's like, hey, when this is information, people will just advertise your platform because of the information that it's giving.
I absolutely agree.
I think it's going to be really interesting how this progresses now because historically, like I've shared here, I grew up prior to getting into crypto and the NFT mania, my side hustle
outside of building businesses was DFS. I was in the DFS trenches for over a decade.
And I saw this very, like, this is so reminiscent, Polymarket versus Couchery is so reminiscent of
DraftKings versus Fandle. And there was a lot of others. It's just those two won.
And that was an era where those two software companies, those two
apps ended up at the top of the mountain and they won. And
for all intents and purposes, most of the others died.
Now we're seeing it play back again, although because of everything we just talked about,
I'm not sure it plays out the same way. In fact,
both of those just raised,
I think their last round,
they were both valued a little over $10 billion.
I don't know where they go from here
because liquidity is important, certainly.
And they do have the base.
They also have some great partnerships
integrated into Coinbase and Robinhood and others.
I just wonder how long that lasts. Like, while I can applaud the attempt from like
Myriad Markets and what Farrokh and team are attempting to do over there,
I'm not sure how they capture material market share without something major differently happening.
And I wonder, I don't even, I don't, usually I would have a, oh, this is going to be these Cal,
she and polymarket win. They're going to be the two main prediction markets forever,
or one of the two is going to win and the other one's going to become a distant, you know,
an afterthought. I don't even have a take right now.
I don't,
I don't know how this thing plays out,
which is odd for some sort of two businesses that have captured so much
market share,
so much revenue.
And yes,
I'm biased because my friend bunch you,
but I think something like Billy bets and how they're doing things now,
we do a bunch of a time
we need to get back on the show here for an update because bunches or billy has made some some changes
i think i think i think that like aggregators a prediction market aggregator i think is is you
know i know with with clutch you were building was the first parlays. And I think that sort of stuff tapping into these markets could be an even
bigger part of prediction markets in the future. It's just, it's,
it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out.
It'd be interesting in any world, but especially when you,
you compound it with how rapidly our world is evolving with AI and,
and AI agents
and everything we talked about today,
it's going to be really interesting to see how the prediction market war plays out.
I see your hand up. We'll go back to Simple Farmer.
And then we'll play that reset song and get everyone out of here.
Yeah, I think just the success of a platform based on blockchain,
you know, it's using decentralization,
which is, you know, the bets,
creating like very trustworthy information.
People can build upon this.
You'll have derivatives built.
You know, that's what Clutch is.
That's what BillyBets is.
Then you'll have additional platforms
that maybe utilize bits and pieces
of what Polymarket is doing to do things better.
I think perps and lev trading
would probably be better
in some type of prediction market platform as well.
Just nobody has really found the perfect model yet
because then you would evade liquidations.
Cap, would you mind if I take 30 seconds here
and just drop a quick show about a platform I'm dropping today?
Yeah, go for it.
And then we'll have you back on for a deeper dive in the future.
But yeah, go ahead with a quick 30, 60 second elevator.
Yeah.
So it launched in about one hour now
from Clutch is called Super Squares.
Oh, shit.
And it's Super Bowl Squares,
but fully on chain.
You can create the square pool for any event.
So we're going to have NFL and NBA to start.
Creators get 1% of the fees for the pools they make.
You set the price of each square. You set
the payout for the end of each quarter.
And all the squares
are NFTs, so they're tradable. And you can see them on the
game board. You can list them for sale. So then
people can essentially speculate on the
end results of each game and each
quarter. And I think it'll be a really cool product
for the World Cup, too, which we'll add
when the time comes. I love it. We have seen
some squares on-chain before.
I think...
I don't remember if they were tradable
or not, but I love this idea
and yeah, it's just
a simple example where
on-chain Super Bowl squares or World Cup
squares are simply better than off-chain
squares. You know, if you've got two minutes
left in the first half and you've got a square that
might hit, you could either write it out and it hits and you cash out. Or if there's bidders,
if there's liquidity, you could sell the square and hedge your bets. I also see, we probably
need to get Coco on here as well to talk about what he's building with Ape Church. But yeah, appreciate you sharing.
Go check that out.
It's pinned up top.
And you said anyone.
So it's not just the ones you're creating.
It's also built to where if I wanted to go create a Super Bowl square, I could do that as well.
Did I understand that correctly?
Yeah, that's right.
So you could create a pool.
You can even token gate your pool.
And you can create a pool for NFL events. So obviously, that's why we're launching so people
can make them for the Super Bowl. And you'll actually get 1% of the fees. So you're incentivized
to market the platform. So for example, if your pool has 10,000 bucks, you'll get 100 bucks for
being the creator of that pool. Awesome. We need to do a Coffee with Captain Super Bowl Squares.
I got a few days to do that. Big game is... I hope I don't get a nerf today for saying super bowl out loud.
You're not allowed to do that in marketing.
But the big game is this coming Sunday.
I'm writing the Patriots.
I I'm,
I'm rooting for the dogs.
I know I,
you know,
it's rare to say that the Patriots are a dog,
but at least it relates to their super bowl runs.
But I am,
they're not getting any really credit.
And it seems like the masses
are, I think the Seahawks are going to win this
one going away and
I'll take the plus 195
or whatever you can get them at currently
and have some fun with some player props. Phonics
asked if we're doing a Super
Bowl prop show. I wasn't planning on it.
I do have a busy weekend with
some travel and then a lacrosse
tournament, but maybe,
maybe we could do something Friday after the show.
if there's,
if there's some interest in that might,
might spin up just a fun,
you know,
a fun space to talk about Superbowl props,
but I won't bore everyone here.
Who's not here for sports talk.
don't sweat mayhem or,
or outer lumen.
catching up a little bit,
on some chats before we go.
Looks like another,
I guess Ledger's doing something with Lamborghini,
go figure.
I think we hit on all the notes there.
So 10 a.m. dump,
we did not get the coffee with Captain Dump,
but we did bounce.
So hopefully we send everyone off into a better day as the markets are concerned.
Bounced a little bit, but yeah, Bitcoin down now below 75, 74, 456 at the 1010 AM.
And with that note, I hope you enjoyed the show today.
Appreciate all of our guest speakers.
We'll be back tomorrow, as always, 8 a.m. Eastern time.
And look forward to seeing you all then.
If you've not yet checked out our
YouTube, head over there. It's linked up top. Hit that subscribe button and more goodies coming
soon for our YouTube subs. We'll drag out that tease for the remainder of the month. But as I
play it out here, I am going to highlight one of our new resets here for those coffee,
refilling the coffee.
And then we will,
I'll play a little bit of this and then I'll
roll right into the outro. Appreciate y'all being here.
Shout out to Payne for all he does behind the scenes.
Go give him some love and a follow-up if you haven't yet
done so already. But even if you can't find Payne right now
on the timeline, it would mean the world to him
if you go hit the subscribe button on YouTube
as well. Thank you all. Appreciate y'all being here and as steve would say hope you have a wonderful
wonderful day everyone
pain should really just be on the show so we can like direct followers to him all the time Thank you.
