Oh yo-yo, what up, what up. Good morning, Good morning GM
GM, it is another beautiful day to have a beautiful day to
folks. Welcome to episode 141 up Homo
Hour. Today is Wednesday, June 19th,
202444444. My favorite for oak bit the
fourth thing. I love it every single morning
when he does it. I'm going to honor him this
morning by dropping the fours, folks.
No for Oak or Mando today. They're still out gallivanting
around Europe. But don't fret, I've got bread
got on with me here today. He is my single favorite persona
on crypto Twitter, repping a primary sandwich component.
His infographics and primers are the best in the biz.
He covers multiple areas of the market, describes himself as a
nuanced convo maxi. I'm excited to have a long,
nuanced conversation with him here today.
Brett GM, how you doing? Hey.
What's up Tyler, still try and get it set up on the spaces but
I can hear and see you just fine on live stream with people when
I join us over there. Love the fro compression and
looking forward to the conversation.
Yeah, well, thanks for jumping on with us.
We'll we'll try to get you up on stage.
But again, it's not a huge deal. I think the the listeners want
to know the the big news, your big personal news from
yesterday. You are now a fantasy top hero
included in the recent cohort. How are you feeling?
Are you seeing the world in a different light this morning now
that you are a hero? Yeah, pressure's on.
Yeah, that was exciting to see. So now I can both passively and
actively lose money on the game. I've been pretty involved in it,
spending my own capital. Hopefully now I can provide some
value to people so that they buy my card, I make some money, and
then I can lose that on on fantasy top.
So yeah, it's really exciting. I don't actually have any cards
in supply. I think that's actually what you
faced early on too, is that you come in middle tier, upper tier,
supplies low. So yeah, we'll we'll do that
dance. But I look forward to the tweets
of people saying I'm losing generational wealth for them and
that it is my job to make sure that does not happen anymore.
You, you will feel the pressure once the tournaments are live at
the big main tournaments, especially once you get more
cards out there. And if you're playing yourself,
I think that's also the key. So I mean, if you're not playing
yourself a little, a little bit, the pressure's probably off.
But for the heroes who play it the right way and and do Rep
their own cards, I mean, what you earn is directly tied to to
your performance out there. And some of these heroes are
good, they're tough, they are hard to beat.
But I guess, I guess you are in the tactics.
But we'll talk about that later on in the show.
So you will get an early taste of some of this market action.
Folks, we're going to talk about that.
We're going to talk about a lot more on today's show.
Lots of big news from the past day.
So we had the the blockbuster. The SEC has dropped its case
against consensus ETH wins. We're going to talk about that.
Fox News is building a media authentication protocol called
Verify on AZ KL2 using polygons CDK tech.
So that was a big one. I again is live for trading on
Coinbase's pre launch market. That's Coinbase's first pre
launch token. It opened up around $6.80.
I think that's around $11 billion FDV.
Think a little bit disappointing, but not too bad
an open an AI crypto news wave. Finder shared a new demo for its
AI agent functionality still to come.
That's going to be a big one. I think that's going to be a
storyline to watch for a while. We've got PAC Moon teasing its
V3 in the blast streets. This pudgy Penguin loan crisis
is seemingly just getting worse by the day, so hopefully that
gets solved here soon. And then we have a lot of topics
on Bread's list to cover. I'll give us a quick preview.
So he outlined a long thread on the structural bullishness of
crypto. We're going to go through that
because we need the opium, we need the bull case right now as
much as ever. GCR, he's reminding everyone
that we're in the bull market. Bread was already there.
We're going to talk about ton. I don't really know a whole lot
about ton, so we're going to look at some of the data with
him there. Blast growth predictions for
TGE. Then we'll end the show with
some fancy top, perhaps a little bit more social fight chatter
time dot fun. What the hell has happened to
friend tech and maybe a little bit more.
Before we dive in, just a quick shout out to our monthly
partners. So the show is powered by moon
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They've been fantastic here at this month.
Go check them out if you haven't already.
But before we dive in and we'll start with the market report and
then this consensus story. But Brett, I got to ask, were
you following this crazy DJT token GCR versus Martin Shkreli
saga that was playing out yesterday?
So it. Was pretty tough.
Thank you. I was keeping up just on the
timeline a little bit. I honestly have been getting a
little wore down by all the celeb stuff.
So I've almost consciously been trying to avoid diving in and
out of that stuff. I don't do the short term
trading. I don't chase, you know, meme
corn trenches. But it is interesting and that
you see things come forward like a a conversation between Skrelly
and Baron and now top GS in there.
And like, there's just there's a lot going on that, you know, GCR
obviously wakes from from his his bull posting to, I mean,
he's only done it twice, right? Came back from multi years just
to say we're in a bull market disappears for a few more weeks.
So we save the bull or save the bull, then goes away and then
comes back just to dunk on this specific like meme coin bet,
which is kind of funny. So yeah, hard not to not to
follow it a little bit, but not in the trenches, not trading it.
So I I have a lot of takes. First, my hot take is I think
GCR made his bull post last night to save face 'cause he
he's probably going to lose this bet if he actually does get into
it. I'll give folks the recap of the
situation and this was just a wild one.
It doesn't seem like it's over just yet, but but basically it
started yesterday. Alex Weiss put out this
challenge to to bet Martin Shkreli a $1,000,000 at this DJ
token is false. False here, meaning it's not
from Trump or someone on his team or his family.
Shkreli snap accepts the bet and then he replies with how high
can you go? GCR joins the conversation and
he says I'll go up to $100 million.
Shkreli accepts that they they go back and forth on the terms.
Love the bet. Screles in the camp that as long
as it's from Baron, Trump or Donald, that counts as a win for
the token to be real. Screles going on all of these
different Twitter spaces. He's I joined a few of them.
He was sounding just super confident in his side of the bed
and we saw some roller coaster action in the market while this
was all playing out. The token dumped 30%, jumped 40%
during all this. Basically it was live trading
based on what was happening in these spaces.
That was my read on all of this. And then Zach XPT enters the
conversation and Arkham Intelligence had put out a, a
$150,000 bounty on anyone who had information on the real
creator of this. Zac XPT submits.
But before that goes public, Skrelly comes out and admits,
hey, I leaked the DMS to to Zac XPT, I'm the creator of this
token. I've got conversations with
Andrew Tate trying to, to get him involved.
And so at this point in time, it the situation is Skrelly's the
creator. He he likely has had some kind
of conversations with Baron Trump.
Kate was involved Zach XPT exposed this, but I don't think
he's going to get the bounty anymore.
The token fell 50% overnight. It's all around 100 and 1000 and
20 million here this morning in market cap.
The the is the bet live. That's still an open question.
I saw Skriley tweeting this morning at Kobe because Kobe was
going to escrow this $100 million because of of course
Kobe is going to get in the mix on all this.
And Skrille was asking, hey, is the bet still on?
So it looks like it's the bet's probably not going to happen.
As for the token, I don't really think it matters at this point
if, if Baron is somehow loosely tied to this cause Skrille
convinced him to get into it. It this feels like a Skrille
token at this point in time. Am I off base there?
Brett, how are you thinking about this?
Doesn't matter if Skrille does have receipts that say that
shows he has a conversation with Baron Trump on all this.
Does this make it a Trump coin for you?
Yeah, I mean, we've seen a a crazy market dilution of Trump
coins the last whatever months. I guess it has been like, right.
We had the Trump on ETH and then we had Tramp on Solana and then
we had 1000 iterations of Trump on both of them just trying to
get stuff going on. And now this is a kind of a
Baron Trump, our Baron Trump coin.
But also not yet. Shelly's like the forefront.
He's the voice of it. He's the one that's spearheading
all this stuff. And I think if if these things
are really gonna be culture coins, right, if like they're
really going to be sentiment trading on like the person it's
tied to, it really has to be tied to that person, right?
And like, I don't think the market is going to grant this
thing a valuation whenever it's three and four people removed
from the actual Trump Foundation.
So unless like you can have Trump or Baron or whoever
bringing attention to it. Like it's a Shkreli coin in my
opinion. And again, I'm not trading it,
but like, that's, that's how it appears from the outside.
And at least to me, like I wouldn't buy this assuming a
Trump valuation. Yeah, I think that's spot on for
for it to be a culture coin, it has to be tied to the actual
person. I would tend to agree.
So what what's a little bit of egg on my face?
So I basically held a funeral for the rest of the Poly fi
Trump tokens on Tuesday. I I said they're they're dead
and gone. Like there's, there's too many
rumors of a real Trump token coming.
The, the market totally reversed course.
So like Trump was up 20%. The Trump token on ETH was up
like 3033% overnight. So a, a large part of the dip
getting reversed here. And now I'm I'm kind of
reversing course. So like that this was this felt
like our shot at at a Trump coin.
Now it seems like it's not that narrative play out.
And now it feels less likely like Barron's not going to get
involved, I don't think with another one.
And now is Donald Trump going to get in on another one?
Seems lower likelihood. So I don't know I, I, I'm out on
it. I think that's a, a good pivot
perhaps just into our broader market report here for the day.
So let's run down and take a look at some of these tokens.
Bitcoin up a ticket on the day holding right at 65,000.
ETH is at 3531, the top winner on the day up 3.7%.
Love to see the green on the board.
Solana at one. Up 1 1/2 percent here at 1:37.
So a decent day for the tokens. Let's look at the memes here.
Memes up actually on the day so dose up 3%, Pepe up 9% with up
3% lagging a little bit breath and others up 20%.
So a little bit more green on the board here.
I I took a look at the ETF inflows or outflows from the
day. It looks like 150 million in
outflows from the ETFs. So that's causing a little bit
of downward pressure there on Bitcoin.
But folks, the reason is up 3% on the day the SEC has dropped
its case against consensus. So I'll I'll kick us off here
and then Brown, get your thoughts on this.
Get to where clarity seemed one in the last big hurdles keeping
crypto from really booming in the US and it feels like
dominoes are starting to fall that we may actually get some of
this regulatory clarity. Pressure is coming down.
So last night consensus announced that the SEC has
dropped its investigation into Ethereum. 2 point O the impact.
The SEC will not bring charges that ETH is a security and that
ETH sales are securities transactions according to
consensus. This comes after they sent a
letter to the SEC on June 7th asking them to confirm whether
the May ETH ETF approvals were premised on ETH being a
commodity. The SEC did not answer that
question directly, but simply dropped their case.
Huge win for consensus, huge win for broader crypto.
We've seen ETH already respond up 3.7% on the day when
everything else basically is flat consensus.
Not quite out of the woods just yet.
Their fights to declare their wallet Metamask via swaps and
staking that it doesn't violate securities law that is still
alive. But we have to think probably
the that they are more positioned to win than ever.
And just zooming back or zooming out here for a minute, after
three years of attacks and offense by the SEC against
crypto, it feels like they might finally be backing off.
I think OSF posted about this in the past few weeks, the ETS have
gotten approved, the SE CS head of crypto has resigned and now
the SEC has withdrawn its case against ETH Two point O it.
It feels like that the winds are shifting bread, I guess.
Curious for your reactions to this.
You know you you are a big ETH believer.
How big is this one? I mean, it's hard to deny it's
not it's I think anyone who has been following this closely is
not surprised by it because like, I don't know if people who
have been tracking this whole saga, like there were emails
turned over from the previous head of the SEC like pretty
definitively saying like, yeah, we don't consider you to be a, a
security. And they were just trying to
find regular regulatory clarity about that.
Obviously Gary hasn't been that kind towards it.
But anyone who's been watching this, you saw consensus.
They were really pre emptive with their their suit against
the SEC knowing this was kind of coming.
And the SEC is no, no stranger to lawsuits against them for
some of their accusations. They had had one and lost
before. They knew if this played into
the ETF that they were going to get probably a lawsuit.
So consensus, I believe there's actually another company that
came out and issued a a lawsuit in conjunction with consensus to
kind of get front run the like turmoil that might come from
Gary Gensler and SEC ahead of ETF.
So they got out, they did this stuff getting this wins.
Good. I think it's just yeah, it's
bullish for broader adoption. And then this will kind of go
into that, that thread of the structural bullishness of this
environment that we have for for crypto broadly.
It's like, yeah, man, it, it becomes normalized, gets
approved as an ETF and then like we already got 5% of the, the
BTC supply that's been gobbled up by ETF inflows.
And like now we're going to start applying that stuff to
Etherium. And whether or not you're a
believer, anyone's a believer of, of Etherium within the
broader landscape, if you have that level of inflows,
structural inflows from traditional markets into our
industry, like that's just, it's wealth going up for everyone.
So it it's a, it's a wealth effect for the entire ecosystem,
not just Ethereum as an asset class.
So it's good for everyone. I think the other headline
somewhat tied to this is Pantera.
I, I believe that they've got like $100 million lined up to to
buy into the ETTFS when they're live at.
They haven't seen it. I didn't see that number, but I
know that that happened with Bitcoin too.
They had several, I think BlackRock and a few others said
that they had seed funds ready to, to buy for initial liquidity
and they're either ETF to, to pre buy that stuff to try to
front run everything else. And, but not surprising.
And 100 million to each market cap versus, you know, however
much it was to BTC. Like that's why people are
excited about this because yeah, the asset class is much smaller
than or not asset class, but the asset is much smaller than BTC
was. And if you see 1/3 or 1/4 of the
inflows of BTC put into the ETF, the impact may be
disproportionate. The the Balkunis brothers
calling for ETF approval July 2nd.
I think it was their latest call.
What are your thoughts? Is that timeline?
Are you taking the over or the under on July?
Second, I actually so Polymarket has a market open on this for a
no, the 2nd. So I think it is the second
actually, or no, the 4th, Sorry, it's the fourth.
It'll be trading by the 4th. So you can bet over under on
that. And I actually, I was looking at
that and I thought the, the smart play would be to take the
over just 'cause there's a holiday there.
And you know, Gary Ganz already came out and he said that he
said August was his, his guess on that.
So he said that they said the 2nd.
If you kind of just look at what the, the general outline was, I
think they probably want to go after the holiday, July 4th
there. So my guess would be second is a
little early, but you know, early is better, better.
So I wouldn't be, I wouldn't hate it.
Yeah, I like your over bet there.
It would be weird to to launch it the day before the holiday.
I think July 4th is a Thursday, so then it comes back for Friday
and that's the weekend. Feels like it would be the next
week at the earliest and that that's if everything goes right
because I'm on July 2nd's in two weeks, 14 days.
Yeah, two weeks from today all. Right.
We just still delay from the BTC one, right?
That was live almost instantaneously.
And this is now giving me like 5 weeks or whatever, but still
like we've been waiting years, right?
This stuff has been going back and forth for a while.
It's a few weeks. I mean, it's, it's a matter of
when and not if now. And that's just a part of the
broader crypto bull case. So we've got, I mean GCR came
back somewhat saving face. He's like, yes, we're in a bull
market, stop panicking. There is some hints of summer
2020, some hints of summer 20/20/21 with respect to where
we've been. But Brett front ran Brett
already laid out his bullish structural structural
environment thesis, telling everyone to to zoom out and
giving us the Hopi on You have a lot of data back in this Brad,
do you want us maybe walk us through some of this?
You know what, I guess what what made you want to write this and
what are some of the the points that that jump out the most when
you're talking about protocol TBL up up only since Q3 stable
coins similar rise. You talk about the Bitcoin ETF
performance. Where should we drill into?
Like what? What are the the big that the
big items you know from your thread here?
Yeah. I mean, if we're just going to
talk structural stuff, for me it's stable coins and it's it's
BTC and flows, right? Because like whenever stable
coins is always like the genesis of of net and flows into our
ecosystem, right. So like everything comes in
typically through people turn their dollars into coins,
USDTUSDC, whatever. So those get minted that's and
flows to the ecosystem and then that purchases your assets.
So you're getting, you know, BTCE salon, are you going crazy
down the risk curve to do, you know, means whatever, right?
So net inflows to the ecosystem through stable coin minting is
typically a pretty good indicator of is, are things
coming into the ecosystem? Are they coming out?
And you can look back on that chart and see back after 2022
stark drop and then we bled out for up until July of 2023, maybe
a little bit beyond that, right. So that and that was that felt
like a bear did it not right. It was everything was down only
pretty consistently for months, although we had macro or micro
up and down waves within that stuff.
Generally it was sentiment down prices down bear market and then
since Q 3:00-ish of last year, you can see there minting and
total TVL of stable coins up only right.
We've slowly started to get sentiment back.
We're slowly starting to see prices rise.
We're seeing spikes of the of of all time high and a few coins
Solana Bitcoin, you know we've had a few other tons of
ecosystem. We're gonna talk about
potentially prices all time high.
So you're starting to see things bubble to the surface of of net
new liquidity coming in ecosystem.
So awesome. Great sign.
Like one of several things. The other is.
We're talking structural flows, right, things that are just, it
just inflows into the ecosystem, which is all we care about.
And whenever you talk about the asset price disparity or the
asset class disparity between us, you know, we're, our market
cap right now is 2.4 trillion. I think it is relative to the
traditional market, right? You have all these ETFs getting
approved and you if you have even a small, small portion,
right, we're saying people are going to our asset managers are
going to start recommending between one and 3% of your your
passive portfolio to have exposure to crypto.
Like 1 to 3% sounds small, but whenever it's one to 3% of
hundreds of of trillions of dollars, right, that's a lot of
money, especially relative to us, which our entire ecosystem,
everything that we have 2.4 trillion.
So if you get 1% of a multi $100 trillion as our group of wealth
pouring into our ecosystem structurally, right, People
don't aren't swing trading this shit.
They're not like panicking because something's going on.
They just say, have my probably managed portfolio.
It's an index, allocate a small portion of stuff to you guys
over the next 60 years because these people are just doing it.
They don't understand finance. Most of Americans don't.
I'm talking to my family, my my girl, everyone of their like,
they don't understand where their retirement money is.
They just know that they have a retirement account.
And then on the back end, an asset manager does this thing
and they go based on the recommended like growth versus
risk versus whatever portfolio allocation and that money just
gets allocated all of that money or one or two percent of that.
If that's the average, it's just going to flow in.
And you can see that with the net inflow of the, the BTCETF
best performing ETF of all time already eats up 4 1/2% of all of
BTC supply. That's over a few months of an
asset class that is just now. It's not even hit the marketing
window yet, right? You, you hear asset managers say
like the, the, their marketing isn't really ready to go and
there's still some framework ready that needs to be worked
on. So I see those two things and
it's just it's pretty easy to say like chill out pros.
I'm with you there. A few thoughts.
So I mean, once the once the investment managers in the 401K
bond just turn the switch on. It's, it's really every two
weeks it, it's just constant drip of funds in here.
You said 1 to 3% at the Coinbase Summit last week.
They, they basically said that's where we're going to start.
But once there's regulatory clarity on this, like we're
upping this to five to 10%. And that feels reasonable to me.
Like we, we're starting to see the stats.
This younger generation is more interested in real estate and,
and crypto than anything else right now.
And stocks is last I, I just saw a tweet about that here this
morning. I thought it was interesting
that stocks would be that low. So I still think there's,
there's a place for stocks, especially that like NVIDIA and
the AI stocks. But putting that aside it, it
feels like that that number is just going to increase and five
to 10%. It's just like we aren't no
one's ready for for that. A few of the other points I want
to quickly talk about Coinbase. So you, you mentioned Coinbase,
they're yielding $10 million a month on base.
This is on their quarterly reports coin up 400% in the last
year. How are you feeling about COIN?
What's what's the Coinbase bull case right now from your
perspective, if you had to to lay it out and I guess are you,
are you holding coin in in your? Coin like the the stock yes Oh,
I'm very allocated very long coin and I that and honestly,
that's what's funny is so one yes, they've shown with base
that there is a way to monetize an existing user base, and I
think that is something that we're going to see with with L
twos as time goes on because BlackRock already admitted that
you know public chains or whatever.
It's like starting your own network's kind of kind of skeevy
and it's expensive right, because if you create a token,
you have to issue it. You have to do all this
decentralization stuff. Now Coinbase is showing you
don't even have to create a token.
You don't have to do the distribution stuff.
You don't have to run the cost of spinning up a network.
You just create a sequencer, which I think right now the cost
of actually running an L2, I think like the expenses on that
basis. Other sides about 1000 a week
that may have been before den goon upgrade would made it even
cheaper to post down to Ethereum.
So cost basically nothing. You you have these roll up as a
service. You can really do go do like a
several clicks and spin up an L3 or L2 and it creates your thing.
You have total control over that thing.
So these these companies can come in and be as try to be as
decentralized as they want or as private controlled as they want,
and they can generate a shit ton of money, right.
They can point all their users there, generate transactions,
get a portion of the transactions and make money.
So Coinbase is already averaging about 10 to $15,000,000 a month
right now based on on the sequencer fees for transactions
on base. And if you're, you know, if
you're a Meta, if you're Instagram and you have a huge
user base, if you're a Twitter and you want to monetize it, you
can now spin up a blockchain L2 tying on Ethereum.
So you can claim to centralization or you know, do
it to whatever degree you want, point your entire user base
there and then deal with tokenized assets, digital,
whatever on the back end. It's just a way to generate
money that they've never been able to.
And it's shown up on quarterly reports for Coinbase.
And yeah, I'm I'm super bullish coin for a multitude of reasons.
I think if you look at what they've done, they've basically
cornered the market on on web three infrastructure.
So like they're they're the custodian for all of these ETFs,
right? They're the ones that are run
running all the back end handling of that things for most
of that those inflows, they run staking as a service where they
eat 25% of the yield on, on the staking.
So if these large asset managers want to come in, they want to
have their stuff staked. One basically do all that stuff
is they're going custodian it, they're going to make them
generate the yield, which you're also going to see these ETS
eventually on the ETF3M1 specifically.
And then they're probably going to take a portion of that.
They have this wallet as a service.
They have their own L2. They have like they have all of
this stuff that is just the the plumbing behind getting
integrated to crypto on an infrastructure level on top of
owning the actual user front end right there.
They own the US market basically outright finance got kicked out.
They are now expanding into Canada and even a little bit of
Europe with some of the future stuff.
I just think they have so much foundational stuff in place
right now that if you believe assets or digital assets, crypto
largely is going to go up, then Coinbase is gonna play a key
part. And yeah, now they're the
vanguard of of the political front too.
So they're like the good guys on the crypto front as well as the
people that are the stand up company within America.
I just think there's too much going on there that it's not
worth net worth being allocated to it as a yeah.
It's just a strong bull case. It feels like you've got two
levers. Anytime the the crypto majors go
up, it feels like that Coinbase stock typically kind of goes up
in line. And then you've also got all
this revenue they're generating from the the various products,
which is just another income stream and another reason why
like when this hits Wall Street and their quarterly reports and
whatnot is another lever for it. So yeah, it is a bullish setup.
You know, you mentioned companies like Meta dropping
their their own blockchains or perhaps L twos or to
organization like quickly, like how do you think that does play
out? I know this was another topic of
conversation at the Coinbase Summit last week.
I think their school of thought is that Ethereum's already won
for this and that they're going to come in as L twos so as not
to fragment liquidity. Is that your view?
How do you think this the whole tokenization race plays out?
Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't they?
I mean, so like, yeah, those are the options are OK, you're going
to launch a product is your is your, if you have a specific
product that you want to launch and you just want to put that on
a blockchain, then like, yeah, you might go to a higher
throughput chain like a Solana or whatever.
So or maybe even an existing L2, right.
I think those are the two sectors we see.
Whichever one they choose, there is probably just going to be,
you know, based a little bit on what connections they have, who
they talk to, whatever. I don't think the disparity is
really that big between like a base and an assault on it right
now. And that gap's probably going to
start closing. So ideology's probably going to
drive that. But then if you say, OK, well,
we also want to make money and we want to to create an entire
ecosystem, well then they have to launch their own blockchain.
And I think whenever that is the discussion we've seen pretty
consistently, if you launch your own L1, it's very hard to get
going. Monad may be the exception where
they're before they even launched, they're already got a
crazy community into whatever. But most L ones don't garner a
community, don't garner any kind of action.
And because of that, they kind of die off.
Block chains need transactions, so they base has laid out a
blueprint, spin up a blockchain, do it on the back end.
You can try to do it as seamless as you want to where like people
don't even know they're doing their own stuff right now.
You have like the privies of the world where people are are
signing blockchain transactions, but they don't actually know it
writes a few buttons. You don't do any private key
stuff, you know, and that's getting better with stuff like
Coinbase smart wallet, which just uses all pass keys.
So I would say if they want to spin up their own ecosystem and
do something like base, get really involved, like coinbases,
then yeah, spin up your own tilt own L2.
It's cheap. You don't have to do any of the
research to do it. You click and launch this, this
thing, you're interoperable with all the liquidity that exists in
the Etherium ecosystem. You generate fees based of all
on all the transactions that take place.
And yeah, it's just it's additional revenue for them.
It's a way for them to modernize, monetize and tokenize
their user, their existing user base.
It makes sense to me and it's hard not to be massively bullish
Ethereum if you think all these big players are just going to
comment in the future of tokenization, which I still
think is like the end state, end game, biggest unlock that we
have for blockchain and crypto. Perhaps, perhaps maybe besides
AI coming and it's going to happen on 8th.
I mean that's a huge win. I, I want to pivot a a little
bit, Brett. So as we go through this thread,
there's a lot that you cover. You start getting into the the,
the ton blockchain here a bit at the end you're mentioning how
Telegram is ton and ton have seen massive volumes on chain.
We've got some of these handles selling for for hundreds of ETH,
which other than you, I haven't even seen anyone reporting on
this. But these are some wild figures.
Like we've got this anime handle song not that long ago.
Like that's why I'm surprised like like that no one was really
talking about this that much. I mean, we, we, we usually us,
you know, creators, we love to, to to hit these flashy sales,
but apparently we all miss them. This anime handle song for 700
1000 tokens selling for 750,000. And and then you you get into
some more detail on TON and and some of the the outlier holder
account. So I don't know, let's just back
up a little bit for for listeners out there who don't
really know much about TON and, and I'm included in this.
Like what, what is it? And, and like what what's
happening? What what piqued your interest
or curiosity to get you to explore the Ton Eco in in more
depth? So it was users and user counts.
So several weeks ago, I like I heard some stuff bubbling up.
You heard you heard it thrown around a little bit.
I never I heard about this not coin, not coin being created as
like a a meme slash. The very first, like it's called
a clicker. You spin up an app inside of
Telegram, click a little button and then you get you play the
game that way, right, Just clear game.
There's a whole like subsection of them anyways, whenever I
heard about this not coin and it was like, OK, it's it's
valuation or FTV was at over $2 billion and I was like, what
how's your coin over 2 billion that we haven't heard of Like
it's it didn't have the the energy momentum conversations of
a whiff or whatever like anything else that a boom that
got in that didn't hit any spaces whatever.
So it was strange to me. So I started looking at it and
saw that their holder count was just absurd.
Not only they have 2 billion FTV, but they had over 2 million
users or holders of that of that coin.
That's like that's that seems like a lot, but I'm not sure how
much a lot that is. So I started comparing it to all
the other like meme coins, whatever else across all of our
ecosystems. And yeah, even like even if you
were faking the numbers and trying to intentionally like
outdo it, you still see like it's more than than bonk, right?
Bonk was something that was dusted to all Solana NFT
holders, like a ton of wallets whenever it was created.
And that was a year ago, right? Plus it was in the depths of the
bear. So it was, it was given to
everyone. And even then it's three times
the size, right? That's crazy to me.
So I started digging into it. TLDR is just that it is a
blockchain that was spun up and by the founder of Telegram and
he is working to make it natively integrated inside of
Telegram. So you have an existing user
base. This kind of plays into our L2
conversation. You have an existing user base,
right? They have a bunch of people that
use this app hundreds of millions and all they do is they
just tie a tie a blockchain on the back end and then natively
integrate some of the the key assets to it.
So, you know, you saw the the handles there like this.
This kind of again goes back to the Lt. conversation, like what
if Twitter like they literally just like, what can we do on
chain? Yeah, you can just sell handles
on chain. And seeing that that formal
tokenized trustless ability to exchange handles in Telegram,
spin up a wallet in Telegram, keep the UI seamless because you
again, you can just go into Telegram and do at wallet.
It'll spin up a wallet for you in the back end.
You don't have to deal with it. You don't do whatever it does
this for you. It's tied to your, your unique
user. And if like Twitter could do
something like that, they could generate a shit ton of
transactions. If they could generate a shit
ton of transactions, they can make a shit ton of money.
If I could formally go and find a, the actual like or bid on the
bread handle on Twitter, I would absolutely do that.
People would absolutely do that. People are absolutely doing that
on TON because they can on the back end place a bid on someone
else's handle and then actually exchange that stuff for native
TON assets. And that's something as simple
as that is enough to drive a lot of activity cuz people care
about this stuff and that's what got me looking into it and
that's what ton is. TLDR.
And that makes sense to me. People love their names and
handles on chain. But I guess is the vision, you
know, turning this into like integrating payments within
Telegram. Yeah, USDT, they just partnered
with Tether. So USDT is is working on the
back end to make sure that you can seamlessly exchange money
right there in Telegram. So if you have it on your tongue
wallet, you can just send, you know, you directly to your
handle. I can just say, hey, send a
Tyler, you know, 10 USDT or 10 ton or whatever and it all works
on the back end for you. So yeah, it's, it's trying to
make it seamless, trying to obfuscate some of the, the
actual. And we, we talk about this all
the times whenever, you know, it's on the back end, like
that's when it's mass adoption. You're, you're kind of starting
to see that there and you have a crazy distribution of a, a chat
app. So you can imagine it happening
with WeChat, with whatever else, right?
Like that's that would be the kind of the the promised land
for what we've been talking about.
Yeah, and the the payment use case still you know one of the
foundational ones for cryptos. This this makes a ton of sense.
I think this kind of snuck up on me.
I just I don't it is it's top ten.
It's massively in the top 10 some time folks, if you're not
following this, it's at $16 billion market cap here just
below dose looks like a $35 billion FTV.
So about half the tokens still left to come, but this feels
like a force to, to watch in, in this market.
So I'm, I'm sure we will be covering it more.
We've got about 20 minutes left in the show bread.
We got to talk about blast. I, I know there are folks out
there who this is all they're focused on for the next week
'cause we are one week out from this blast AirDrop.
Massive sigh of relief for folks who have been farming this
relentlessly now for months. For others, this is their their
final Sprint and then they are very curious of of what is to
come. So you've laid out a thesis on,
you know, how blast could come out at a $10 billion FTVI?
Don't have the exact mass. So I think this is what, $7.00
blast gold at $10 billion FTV? Roughly, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm
standing on the shoulders of giants and giants here being
empty stats in some of his token allocation assumptions.
I didn't do any of that. I just did like what could the
FTV be or justified? And then I backed that into what
his token percentage guesses were.
And yet that comes out to around $7.00 if you do the 10 billion
FTV, which is, which was the same as his guess.
But frankly his guess was based on something that has no
correlation between the numbers. So like he he got he got the
number, but the number didn't make sense.
Got it. Walk us through this.
So I mean $7.00 per gold is going to be music to a lot of
folks ears it is above. So like yesterday I think we saw
gold still trading pre market like $4.80, not a ton of
liquidity in there. So I don't put a huge amount of
weight beyond that on that though what we've seen this year
for the most part is these tokens are opening about 30 to
50% lower on the actual market than they were on pre market,
which I mean that puts gold at like $3, which feels absurdly
low. I think that puts it that blast
would have a similar market cap as Blur.
So I have some, I have my concerns.
I think half the time on or more is is bearish on on gold and
where this is all going to come out.
What's the bull case here? Like how could this come out of
10 billion? Yeah.
I mean, so the again important thing to note is just that there
are assumptions and token allocations like until we know
those, it's all it's all guesses.
But what I did here was I said like, you know, is there
anything that we can track on chain to see there's a
correlation between usage like on chain usage and FTV of the
token, like what the market is valuing a given token of a given
L2 ad. So what I did was I looked at
all L twos that had tokens and then I compiled a bunch of
metrics to see like, is there any correlation?
And you see that top picture, that bottom right, you can
actually see a little bit of a correlation between like as FDV
increases the OR sorry, as gas price increases or the fees paid
by users, it typically correlates to a higher valued
network. So it's, it's just kind of a, a
linear, maybe a little exponential at the end
combination. So I took that and said, OK, let
me look at this and see like eyeballing it, does it line up
with my perception of these chains?
It does, right? You see.
So usage is the Y axis total value, like the FDV of the token
on the X axis. There would be like arbitrome
optimism. They generate the most fees by
users and they are also simultaneously the most value
tokens, which, OK, that makes sense even though there is no
structural connection between the two, right?
Like the fees generated by users and and by the protocol don't go
to the token. It's still the market is seeing
those two things and seeing activity and saying because I'm
seeing activity, because I'm seeing growth, I am valuing the
token higher. I'm willing to hold on to the
token at a little bit higher price.
So, OK, that was cool. So we see that it lines up kind
of with my perception and you can see there ZK Sync dropped
came out the other day. So I was able to throw that in
here, which is really useful. ZK Sync was generating fees
again the Y axis up and down in line with kind of what the token
was being valued at, right? It was generating fees less than
OP and Arbitrum and it is also simultaneously valued less than
Arbitrum kind of on on par with Mantle.
Cool. OK.
We're seeing correlation there. Makes sense.
And then using that same metric, there seems to be a correlation
here, the token or and then you can see the very bottom load
Metis Manta not used at all. No one talks about them valued
very poorly. OK, so like it's starting to see
something. So now let's throw blast in here
and you can see blast relative to tokens or to change with
tokens shit ton more fees generated way more than OP and
arbitrary. That's usage.
That's that's users paying stuff.
OK. So if we are going to stick to
what the market seems to be valuing these tokens based off
of network usage, then BLAST should be or at least has some
justification to say based on usage if this token could or
should be valued more than OP and Arbitrum.
So if we were to stick to our lines that are are showing here
based on usage, based on valuation, BLAST could justify
A10 to 12 billion FTV of the token, right?
Yeah, I see. 12 blade when I look at this chart, Brett.
So I I open it with 10 but I see 12 when when when I look at
this. It looks better on like, but
like, since we're going to the upper tier, like we're going
beyond the L2 scale, like I didn't know like, 'cause there
might be a ceiling, right? There might be a, a mental
market cap that we're given to these things.
And so I did that and I said like, OK, like based on this,
based on how the market traditionally has valued these
tokens, even though there's no direct correlation, it could
open up at or above the FT VS of Blast and OP.
Like there are some other nuances in there.
Like both of those are you're kind of buying OP as a as a beta
play on on base because you can't get exposure to base
directly. So like there is a little bit of
a premium you probably see in there.
So there's some some funkiness, but that's why.
And I think that's why I actually pulled Blast down off
that 12 million because it's not one to one with with Arbitrum
and and OP because those have like entire ecosystems.
Arbitrum has orbits that you can launch, Optimism has the OP
stacks, you can launch basins or and all those things are all
based on OPS. You're kind of, it's earning
value based on that. So that's why I scaled it down a
little bit. And then as like the last one
was just like, yeah, you can see that's the growth of protocols
on the actual chain. You can see that blast as a
protocol or as a ecosystem. The protocols growing are much,
much faster than basically everything else, which I think
is surprising. Like there's a lot of
development there by teens. So it's not just like farmers
over there farming, there's growth over there.
So yeah, based on those I am using NFT stats assumptions 7
made sense to me. Well, I appreciate that the the
legwork and the data behind this.
And I think we're all the the bear takes that I've seen like
no one has any real data backing any of it up.
There's like this. Yeah, it is a hated chain, I
guess. What's your response to that?
So I think I have seen, I think the criticism I've seen that I
feel like has the most potential merit is that real builders
don't want to build on blast because of this
hypergamification, hyperponsification ethos that
that Pac-Man has kind of instilled in this.
I guess what what would be your reactions to that?
My counter would be real builders want users and Blast
and Pac-Man are really good at getting users.
There hasn't been an L2 like it's the actual literal road map
of Ethereum to get everyone the F off of L1 and go to an or
multiple L2's. Like that's the road map.
You're not we're not meant to stay on L1, but there's no like
formal guidelines to OK, everyone go here, right?
There's never been that just kind of find one that aligns
with you go to wherever an app is that you like just go there
and everyone kind of like goes wherever we went to base for
friend tech. We'd like maybe some other
smaller things, but largely that's what it is.
And I think Pac-Man has been really good and will continue to
be really good at being this like Moses character leading
everyone across the Red Sea of the bridge to like come to my
L2. Like I have games, I have
whatever's I'm from the class of 2021, which is what most of the
these like you should eat the old heads going to base.
You see a lot of the the newer 2021 class sticking who came for
NFTS kind of sticking to, to Pac-Man because he's a known
trusted entity. And yeah, they're all playing
there. So I think it's like you're
going to see a Coinbase old heads blast new new age like
social ecosystem. Yeah.
But yeah, I I think he'll just continue to get users and
builders don't want to build in a place that's empty as someone
that's built in a place that was empty and it sucked and I I had
to get out of there. So people will, people will
follow the users and they'll follow the money and there's all
that stuff is there. I guess what is attractive to
you about what's in the Blast ecosystem right now?
So I think you've been playing in the fancy top streets.
We'll, we'll perhaps talk about that here in a minute.
Have you been using much else on on blast here over the last
couple months? Not really, and I like that was
a conscious decision for me because I am across a multiple
protocols. Like I try to, I try to keep
tabs on a lot of stuff and just identify the thing that I think
is going to be the most successful and then be pointed
in there because I quit. If you're an on chain citizen,
your stuff gets strewn about all over the place.
And I I don't want to lose track of all my positions.
Like, you know, a little bit on Bitcoin.
I'm on a theory, I'm on Solana, I'm on face, I'm on like and so
I'm trying to be pointed in my stuff.
So I went over there. I try to do some double stuff,
which I like I'm doing re staking.
So, you know, try to take advantage of some double farm re
staking opportunities over there, but it's mostly just been
fantasy top. I saw something that that had
some a spark and I wanted to make sure I go there and I go
hard as opposed to doing like 1000 things a little bit.
So that spark is that spark getting bigger here with
Tactics. So I think one of your, your
posts from this morning, Brett, or perhaps yesterday you did
nice little visual primer on what the fuck is Fantasy
Tactics. This is effectively their new
daily fantasy game, $20 entry price pool 60,000 dollars,
30,000 and blast gold. I think pending your your, your
blast gold target, this thing was massively plussy like $50.00
to $80.00 in expected value per entry.
Like we've seen the market respond to that.
Like yesterday's tactic sold out in like 5 minutes, this morning
sold out in like 7 minutes, and they just stealth dropped the
link so you had to see it and Register here here pretty
quickly. What have been your early
reactions here to Tactics and is it going to be like the
sustainable? Is this how they're going to
generate revenue ongoing here for the near future?
Yeah, I that's what I'm hopeful for.
So yeah, Spark is getting better.
I, I thought they needed something like this because the
people were getting boxed out of like from price on the other
tournaments, right? You couldn't do like a true
fantasy format where you're like, I want a selection of
everyone and I just want to be smart and strategic cap limit,
whatever. So and yeah, this, this, these
guys need to continue to generate revenue if they want to
continue to put out price pools. So they need to come up with
sustainable loops that people can get involved in to the
degree that they want. And now they have multiple
categories, right? If you want to be.
That's kind of why I spun up that that little infographic or
just like now people can say, I just want to play the game.
I don't want to get like too interwoven into the ecosystem.
And the other one is like, all right, I'm here.
I think this is fun. I want to go do a bunch of
stuff. So if you want to build a deck,
customize, be really like play with rarities, do all that other
stuff or like, I just want to play the game.
You can just play the game. And I think, yeah, that's, it's
going to be a little tricky because they need to their prize
pools need to be like self-sustaining between the two
ecosystems, like the one that's build your own deck and the one
that's, you know, get your random cards.
But it's good. We need them to generate revenue
so that they can continue to give people prizes because
that's always going to be the carrot.
Like, I don't know that you would play this game if it
wasn't for money, right? Like we're not for the love of
the, the Twitter algo or whatever.
We're doing it because you can make a little money.
You think you have an edge. It is fun to kind of like have
some involvement there to be at Euro.
So yeah, I'm curious to see what your, your early reactions are.
I was able to get 10 in on this this one this morning.
I just I I needed a big pack and started going for it.
So I I've slow rolled it. So I've just been doing one
entry per tactic so far. So I've got one in each of these
and I had to move some money around just to even build the
the bankroll that the $20 entry. I like the gaming concept.
I don't know. So I guess I thought we were all
playing with the same deck options, but it seems like the
deck is different. Yeah, I did that doing multiple
entries, each one was different. Yeah, so I guess that's an early
frustration. I, I thought this was going to
be a skill based game where like we all had the same deck of, you
know, I think 30 cards is, is not enough, but like 50 to 60
and like you've got the timer. So you got to think quickly and
you know, who, who picks the best and then who performs the
best. Cause of course that's the, you
know, is like you could, you can pick a great player or hero who
just may not tweak today and then so your team is done.
But now I, I look at the leaderboard and I see folks
who've got cards that weren't even.
So I was drawing dead from the start.
And now it's more of a, a luck based game than a skill based
game. And I'll be honest, I don't love
that. So why are you?
Seeing this I was I wasn't able to actually find like my my
decks that I had played. Where is this in?
Yeah. So if you go to the to the home
page, the tactics is is top left click play, you get to the the
for tactics and then this middle.
Box view. Your tactics and and you can see
how you're doing. So I'm doing terribly.
I'm in three thousandth place, so I will not be cashing with my
terrible team of Kaleo, BDB, Gab Shapiro, McKenna and Andy with
which was what I thought was the best theme of five that I could
create with a deck available to me.
I clearly didn't get the deck that Kenobi had who has Greg and
block Grey's and others. He's got a nice little Penguin
in there at least, but that that changes what this game is.
So I'm it's very early. I don't want to overreact.
I'm curious if they're going to iterate on this because I would
have preferred this as a skill based game and a pure luck based
one, but perhaps there's room for both?
Yeah, it looks like I I'm 116, not doing hot, but I'm at least
in the wind. Maybe we'll pay for the the
tactic that I did put in on that one.
Well, glad to hear you're, you're doing all right.
I so I guess what are your general thoughts?
I've been back for a minute. Is, are we still going to be
talking about fancy top in two to three months?
Does it have some longevity? It's more hopeful for sure.
I, I, I did think the, the other one was going to do one of those
euthanasia roller coasters where kind of, you know, everything
gets smaller and smaller and smaller unless they, but they do
still have a huge war chest of, of fees that have generated,
which is good. And maybe that's enough to
generate some excitement. They mentioned in this Last Post
that they're able to get more heroes involved because of the
tactic stuff, and if that's the case like that, that's a little
more exciting to have variability.
I do agree with you that like having the randomness of the
cards given to you on top of the like time constraints on top of
everything else is kind of doesn't feel awesome because
you're like, it's out of your hands, right?
It's not pure skill. It's pure skill plus luck.
And like, if you don't draw the pack that has like that two star
that you know is going to ace it and that's like, that is a huge,
huge advantage because they were misrated or whatever.
Like that's like, I don't know. So it's, it's, it's good.
I'm glad at how fast the team is iterating and continue to push
stuff out because even in this short period of time, they've
rolled out the second thing and they've expanded it.
Yeah, I, I, I think the fly, there's enough flywheels there
and the team has shown a willingness to continue to
iterate that it gets me excited that people wants to play.
I know you had mentioned that like right, you said you would.
This is actually fun for you. You think?
I know we're we're both a little probably a little blinded by the
prizes that we can potentially win.
This is how they squeezed in that second goal distribution.
We were wondering how they'd be able to do.
I guess this is that second one. So that's good.
We'll see if it continues after the the actual money fades.
Yeah, and the prizes are a huge part of it.
But that's like, I've been a a daily fantasy sports player for
almost two decades now. The reason anyone plays data
fantasy sports is because of the prices.
So like that, that's inherent. So don't, I don't like the
argument of like those. Once you take the prizes away,
no one's going to play. Well, of course not like, like
we're not playing fantasy sports for free on a daily basis.
I do think the game is fun. I think it's got some legs.
We got a couple minutes left in the show, just rapid fire in the
social Fi realm. What the hell happened to
Frintech? Is it over?
Bro, Oh God, I don't know, man. It's it's hard to keep up with
with like the app is still not great as a user experience.
That's frustrating. Which, you know, I get it at the
start. I get it less a year later and
$50 million later. I did that little infographic.
Yeah, that's 60 million in fees and the token itself is
52,000,000 market cap. Unreal.
Which? It still, it still feels crazy
to me given what it represents, but maybe it's like, yeah, maybe
you just actually need users and maybe the walled garden thing,
limiting it to just their decks, just their whatever over all
this time is yeah, it's starting to bite them.
Well, starting to bite us because we're the ones who's
token right gives a bit of shit. I've got less token.
Yeah, not as lucrative as we once thought it could be.
Like they're still buildings. Too soon to write it off as dead
dead. But right now it looks like it's
going to be a painful summer time.
Not fun. That's the other shiny new
social fi where users can sign up, you can buy, trade people's
time. So like and some you can get
like a 30 minute meeting on his calendar.
This is a new twist. I've seen some folks come off
bullish on this. What are your early reactions to
to time? Not fun?
Yeah, it's a little interesting. I honestly, so the only thing
that I saw like I don't think the calendar thing makes a ton
of sense maybe. But like, I don't know, like we
we had mentioned before in the pre show, what's to make people
make people honor this stuff. Like I could sit there and farm
fees for three weeks and then someone tries to redeem it.
I'm just like, no. And then I still have the fees
Anson's already generated. He generated like 400 and
something $1000 in volume day one.
So people are, are speculating trading this stuff.
I don't think anyone really plans to redeem a ton of it.
So I'll play with it. I saw someone that that was
joking and said like, you know, set your time.
And then like he was just basically an escort for, for
like a full day that like I'll just buy a full day of this
dude's time and then make it a like you have to hang out with
me for the weekend. And it ended up being like
$400,000 or whatever. I actually, I don't know, it
sounds kind of fun to say like set your price really high if
you buy it, like I'll come and hang out with you for a day.
Seems kind of wild, but there's a lot of money in this space
that you I wouldn't be surprised to see that actually happen.
Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll see. I, I see the, the concept in in
theory why someone would want to do it.
Then there's the whole execution, like is someone
actually going to, to live up and give you like a good 15 to
30 minutes of their time? So that remains to be seen.
I'm getting reports that we lost the the Twitter Spaces audio.
Twitter Spaces have just been God awful lately.
So apologies to anyone who is listening through there, but we
are at the one hour mark. I think that's a good place to
end it. Brad, this conversation has been
fantastic and nuanced like you promised in your BIOS.
Thank you for living up to that. Folks.
If you're not already, please go follow Brad.
He is at OX bread guy on Twitter.
You can follow around the sphere.
He he's on spaces all the time with the modern market in the
morning. He's on the lucky lead spaces.
Sometimes he jumps on with Darren and thread guys as well.
So so give Brett a follow. I asked for today.
We're going to wrap this up. Thank you for joining us.
We will be back tomorrow with Mando.
Have a good day, guys. See you tomorrow.