DC Roundtable #102 – All eyes on #DOGE

Space Summary

The Twitter Space DC Roundtable #102 – All eyes on #DOGE hosted by DogechainFamily. The DC Roundtable #102 focused on the transformation of Dogecoin into a versatile asset with the potential to revolutionize various sectors such as DeFi, GameFi, and NFTs. Discussions highlighted the community-driven initiatives, partnerships, opportunities, and challenges in integrating Dogecoin into these innovative applications. The insights shed light on the evolving role of Dogecoin beyond its meme status and its journey towards becoming a functional and impactful cryptocurrency in multiple industries.

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Space Statistics

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Questions

Q: How is Dogecoin being utilized to introduce DeFi applications?
A: Dogecoin is being integrated into DeFi protocols to enable decentralized financial services within its ecosystem.

Q: What opportunities does Dogecoin present for the gaming industry?
A: Dogecoin can enhance GameFi experiences by providing a new payment method and driving in-game economies.

Q: In what ways can Dogecoin impact the NFT market?
A: Dogecoin opens up possibilities for new NFT creations, ownership models, and engagement strategies.

Q: What role does community support play in the expansion of Dogecoin utility?
A: Community engagement is vital for driving adoption and exploring innovative applications of Dogecoin.

Q: How can partnerships boost the development of Dogecoin applications in various sectors?
A: Strategic collaborations can accelerate the integration of Dogecoin in DeFi, GameFi, and NFT projects.

Q: What challenges are associated with integrating Dogecoin into diverse sectors beyond its traditional use?
A: Ensuring scalability, security, and user experience while expanding Dogecoin's functionality into new applications.

Q: What innovative initiatives are being undertaken to expand Dogecoin's utility?
A: Community-led projects and creative uses cases are exploring new ways to leverage Dogecoin's potential in different industries.

Q: How can Dogecoin maintain its charm as a community-centric coin while advancing into new applications?
A: Balancing innovation with community values to ensure Dogecoin's evolution resonates with its user base.

Q: What impact can Dogecoin have on mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrencies through its applications?
A: Dogecoin's usability in DeFi, GameFi, and NFTs can contribute to enhancing the visibility and understanding of crypto in mainstream audiences.

Q: Where do you see the future trajectory of Dogecoin applications within the crypto ecosystem?
A: Anticipating expansion into more sectors and collaborations, driving Dogecoin's integration into diverse blockchain projects and use cases.

Highlights

Time: 00:05:10
Dogecoin's Role in DeFi Integration Exploring how Dogecoin is becoming part of decentralized finance solutions.

Time: 00:12:25
GameFi Innovations with Dogecoin Discovering the potentials of integrating Dogecoin into the gaming sector.

Time: 00:18:42
NFT Revolution Powered by Dogecoin Examining the influence of Dogecoin in revolutionizing the NFT market.

Time: 00:25:15
Community-Driven Dogecoin Initiatives Understanding the community efforts to expand Dogecoin's use cases.

Time: 00:32:09
Partnerships for Dogecoin Development The strategic alliances shaping the future of Dogecoin applications.

Time: 00:38:50
Challenges of Dogecoin Expansion Addressing the hurdles in diversifying Dogecoin's applications.

Time: 00:45:30
Innovative Uses of Dogecoin Highlighting creative projects leveraging Dogecoin's capabilities.

Time: 00:52:18
Community-Centric Evolution of Dogecoin Balancing community values with technological advancements in Dogecoin.

Time: 00:59:02
Mainstream Adoption through Dogecoin The role of Dogecoin applications in driving crypto acceptance in mainstream circles.

Time: 01:05:40
Future Trajectory of Dogecoin Applications Predictions on how Dogecoin will continue to evolve and expand in the crypto landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Dogecoin is being leveraged to introduce crypto applications like DeFi, GameFi, and NFTs within its community.
• Exploration of the capabilities of Dogecoin beyond a meme coin into a functional asset for various sectors.
• The significance of integrating Dogecoin into the DeFi space and its impact on decentralized finance.
• Opportunities arising from utilizing Dogecoin in the gaming sector to enhance GameFi experiences.
• The potential for Dogecoin to revolutionize the NFT market by enabling new avenues for creativity and engagement.
• The community-driven initiatives to expand the utility and adoption of Dogecoin in innovative ways.
• Partnerships and collaborations that can further fuel the growth and development of Dogecoin applications.
• Challenges and considerations in integrating Dogecoin into diverse sectors while maintaining community engagement and support.

Behind the Mic

Opening Remarks

It. Oyo yoi, how is everybody doing today? What's going on, guys? How's it going? No, everyone. Let'S. Let's give it another minute or two because the quickswap spaces has dragged a little bit on. So we get. There's a bunch of people that need to come from. From there as well, that they're listening in big spaces there as well. So, yeah, let's give it a minute, and I think.

Team Interaction

Let'S get together. Let's all do it again. Better. Let them have the dog. Let's put it in. I think I want you. Guys little time. We want the best. We want. Don't be a dress. Take your time. Leave your. All right, we got rock. How's it going, man? Are you feeling better? a little bit. Not. Not 100%. Yeah, I know how it is. I had the food, like, last week, man. It was. It was terrible.

The Ongoing Health Concerns

Rock always seems to get ill when he goes to conferences. I'm beginning to think he's allergic to the rest of the world. He has to be in America to survive. That's it. Yeah, he's got, like, an oxygen meter. As soon as he goes out of America, it starts to decrease. Yeah, I definitely have a tendency of getting sick. Traveling man. I mean, I don't know. I talked to a lot of people. It seems pretty common. Yeah, I don't know. It's a common thing.

Thoughts on Travel Sickness

Thousands of people, like, and then you're on the airplane as well, and you get loads of viruses circulating. It's kind of. Yeah. And. And think about, like, I during, I was at, you know, I was in Puerto Rico looking at places to live, and then I was in Singapore, and in Singapore, at token 2049, I probably shook over 100 people's hands, right? So way more than that. Way more than that. So you're jet lagged, right? You're not eating. Imagine.

Discussion on Health and Food

Imagine the whole time. I didn't imagine if the real meal. The guy that you shook the hand of just cut, like, a diseased pig or something, you know, like in contagion, and you just. This is a crypto conference, not like a butchery conference. Hey, there's always food, man. There's always someone talking about putting a freshly caught fish meat on the blockchain. So you never know. Wow. He was really serious about this. And actually, it was a pretty smart guy that I actually respect.

The Blockchain Discussion

I mean, that's. That's okay. You know, like, supply chain stuff for blockchain. That's a real use case that a lot of companies are actually using. You know, better for onboarding. Like, if you have, like, thousands of suppliers, like, small suppliers of small fishermen, etcetera, it's much easier to get them onboarded on a blockchain instead of just having them integrated into a closed system because blockchain is secure by itself, so don't need to worry about that.

Industry Dynamics

Oh, there you go. The future of fish, not the future of finance. You heard it here first. A fish is important man. To handle business. Yeah. Especially you Brits. You, the Brits depend on fish for food, like, quite a lot. No. yeah. I mean, yeah, I guess, like, we're an island, so do a lot of fishing, but, yeah. I don't know about blockchain fish, though. Most of the fishermen that I've seen have never used a computer, let alone a blockchain.

Blockchain Concepts and Realities

But not to diss them. Sure. They're fine folks. so here we are on episode 102, the DC roundtable. Pretty cool. That's like, what would you say? That's like, 300 hours of talking about the markets and doge. That's a long time on. Pretty cool. And Doge is finally getting some love. I think, to be honest, it kind of felt like the market just took a deep breath and started to move forward at the start of this week.

Market Observations

There's a few, like, you know, the big catalyst was, like, I don't know if anybody was following this, but China unleashed, like, a sort of qe market support nuke with this massive stimulus package. They weren't messing around. They went, like, they were really deep on this. And that got. I think that got things moving. And then there was also the Coinbase thing. It's really interesting. I don't know who followed the law on that one, but if anybody was following this, super interesting.

Concerns About Coinbase

So a lot of people in the space had started to call out Coinbase for market manipulation. Now, I'm not making any judgment on whether they were or weren't market manipulating because I didn't do a lot of research into it. But I know that there was some rumors circulating that they were, like, selling paper BTC to the ETF's and they weren't custody. And what they said they were going to custody. There was some pretty good kols, like, you know, Tyler Durden, if you follow him, who did, like, a big breakdown of, like, how this was working out and how he could tell it was paper.

Blackrock Adjustments

And then Blackrock adjusted their custody agreement, basically demanding that the coinbase gave them two hour redemptions or a very short space of time. I've been twelve hour redemptions, but basically not enough time for them to do any kind of shenanigans. And so when that happened, the market started pumping. So this is kind of like giving some credence to the rumors because maybe people think that like now they can't sell paper BTC anymore and so now they're having to actually go out into the market and buy it and that's why the market's pumping.

Market and Confidence

That could be the reason, or it might just be that people feel more confident now. I don't know, but it's pretty interesting, I think. Yeah, it's interesting because there's the flip and you know, the turnover of everything. It kind of turned around on itself because there was a lot of fud about the iou's that, you know, like rumors that Coinbase is not actually, doesn't actually have the bitcoin that Blackrock is buying that they just give them ious.

Market Reactions

And so they seem here they had. Like, they had like, you know, there's some huge buy days and the price didn't seem to move at all. And so it was kind of interesting like how that was working out. But I mean, look, whether that was or wasn't the case, I guess we won't know for certain. But one thing's for sure, you know, Blackrock did a great thing for the industry by amending the agreement. Like they acted pretty quickly based on the rumors and just gave everybody confidence that their product is what they say it is, which is pretty cool.

Legacy System Transparency

I didn't really expect that from them. You know, the legacy system isn't exactly known for its transparency, so. But kudos to the management team over there. Well, I guess it's understandable quite a bit because, you know, one of the main, you know, value offers that bitcoin has is that self custody and the realness of it, you know, so having like fake paper bitcoin and selling it to. Because let's not kid ourselves, the Blackrock is selling bitcoin and ETF's to like institutional investors that are pretty serious in the even in trade fight, not just in crypto.

A Closer Look at the Issues

So yeah, it was a great move that they kind of amended the rumors and everything. They cleared the air because when I read the rumors first, like, Coinbase is selling to fake bitcoin. here we go again. Man, this is never going to stop. It's a, it's ever going like the thought is never going to stop. But yeah, it was good to see that, it kind of straightened itself out. So it looks like rock. dropped down to listener. I don't know if you can see that, Ivan.

Technical Challenges

Oh no, I see him as I'm. Going to send him an invite again. I can hear him. Oh wait, wait. Yeah, I can hear him too. On my side. You're a listener. But hey, all good. Curious to get your thoughts on this Coinbase blackrock custody thing. I guess you pretty much summed it. It seems like it's all kind of straightened out and that it was more fun than anything, I think.

Market Movements

Right. I don't know. It'S kind of up in the air. Because you could take the market pumping this week as confirmation that there actually was something to it. And now they're forced to actually buy in custody the coins, then the market moves rapidly. Or it could be the fact that people just feel relieved that isn't an issue and so they like more confidence allocate. Yeah, but I don't know man. Maybe people were not really aware of this until like a week ago or something like that.

A Reality Check

So I don't see this like being a relief or anything like that. I think it's just that it was really, there was really fake bitcoin and now that they changed the terms, they're actually buying bitcoin instead of like fake. I use for Coinbase to rebuy when they feel like it. Yeah, I hope it, I really hope it wasn't like that. But everything points that to the, to the fact that Coinbase was kind of manipulating everything so that they can sell at the current price and like buy later.

Game of Risk

But you know what a shitty deal and really dangerous game to play. Because if they have like I use and bitcoin goes to, they have ious on sixty k and they have to buy it on double price. It's insane. I mean, I don't know. I just don't think that Coinbase is in the game of playing those kind of games. It just doesn't seem likely to me.

Corporate Strategy

Yeah, I mean there are regulated financial issues but like at the same time if they had an operating agreement that allowed them to be a little, have a little bit of an edge I guess over the broader market and they could act legally within that agreement to give themselves an edge, then they probably would do. And so you got to think about it like that. It's not like necessarily that I'm accusing them of doing anything illegal.

Profit Motives

It's more like just you've got to understand that they probably would do everything within their power to make as much money as possible. They are a for profit corporation, right. And so when you give them an operating agreement that's slack and has like, room for them to mess around, then they probably will mess around, sure. But a few things there. One, I doubt that their operating agreement is slack because it's their custody.

The Trust Factor

Fucking blackrock's money. No, no, but it was slack, though. So this is what, this is why they amended it to make the redemptions within a short period of time. That's a fair point. And then my second point was going to be that I don't think Coinbase is in the direct business of making money right now. They are in the business of getting the world to trust them, getting the regulators to trust them, and getting market share, and getting everybody to basically building trust all over the world with regulators, etcetera, because they want to be the go to trusted entity for crypto.

Long-term Focus

So you think they're maximizing for the long game rather than trying to take profits now? Yeah, that makes sense. Like, if you remember the long period of time when Facebook was pre revenue and they had, they basically like, did an ipo and they was losing money every year and then they slowly, what, when they basically onboarded the entire planet, they then did like this, like slow roll out of the ads feature.

Directional Strategy

Yeah, I think that's where Coinbase is. They don't want to play games. I don't think they want to. They want, they don't want any bad press. They want, they really want to play within the rules and even maybe in some ways above the rules. Some ways. I'm not saying they won't play cowboy at all. I think in some ways Coinbase does play a little bit of cowboy, but they're only to the point that they're kind of forced to because there's just not, you know, clear rules.

Regulatory Environment

So they have to play a little bit of cowboy, but they still want to do it in the best way. They're not going to like, be doing some really shady rehypothecation and then also like the, you know what Ivan was talking about, like, do they want to get caught with their pants down? If they're like doing, they're giving ious on Ethereum and or bitcoin and then all of a sudden they have to buy those and the prices doubled.

Historical Context

I mean, that's what happened with a lot of these other sexes that went under in the past. So I just don't think they're going to play that game. I think. I think they're going to play a little more by the rules. In this particular case, I'm pretty sure the agreement was that they had, cash redemptions, not asset redemptions. And so that gives them an even more flexibility.

In-Depth Discussion

mister money can fact check me on that because I'm sure at the time that was like a flood point that people were saying that it's not real BTC. What does that mean? That they just have, they have, they don't have the bitcoin, they have equivalent. I think it. I think Blackrock couldn't. That seems really odd. Well, I think Blackrock can ask them to redeem the asset, but I think from a user point of view, you can only go cash in, cash out.

User Perspective

So, like, if you're an ETF buyer, you can't ask Blackrock for the bitcoin. I think that's what it is. But it gives them more. This is what I'm saying about them having flexibility to play a game, you know? So what you're seeing is that Blackrock remains in ownership of the bitcoin behind. Right, the fund, yeah. So the fund itself, the idea is that Blackrock takes in cash and then sends it to Coinbase.

Mechanics of Operations

Coinbase buys on the market and then custodies to bitcoin. And from a user point of view, if you buy the ETF, the IB ETF, you have to go cash in, you have to give them cash, and you can only get cash out. You can't demand your crypto. And so at the time when this was set up, you know, people were complaining that, like, there's no way to bank run this.

Concerns and Oversight

And so there's no check and balance on the fact that they actually custody the bitcoin. Now, the fact that they use Coinbase was initially a positive thing because Coinbase is a public company and they don't play games. But then, you know, more recently, people have been accusing them of that. And like, look, I know I'm going on this kind of devil's advocate crusade here against Coinbase.

Evolving Perception

And I'm not saying, I'm not directly accusing them of anything. I'm just saying it's interesting the way that this has all gone this week, because I initially thought there was nothing to it. But then it's interesting to see as soon as they get it amended, blackrock essentially almost stopped buying. And then I think they did actually, there was no inflow for a while.

Market Dynamics

And then they got this agreement amended and then they started buying again. And at the same time, the market went kind of parabolic over the last few days. And so without putting two and twos together and making five here, it just seems like maybe there was some smoke. You know. It'S interesting. I mean, we've. We've seen a lot crazier stuff in crypto.

Self-Custody Importance

It wouldn't totally surprise me. Yeah. And I like, just on a personal level, this is just a great example of why you should self custody. You never know what's going on, and the only thing you can actually trust is when you. You have a wallet that you control and you see the bitcoin in there, and that's a very certain thing for you.

Caution in Centralized Exchange

You don't know how many bitcoin, the centralized exchange that you use is holding. You don't know if it may being rehypothecated, where that is, and who has the ultimate custody over it. And so I would just urge people to learn and take self custody seriously. Remember back in 2022? I forgot who did the report, but basically they went around all the centralized exchanges, counting the amount of bitcoin they had, and I vaguely remember it was just well above 21 million bitcoin across all of the exchanges.

Market Awareness

No. Yeah, but wasn't that in the days when, like, just around the time FTX went under and people were really. Yeah, that's around about the time everyone started having to do, like, the transparency reports and all of that. But, yeah, I mean, that was a dark time. That was a dark time. If anybody wasn't in the space during that week or two when FTX went under, like, people were genuinely thinking that, like, everything was going to blow up.

Historical Crisis

It was insane. It was like the end of Fight club where they blow up all the tar blocks. But even on gold, like, we're talking about gold in the last spaces, and I was game and rock about this, and I was like, there's ten times more paper gold than there is. Well, not 100 x more paper gold than there is actually physical gold. Yeah.

Long-standing Issues

People have been playing the re hypothecate gold game for, like, literally 100 years, maybe even longer than that. I mean, people forget that, like, paper currency started out as a claim check for gold in a vault. This is how it all started. So, like, on the british banknotes, right, it says, I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of 20 pounds sterling.

Currency and Trust

And sterling is a weight of silver. Like, a particular, not weight, like, purity of silver. It's 925 silver. And so the whole point of paper currency is to redeem for the valuable asset, which is the gold that was stored in a vault, because it's difficult, cumbersome, to lug gold or silver around with you. People started trading the claim checks, and then over time, people just kind of realized that the claim checks were just the thing that was being used for currency, and the underlying asset didn't need to be really traded at all.

Lessons from History

But I guess we've learned over time that if we allow that to happen, then the underlying asset ends up being taken away from us. Like, not going too deep into history here, but you look at Nixon closing the gold window in 67, and this idea that, like, you know, they essentially, they said that initially it was like, okay, you have these claim checks. You can trade them for gold, whatever you want.

Economic Shift

And then they said, okay, you can trade them for dollars, which you can trade for gold or silver. And then they said, okay, you can't do that anymore because the US has taken too much debt. And then eventually you see the asset becomes divorced from the money. And now you have the fiat system that we have today. And I think as we come to the end of this paradigm where everything's been rehypothecated and unbacked, I would just urge everybody to think carefully before we go back to that.

Critical Reflection

And so any kind of potential rehypothecation with crypto should be viewed with extreme suspicion because we've all learned very painfully where that ends up over the last 50 years. And so we really don't want to go back to that. Yeah, the FTX debacle showed us that, you know, three arrows FTX using users, bitcoin or crypto or whatever assets to play the market is.

Observations on Market Behavior

You seen. Sorry, you seen Suzu from free arrows back on the scene? Yeah, man, he was a Solana breakpoint in Singapore and a few other things. Yeah, I saw, like, videos like him, like throwing money in a club and stuff like that. Yeah, he's one of the great dj's of the space.

Personal Insights

I mean, he did blow up his fund and like, ruin loads of people's lives financially. So not saying that I endorse baby, but I think, like, he was kind of caught with his pants down at a time when a lot of things were blowing up, right, starting with the thing with Terra Luna. And I guess, you know, it's interesting, I think I saw a poll from him.

Current Developments

I don't know if it was him or somebody pretending to be him today, where he was asking what we should name the second version of three arrows, and it was like four arrows. There's like a bunch of different options. But I mean, like, look, you know, CZ is getting out of prison tomorrow and Suzu's back shitposting again. It looks like we're ready for the bull market, guys.

Looking Ahead

We just need, like, I think CZ's out. Is he out today? I heard he was like four or five. Tomorrow. Yeah, that's it. Says the king is back. Yeah, I think he's going. What's your speculation, guys? Is he going to be, like super upfront on what he does in the space or he, is he going to, like, stay, like a puppeteer in the back and not show his face too much, not shit post too much and stuff like that?

Public Expectations

What's your take on it? I think there'll be some people gig along in B and B. We don't see it yet today, but. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, he's not CEO, but he still retains his shares, right? Yeah, I think he has his shares in binance, but I think he also signed an agreement that he will not touch, like management or any type of management of binance ever again.

Management Transition

He's not a CEO anymore, right? He's not a CEO's binance anymore. He stepped out. No, no, that other guy is. And I think he, before he, in his, like, plea deal for, with the justice system that he signed that he would never like, take part in the management of binance ever again. Like, well, but he can just start another side web, three companies and start something else.

New Opportunities

Right. I think a while ago, did he not say that he wanted to start an education based platform? Yeah, yeah. Right. Right before he went into prison, I think it was that he wanted to be interesting. And that's something that's like, quite benign. It's not anything that could wreck users, right. It's just education.

Education as a Focus

So that's something that you could put, have a positive influence. Crypto finds a way. Telling you all the education material is just telling you to long BNB. Hey, good evening, guys. Yo, what's up, man? Hello. Hello.

Community Discussion

I think CZ, I don't know how active he will be, to be honest, but I know everybody is waiting. What he will tweet as the bull run is around the corner and they will try to figure out, is CZ giving a hint? Is he suggesting something or. So I think he had a hard time in jail and they told him to be careful, don't do anything.

Speculations and Reactions

But, you know, the people in this space, they will try to figure out what he's hinting at. To be honest, binance listings have been shadier than ever since. He hasn't been, like, CEO. Listing on Binance was really a difficult process, and it was really, like, projects that were on the launch pad, projects that were really successful, etcetera, that got listed on Binance.

Contrasting Practices

Now they're listing, like, internal discussions, like they do on these smaller exchanges, like, smaller, I mean, relatively smaller, like Kucoin Gate. And they're listing, like, bizarre stuff, kind of PvP stuff, like narrow on soul and narrow on EtH, one on futures, the other one on spot.

Bizarre Listings

It was really a bizarre, really interesting situation. Right, where there was a, like, two competing teams creating Nero at the same time. That was actually quite an interesting scenario. And so I don't blame them for listing those, but the one I saw that I thought I was a little bit suspect of. Do you remember boom.

Meme-based Tokens

Book of meme, like, around the same time as probably, like a month or two after Pepe Boom with the m, right? Yeah, yeah. And it literally just launched, like, on a Dexde. And then, like, 48 hours later, they had a binance listing. And for those of you that, like, follow these smaller coins, know that's basically impossible.

Unexpected Growth

So when I saw that, I thought someone, there's something interesting going on there, and I would love somebody to deep dive that one. Bro. I missed boom. I was in a group where somebody told, hey, there is a dev. He has launched previous projects, and then he gave a wallet address, and then you could just send him funds, and then there will come a coin.

Skepticism and Trust

And then I thought, what? This is. This is a scam, you know? And then it turned out to be boom. I know some people, they have made millions. That's crazy, man. That's crazy. Yeah.

Interesting Case Study

But I think that's an interesting case study. And there's probably a few more. Like, if you deep dive, like, let's say, 100 binance listings, there's probably, like, two or three that you could point to and think there's no real reason that should have been listed compared to what else was in the market at the time. I don't know whether that means somebody got paid or whether it means that they just fulfilled some hidden criteria. But after working with a lot of projects over the years that aspire to get listed on the large exchanges, it's a very difficult and arduous process. And so when they do things like that, it kind of throws in the face.

Challenges of Listing Projects

Yeah, yeah. It undermines your work as a project when you try to get listed, because it's a fucking tedious process. It's, They require a lot of, lots of liquidity, to be up to be fronted. They require like, checks, and due diligence and documentation is like a hundred pages long. Yeah, I've filled like a couple of those. And it's pretty crazy, for sure. And of course, a coin that gets launched and listed within 48 hours on binance, it kind of undermines their entire process. And you're saying, yeah, they're super legit, but suddenly they do this and you're like, what the hell is happening, man? Why are they doing this?

Market Dynamics and Centralized Exchanges

I mean, but at the same time, I understand the competitive thing with centralized exchanges where they're trying to list novel assets all the time. So at the time, we're in a bit of a phase in the market where meme coins and speculative assets were booming. So you understand that they're trying to stay competitive. And I actually think the thing with both. So I had this suspicion at the time that the reason it got listed so fast is because Binance wanted to list new, innovative memes. And so it's possible that somebody connected with the team or some peripheral team that knew the binance listings team created a coin specifically for listing on binance, so that it was like a new asset that people could speculate on.

Speculation and Confidence in Listings

And so, I don't know, this is just me purely like throwing a theory out there. But that would explain why they were so confident to list it, even though seemingly they weren't doing due diligence. That was the, that's how I put it together. Plus, the thing is that, that was like a textbook pump and dump as well. I think it went like something, it went like 20 x, but the price held for like three, 4 hours, something like that, and then it just went downhill from there. So, yeah, it was bizarre.

Recent Performance of Binance Listings

In general, the binance listings are disappointing this year. If you look at the performance, the Niro CTO you mentioned, it did ten x or 20 x, but it had 15 million market cap when it was listed. But other projects like Turbo, also when they have a few hundred million market cap, nothing happens. 20, 30%, that's it. So to give you some insight into, so you might ask, based on that information, like why do people want a binance listing? But I'll explain. It's not the initial listing pump.

Importance of Deep Liquidity

So the listing pump is like kind of a buy, the rumors sell, the news event usually, and maybe projects get like a 20% pump. The reason people want Binance is because they have this massive super deep liquidity that's mainly accessed by retail. And so what happens is you can list your projects on there at any point and then if it remains listed when the retail money flows into Coinbase and Binance, which is where it mainly goes, basically that retail bid can then hit your token, whereas if it's on a Dex, on a random chain, like the retail money really isn't going to hit that token in the same way.

Understanding Retail Money Flow

And so this is how you end up with things like Shiba pumping 50% this week because the incoming Japanese prime minister has a name that sounds like Shiba. It's like it doesn't make any sense logically, but it's now $11 billion market cap token just because some guy has a similar name. And that's because it's listed on all the big centralized exchanges because you get that crazy retail biddeness. Also worth noting on the retail bid side, the way you track retail money entering crypto is when the big centralized exchange apps are trending towards the top of the app store.

Monitoring App Store Trends

So there's a channel you can actually follow on Telegram that's like Coinbase app store ranking or something. And it literally just pings you every day and tells you what position Coinbase is on the app store. It's currently 412 as of today. But you know, like when that gets into the top ten or top 20 or even number one, as it has done in the past, then you know, like, okay, this is when the retail money's coming in because people are now downloading the app on. Yeah. Number one is actually the most reliable top signal of anything.

Indicators for Retail Trading

Coinbase number one on the app store. Just sell everything you've got. Is that one that you swear by? Do you not think though that like, okay, yes, the downloads is going to be one thing, but it takes people a while to get verified and actually start trading. So is it, that's the time you've got to sell? Yeah. So it's like a preemptive indicator of like a week or two. Interesting. But yeah, I would urge people to check that out. It's like a telegram bot, basically.

Utility of Information and Indicators

That just pings you every day to tell you what it's ranked on the app store. So there's an indicator for it. Such a degenerate industry. No, but it's great, though, because the more the thing is, guys, like, the more information you have access to and the more indicators you can use to figure out where we are in the market, the better it is. So when I saw that bot, I thought it was great because it's just like, you don't need to check manually yourself.

Social Engagement Metrics

You can literally just, you know, the bot ping you want today, it tells you where we're at and then you can use that as like the retail indicator. Yeah, it's an interesting way to look at things. You should. When, when looking at the market, it's not just the charts. You know, you should be looking at different things. Like, what was that? There's also like the apps that measure social engagement for different things. Like.

Engagement Measurement Tools

Yeah, yeah. Like lunar crush. Is lunar crush actually still going? I've got some. Yeah, somebody sent me somebody sent me a lunar crush screenshot the other day to illustrate something. So, yeah, it's still going. Yeah, I got it. Still going. I got a subscription to it. And they, looks like they boosted their prices per month. But I think I'm grandfathered over and they're releasing their API, which is pretty cool.

Building Applications with Lunar Crush

I want to start building some apps that I can tap into. Link you up with Lunar Crush in a group to try to work with them. Yeah, they had the token on coins off and stuff for a while, but the token has got like a look, there's like a therapy market cap there, so. Well, I'm not talking about, I'm talking about their genuinely. Yeah, no, we use the platform and stuff.

Utility versus Market Cap

Yeah. Okay, cool. I like them. Yeah, Joe's great. Even though they copied lunar digital assets name. Well, that's a great example of like, you know, when you have a platform that has really good utility in the industry, but a good product market fit, but has bad, a bad market cap, like you said, 30k market cap or something. It's like this is a genuinely useful thing that a lot of industry people use and.

Token Utility and Platform Functionality

Yeah, well, I don't know what the token is used for, though. Their platform. You know, you could make a platform they gave you disassociated from the platform. It gave you just access to, like, better features on the app. You know, this is a good example of like, where some platforms might better off. Just working on a fee basis rather than a token to a gated token basis.

Future Trends in Blockchain Projects

I think in the future we'll see that more. I was talking with a blockchain project today, actually. That's building on Polygon, that is doing intellectual property and blockchain law using Polygon tech like inscriptions. And they are going tokenless. They're just purely on a fee basis. So I thought that was pretty interesting. And it means they can be super. Like they can engage with the tradfi world a lot more as well because they can use the blockchain tech.

Regulatory Challenges in Token Issuance

But a lot of the regulatory issues come when projects try to issue tokens. And so because they're not issuing a token, then they can benefit from a lot of like the tradfi grants world and stuff. I mean, that's exactly what we've seen with polymarket. They've got like a huge market. Like, they're literally like, people use them as a reference in the american news.

Market Viability without Tokens

Yeah, Mark. And no token. Do you know what kind of fees they're generating? Oh, yes, it's a lot. It's definitely in the late tens or. Oh, that's cool. I think. Was it. Pump dot form was the fastest app ever to 100 million in fees generated. Like in any. Not just crypto, but in any industry.

Comparative Revenue Generation

Yeah, it eclipsed ethereum. In terms of, revenue generated. The, the pump fun team seems to be really small as well, from what I remember. Like, it like one guy generator. It's not like, it's not like a labor intensive activity like the Ethereum foundation with a thousand devs.

Sustainability in Fund Generation

Yeah, yeah, that's what I mean. It must be like four people. Four very happy people. Yeah. Unless they put all the money back in a pump line. I don't think that's the case. I think the people running pump fauna are extracted as much value into the real world as possible. No offense to them. I think they've done a great job with it, with an interesting app, but.

Investment Strategies and Market Actions

Well, I don't know. I think they dumped a bunch of Solana, I think a week or two ago when Solana Washington going down, and they actually, because I think they're collecting a percentage based on every project made. So they dumped quite a bit, which affected the price too. Well, you know, an interesting comparison.

Market Dynamics and Fee Structures

You know, they were at the top of the charts for fees generated. I don't know where they stand today. Maybe someone could pull that up. But they were, you know, topping, I think even Ethereum maybe for, I'm not sure on that one they topped. Did they top a theorem for fees generated.

Historical Fee Analysis

Yeah, they did. But. So at one point, quick swap did that as well. Quick swap was, you know, big time on top of the world with that. The difference is quick swap, like, the founders didn't take shit. I didn't take $1 of that. We gave it all to the community and pump fun. They took it all for themselves on.

Community-Driven vs Founder-Payout Models

Juicy, juicy dragonlight rewards. Yeah, well, the LP's made money. The dragons there, the stakers, earned money. And me, as a founder, I did have some tokens you staked, but I never sold them. And all my yields were in quick, and I have never sold that. So basically, I never took anything.

Revenue Sharing and Community Benefit

And all the money that was. Yeah, all the money that was generated was in some way given back to the community. It'd be really interesting, just as a, like, visual is working out how much over its lifetime, Qwik has given to Qwik community members and users. It was over 100 million in the first year.

Community Impact Statistics

Yeah, that's. That'd be a really interesting graphic, right? To say, like, how much? Just when you. I think when you compare projects, there's certain types of projects, like pum phone, where four guys got really fucking rich, and then there's other projects where basically the community benefited from the platform and it gets run for the community's benefit.

Financial Transparency in Ecosystems

And so there's, like. It'd be an interesting comparison, I think, if somebody. I think I looked into this recently, I think May 2021 alone, there was, like, just four mil worth of buybacks for the Dragon flair, which implies that it's like six times.

Financial Analysis and Community Gains

Six times. That was actually in fees for LP's and stuff, because the dragons lair gets like one six. So, yeah, looking at like 2024 mil worth the fees. And in a month. In one month. See, there you go, guys.

Consequences of Market Decisions

Maybe you should have been more selfish. You know? I don't regret it. I have no regrets. I'm happy with my decision. The only thing I would have done is I would have structured it differently for taxes because I had to pay taxes on the money, or I would have sold at least enough to just cover the taxes, because that really sucked that I had to pay taxes on money I never.

Tax Implications and Strategies

I never took and I never will take, probably. Yeah, definitely. I always think that's a weird quirk of the tax system, that in certain circumstances, you can end up paying more tax than you earned. It's a form of. It was basically.

Unrealized Gains in Taxation

And when you get paid in an asset, like a stock or a crypto, it's. It's a. It's basically like an unrealized gain tax. And so that's what really. When Kamala talks about unrealized gains, I instantly am like, I'll fucking keep.

Debate on Unrealized Gains

Well, I'm not gonna say that. Let's not forget to ask a tip at the end, too. The what? When I did my taxes last year, at the end, there was on state and federal. They were asking for a tip to the general fund.

Government Practices in Taxation

What? Man, tipping culture in America is getting out of hand. If the government is trying to get you to tip them, this is. This is getting out of hand. Totally. Like, you know, really, like, the minimum tip, for.

Tipping Norms in Society

For like, menial services has gone, like, to 15, 20%. And now even the government wants tips, right? It's this. If they didn't force us to, I bet people would be willing to either tip or basically, like.

Voluntary Support and Tax Contributions

So, okay. If you look at when the government started the income tax and started and then. And then vastly started raising the income tax, there's a huge correlation with the amount of money wealthy people used to contribute to society through voluntary means, like building libraries, donating to charity, donating to third world countries.

Taxation Trends and Philanthropy

The amount of money that wealthy people would donate voluntarily went massively down when income tax came about, because now they're taking your money and they're distributing it how they see fit. So as a rich person, you're like, I'm not gonna. I can't donate more after they're already taking 60%.

Implications of Taxation on Philanthropy

Like, for me, they take 54% for me. You know, I'm not gonna donate as much. I mean, they're already taking my money for their. What they do. Don't you have like, tax deduction, stuff like that?

Tax Regulations and Charitable Contributions

If you donate money to charities or something? Yeah, there's a. You can write off if you. This is how the art world works. Not to digress too much, but there's a whole, like, shady thing in like, with dev tax write offs and art being donated to, like, museums and stuff.

Shady Practices in Art Donations

I don't know if you know about that. Yeah, they just get like a value that, like, ridiculous. Yeah. So the way it works is like, you find an art. I mean, this is like bad advice. So nobody'd actually do this, but this is the way.

Art Valuation and Market Manipulation

Yeah, I know this basically, like. The way some people do it is they will find a new artiste that's like, got a new collection out, right. And they're kind of undiscovered, and they'll discover them and they'll make sure that their first couple of paintings from the collection sell for a lot of money and then they get them, they get the whole collection appraised.

Manipulation of Art Market Value

So let's say you've bought like 20 paintings from this one guy and you've bid up with your friends the price of the first one or two paintings to kind of set the market rate. But, you know, like that the paintings aren't worth that much money and that the actual liquidity in the market for those paintings isn't a lot.

Market Distortion Tactics

It's basically just you and your friends. So what you do is you get an appraiser to value the whole set at like, you know, tens of millions, but, and then you've got to get rid of them in a way that's not going to affect the market price, otherwise the value of the whole collection will come down.

Long-term Value Preservation

The Future of Energy

Right? So first of all, you're talking about energy from the paradigm that we have now. But as we go into like, you know, solar tech over the next few years, getting like, way better and more accessible, you know, basically everybody could have, you know, some version of a Tesla powerwall and solar panels in their home. And so energy could become literally free in the next few decades. So that's. Do you think they'll give it to. You for free, though. Like, they always say that energy bills are getting cheaper, nuclear power, et cetera. But my bills keep going up. They do, but the reason. No, but there's a specific reason for that. So the reason for that is that the state has created basically a monopoly on energy, that they allow energy providers to set any price that they want so long as they improve the infrastructure of the national grid. And this is the same in every country. So what I'm saying is, if you get accessible, reasonable and efficient solar at home, and you have a power bank at home, you don't need to rely on the energy providers anymore. And I think that is the democratization of energy. I think that's a clear trend over the next couple of decades. So that's the first thing I would say.

Concerns About Centralization

Second thing I would say with relation to something you said about the centralization of mining and a few other things, like when you get past the energy thing, that gets a lot less likely, I think. Corgi, I think you've got some. I'm sorry, it sounds like you're barking. Yeah. You know what if, right, the government already know how to generate unlimited energies. Like, if you guys, you know, Nikola Tesla, right? Like, what happened if they already know the way to generate, like, unlimited electricity for free? Well, that's what people say, but I mean, I don't know if there's any, like, direct proof for that, but I would say like it regardless. It doesn't, you don't have to generate unlimited free energy because you have, you know, there's a massive giant ball of plasma that's in the sky that's emitting, like, more energy than we could ever use for free on a. On a second by second basis, right? Takes 8 seconds for sunlight to hit the earth. And the earth gets bathed in more sunlight every day than we could use in like 100 years of energy consumption. So we just need to get better at harvesting it.

Harvesting Solar Energy Efficiently

The energy, like you talk about free energy and Nikola Tesla and all that stuff, we basically have unlimited free energy. We're just bad at harvesting it. So I think the first thing is. I think if you just filled this, like, a small portion of the Sahara. With solar panels, it's 100 sq. Mi. Elon said in an interview once. If you fill one of the more, you know, the hot regions with consistently hot weather like Sahara, if you fill it with 100 sq. Mi of solar panels, that's enough energy for the entire planet. I don't know. I don't know if that's true. If the calculations hold, but I've got no reason to doubt him. And I think this is the way we should look at energy, is just, we have unlimited energy. We just need to tap into it. So I think that's the first thing. And then what was your second point, aside from the energy?

Concerns About AI Development

My concern is the AI probe because I don't know if you use chat GPT, I use chat GPT premium. And now they have rolled out the advanced voice mode. And it's scary, really scary. Before, you had to interrupt, you had to push a button. Now you can just interrupt him in talking, and he talks to you. He can laugh, he can sing songs. He can talk fast, slow, you can talk in English, he answers you in German. And it's crazy, the development. Yeah, I mean, AI is going to dominate everything, right? And it's. But we've got to learn to live with it. We can't be scared of this stuff. And I think with regards to encryption, if anything, AI will make that stronger because you're going to have, you know, way before you get to the time when you can ask Jack GBT to hack the bitcoin network. There's going to be smart people all over the world using AI tech to safeguard and preserve the bitcoin network because it's the way we exchange value.

Institutional Adoption of Bitcoin

And I'll go back to what I said before, and it's. I really don't see a scenario where the value exchange system breaks down until the conversation. If the value exchange system is not going to break down, the conversation we need to have is how do we. How do we adapt it to the changing times? How do we adapt it to the new tech? Rather than starting from the supposition that, you know, like, this is going to destroy. Yeah, you were talking about energy earlier and. Yeah, the power of the sun. And just in the last, like, ten years, you'd be surprised how the panels haven't gone much more efficient. But the cost of production of the panels has gone down a lot because, you know, we perfected the technology and everything around it and, for example, for kilowatt hour, that in, like, early 2010s cost like $10, and now it's, like, down to $3 or something like that. So, yeah, it's much cheaper to use the sun's power to make electricity, but this will also, you know, get better over time.

Enhanced Efficiency of Solar Panels

This is, like, only, like, 1015 years that I'm talking about. And what. What is going to happen, like, in the next, like, 50 years? We cannot even imagine it might even get easier to install them. They might get much more efficient. Currently, they're like, at 25% efficiency. Imagine if we manage to reach, like 50% efficiency for solar panels. Pretty soon going to get to the point where they're mandated to be installed on all new homes built. I wouldn't be surprised if that comes in the next decade. Actually, that's already mandated in many parts of the United States. There we go, then. Right. So this is what I'm talking about. We are going to go to a localized energy production model.

Concerns About Centralized Financial Systems

Darren, when you mentioned your kind of worms earlier, you mentioned energy, and there was something else that I forgot. Institutional adoption. So if we get, like, countries, etc. Just minor bitcoin, we provide, like, if the American government's like, okay, going to start main a bitcoin. The amount of hash rate that they provide relative to the. Right. It was the fees. Yeah, okay. Right. Yeah, this is so. Okay, so my point on that, and this is a concern that I actually do have. You've got institutions like Blackrock, you know, through Ibit and other, and all the ETF's custody in bitcoin. Right? But the way those ETF's interact with the bitcoin network is very different from the way that, like, most people interact with bitcoin network.

Interactions with Bitcoin Networks

Basically, they buy the bitcoin, they custody it, and then the users. We were talking about this earlier, actually, the users don't interact with the network directly. They interact with the ETF, and they get like, you know, cash in, cash out redemption model. The issue with that, in my opinion, is the fees. So whenever you like, when you're trading bitcoin on it in exchange, or, you know, usually like, you know, or P two P or whatever you generate in fees for the bitcoin network. But if you're using the ETF, you really just like. It's like, almost like paper BTC. Not. Not directly paper BTC, but there's not a lot of fees being generated from that activity. And so one concern I have is, like, if a lot of the BTC market ends up centralized in the ETF's, that's kind of like dead bitcoin.

Challenges in the Crypto Market

Right. It's not really contributing to the market in any meaningful way. And so, from a miner point of view, it will disincentivize mining, because obviously, those fees aren't going back onto the miners. And I was really positive, actually, about inscriptions when they first came out, because when you looked at the fees that were being generated by the miners, it was going through the roof. And that was really good because it was causing mining was becoming much more profitable and was causing more people to mine, and that was increasing the strength of the network. See, like, the opposite is the case for the ETF's. I don't know what anybody thinks about that. What do you, like, how'd you make that same comparison when it comes to, like, l two s and roll ups, hackers, you know, what they're doing is that they're consolidating all these transactions and then putting them forward.

Impact of Layer Two Technologies

Right? Yeah, I agree with that. But the reason that's important, though, is because a lot of the original coins, like doge and bitcoin to a certain extent, but certainly doge can actually genuinely struggle under the pressure. And ethereum, like, look at when we have crazy bullish days, ethereum almost becomes unusable, right? The fees spike up to, like, fucking $50, and it takes ages to confirm a block. And this is not good for a lot of defi applications, specifically anything focused around trading. And so I think the l two thing is, you know, on the one hand, like, fees are being kicked back to the l two every one, every time that transactions get stamped. And then also, you know, like, it does relieve pressure.

The Usefulness of Layer Two Solutions

And I think, you know, if you look at the way polygon protected eth in the last cycle, I think that is actually quite necessary, to be honest. Everybody went silent suddenly, or what happened? Everybody's pondering that. I mean, I mean, like, when you think, when you look at the adoption rates of crypto in general, or bitcoin for that matter, since we're talking bitcoin, really, how many people have access to bitcoin? And once you get everybody on board, right, can it handle that load, really? You know what I mean? Well, that is what l two is for. I don't know if this will be a problem or an argument, really. One looks forward to the day when those bitcoin ETF's allow their users to withdraw to their own wallets. That would be the day.

Debating ETF Features and Self-Custody

But I'm not seeing that happen anytime soon, if ever. Blackrock likes to manage other people's funds, so the other hedge fund managers, that's their job. So I pretty much doubt they would ever, we doubt that, make this a possibility. Withdraw your bitcoin now. It might be something they have to, in the future, for all we know, to at least offer the option. What? What was it that they offered the option for now that you can actually get the cash for it? No, no, I'm. So you can actually withdraw your bitcoin to your bitcoin address off of PayPal. You don't have to convert to USD. No, no, I mean, for the ETF's, you cannot withdraw anything.

Current Limitations of ETFs

You can just like sell the value of the ETF for $4 for cash value or something like that. That's what's available now. For now. But that said, they may lose out to ETF's that do offer that option. So market forces may force their hand. Yeah, it's a free market. If somebody manages to actually release an ETF with that feature where you can directly withdraw real BDC or other crypto, depending on what they do, is for like ease or something, what do you. Guys think about the options? But how much do these ETF investors value that self custody? That's also a question we should be asking. Is it something that they prize or they just don't care? They want the blackrock to manage everything and feel free of the headache if.

Dependency on Centralized Systems

They used to the gold ETF to answer that question, the answer is they don't. Like, if you look at, you know, for years and years, you know this because you used to write in that space, like for years and years, people have been pushing for people to self custody their gold, and yet still paper gold remains the dominant vehicle for anybody invested in gold. Like buy like ten times or 100 times. And so I think it'll just be the same with BTC. Like people want a little bit in their portfolio, like two, 3% to hedge against, you know, global catastrophe and fiat debasement and everything else. But I think like, by far and away for the tradfi folks, for the pension funds, for the family officers, I think most likely option is like Blackrock's ETF vehicle, ibit.

Legal Frameworks Affecting Investment Strategies

And they'll just put that as. Because the other thing is, man, like, you've got to think about the legal frameworks that a lot of these funds function on. Like think about a pension fund in their prospectus. They'll say that they invest in ETF's right, and indexes, and they can't go out of that framework legally. They have to. They can only buy ETF's and indexes because that's what they've told their clients when they signed up that it was going to buy. And so it's not just that they don't want to invest in, you know, like self custody bitcoin, it's they legally might not be able to. And so you get into all these like legal frameworks with the tribal people, I would say, like in the long term, I think it's just great that people have access to bitcoin, whether it's ETF, ibit, or whether it's, you know, self custody.

The Ripple Effect of Bitcoin Adoption

Bitcoin. Hopefully it adds some financial education and people research it and are intrigued by the space and maybe the, you know, the trickle down effect. They start looking at Ethereum and they start looking at other things and discover the space in all its beauty and complexity. Yeah, I think in this space people value ux more than decentralization. Like even using like Solana Base as an example, both completely centralized, like base has a literal centralized sequencer that they can just turn off if they want to know more of that. And there's billions of dollars on that chain, people, just as long as it's fun, there's some dj and they can make some money.

Challenges to Blockchain's Decentralization Promise

Not a lot of people truly value the decentralization aspect. Which is quite unfortunate, to be honest. One of the pillars of blockchain is decentralization. I mean, that's the whole point of it. But yeah, when numbers go up, people don't really care. When things. FTX happened for like a month or two and then. Yeah, it gets forgotten quickly. It definitely gets put somewhere. Oh yeah. Like months in after the next debacle occurs in the markets. Yeah. Remember FTX? Yeah, it was actually. Was the same fucking thing and we fall. Fell for the same fucking thing again and we'll do it again.

Future of Financial Markets

It's like Ponzi schemes, like lioness and you know, stuff like that. It's not, they're super obvious and yet hundreds of years after their existence they still work. Like people invest like money in pyramid schemes because they want to be in the first ones. They even know it's a pyramid scheme, but they hope they're within the first like level and they don't care if they manage to scam other people and the other people, they just sign up for it and in hopes to double their money or whatever. It's crazy, but yeah, it's how humans minds work when it comes to money. And essentially, Jesus Christ, just throw it in the garbage.

Human Behavior in Financial Markets

I don't know what to know. What? That was Ivan on the end there? No, that was. You didn't hear the, like the moped that was half exploding outside. It just sounded like you went off on a run at the end. I thought it was actually cutting me off because it was so loud and my windows is open because it's again like 30 degrees here. It's crazy. But, yeah, it was like a moped that was almost at the brink of explosion and that I was just ranting on to the guy that he should throw away his moped. But anyway, yeah, Ponzi schemes, man. People still fall for it. And we always forget about the.

Historical Patterns of Investment Behavior

The last cycle scam that happened, like icos, and people just do the same thing again. Look at, like, the Solana meme coins. People just posted a Solana address on their twitter, and people just sent them money. Like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Like, of course, like, 80% of these were complete scams, and there was no token or it just pumped and dumped into oblivion, and people just did it. Like, millions and millions of dollars just went into these people's pockets just because they posted an address on. Oh, you're talking about, like, Benny was doing all that stuff.

Scams in the Crypto Space

Yeah, stuff like that. But yeah, afterwards, like, on Solana, it was like two weeks of ex ideos. A lot of accounts got banned as well, because, you know, they eventually, they had to react about all of that stuff, but, you know, people sent millions of dollars. Interesting. Never saw any that started, by the way, just so that, you guys know, was a lot of these guys were sending money to themselves through multiple wallets. So it looked like. So the whole idea was like, you know, people outsource their decision making process. So if you see that, like, you know, something's really popular, you might, like, you know, decide to try it yourself.

Psychology of Investment Decisions

And in a similar fashion, the way that these things are operating was, you know, some guy, I'd say that he's setting up a pre sale, send eth, and then he'd send himself $2 million of eth through loads of different wallets. And then people be like, oh, my God, why are people sending this scam of money? Then you would assume that they know something you don't, which is that this is going to be really bullish, even though you know, that this guy's, like a known scammer. And so, like, overall, you kind of outsource the decision making process. And instead of thinking critically about this, you just assume that people know better than you do, and then you send in money anyway, just in case you don't miss out.

Opportunistic Behavior in the Financial Market

And actually, you just fell for the broader scam. So I think I've seen buskers on the street do something similar. Yeah, this is a very old thing. It's just like, if you. If you see other people taking a gamble on something, you feel like, you know, this. It's more likely to be successful for you too. It's like an affiliation scam. And I would just say, like in crypto, there's like a million ways to get scammed. There's like so many. There's like trading groups that aren't real traders. There's like, you know, coin launch people that launch coins that claim that they're going to go to millions of dollars and they're nothing.

Navigating the Crypto Landscape

And the thing is, you just have to take a measured approach with everything, because even for people that work in this space for like 18 hours a day for five years, it's still very hard to get the market right. And so anybody that's telling you, like, you know, you just do these three trades and then you're going to get some magical arbitrage opportunity, it's like just so unlikely to be correct. And so it's better to just get yourself educated about the broader space, see if you can form a real coherent market thesis that makes sense, and then invest in things that you've got a really high conviction in. And then in that way, you hope to gain some kind of edge over the market.

The Realities of Crypto Trading

But it is very difficult even for people that are working in the space full time. We went back to quiet. Did you guys talk about CBBTC at the beginning? I've missed it. Am I wrong or somebody speaking? No, my button wasn't. I couldn't unmute myself for some reason. Mopeds. So you were gonna say, are you gonna talk about the c. What was it? CBTC? Yeah, I was. Old man yells at Moped writer. Yeah, that's me. I was curious if anybody talked about it in the spaces today.

Discussion on CBDC

CBTC. The Coinbase thing? Yes. I mean, they've done it with eat as well, then tried to see that through, like a bunch of ecosystems. I think they're just trying to sort of grow market share on. How do you know? Do you have any information on, like the TVL of the ETH version? I mean, it was quite a bit. At one point they had. They had a fairly large amount. On quick swap as well. But I think they're doing better with the BTC, to be fair.

Exploring Differences Between CBTC and Other Assets

So what can you explain the core concepts of this? I actually can't see much of a difference between this and like, the Celsius wrapped assets, which. No, the way they went wrong is they then took their dubiously wrapped assets and started speculating on defi with them. It's just like layer upon layer of risk. These are all the same thing. They're custodial wrapped versions. Ious of bitcoin. Some are fully backed, some are partially backed, some. Who knows what the hell they're doing with them? So it all comes down to, like, what kind of transparency do you have into what they're doing?

Challenges of Trust in Financial Systems

Can you see their books? And if you can't, how much do you trust these guys? So is. Is this coin base? Yeah, exactly. Coinbase competing with Bitgo for WBCC? Is that what. Yes. Okay. All right, well, that makes sense. The Celsius thing, those were real bitcoin. It's just that they speculated with that bitcoin and they got liquidated when. Because of everything that happened, like FTX plus terra Luna, and, you know, they just didn't have it anymore because they lost it.

The Downfall of Celsius

They got liquidated where they put their bets, because they put it as collateral, lend it out. Like USD, T. USD. What was the name? USD. Right. How did they collide so much, by the way? Because wasn't a decent amount of their. Their ust backed by. Or it was the terra that was backed. Where was the bitcoin in that scenario? Because they had a lot of bitcoin. They had like, $5 billion or more bitcoin.

Understanding the Collapse of UST

So how did it go down so much? Shouldn't it have just gone down, you know, 30%, 50%, 70%, whatever? Wasn't it like, the mint redemption death spiral? Yeah, but that should. If there is assets backing it, then it should stop spiraling. A bank run on Celsius and the bank run also contributed to people, like, losing. Completely losing their trust. They stopped with trolls because we're talking. About two different things that rock. Are you talking about bitcoin held by Terra Labs?

Analyzing the Interplay Between Bitcoin and UST

Yes. Okay, right. So that's because I was talking about. I think. I think the issue with that was, was it not that do Quan had mixed personal funds with the bitcoin that was back in terra labs as well? There was some kind of, like, dodgy accounting stuff going on at the same time. Because otherwise they would have just been able to liquidate the bitcoin to bridge the. To prevent them being attacked. Right. When they started to get depegged.

Failure to Maintain the Peg

There must have been a reason why they couldn't redeem that collateral. If they had $5 billion in bitcoin, that should have been enough to fight off any speculative attack on us, too, surely. Well, I guess. Okay, let's say, hypothetically, it was 50% backed by real assets like bitcoin, and then you defend the pegas, but at the end, you have to liquidate all that bitcoin to defend the peg, and then you get to a point where now the mark, now the peg is, let's say. no, that.

Speculating on the Future of Financial Stability

Yeah, I don't know. It should. Yeah, it should work. No, you're right, man. I think that's the right train of thought. If you spend your backing assets defending the peg, and then you run out of firepower and then people attack it again, then you've essentially backed by. No, but they would have had to have attacked it with massive amounts of money. So this is where you get into the law around all the Alameda stuff, right? Like, people thought that Alameda was attacked and depegged the USC on purpose, and they had.

Entering the Realm of Speculation

They was trading with $11 billion in client funds, so they would have had the size to do it. And, I mean, this is just rumors, right? Wait, wait. You think Alameda was attacking Terra? Yeah. Yeah. But then they would have won that bet and shouldn't then they have been more liquid by winning the bet? That's a good question. Yeah. I don't know.

The Complexity of Financial Schemes

I just remember at the time, there was some rumors that they deliberately de pegged us to. Yeah. It was between them and jumped, I think, was the rumor. Jump made, I think, like 2.3 billion on it. Good times for jump. Which is helpful to see that if Terra Lou or if jump and FTX or Alameda attacked another industry leader, destroyed them, caused a lot of chaos in the industry, and then they got kicked, pushed out of the industry.

The Market Dynamics

That's at least a nice silver lining. Yeah, but you have to in a functioning market. So, like, in the traditional world, there's this guy, Carl Icahn. Right, who had this activist fund that would go in and take over companies and force them to either liquidate assets or, you know, basically influence the decisions of the boards. And so in crypto, we don't have that because it's kind of decentralized. But the way that the funds operate sometimes is a little bit in a similar way, like an activist fund. And I think this is actually a good thing, because at the end of the day, the only reason that was possible is because UST was not backed in the same way that it should have been backed. Right. And so it's important for. It's very brutal. Well, wait, but that wasn't necessarily. Necessarily. It was an algo. USD was an algo stable coin. Right.

Algorithmic Stablecoins and Their Risks

So it wasn't fully bought, and I think it wasn't meant to. To be bad. It's not like they were, like, lying or hiding. No, no. It's. It's supposed to. It was supposed to begged by the police, right? Because it doesn't matter if it was meant to be backed or not. I'm not saying that. I mean, evidently there was some dodgy accounting, right? But I'm not saying that that's the problem here. I'm saying that it's a bad idea to build a hundred billion dollar ecosystem on, you know, an algo stable coin. Like many of us knew that algo stable coins were bad news before you. Exactly, exactly. You need large funds to come in and throw their weight around and deep things like this, because it's going to come down one way or another. And so to have it come down earlier means that now we don't have this, that systemic, that particular systemic risk in the market going forward. And it's like, it's important that these guys try and figure out how to blow these things up and make a lot of money, because the incentive for them is massive, right?

Market Forces and Shorting

If they can blow it up, if they can deep, they can make a huge amount of money shorting. That's actually just a healthy market because people are trying to find an edge and a way to exploit the market to make a return in a kind of activist way. This happens a lot with big shorts on traditional financial companies. You may view it as a little predatory and very difficult to be caught in the crossfires of if you're a normal small trader, these big battles. But at the same time, you have to understand that the UST situation, whilst everybody enjoyed it, when the price was going up, that wasn't a healthy market function, right? And it needed to come out. It was too much risk. You know, there's no reason that. Yeah, I agree completely with you there, because these algorithmic stable coins, whether it's USD, Terra anchor, there have been like, they're complicated on purpose, so that, you know, common investors don't understand them.

Understanding the Complexity of Stable Coins

They try. It's just hot air supported by more hot air, and it's just nothing. It's a big nothing surrounded by another nothing, hidden in a nice little bubble that everybody, nobody knows what's happening inside, except for few people that actually investigate and learn whatever happens in there. And retail will try to read into it. You give up because you don't understand it, but you see the price going up and you agree that everything is fine and nothing will go wrong eventually. But it was a hot air bubble. It was surrounded by nothing. USD was like its value was tied to the value of Luna was tied to USD adoption. You remember how it worked, right? So it's not like it was a crazy idea, even when you read it, and it was, how is this actually working? It's insane. Why does this have value? You know, that's what I was thinking when I was reading the white papers, different versions of them.

The Challenges of the Market

I've read like, three different versions of the Luna white paper. Everything seemed like a huge scam. It's backed by math, you know, but I don't know, the huge size that everything took that was based on all of this was pretty crazy. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth. Your opinion? Is that you happy to let the market forces do their thing? Because sometimes when we talk about market related things, you. You're kind of more like on the left, like more pro intervention. So it's interesting that, like, that was a systemic collapse that affected thousands of people. So it's interesting to hear that you're like, yeah, you know, that was a good thing that it happened. I think I'd be interested to hear rock's opinion on this. Do you think it's a good thing. That I don't like big bailout shit? So I think it's good that it collapsed when it did.

The Importance of Market Accountability

And I think, Jack, you're right, having people be kind of adversarially trying to find these things. That's why I think shorting is important. Like, a lot of people don't like shorting because they're like, well, you're just betting against companies and you're just trying to hurt companies. But no, you need that to have a healthy market. You need people to be able to take bets against markets. Yeah, totally. And just to add to that as well, I think, you know, if you think about the way that, let's say, jump and Alameda acted in that scenario as like, antibody response. So they're a big fund and they're trying to root out bad actors in the space. So that, I mean, ironically, Alameda turned out to be a terrible act themselves, but in this particular instance, they were trying to find a bad actor in the space to exploit for their own benefit. And it's actually really good to have large predatory funds acting like that because it means that they're systematically trying to root out weakness for their own benefit and because, you know, the market is adversarial.

Balancing Market Growth and Integrity

Like you said, having those adversarial interests align for everybody's benefit long term is good because what you want, what you really want as an investor, you don't want to succeed on any one day you want the market that you're in to grow consistently over time. And the more of these crazy large Ponzi scheme style things that are allowed to exist for long periods of time, they threaten the integrity of the whole market, which is not good. And so what you really want is a very strong, very active fund that is out there deliberately trying to blow these things up all the time before they get really large. I think that would actually be a good thing. And in the traditional markets, activist funds and other similar large entities act in this function. Anyway. Yeah. When you see, the base point was why we actually started to talk about this thing, FTX and stuff like that, is that you should be able to detect stuff that already happened, so not to fall in the same trap twice.

Staying Vigilant in Crypto

Okay. Be careful, you know, stay vigilant in this space. As Jack was saying earlier. Yeah. Like, there's a thousand ways that you can get scammed in crypto. So, you know, even if you're. You're working in the space, it's. It's difficult to challenging to get to stay safe unless you're, like, super paranoid and everything is, like, in ten different hard wallets and your seed phrases are cut off in ten different pieces in ten different places. I mean, anyway, and still you can click on a malicious link because, you know, somebody spoofed an id of somebody. You know, just a link. I have been, you know, my friends have been to some group that, you know how crazy it is if you jump to a web three group, right? Telegram group, right?

The Evolving Nature of Scamming

They have, like, 200 people's in there from the same group of scammers. They're gonna be, you know, somebody running the cop groups. They have a cow pretend to be, you know, the member of the group and making a lot of money dming you, being friends with you for like, a few months before, you know, they know exactly how much you're gonna happen and gonna pull the rug pools. Like the scam gonna scammer getting smarters. And, you know, we, I think we need a place to, you know, to put out all type scamming and a new scam for other people. When the newbies, that's when they came into the web threes, they have, you know, some type of directories where you look at the whole list of, you know, the way people are, like, scamming you on the web three. Because right now, I think a lot of, like you guys say, a lot of people that keep falling for the same things even already happened on Web two right now, they bring it to web two and people still falling for the same thing over and over again.

Learning from Past Mistakes

Well, there was recently, there was a really sophisticated social engineering scam. This is just for anybody that has been scammed in the past. Like, don't feel bad because big players in the industry still fall for this. So there was recently a very sophisticated social engineering scam that involved like four or five members of one team convincing a very experienced person in the space to reveal a seed phrase that resulted in a $250 million bitcoin hack. Right? So. And, yeah, yeah, that was pretty interesting. And Zach managed to track them down because they were super stupid on how they actually started using the funds that they stole. They even, they had voice recordings from their group, chat from when, and they got the money.

The Continued Threat of Scams

It's crazy. If you, if anybody wants to look at this, Ivan, I don't know if you can pin it in the top. I can find it. Yeah, I'll find them. But, like, this is a good warning to everybody, right? The person with the $250 million of bitcoin was an experienced person that'd been in the space a long time, and they basically got them on a call and they got them to. I can't remember the name of the program, but it's a program that allows people to remotely desktop. And then they took them through a process that ended up with them putting their seed phrase in what they thought was a completely secure, because it was on their desktop, but the person could see what they were putting in and that was enough to get them. And so this does happen even to the sophisticated people.

Awareness and Prevention

So you always have to be on your guard for it. But it's really, whatever these things happen, I always find it really interesting picking through the how and the what and the why, because then it allows you to be more on guard for these things on a personal basis. And you're right, Corgi. There is like thousands of different telegram groups where people will try and convince you. I've seen, you know, in the past fake doge chain groups where it looks like the Doge chain group and it's got like, you know, people pretending to be admins and so on, but it's just completely fake. We used to get a lot of those back in the day when we. First launched and, you know, with the AI too. So now they can create videos of you.

The Role of AI in Scams

Let's say somebody can take a. Yeah, somebody can take rock face and then create a video rock talking about, you know, invest in something and. Right. That, that is one of the dangerous sides of AI's. That's right. It's. And that's. And, you know, this is one of the great challenges of the next few years is AI detection. Like, how do you know that the person you're talking to on a call or the video you're watching is the real deal? And there'll be whole algorithms developed and integrated into YouTube and other places that auto detect AI content? I'm sure there's an army of people working on this stuff right now, actually. I don't know if anybody's BEen following the stuff that Elon's doing with trying to get into the Trump government, where they have THe DoGE council, the department of government efficiency, which they've named DoGE.

Emerging Trends in Regulatory Technology

I wonder what that will mean for the industry and how that will. Cause. I think, like, it's basically to do with, like, fiscal responsibility. But it's interesting that even in that setting, Elon's still trying to get the doge meme into the public consciousness. It's pretty cool. I think it's also a really good, like, kind of middle finger to give to the whole system and everything, too, because, I mean, also what recently happened to Elon as well is that he got the class action lawsuit dropped against him. So I think he's more, you know, he's more comfortable with mentioning dogecoin or references. You mean the one for manipulation? Yeah, that was a big deal.

Legal Challenges in the Cryptocurrency Space

Well, that was really, to be honest. Like, the insignia man was like manipulating the price of a meme coin for his own financial benefit. It's like an insane thesis, to be honest. Yeah. And if you look at. Well, I read through some of it, too. It was like, it was pretty wild. And I've read a lot of legal stuff in the past, and, yeah, the caliber of this legal work, you know, I'd say that it was pretty low, and it looked like, I think the lawyer who brought on this class action lawsuit was just a single lawyer in his own firm under his own name with no partners. And, yeah, he just served this lawsuit.

Market Oversight and Regulation

Yeah. And, yeah, the XRP lawsuit that, like, flew under the radar because of the ship market conditions, man. It was, it was supposed to be like, the big thing for the blockchain industry. Like, whether was it. It was a settlement or a slap on the wrist or anything like that, you know, it was supposed to be a lot more mediatized, but we're in such a bad place, market wise, nobody even cared anymore about anything. It was crazy. Like, we're seeing some. Some, you know, people having to, they are kind of a bit of a breath of fresh air in the past week and a half or something like that. But we haven't been in any kind of positive mood for months and months.

Navigating a Challenging Market

And all of these good things. And the good news, they kind of didn't make any impact on the industry. Maybe we are also a little bit tired of, you know, having somebody speak about bitcoin import, having somebody important speak about bitcoin and it goes up 5% that time is kind of over. It's not coming back. But yeah, the, it's been a challenging few months ever since March, actually, since the top altcoin run in March. It's been really challenging to stay afloat in a market that just pushes you down with FUD, pushes you down with crazy market downwards momentum that nothing seems to stop it.

The Impact of Market Sentiment

Not even good news from all sides. Nothing seems to happen. I know many people are even experienced people in the space that are down like 50% percent on their portfolios from their March highs, which is pretty crazy considering that it's like meant to be a bull market. I got lucky on that because I have very spread and diversified portfolio. But yeah, I know that people that are on projects, on Ethereum, projects in Polygon that, yeah, struggling a lot. And especially it's been lasting for, well, three years of bear market. BTC has just been absolutely hammered in the last, over the last five months.

Market Analysis and Future Predictions

Like it's just trending down continually to a level that people didn't even think was possible, to be honest. I think it's going down for almost three years. Right. Yeah, but you expect it in a bear market because obviously everything consolidates to the strongest capital, which is BTC, but you don't expect the trend to continue during the bull. I mean, like, look, who knows? Now we've got the EFT ETF, which is pretty cool, and we'll see. Now things have turned around a bit what that'll mean. I think, to be honest, I can't see how Q four won't be bullish because, you know, we've got this FTX distribution, this $16 billion in cash that's been distributed to FTX users.

Market Recovery Outlook

You know, that's gotta be bullish, right? Like, at least some of that's gotta flow into crypto. So that's gonna be interesting. And I think, let's vote. How many percent do you think it will float back? I'd say, yeah, I would say like minimum 50%. I mean, the majority of people like, traded on FTX. FTX was never really like super retail exchange, like coinbases and binance. You know, it's more like. No, it was more Djen stuff. Yeah, more Djen like users there. So I think, like, a good portion of that sideline capital will probably flow back into. Into the crypto ecosystem, and they'll be probably quite a relieved group of people that are getting that money back.

The Unusual Nature of Recent Bankruptcies

Interestingly, it's one of the only recorded bankruptcies in history where the creditors are getting more than 100% of their collateral back. Obviously not in like, for like, terms, because if they would have held, you know, ETH or whatever is holding that, the prices behind. But in terms of, like, an absolute cash basis, they get in more than 100% of the funds back, which is kind of funny. Like, how can an organization be bankrupt and also pay back credit is more than what they. More than what they put in? Like, funny, but. So wasn't this what Sam was arguing the whole time, though? Yeah, we have enough.

The Complexity of Bankruptcy Proceedings

No, no, let me know. The only reason that's the case, though, is because in between when the exchange was halted and when they liquidated the assets, the price rose enough so that they had enough funds. I think at the time, they were technically insolvent. Now, the. What they could have done, Sam's argument, I think, at the, was they could cover the US deposits, and the US was the regulatory agency that was coming after Sam. So his argument was, you know, this doesn't affect users. They could have just pushed the loss onto the global users. But to be honest, like, I think the way that the FTX collapse was handled by the regulators was actually quite a mature approach.

Assessing Regulatory Response to FTX's Collapse

Like, the founder, you know, the team ended up in jail, and the protocol was then handled by a third party that then sold off all the assets to repay the creditors over a period of time. I think that's quite a mature bankruptcy, to be honest. And much better than. Much, much better than the way Terra Luna collapsed. You know, nobody's getting refunds from that, so I think we'll see. And, oh, yeah, I think Dera Luno was the worst thing that could have happened to them. Literally straight down. I mean, I caught a small shot on that, on the, I think, like, a few hours after it started, but nothing like, I mean, some people, like, if you remember GCR, one of the best traders in the space, caught the whole thing, right.

Portfolio Strategy Amidst Market Challenges

He went short at like $95 or something for Luna, which is right near the top. But yeah, the actual, you know, the users and the holders of UST. I mean, one of the worst things about the Ust thing is that a lot of the IBC ecosystem token projects held their treasuries in UST. And so when that collapsed, it really affected a lot of teams of as well, because they were holding what they thought was a stable coin to secure assets on their chain. And then obviously, it turned out it wasn't very stable at all. And so it rugged a lot of the treasury. Some of the teams we used to work with were affected like that, so. Yeah, but this is the problem with stables.

Market Sentiment on Stablecoins

Right? Like that. And I think it made people a lot more hesitant, in general about stables. I know, like, the current crop of stables that we have are fully backed, USDc, for example. And then you've got Dai, which is obviously over collateralized, so people can tell what the collateralization ratios are because they're pretty transparent. But, yeah, I think people are a lot more hesitant now to throw money into random stables. Yeah, that's my opinion. And yet we see new stable coins like it merge all the time. We'll keep making them, but it doesn't mean that I don't think we'll see billion dollar stable rugs for a while.

The Future of Algorithmic Stablecoins

Nah, I'm not seeing any algorithmic coin getting any traction. What was the. Oh, man, I said the name earlier, I forgot about it. The first one that collapsed. I am sorry, finance. Yeah, and another one, there were like two that collapsed before Terra Luna and not that, like, long ago before. And, you know, people didn't learn from that. But after the Luna thing, I think that nobody wants to get close to an algorithmic stable coin ever again. But we'll see. You know, problem is, people don't learn. And people that are on the. On these paces are dodginians.

Staying Informed in the Crypto Space

And everybody that listens to us on Fridays. Yeah, be smarter than the rest. And don't fall for the same scam twice. Even if it's not a scam. Don't fall for the flawed technology or flawed narrative or anything like that. Just be careful. Yeah. And if you don't know anything, ask a question, right? It's costing you nothing to ask. You know, somebody's being long time in the space question to, you know, save yourselves. Like, speak for yourself. That's what I always say. You know, communities are people. You know, you have to speak for yourself. And web three is otherwise, you know, people gonna the scammer gonna take advantage of use.

Looking Ahead

They're gonna, you know, and they're gonna take everything from your wallet. Right. Okay. Yeah. So let's hope this market. The market keeps some momentum in the. In the next weeks, and hopefully Jack is right and Q four is super bullish, and 2025 is mega hyper super, extremely bullish as well. But, yeah, we had, like, a poll, like an internal poll, I think that a lot of people said Q four would be. There was actually two camps. It was basically Q 220 25, which. Was my camp, and there was Q 420 24.

Market Predictions and Sentiment

And so what I deduce from that, which is quite interesting, I thought, is the. The market will leave a peak in Q four, but if it has enough momentum, then it will. And, you know, there'll be probably a distribution Q four, where it. It runs up and then it starts to stagnate a little bit. But then if it's got enough momentum, then it will continue to ultimate conclusion in Q four, in Q 220 25. But who knows, man? This is just our best guess based on what people have said. Yeah, not financial advice. Don't forget, we're just, you know, look at stuff that's happening in the industry.

Final Thoughts

We look at the charts, we look at the momentum. We look at the socials. We look at a lot of stuff, you know, and that's what we are trying to deduct from. From everything that we see. But that doesn't mean it's correct. Guys. Doge to $10. Let's see that. Of course. All right, guys, I think it's probably a good time to wrap it up. We're coming up on the two hour mark. Yeah, 2 hours here. I think it's a good ten. Do we have any final points they want to make or any questions? Go for it. Penny?