All right, all right. Welcome to another episode of
FOMO Hour here today, folks. Good morning.
Of course, I missed Mr. Andrew.
Good morning, GMGM. This is episode 188 of FOMO
Hour. We are encroaching on 200
episodes here. That's going to be a big one
today. It is Tuesday, August 27th,
2024444. It is another hot sunny morning
here today in Chicago, folks, we're touching. 95° doesn't
usually get that hot in Chicago. We're not used to this, but it
seems like today is going to be the the hottest and then we're
going to cool off. We thought the crypto markets
were hot again. Finally, we thought, but alas,
it seems like perhaps another head fake pump and more summer
chop in store for us here in the the weeks ahead.
We'll talk about it on today's show.
Folks know for Oak today he is still travelling around Asia.
We've got Mando on with us as always.
Mando, Jim, how you doing? Doing great, man.
Yeah, it does a little bit of wind out of the sails of the
crypto crypto market, it feels like.
I think. I think everyone's just waiting
for NVIDIA tomorrow. It's like the main thing from a
macro perspective, but I don't know, I just felt like we, we,
we could short squeeze for a little bit more, didn't it?
It felt like we'd go to 6667 K and this hasn't happened.
This one felt different like that.
That was the consensus on Friday.
We're actually out of this and no, no, the answer is no.
No, we're not. Maybe, maybe the video will save
us tomorrow. Folks.
If you're in the stream, you might recognize a new face.
We've got Jeebs on with us. I typically have been doing a
Tuesday macro show with Jeebs Deez and and Peter Jennings on
the lucky lead show. We're bringing him in.
We're merging shows. He's on FOMO hour here this
morning. If you don't know Jeebs, he's a
renaissance man in the crypto space.
He's a collector, he's an investor, he's a quant.
He really does it all. Jeebs, Jim, how you doing?
GMGM guy happy to be here man, going to try and bring that
baroque energy. I think that's just like
critical part of the show can't replace.
Don't try it's. Impossible.
Happy to be here guys. Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it. Of course.
Well, thank you for joining us, folks.
I'm going to try to get the screen share up and running
because I'm I'm distracted this morning from a collection, an
NFT collection that Jeeves just sent me right before the show.
It it actually it might be a sign are are we back?
So there is a punks derivative NFT collection actively trending
on bass right now. It's called Penox.
It's. Not that one, Tyler.
What's the What's the pronunciation there?
Yeah, we managed to put this one out to devote.
I'm going with Penox. It's got 16 eighth volume on on
this set. It's close to a point O1 8th
floor already 1500 unique owners.
I mean, it's your classic punk derivative, but it looks like
they're mixing in like the brainless meme here with the the
heads indented. I don't know, we I feel like we
haven't seen a punk's derivative or just really a meme and T
collector running some time. Jeeves, how's this going on your
radar? Some folks passed it over and I
looked at it and just immediately laughed.
I think it's hard not to. And then for me, like you said,
like we haven't seen a punk's derivative in a long time.
I haven't seen anything really take off that well on base as
well. And so it seemed kind of
fitting. And then I just saw it and like,
it just constantly kept updating.
So I scooped up a couple myself, but it's one of those ones I
might actually watch for a little bit.
Yeah. What do we have here on the top
sales? What is that?
For you someone pays for $10.00 for that thing and the the
hoodie aliens sound for .1. So yeah, some rare sales here in
the in the Punk's derivative. This is what this market needed.
You know, we've been chopping all summer and we really just
needed a new good Punks derivative NMT collection on
base. That's what's going to get us
out of this Chopped summer for sure.
So we'll, we'll check back in on that the Peanuts floor here
during the show, folks. We've got a good one on on deck.
We're going to start with Mando's market market report.
We're going to talk base. So quietly, peanuts aside, base
past 1,000,000 active users on the daily or on Monday.
So we're going to talk about that 84,000 new crypto
millionaires, PAC man's crypto cryptic blast tweet about
bridges no longer being needed, perhaps some polymarket.
And then jeez, he's got a good one for us in the store.
He he did a nice little, I'm going to call it an essay on
crypto narratives past, present dormant active.
And we're going to dive into that later in the show as well.
Plus, folks, it's Tuesday means roll bit spins are on deck.
As a reminder to be eligible for that, make sure you retweet the
spaces, make sure you follow all of the hosts to be eligible for
those roll bit spins. All right, with that, I think
let's dive right in. Let's start with that Mando
market report, since who is the man macro daddy of the land?
Can you dig it? Yeah, so as we as we already
said guys, it does feel as though it's a little bit of a
week day Bitcoins head below 62 K ETH is headed around to yeah,
2600. Wow, ETH continues to
underperform, right Solana slightly outperforming at least
versus ETH, I would say 154. But yeah, just a bit of a a
softer day. Like I said, tomorrow we have
NVIDIA earnings, which I think it's a bit of a bellwether.
Stocks had a little bit of a weekday yesterday or mixed day
yesterday. I think the Dow hit all time
highs, but other other tech stocks were a little bit mixed.
I think people will be waiting to to see the results of that.
It was a good day and it has been a good period here for the
ETF. We've had twelve straight days
of inflows into the Bitcoin ETF. Yesterday was the biggest inflow
day for the BlackBerry ETF in 35 days.
Overall it was around 203,000,000 across all Bitcoin
ETFs ETF it's eight straight days outflows.
So with another 30 minute, 30 minute outflows yesterday.
The what what's been interesting to me just looking at that data
is the it's BlackRock that aren't really seeing huge amount
of inflows on their EDTF product.
I think everyone expected the, the Grayscale ETH trust to lose
funds, but like the main winner is BlackRock and they've had
many days recently of 0 inflows and that's that's the big delta
here. Like if you go to Blick Bitcoin,
I think Black Rock has had Black Rock has had something like only
one day or two days of 0 of 0 flows in.
They had one day of an outflow, I think very, very small.
But like BlackRock get money into that fund everyday and it's
all buy and hold. That's what that's saying.
They're saying it's all from like buy and hold style funds
and they're just not getting it. And I think that's that's kind
of worries me slightly because yeah, greyscale is greyscale.
You know, they'll keep on having outflows forever.
But the fact that BlackRock can't convince institutional
funds to be buy and hold tells me this was a bunch of people
who own the ETH trust for greyscale and probably just
buying ETH out right now. Like they're not, there's no new
institutional money going in if BlackRock aren't seeing
sustained inflows, in my opinion, Fidelity are seeing
some inflows on the ether side, but it's definitely looking a
little bit precarious there from from a from a BlackRock side at
least or an institutional side, which you'd assume that they
would dominate. So that's the one thing I'm
looking at. You have seen an all time high
hit for stable coin TVR. We would speak about this a week
last week and we said that that was probably in range.
We did hit 168 billion now on on stablecoin TBL, which is which
is great. You saw this week also that
Russia's going to start using crypto for all of its trade
payments, which could see the amount of throughput going
through on things like Tron go even higher than they already
are right now. It does feel as though a lot of
a lot of stablecoin transfers are going to be picking up if
Russia starts to use all of its or it starts to settle a lot of
its dollar trade using stable coins or non dollar trade even
as well as they say they'll create stable coins for all the
different major trading partners.
But good sign for payment side of the business, even if it's
getting around U.S. sanctions. The ton situation we spoke about
yesterday that it hadn't gone low enough.
Well, it went lower. It looks like Dura is probably
going to be in prison for a little bit of time here.
There's been some diplomatic pressure for him to, oh, I said
she's recovered a little bit. But once the charges came out,
they, they were, they were pretty serious, as expected,
terrorism, child pornography, getting around sanctions, all
the classic ones. There was some pressure
seemingly coming from the UAE and from Russia Today to free
him. I don't know, it feels as though
Macron came out yesterday and kind of wanted to wash his hands
of the situation. So I feel as though he could be
in prison for a while. Polymarket.
I didn't check today, but they they had a 25% chance that he'd
get out this month yesterday. I imagine that's gone lower, but
well, it. Looks to be it's higher total
percent. That'd be a high.
There's four days left in the month.
That seems high, but maybe there is.
I mean, UAE has got a lot of lot of political clout to it, you
know. So this is like released from
custody, not actually remaining just within France.
I mean from custody, yes. Yeah.
So I imagine that would be bail. I don't know.
Interestingly, like this what they said yesterday, this
doesn't fall under the EU regulations.
This is this is a France thing. So I don't know, maybe that
makes it less serious. More serious It it definitely.
It. I don't know, definitely feels
like. No shortage of conspiracy
theories on this one. Yeah, exactly.
Do. You.
Do you have any of your any favorite conspiracy theories for
you? No, I have.
I have no comment on this one in general.
This is one of those ones I just want to see play out.
No thoughts. Well, there's a lot of talk
about how Telegram is used right now by the Russian military,
particularly on the frontline. And so there's a lot of
pressure, pressure there maybe from Russia around that UAE is
obviously UAE citizen, but I imagine a lot of the UAE also
uses Telegram and who knows, like there, there's clearly a
lot of a lot of people that could be affected if if this
stuff starts to come out. So.
I. I really don't know.
I feel like though, if he gets out, it'll be because a deal is
made and we might not even know what that deal is.
And I don't know if that's even a good thing, you know what I
mean? Like, I don't think we'll know
if he, if he starts playing ball because there's no way he'll
make that public. So do.
You think he goes down with the ship Mando?
Like, do you think he's the kind of person that would, you know,
spend a ton of years in prison or or sell out?
Well, he, he did leave Russia when this thing happened last
time, right? So when Russia asked him for the
keys for his last last social media project, he just left,
raised a bunch of money and moved to UAE.
So doesn't feel like the sort of guy that will go to prison for
his for his morals. Feels like the sort of guy that
will run. He's following 100 kids.
Someone has to take care of all all those mouths to feed and
this is a lot of targets and that that was the I think it
really hit yesterday when we when we saw the the laundry list
here. So it's going to take quite a
bit of cooperation that the Polymarket line has me.
Yeah, I guess a little bit differently.
I mean, you always have to wonder if it's sharp money or or
dumb money coming in on this. But 40%, I would have put it at
like 10% or lower. Yeah, for sure.
These are set very serious charges.
These don't just get dropped. And if they do get dropped, he's
basically just giving up the keys, right?
Like or something very serious has happened.
I don't know. Maybe that's why maybe Tom is
going to be trading in line with these with these odds.
Yeah, 100%. I mean, that's why I was
surprised that Tom was higher. But maybe that's because his
odds, it hit a low of looks like it went down to like 25% when
the allegations were hit and then it's gone up to 40% since.
So maybe people are in the know. He's a wealthy man with a lot of
very, very wealthy friends and powerful friends.
Maybe, maybe he gets out. Not a ton of only two 100K.
Let's see what the top holders are And no one, no one's bet
huge, huge on this. So yeah, we will certainly see.
How big is this market? About $200,000 bet so far, OK,
so not bad but and there's. Unravel.
Unravel soon? Too few days, right?
Yeah. We'll see.
Yeah, I don't. Know right?
I do like going on the polymarket homepage.
Like if you just click on the homepage, you just see like what
people are betting on, like it's, I don't know, just Israel,
Hamas ceasefire in 20245050 shot.
Like you just don't know. Like you read about these
stories and you just like you have no real concept of is that
going to be true or not. I like going on to it because
you do get very much closer. You're able to read the news in
a slightly different way, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I was speaking on three days this morning.
The the one that was surprised me the most is actually the
highest grossing movie in 2024 with Inside Out Two.
There's still so much time left in this year where like me and
I, I don't know much about this or like how much this has
brought in, but I find it really surprising that this is already
so solidified. And I feel like taking nose on
on somewhat something like this that has a lot of time to
resolve seems like an all right bet.
Yeah. You're the pro here, Tyler.
Moana Two's coming out around. Thanksgiving.
He's such a pro. He knows blind.
He knows the lot. He knows Moana Two's coming out.
But what I haven't seen, I, I think I need to look at the
inside out too. Revenue numbers, clearly
they're, Oh my. God, 9 million bet, Yeah.
This is a big one. I mean, this feels like one
where you could crunch the numbers and kind of try to
create an edge, so. This thing's like Deadpool
Wolverine's only down by. It's actually kind of quite a
bit, but I feel like there's room, right?
So it's 1.6 billion. It looks like worldwide.
I don't know, like Deadpool Wolverine's at 1.2 billion.
To your point, Tyler, there's still so many movies coming out
this year. I guess you're right.
You have to look to see what's coming out this year.
What has, you know, a probability of taking that down?
But it seems inefficient. What about this monkeypox?
One confirmed case of monkeypox in the US by September 30th.
Feels like that at 37% chance. I reckon that one.
Which side do you like? I like, I think there's going to
be a case of monkeypox. Well, so I bet yes on the August
line. I bet yes on the August line.
It's super hyped up and now that's basically at 0 unless we
get a a miracle draw out here. A miracle.
Rob Bad use the word miracle. Diana, what's your process like
here? Like when you go take bets?
I feel like you're deep in the Poly market streets, You're out
here, right? You're taking smart bets.
What? What's your process like?
Like how do you go about approaching a bet?
What's the research? Like smart bets like.
Yeah, I think I, I have a combination of smart bets where
like I, I grind and try to find an edge and one then once I win
those bets, I get much looser and I start gambling.
Like the monkeypox bet. I did not have an edge on in any
way. It just felt like there were the
headlines going around that it was already in the water in San
Francisco. I didn't dig into that enough to
know that that was the old strain of monkeypox and and not
the the new ones. That was that was a a misread by
me. I think the election ones have
been, I think the election ones are still some of the easiest
to, to bet on because there's a lot of emotional betting.
And then you, you can use things like Nate Silver's election
model to understand, you know, where, where states are coming
in. So I've been mostly having
success there that frok. I mean, we've been betting on
the, the words, the mentioned markets for all the speeches or
I think that that's dying out a little bit.
I think another edge is on sports.
So the sports markets aren't super liquid yet, but there was
like in the main color boxing match in the Olympics, he was
going off as like a three to one favorite on Polymarket and she
was a 10 to one favorite on sports books.
So you can find those types. Of that's what I was saying I
was suing to O stuff around this two days ago and being like
there's going to be so many different prediction markets
like people are just going to be arbitraging these all day.
Sports feels like the the main one where there's going to be
massive differences and you'll be able to make money doing it.
But yeah, I I guess the liquidity isn't like insane at
this stage. But what do you think of Alex
make yesterday where he was like, this is not batting.
This is not gambling. Let's try to find that.
Yeah, I think I'm on the opposite, opposite side.
So we've seen like Nick Tamano and Cruz.
So there was the the narrative out there that Paul and Market
was the truth. There's something we said.
About that, what I would say is like what I said this morning,
which was we're we're looking at the news slightly differently
having seen those lines. But I mean, when we're betting
on the words that Kamala Harris is going to say in a fucking
speech, it does feel like we're just gambling at this stage.
Is is fantasy sports gambling? I don't know the version of
fantasy sports where in the UKI think it's quite different to
hear like yours often has like draftking.
I don't really know how it's done, but there is like added
sweepstakes style odds to some of this stuff, isn't there?
We don't really have that. Your game.
Is that kind of? Yeah.
We have, we have like they're quite separated in the UK.
So like the fantasy football game in the UK is like not for
money or you can have very small cash gains, but like they're not
really based around money. And then you have sports
betting, which is like slightly very big in the UK and legal
and, and lots of people would do it.
Another way to do it. Yeah, the way that the US does
it does feel more like gambling, or closer to it.
What do we got here? Oh Vitalik.
Oh boy. Yeah.
I mean, he's saying putting Poly market in the category of
gambling is a massive misunderstanding of what
prediction markets are and why people are excited about them.
They're interesting because they're a social epistemic tool.
Public gets a view of how important certain events are and
kind of and what kinds of things are likely to happen with less
editorial opinion than social media or news websites so I I
think in general that can be true but polymarket is a lot of
things and there are plenty of betting markets on polymarket
that trend based on news that's being published by media and
social media so example of Beyoncé performing at the DNC
last week there was rumors going around Twitter polymarket bet
that up to 97% so if you log in and.
You're saying, OK, Beyoncé has confirmed performance at DNC and
then she doesn't. So like everyone was just
speculating on rumors that they saw.
So like, there are certainly other lines that are more like
true to the real world. And I think there's others where
people are just heading and gambling.
So I think you have to take everything with a grain of salt.
The the Walt VP is another good example where there was like
video surfacing of all the cars coming out of his house.
The odds changed almost instantly.
Like Shapiro was what, 80% at one point and then it just
nosedive Walsh came up. So I think.
It is like people have alpha on some of these or like could
could get information pretty quickly on them.
It is very good at breaking news fast as well.
So like the, the waltz, like as soon as the, the, the big black
cars were, were running out of Waltz's driveway, the line shot
up, right. And I think they're, they're
trying to lean into that. So they've got this new breaking
news tab. You know, Mando mentioned how
it's an interesting way to kind of start your day by just seeing
the kind of what is trending. And I agree with that.
And and the markets have gotten much more diverse now than just
purely election markets. So you get a little bit more pop
culture. Bieber baby boy or girl is a is
a breaking news line. It looks like he's having a boy.
Congrats to to Justin. See if there's any other
breaking news here. Telegram banned by a European
country at 11 percent. Oh, so the microphone's muted.
That's the hot one in the that now Trump and Kamala are are
fighting a bit over the rules of the next debate is.
That so they can't interrupt each other like mid.
It is, as I understand it, so that the rules were set to be
the same as the last one or they were muted.
And it's and Trump had agreed to those rules.
And apparently it's the the Harris campaign who wants them
unmuted. And I saw because this is not
me, that they, they want America to see how unhinged he is.
And he's like, no, we already agreed to these rules, which I'm
I'm on Trump's side. Like the rules are sad.
Like you go with the rules. But yeah.
Yeah. There there's some interesting
ones on this list. Oh, this was the most
interesting one. Let's just take one second on
this, then we'll move on from Polymarket.
If RFK drops out, who will gain more in the polls?
This is one where like if you read crypto Twitter, everyone
was saying RFK dropping out was good for Trump and Polymarket is
on the opposite with $870,000 bet.
But what's? Great.
But I think if RFK dropped out, it was always going to be a
benefit to the Democrats, right? Because he split their split
their, their ticket. The best scenario for
Republicans would be that he dropped out and endorsed Trump.
So I think they've got the best of a of a bad scenario basically
in that. Yeah, How do they define these
rules here, Tyler? Yes, this is an interesting one.
It's measured by the RealClearPolitics daily polling
averages and they only run through August 30th.
So this is another one where you can just sit down and, and do
the math, check the poles from the last four days, start to
think how they're going to project out from the next three
days and, and try to, to reach a conclusion.
And you have to imagine if nothing major happens in the
next three days, the, the poles aren't going to be super
unchanged. I would guess, you know, perhaps
some of the DNC pump is is wearing off, perhaps some of the
RFK endorsement is wearing off. I don't know.
But I wouldn't I'm not really expecting a whole lot of change
until September 10th, the next debate.
So an interesting line to watch this is this actually aligns
with one of your narratives, Jeep.
So perhaps we just get into to this part of the show.
I think we we were around the horn, man, that was a great
market report. I didn't really have a whole lot
else. I think maybe just quickly going
around on a few other headlines. So we did see base reach
1,000,000 active users. Shout to Milk Rd. they've been
doing a great job with their graphics.
That number jumped out to me. Perhaps we'll talk about that a
little bit in, in some of your some of your narratives.
Memes totally dead. There's basically no memes over
10 million in the green. There's a handful on the day.
It's not a whole lot of action memes, Sorry, NF TS kind of
giving back some of their recent gains as well.
So so not a whole lot else. But jeez, I I didn't want to get
into to some of your narratives. So I'm a big narrative guy
myself, one who who likes to craft narratives following price
action, which I think it is a a common trend in in crypto
Twitter. But you did a nice job.
You're basically an essay, you know, thousands of words laying
out your thoughts on the crypto landscape.
So why don't you walk us through this a bit and then we'll get
into some discussion. Yeah, definitely appreciate
that. This has just been something
I've I've been thinking about for a while.
You know, I, I work in the venture space within crypto and
I'm similar to you. I, I think about things in in
narratives. I'm not a technical trader, I'm
not looking at the one minute chart through none of that.
But I think if you can like spot narratives early on, they shift,
they change, they evolve. So I started thinking, OK, how
can you bucket narratives in the space and then continually think
about these and present them out to folks to, to get some
thoughts. So really I broke it down to
three categories. The first one's going to be your
spotlight narratives. These are things that are in the
limelight. People have a ton of attention
toward them. They're getting a ton of venture
funding. People are watching them
closely. They're being shield like crazy.
Two then is your brewing narratives.
You're starting to see key people go ahead and and talk
about these things. They're gaining some momentum.
They could enter the spotlight soon.
Maybe they were in the spotlight and they've slowed down into the
brewing category. And then the third one is just
flat out dormant. These narratives, you know, they
were in the spotlight where they're gaining traction and
they've kind of just lost steam and they have the opportunity to
resurface and get back up there or they honestly could just die
off. So laid out a bunch of different
things here. You know, we could talk through
a few of them and then maybe I'd love to talk to you guys about
them and just see within those categories, what are some that
really are interesting to you guys.
Yeah, let's do it. So maybe let's start with with
some of the, we're going to start at the top with some of
your spotlight narratives. So we, we just talked about
prediction markets. I think certainly one that that
most listeners, those who are active are, are familiar with.
You got new layer ones, the ton ecosystem, memes, ETFs,
institutional adoption, political favour, stable coin
usage, D pen. I know you're, you're in the D
pen a bit. Maybe we'll come back to that.
I don't know. I think a very interesting one
for me is the new layer ones. Yeah, I did mess up one of these
is not a layer one FYI. Someone corrected me on that.
But still new chains, These new chains, these new super hyped
chains. Fast cheap culture growing
around them, lot of hype. Yeah, when say was being hyped
all over the timeline, right? For for rightfully or wrongfully
for grant reasons or not for grant reasons, I think it kind
of revised this narrative of what is the next killer L1.
And it's an important one, right?
Because if you identified Solana as the next killer L1 last
cycle, that was an incredible trade.
So now I think folks are trying to figure out what, what could
be that next one. And I think it's somewhat
consensus that folks think Solana will be, you know, it is
the killer L1 of this cycle, but will not be next cycle.
At least that that's my read. So I'm, I'm curious, Jeeves, A,
do you align to that? And then B, do you have a
thought? Do you have a leader on who you
think might be the the Solana killer or the hot L1 for for
next cycle? Yeah.
So the Solana killer narrative comes from the past two cycle
narratives. We've seen the first one being
the Bitcoin killer narrative where you had stuff like
Litecoin, other people that were chasing that.
Then you had the ETH killer narrative where all these other
chains sprouted up, AVAX, you know, Poly, you know what not.
And now with Solana in the spotlight, it's clear that
there's other folks that are kind of going after that same
area, which is sort of culture high throughput, a lot of users
on there. Out of these three, so folks I
can't see, it's Monad, Bear Chain, Mega Eve.
That's the three that really I'm seeing the most on my timeline.
Hard to say which ones end up being the most positive here,
but I think the one I see the most is probably Bear Chain that
folks are continually talking about sort of a, a novel
consensus mechanism and just a lot of folks talking about, you
know, random products or things being built in, a lot of
shilling on it. And so that's probably my my
number one pick. I think it's also the 1st to
come to market. So we'll have the first
opportunity to really shine, I think later this year.
I think Monad's really next year Mega Eve, not entirely sure on
the timeline there. What do you guys think?
I mean, I'm sure you guys are seeing a ton of this.
Is any sprouting up to you? Any thoughts here?
So when you talk about these narratives, are you, are you
thinking about it from the VC side of things or from the
public market side of things? It's really just from my
perspective, which I think mostly comes from like VC.
Yeah, I feel like the issue about a lot of these and like, I
guess the altcoin cycle this, this, this cyclist has been, you
can identify the narratives and then get completely wrecked on
trying to buy them in liquid markets, right.
I think this is a really good list of which ones to buy into,
which are popular narratives. I just still find it really
difficult to work out like what are the good investments in this
narrative sometimes. Like for example, you could
probably have said that about Blast, but then this was Blast a
good investment Like you just, it probably was for the VCs,
like it got itself to a $2 billion market cap or whatever
it was or even higher. And that's probably still been a
good BC trade, But it's still been difficult for users to like
at times. And I feel like that's still
where I'm at with a lot of these.
I think these are really good narratives, but I feel as though
they will flow back the value of a lot of these.
I think the easiest way to play them is still with the with the
L ones. So I think the most important
question as well is then which L1 is, is next cycles L1?
I do think Monad for me was the one that I felt like had the
best chance out of those Berra chain.
It feels OK, they will have their, you know, their
differences in tech. But it felt like Berra chain was
all built around bears and like it was a bit kind of kooky in
that, in that in that world. I don't know if that goes to
like 50 billion, you know, but I, but I feel like Mona has had
a shot and I was really bullish on ton.
Like I really did feel like ton had a good, really good shot at
being that one as well. Like because it has so many
different users, like billion users, you know, that's, that's
a very, very big deal. But now, now I'm less less sure.
And you know, I've even been pitching myself like the Tron
bullish case. You know, that's what I've been
pitching myself a little bit like look at Tron.
It makes more fees than Solana and Eve, right?
It makes one, it's on track to me like close to $1.5 billion of
fees this year if it continues at it's current rate.
And it is very clearly going to be the blockchain which allows
dodgy transfers between different countries that are
probably under U.S. sanctions. And Russia's just said, hey,
we're basically going to allow that as part of our like, is
that not just the screaming trade?
Like Tron is just going to allow the 70 billion of Tether on
that, on that chain to just print itself, print tons and
tons of fees every single every single month.
And that's just going to increase like out of all the L1
that I find it difficult. But I do feel like Tron as the
alternative to the SWIFT payment system has got like this bald
garden that no one else is going to be out to touch and might
actually be the trade, but but it's like a most Haitian trade.
There's a market for that stuff. There's there's a market.
There's a market. For it, the large market for
that stuff, yeah, whether or not I agree with it, there's a
market for it. So you're 100% right.
So do you think, I guess the question becomes, do you think
that the value then accrues to the Tron token or do you think
that the network just grows larger and larger and larger
because you do need some Tron to transact there.
It's not like Solana where it's a fraction of a penny.
Like I went over and you know, I messed around with a couple of
shit coins there just to dip my feet into it.
The, the transactions are kind of they're, they're a little
expensive, You know, it's like 2 bucks or less per transaction.
It's like I, I can do that on main net right now.
But to your point, it's, it's, there's less censorship, right?
There's people turn their eye to what goes on there.
Right, so you pay you pay for illegal money transfers.
Like maybe that isn't a big deal.
You can move in, you know, 100 grand and you don't want to have
any questions asked to you like maybe that's the cost of doing
it. They are high by design.
Like Justin Sun came out the other day and said, hey, we can
actually cut these because meme coins are getting more active
because it was cutting so much into like people trading meme
points. I agree with you.
Tron does not feel itself. The actual token doesn't feel
like a medium of exchange. Like you own ETH, you spend ETH,
you own soul, you spend soul. Tron only very recently became
like a a medium of exchange. Before that it was just a gas
token. And may maybe there's a shot
that they are able to build some dodgy meme coins on the back of
it. They're already, they're doing a
great job of it already, you know?
Justin S he's doing spaces with my own all fall on Tron meme
coins, so he's incredible. No work credible.
It's an interesting discussion. Let's let's move down to brewing
here a little bit, jeez, Because I know we only got you in front
of maybe 5 to 10 minutes. Yeah.
Yeah, some of the brewing narratives, you got progressive
web apps. PWA has the mobile
infrastructure I think that's like go back to talk about blast
for one second and I have Tyler. We wanted to chat about this one
right PAC man's been coming out tweeting quite a bit about this
idea of an an entirely frictionless chain mobile 1st
and I and I I I fall into this like I believe it.
I think mobile is going to be where a lot of users end up
interacting primarily with more consumer facing apps, probably
less trading. I I personally like I still like
to trade you know at my computer.
I like to see everything I like to have a bunch of information
up. Maybe if it's like a snap trade,
I might do it on mobile, but definitely a lot less of that.
So he clearly believes in this world.
PWA seem like almost like a bit of a Trojan horse to get people
into using things. I think we saw some experiments
with fantasy top. We saw some experience with
friend tech things that really took off, but they're more or
less lightning in a bottle. Nothing's really sustained for a
long period of time. So this is one of the things
that I'm I'm looking at and, and trying to figure out, you know,
what's the next big one here? It's interesting, I I like the
vision for blast. I think the question is once
they're full stack, it's still like, So what are people going
to open the blast up on their phone and use it for?
I guess it's still the, the question I have in my head,
right. And, and we said the, the chorus
for several months was well, they're they're give Pac-Man
time. And you know, we, we did that
during the, the pre AirDrop phase.
And now it's like, well, we'll give them another 12 months and
that's fine if these things take time, but I guess I still have
line of sight until like, what? What are we going to be using
the blast up on our phones for? I I don't know either.
Yeah. I think my hardest part too is
that a lot of people left with a sour taste in their mouth after
that trade. And I think it's really hard to
bring back a lot of those users. I think there's it's going to be
an uphill battle for them to to really regain some market share.
At the same time, I think folks in crypto sometime have like
goldfish brain and if there's opportunity, they're game to go
kind of seek that out. So I'm, I'm in the same boat as
you. I'm a bit unclear as to where
this goes, but I'll I'll be watching it for a little bit.
I think blasting might be turning around actually a little
bit like I think we we got the post air drop fun and dump and
now like most people left right. So I think the only people left
in the ecosystem are the ones who are actually using it and
like it and fancy top. I think is is certainly driving
it. I think this guy raises one of
my questions. Like it it it does feel as
though one app is like defining it, like the arbitrum is
currently being called the hyper liquid bridge.
It does feel like blast is like the is the fantasy top bridge at
the moment. You know, like one app is really
sometimes all you need for someone like for people to feel
better about the chain and fantasy top.
It feels like people are are happy to gamble with it.
Like, it does feel like it's got a good thing going.
And I love fancy Top, but like, let's reality check.
Fancy top is like 1500 users. Oh yeah.
So, so it it's not it's not enough.
Yeah, Blast did come out, though.
One thing I will say is they did come out with some of the more
interesting and innovative consumer apps coming out of Big
Blast. The launch, there was a lot of
fun stuff to do there for like a period of time.
It it really was great. It's just I think Mando made a
great point. It's like once the token became
live, people generally just lose interest.
Trade's over, farmers are out. Price goes down, sentiment goes
down, users leave it. It snowballs.
It's it's hard to recover. So I think what base might be
actively proving right now is it's like this whole like we
need consumer apps to consumer crypto apps to succeed.
Do you it's like what what consumer crypto app does base
have right? We're up to a million million
active users I. Have friend tech and friend and
from pet. It did, but but not anymore and
and now their user growth is off the charts.
Yeah. What is going on on base like
some because like the number of users, number of transactions,
number of Uniswap pools is like unbelievable, but the number of
users from Uniswap on base is like 80% of their users aren't
ridiculous, but I don't see any meme coins happening it's.
Not the activity here on Artemis.
Yeah, I've got the same question.
So it's not memes, it's not NF TS.
We saw Ave. they've reached 100 million in TBL yesterday for the
first time. It looks like that just fell
under a. 100 million in TBL just doesn't.
Is that something else needs? To be pulling in a lot right
now. Sora, Sora.
Interesting. Then it's D5, bunch of D5
activity, some NFT apps, little bit of 1155 stuff, but not a
ton. Seems to be like like NFT
focused I think like small collector focused people
experimenting with that. That would make sense.
Yeah. Because it's not something that
I see. It's not like people going, oh,
we'll move into base for base season.
That happened and then nothing really happened on the back of
it it. But yeah, base base has AI.
Don't know. I don't know if we need a
consumer crypto. As I said this in the start, I
feel like payments it's kind of and and Rwas is like are just so
huge. Maybe Tron's.
Tron's the bet man. That's why one of my thoughts.
From Russia evading sanctions, Tron is the bet.
And like when I was going through your list, Jeeves, and
again, like, this is a fantastic lesson and it really got my
wheels spinning. And I feel like one thing, one
of my takeaways is that there are so many like consensus
crypto narratives. And a lot of times those
consensus ones are not being wrong.
Big time, yeah. It definitely does make sense to
try to form your own opinions, even try to form contrarian
ones. Any other?
You love the tokenized luxury goods down here.
This is actually one of the ones that I that I love a lot,
primarily just because you can issue debt on these.
I do want to pop down to the to the to the last category here
'cause I think this is actually the most interesting one, which
is dormant narratives. What are the things that are
slightly dead that we think could come back here?
And I lay out a bunch here, which is political tokens.
I don't know if those ever come back.
I think that cats out of the bag, maybe they run up to some
extent leading into the election.
But I think that like when you select the right outcome and you
lose, it's bad. But people like to gamble.
So maybe they have some level of comeback, but then there's also
now a ton of bag holders, so likely they sell into a lot of
that. Do you guys think these have any
shot? Out of these, I like, I like
NFTS, I like NFTS. It feels like they're coming
back. We spoke about that yesterday.
Risk reward seems OK. The gamble, fine.
Narrative, I'm bullish on long term gambling like I just feel
as a society we're heading that way.
I think it's one of the only ways to re rate like your net
wealth. People are reaching this for
this sort of stuff, whether you like it or not.
But I do think the tokens, I don't know about the tokens as
much Robit hit a high during the bear market, right?
Like people stopped trading with meme coins and they stopped
making money on FTS and they were like, right, we're just
going to, we're just going to gamble.
And Robit. I you could see it feels as
though those tokens probably do best if things really start to
quieten down. Yeah, I actually went on to roll
bit yesterday just to give it a look at it and I I forgot how
great the interface is. Yeah, the UI UX.
It's it's really well built. Yeah.
And I didn't realize they also sponsor like a soccer club now.
Football club, they, they sponsor Southampton, which is,
which is one of the and they sponsor this stream, but they,
they sponsor Southampton, which is yeah, English Premier League
team. They just got promoted.
That's crazy. That's awesome.
That's a big. Deal not, I think Steak
sponsored another team for a year, Everton, but yeah, like
it's a big deal, Big deal to be sponsoring an EPL team for sure.
That's crazy. Any other ones stand out to you
here? Any that you're like these maybe
have a shot or these are this one's going to die.
It's an interesting list. I think Web 3 gaming you nailed.
I feel like metaverse has like a shot on like a 10 year time
horizon. So like I'm not running it to 0
but for the next few years. I agree nothing's happening.
Points and AirDrop farming that meant I got over saturated but I
also don't think it's gone forever.
NFTS was a gut punch. Jeez.
That's what I'm saying. Seeing NFTS on your on your
dormant narratives list what What was a tough one?
NFT 5 seems to be slowing down. I mean I agree with that.
That's that's hard to even argue with.
Yeah, I mean, after this past week, I'm sure that one's hard
to swallow, but like a week and a half ago, I think it kind of
looked that way. You know, it's like I see
everyone just cheering about NFTS and I mean, I, I love NFTS,
right? Like clamped punks was kind of
early into a lot of this stuff. I, I really believe in a lot of
it. I just think it's going to be a,
a tough grind back up, but there's going to be these
sessions where it's like they just spike and then a lot of
this stuff becomes highly legitimized.
And as that happens, user bases grow, collectors grow.
We'll we'll kind of see where that one, that one ends up.
But I you're right, I think the I think NFTS after this past
week, I could probably put back up into brewing, but I'm going
to leave it sit for another few weeks and see.
Do it the wild card on your list, and we've talked about
this before a little bit, is the rise of Dogefra yeah.
So DRC 20s dojnals and dunes. So I think we're going to need
to see that mean coin super cycle thesis play out probably
for this one to to really happen.
But in that scenario where doge goes on a route Dogefra maybe.
Absolutely I. Just think, yeah.
Yeah, this is like one of the more niche areas that I spent
some time in. So you can get like DOGE NFTS,
liquid DOGE tokens. A lot of the Bitcoin
infrastructure that's been built out effectively got put over
into the DOGE ecosystem and and there's a pretty thriving
ecosystem of people that participate in that.
I bought a couple of NFTS, kind of messed around with that a
bit. I still just think DOGE on a
long term scale has a lot of a lot of upside potential.
Then you know, Tyler and I talk about this from time to time,
but there's this idea that like Elon loves it and there's like
integration potential there. Although you know when he he
recently had that doge meme was like director of.
No one cared. No one cared at all.
I think it went down. I I think as a as a form of
payment with doge is is got a is probably up there top three
right like Bitcoin, EI guess Solano as well now.
But like everyone in the world knows about Doge. 100% I I use
it to gamble on golf rounds. Right.
Everyone's heard of it like you. They'll be like, oh, the dog
coin. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember
that. Or like yeah, I've heard about
it. They haven't for Solano they and
probably not even for ETH like some people have heard of ETH,
but DOGE is really what mainstream says.
If you're thinking about if you need to believe in something can
have value independent of you know, like we're we're creating
currencies out of nothing here. Guys like Doge at least has that
respectability that it's known it's.
A great point. Has like a really strong brand
recognition globally, yeah. Do you have any of the doge NFTS
jeeps? Yeah, I've got two.
There's a, there's a few websites you can go to and kind
of check them out there. They got like a little frothy
for a moment. There's also like obviously some
tokens there. I think that that will go hand
in hand with what I have here on like the Bitcoin ecosystem
stuff. So we've seen like runes and
fungible tokens and ordinals on Bitcoin sort of slowed down a
little bit. I think the ordinals have
recently picked up like node monkeys and liquid puppets a
tiny, tiny bit, but they really haven't kept up with some of the
ETH NFTS. And so that ecosystem, I, I have
trouble sort of seeing the vision for it currently, but
it's one of those ones that I I don't think you can count out.
Everyone always talks about unlocking Bitcoin liquidity,
doing all these different applications with it.
I think we'll see it when it happens.
Jury's out until we see Bitcoin run to 100K and if ordinals and
ruins are still dead in that scenario then we can probably
hold the funeral. I have a couple of buddies with
some doge rocks just closing out the doge for I don't know any
but I like the doge rock. NFT play as a bet on on doge for
a in a 12 to 24 month time horizon.
Well jeez, this was a great list.
Thank you for sharing this with us.
This has been a really fun conversation.
I know you've got some time constraints here.