Farcaster Frames, the Ripple hack and a Bitcoin marketing budget

Transcript

everyone wonders when you're going to be able to take a sword from one game and use it in another game that's blockchain interoperability and composability and while gameing isn't quite there yet this week something huge happened within composability on chain I'm talking about farter frames for the first time ever you are going to be able to create actions like minting and so much more directly wear your users already are in farcaster in this video we're going to break that down along with so much more that happened this week gmgm welcome to web3 Academy your one trusted source to

capitalize on the next big phase of the internet we are here to make sense of an onchain World in constant transformation I'm jird along with my co-host Kyle reidhead and we believe that composability on chain is going to change the world I do believe that Jay you're very right I do today we've got a lot to talk about we're going to talk the macro World once again in our market watch we kind of stayed away from that for a bit because all the talk was on ETFs now that the ETF Bonanza is somewhat over with it's back to interest rates it's back to inflation and all the stuff that I don't know we need to hear about but we NE probably don't necessarily love so that's what we got for the market watch there's a lot going on there and then we're going to talk

about what's happening in crypto there was a hack with xrp so what's going on there a lot of airdrop stuff we're going to cover today big one with Jupiter there's some fun and some drama going around on that one but overall was a big success and then a bunch of their drops that came out this week so we'll make sure that we cover that Bitcoin has a marketing budget that's really cool we're excited about that we'll talk about what that even means pudgy I mean every week now we talk with them so of course we'll talk about something they're doing again Budgy penguins that is and is openc for sale one of the biggest crypto companies in our space is it for sale well we'll talk about that as well and so much more but before we do as per usual we take it a deep

breath and we talk gratitude Jay what are you grateful for today it was a nice deep breath thanks for that I hope our listeners took a deep breath along with you there I am grateful for our babysitter we had a uh our babysitter over last night and Sam and I went out on a date and I'll tell you yeah when you got an eight-month-old and you get to go out just the two of you on a date it's miraculous like you you feel like you haven't done it in years and it was simple we just went out for dinner nothing crazy or special but it was very very nice so grateful to Emily for looking after Jack and for letting Sam

and I have a date night that's why you came into this meeting just glowing and full of energy makes sense love that I am grateful for running which is hilarious for me to say because I've always been not against running but not necessarily against running I'm just more in favor of weightlifting and resistance training I think that's where people should spend their time however that being said I sit a lot at work so I was like you know what I need to do something to get my heart rate up more often I don't get to play sports especially now when I'm traveling so I'm going to run so I've been running like four times a week probably and it's beautiful here in Bon are so I do it outside and um I absolutely love it right now what I love about it is it gives me an opportunity

one to just get my heart rate up but not have to go to the gym and like go through the struggles of lifting weights you can't really do that seven days a week and then also I get to listen to a podcast so I usually listen to some very nerdy crypto podcast and like dive deep into something or I dive deep into thinking about the business or my investing strategy or something and when you're running you really want to get your mind off of running and so I just like go deep down rabbit holes on something and I always come out of that run with like the desire to go and write and then also writing is a really good thing to form your thesis and to form opinions and blah blah blah so like it's been a really good addition to my repertoire that I've just I've never

really done I still hate running myself like it sucks but I mean you feel great afterwards it's a good workout my whoop which tracks my like heart rate and my strain and all this stuff is off the charts it's really happy that I'm doing this and just what it does for my mental health is I think the best part so I'm really excited about that and I'm glad I've I've added that into my uh daily routine loves to hear it I love the uh the joys and the hatred that you have for running are quite enjoyable okay before we jump into Today's Show just a few quick announcements we are hiring right now more specifically our parent company impact 3 is hiring three roles right now and we would love somebody from our community we'd love hiring from

within our community so we'd love for one of you to join our team we're hiring for a sales role we're hiring for a leaden and ads role and we're also hiring for a social media management and crypto Twitter specialist role so if any of those appeal to you link in the show notes for each of the job description for those three roles please check them out and everything that you need to know on how to apply will be in there yeah we'd love to to talk to anybody in our community even if you don't have all the experience in the world that's completely fine we like to hire young as long as you are a hustler do you work hard do you have a big like a strong mindset a positive mindset if you do those things and then you like crypto then you're probably a good candidate so

make sure to apply we have a question as per usual our poll Jay why don't you ask that question today's question is do you use forecaster forecaster is one of the leading web3 decentralized social platforms and we're going to talk about forecaster frames today and we want to know if you guys use it because we're trying to decide if we should put more resources into it and if you guys are there then we want to be there too so answer the poll question do you use forecast there's a couple different options on how you answer based on how much use it which will help us decide if we should spend more time there as well all right awesome on to the market watch I've got some charts up on the screen so if you're listening maybe check out the

screen but I will do my best to explain as we go there's not a whole lot of charts so it's not a big deal quick overview Bitcoin sitting at 42400 eth sitting at 2275 and salana sitting at 955 down from yesterday after the fomc meetings the FED meeting where they decided to keep rates as is so we'll talk about that but really we've just been kind of sitting in a range for the last almost two months basically since the first week of December we haven't moved a whole lot I know some people in our Discord are getting a bit tired and I think a bit impatient of the volatility we're up five 10% one week and then we're down 5 10% another week one thing I would just say is like this is just the norm for crypto in you know equities normal equities it's like a 1

to two% per week up and down and that's sort of like your normal crab market you would call it where you just you don't know if you're going to go up or down and in crypto those are like more like 5 10 even 15% which is um just something we all have to get used to so this is normal when you look at the chart like I have the Bitcoin chart up here it almost looks like we haven't moved for an entire two months but if you sat here watching charts every day there has been a lot of volatility But ultimately we're just sort of ranging in the Bitcoin World we're ranging from like 45,000 down to like 38,000 as long as we don't go below 38,000 we're sort of still in that range and if we go above 45,000 then okay we're moving out of that range

but we haven't we've just for two months just stuck in there and so it seems like you know these crazy moves but there really not much going on ethereum same thing other than when the ETF got approved ethereum had a big jump and then came back down into its typical range which is around 2500 down to that 2140 as long as we don't go below 2140 then everything is still looking pretty good there we've now turned that into a really really strong support which is nice to see the only one that's actually had a bit of a a new pattern forming here is salana which is why last week or I think it was last week maybe I put a call in saying I think salana is about to start to move and probably outperform eth after its last month and a half of sort of underperforming it is still

somewhat in a range but it has pass it has basically broken out this current week it broke out of this sort of like wedge pattern that you can see here it's been on this sort of downtrend which is what formed the wedge it jumped out of that it Skyrock and I was like oh [ __ ] Salon is moving I think it went to like $15 two days ago and then it came back all the way down has actually tested that wedge pattern so it's always nice when you see that happen and now it's kind of pop back up so we'll see like really we're in the macro world so it all is going to depend on interest rates inflation what is going on in the global macro markets more than anything in crypto specifically right now unless the ETF eth narrative starts to pick up but

I don't know seems like we're still a month or two away from that to really start to pick up so now we're sort of just relying on relying on macro and so I really still just think we're probably going to continue to chill out here like I said last week I don't have a lot of opinion whether we go up or down from here we could go down people are really scared about interest rates right now for whatever reason but these are always just good opportunities for us so not a big deal so let's jump out of the crypto world let's talk about macro just real quick here so yesterday drone Powell came in this is the the FED meeting where they decide if they're going to raise or lower interest rates they kept it a pause so they didn't do anything the big thing was before that the

predictions Market was saying that give was about a 45% or so chance that they will decrease in March but based off the words of Dron Powell because again he doesn't say yes or no he just sort of like talks around it you have to sort of guess what they're going to do next month because that's the world we live in it's ridiculous now the probabilities have gone down to 36% chance of them lowering rates in March so it's going down and down and down even um Morgan Stanley came out uh and they originally had thought it was going to happen in March now they're saying it's not going to happen until May but I mean they literally change their tune every month month so like there's no point in actually listening to what they say I have stuck at the same time just saying sometime in Q2 in 2024 I'm saying this

for months I don't care if it's March if it's April it's May it doesn't really matter to me I just think it's somewhere around there we know the direction we're going and that's not going to be up it's going to be down at some point and so that's really all that matters there what they did say though is they're still concerned a little bit about inflation not necessarily concerned they more just said we want to hit that 2% inflation rate um before we lower rates is what they've said so interestingly if we look at um true flation which we've talked about a bunch previously which is live real data looking at actual prices of the economy and the goods within the economy like live in the moment and it tracks I think like over a million different data points and compiles it all together to give what they call true

inflation this is all actually on chain as well which is really cool so this we believe is a better indicator of what the actual inflation rate is and currently it is tracking inflation in the US at 1.44% it had a massive drop yesterday for whatever reason I'm not sure what happened I looked through there just a bunch of things went down basically just yesterday which is kind of funny but it's been heading down anyway but we are well below that 2% on the true inflation so now there is a big difference between that and what the what the FED actually looks at when they look at inflation and that's because they typically have one delayed numbers so we will have the next inflation print come out February 10th but that's looking at the inflation numbers from January so it's not live it's usually lagging and then also a lot of the

numbers they get tend to be legging numbers as is anyway and they have a lot less data points than something like true flation as so it tends to almost follow what true FL is doing which is quite interesting and we can see that by if we look at the inflation numbers just to give you a reminder it was 3.4% it actually went up in the last call that we did a couple weeks ago those were December numbers right so 3.4 it was 3.1 back in November and 3.2 in October but if we look at true flation when I go back on this chart same thing it was lower in October lower in November and then December it went up right but we knew that on December when it went up but we have to wait a month because it lags for the FED to give us those

numbers now if we look in January we're right around 2% which my guess is when we get this one in February 10th it will be down it won't be below 2% like it is today because we are now in February so we have to wait for the FED to announce February's numbers in March for them to go oh we're now under the 2% so there's just that that delay in the old world that's what they do so I I think we're going to be probably 3% by February on the February 10th call and then in I don't know the March call or maybe it's one after that whatever we'll probably below the 2% but let's see and if we remember by the way core inflation continues to go down is at 3.9 so the fact that core inflation is 3.9 and CPI is 3.4 they're pretty close as long as

cor continues to go down CPI is going down now one of the other things that's going to help Drive inflation down and probably help make the FED decrease rates much faster is the bank crisis is back baby and and I say that in an exciting way it's not all that exciting but interestingly the New York Community Bank which is the bank interesting that purchased Signature Bank when it failed just last year they are now likely going to go under their stock is down 43% in the last two days this is happening because interest rates are not going down and as we said for you know the last year these Banks need interest rates to go down because people are basically fleeing Banks they can put their money in treasuries Make 5.25% why

would you put it in a savings account in a bank when you make no money on it I mean we have done that with both our treasury I have done it with my personal finances like I don't have much money in a bank anymore it's either in crypto or it's in a treasury right and same with our our company most companies and well I wouldn't say most people are doing this most companies are doing this most people that are aware of their finances are doing this and then just unfortunately there's a lot of issues going on with like real estate especially corporate real estate which a lot of banks hold on to and so their assets that they use as collateral are beginning to fail and all this has to do with interest rates so if we remember what happened last time the banking crisis happened which was early 20123

Bitcoin and crypto went nuts right they love when banks are failing because they are the solution and so I don't know if this is going to continue but it's likely there will be more of these coming because they've also the FED has made some changes to how they're funding these Banks when they fail so it's getting worse and worse for banks basically and so Arthur hay is the dgen of all degens but actually a really extremely smart person who really gets macro and loves crypto he's basically calling for money printing to be turned on soon because he thinks we're going to go back into banking crisis 2.0 not banking crisis in like 2008 like the financial crisis One banking crisis in the one last year where just couple banks fail and then the FED back stops it like they always do and uh that means

more liquidity in the system and probably to solve it they lower interest rates so inflation falling Banks falling means interest rates also going to start falling so continue to be bullish as usual look a lot of the market doesn't get this stuff and so when they say they're going to pause rates it's all [ __ ] and people get scared and sell but if you know what's going on you know you're looking forward into the future rates are going lower don't worry about it so is inflation which means risk assets are going higher one other thing I just want to mention is I did a market watch this week with Tom dunlevy who's a a private investor in crypto he has like a $20 million fund and he was just talking about private markets so I talk about public all the time we see public

I don't do private um investing so I don't have like a good idea of what's going on in the world but this episode was great because he sort of when we started off for the first like 20 minutes really diving into private markets and he said Q4 of 2023 was the biggest quarter in crypto in a long time like over two years and um he said and even this year so January is off to a massive start so there's a lot of funding coming into the space that generally means that leads public markets so he's very bullish on this year as a result of that and there was a few narratives and things that he talked about that they're investing in so I highly recommend checking that out if you want to learn more about markets specifically private but other than that I think just about does it for our

market watch say Jay any questions here's what I heard there is a dumpster fire of the trafi system currently and a bunch of old geezers who don't know what they're doing but don't worry it's good for all of us uh something more like that yeah actually it really is it like the more that the old people just completely [ __ ] up the traditional system the better crypto is right the more important crypto becomes the more necessary it becomes so when [ __ ] hits the fan in the traditional world like sometimes it scares markets and so crypto does dump But ultimately that means more and more bullish things in the future because crypto solves all of these problems so it's all good it's all good baby it's all good okay let's go to the first big

news story of the week which is farcast frames this is a massive innovation in the web 3 space basically what forecaster frames is it allows any app to pull a frame within forecaster to create a frame within our forecaster and what a frame is is it's basically a way that you can engage a user to take an action but you can keep them in foraster you don't have to take them off now this is built using uh Facebook's open graph protocol Facebook created this open graph protocol which was this idea that okay Facebook Facebook actually wanted to do what forecaster is doing right now

but couldn't do it because their business model went in the direction of closed wall Garden in order to monetize for ads basically was their business model now obviously with decentralized social that changes so what foraster frames allows is it allows a user to be on forecaster and forecaster is just like Twitter it's a social Med media platform a decentralized social media platform and you're on forecaster this is where all your users are every day I mean I know not a lot of us are yet on forecaster it's still new but let's if Twitter was doing this we're all on Twitter every day and we're every business that's on Twitter is trying to

get take your attention that they have on Twitter and they're trying to get you to take an action right they're trying to get you to subscribe to their newsletter they're trying to get you to buy a pair of shoes from them they're trying to get you to sign up for a course they're trying to get you to take an action and in order to get you to take that action they have to take you off of the platform where your attention is because you can't transact on that platform you can't sign up for something you can't give your email to something you can't purchase something because there is no monetary way to achieve Commerce on that platform so what frames does what forecast frames does is it brings that ability directly in to farcaster where the attention is this is

just it's a huge huge Innovation because think of it think of it like an embed for those that aren't using farter you know you can embed like a tweet in a newsletter and now you can like like the Tweet but you're actually still just reading your newsletter which we do with ours all the time it's basically that but for anything whether it's like Commerce whether it's reading our newsletter you can actually like embed using a frame our parag our newsletter that's on paragraph and you can be scrolling on farcast stop see that frame of our newsletter and then actually read the entirety of the newsletter in that little frame which is pretty cool so you never actually had to leave and go to our our site which is quite interesting and there's a lot of functionalities that can come from that as well especially when you consider that your

forecaster account is a wallet or not a wallet is your well it is a wallet yeah it's it's basically your um crypto account right and so now that's already connected and you can make purchases without have to like put in your credit card information or leave the page you just do it all in there so that just hopefully helps you guys kind of VIs visualiz what this means yeah to give you a couple other examples of what's happened so far so Kai mentioned that paragraph which is our newsletter platform has already developed a frame so you can read our newsletter or subscribe to our newsletter directly within foraster a few other things that have happened is somebody has launched an instant checkout as using a frame so in this case they did it for cookies so you can if you're on farcaster and you

want to buy cookies because you're following this this cookie brand well you could instantly check out and buy the cookies and as Kai said the key there is you already have your wallet is what you use to log in to forecaster with so you already have a wallet that has Commerce abilities and has money in it you would obviously have to have some crypto in your forecaster wallet but assuming you did you would be able to check out instantly and if you didn't it would just likely ask you to add some money to your wallet and likely that would be just through a credit card hey add money to your wallet and then you can check out and do this also somebody made a frame of Doom the old remember

Doom Kai the the game from the 90s that I used to love playing this game was like one of the first firstperson shooter games that made it really big so somebody made a frame where you can within farcaster you can play Doom you can play this game it's just they embedded this game somebody else are friends at sound sound made so you can listen or mint a song directly within farcaster so like right now your friend shares a song on I I always like using Twitter as an example because we all understand Twitter X better than we necessarily understand forecaster but it's like I share a song on Twitter X and I'm trying to encourage my friends to listen to that song or I'm an artist and I'm sharing a song They're gonna

have to click a link and go listen to that song on a different platform right that's a lot of friction that's taking people offat platform Twitter doesn't like that so they actually push that post down on the algorithm so that doesn't nobody's winning in that case whereas with frames now oh you can listen and mint that song directly within a frame and there's been multiple other frames that people have built look this is to me there's two takeaways here one is we are developing a crossover between the attention economy and the e-commerce economy and we never really had that before like attention was in one platform whether it be Facebook or

Instagram or Twitter and then when you wanted to transact you had to go to a different platform we're now merging those together with web 3 this is just a huge unlock and the other thing is a lot less a dream for marketers yeah and we're creating a new sort of goto Market strategy in that our login is going to become wallet based and obviously the whole internet isn't there in isn't here yet online has not moved to onchain but when it does and this is why onchain is so much better than online you will no longer log in like you do right now or you log in with Facebook or Google or your email you'll log in with your wallet and when you log in with your

wallet you have so many more abilities in terms of what you can do on that platform because your wallet can transact and hold money your wallet can also be a more secure version of your identity and we'll go down that rabbit hole of how identity can change with wallets as well but this means that now because you're logging with Wallets on these platforms you have much more ability as a brand to interact with your user in ways that you didn't have before and what we're going to see is really a new goto Market strategy for crypto companies and onchain companies I think this is going to be a big meta for 2024 is is if you're launching a new brand

and you're going after onchain users you need to focus your go to market strategy you go to where the wallets are and foraster has wallets and there's other platforms that have wallets spend your time there where the wallets are because that's where your users not only they there they can engage in so many ways with your brand because of their wallet yeah I mean to be fair there's 14,000 daily active users on fargas so wallet are not necessarily there yet but in the C CTO world that is where the Walts are there's a lot of crypto natives which is a target audience for certain people that are engaging over on forecaster now and they have left Twitter or X and so like for some people that might make sense to Target them if you're like a

mainstream brand like I don't know farter is probably not the place you need to be spending your time at least not right now but hey doesn't hurt to be early as well right so I love that it removes friction from the payment my only issue is like most people in the world have a spending problem as is if we removing friction from spending like I said it's a dream for marketers probably terrible for the average person because most people are terrible with their finances now people in crypto already generally are much smarter with their finances that's why you're here probably and so like you're probably all good I I fear for when this becomes a mainstream thing it's like one button and I mean I guess the good thing about crypto is you actually have to have the money it's not credit and so like that

maybe a good thing but I'm sure we'll get credit tied into this at some point too and then I'm I'm nervous for the average consumer people just I love how you enter the like sociology impact of this well we don't generally go down like more philosophical psychological impacts but yeah watch out users you might have to be better with your finances yeah okay next up this happened just this morning or last night that xrp was hacked Ripple was hacked what happened here Kai yeah so Ripple itself was not actually hacked what happened was the founder of Ripple his wallets were hacked or I don't know how they they accessed it but basically the founder of Ripple holds a hell of a

lot of xrp which is a scary thing in the first place by the way but anyway his wallets which are not even all of what he owns was hacked for uh 2113 million xrp which is equivalent to $112 Million worth of xrp this is just the founder this is not Ripple and that's how much he owns it means well known that Ripple and the founders of Ripple like they own just a [ __ ] ton and they just sell it on a monthly basis all the time and just like make so much money from this company that in my opinion doesn't do much but anyway turns out it wasn't actually Ripple that was hacked I think he's just the founder so fortunate I guess the person that hacked whoever it is they've already managed to launder the funds through a bunch of different exchanges now it's been reported and

they've reported to the police so we'll see what happens but I mean xrp continues to somehow be one of the biggest tokens in the world and so obviously a a pck of of this amount is a pretty big deal although the total Mark cap of Ripple or sorry xrp is I don't know in the 20 billions I believe yeah 27 billion so like it's actually not that big of a deal probably sucks for the founder though that's a lot of money although I think he's still got a ton so he's probably not that worried okay next up a big partnership between telefonica and helium which is the company that creates these mobile hotspots telica is one of the largest telecom companies in the world public company 21 billion market cap over 380 million customers

and this is really cool and I don't think this got enough attention we talked about deepin in a recent Pro report and deepin is still early it's not something that's really caught mainstream yet I think mainly because uh it's not something within crypto that can get you 10 five to 10 x returns right away uh but it is going to change the way that we build infrastructure and here's the issue Telecom companies have a big issue with creating service in rural areas everybody knows this you pull your cell phone when you're like driving uh between cities or you're driving in a rural area and all of a sudden your cell phone doesn't work and the problem is it cost too much for that

telecom company to put the infrastructure in that rural area in order to provide cell phone service so they don't want to pay that much to build a big tower in that rural area because there's not enough users in that rur area so they had this dilemma of how do we expand coverage to these rural areas and here is an incredible solution that has been created using blockchain so what telepon has done is they've created an infr protocol that essentially encourages their users to purchase and set up a helium mobile hotspot at their house so a telefonica user at home has telica basically is providing their

Wi-Fi in their house and telica is saying hey set up this mobile hotspot and you can be part of providing coverage extended coverage in your rural area and as a result there will be better cell phone coverage in your area and you also have incentive to do this because of the way helium mobile hotspots work where you get helium tokens for providing coverage to these areas so this is just like this is a huge advancement for telom because this protocol that they created anybody could use this any telom in the world could go and roll this out to their customers and

essentially widen their Network expand their Network without having to pay for big towers instead your customers are the ones that are participating and helping you grow your reach I'm I mean I'm extremely on dpin I think it has so many amazing use cases we actually talked a bit uh about it in the market watch episode from Wednesday it is one of the top narratives and so I'm very bullish on what dpin offers and I like helium and what they've done I'm just not I think that starlink is going to completely make this whole thing useless because starlink for those who don't know are is Elon musk's other company one of his many that is basically sending satellites up into space and providing uh Wi-Fi based off of

satellites and so you don't need the towers and stuff on Earth you just put them up in the air or up in space in orbit and then it can send Wi-Fi back down and that technolog is getting better and better exponentially you can get I mean friends of mine have it in Mexico in rural areas that have always struggled to have good infrastructure and they're getting 300 download 300 upload when previous to that it was like maybe 10 if you were lucky and it was out every couple you know days like it was insane so and this is now happening kind of all around the world is not Global yet so like they are not the mass they're not giving it to the mass just yet but I I think they are very much on path to do that and so my problem with helium is it still relies on these big

centralized companies right so it still relies on the telephon on the Verizon Etc because the issue I see is like as the average person that wants to run a hotspot you still have to pay for your expensive bill from Verizon or from Rogers if you're in Canada wherever you are from that big Telephone Company you have to pay for that and then anything access you have you then put connect to your hotspot and then other people can pay whatever it is five 20 bucks a month and have that unlimited data and have good coverage in you know maybe more rural areas so there's still this Reliance on these big companies which I think isn't great there's still the need for a bunch of people to pay high amounts of money in order for the other people to pay the small amounts of money and so when Starling comes and it's

extremely cheap and extremely fast and accessible everywhere in the world I just don't see any Telecom company competing with that and that makes these hot spots completely useless we're years away from that but the whole like space industry is just growing exponentially and the amount of rockets that can go up into orbit are just the frequency of this is happening so so so fast so frequently and that is even happening exponentially plus the size of these things are getting bigger so like elon's already putting hundreds I think it's thousands of satellites up in the air every month and so I think starlink is going to surprise everyone and just be the thing that we all just all use for internet because it's just a way better

technology with a lot less infrastructure and just like [ __ ] in the middle bullish de pin just sound so much helium I I I wonder your if your numbers are correct there Kai what I'm seeing is that uh SpaceX set a new rocket record oh no this is Rockets not uh satellites I don't have the satellite number yeah the satellite number is massive I just read his book where he talks all about it so what they're doing with this is insane and I think it's not many years until we just all use internet from the only issue of it right now is latency so like there's a bit of a delay but they have like typically with satellites satellite internet but they are just like Beyond every other satellite internet provider and I think they are GNA solve that no problem so shortterm probably helium still does

really well because it is a great idea and I like what they're doing I just I don't think the business model sustainable because of competition not because of the model itself I mean competition is a good thing and hopefully leads to the best results for the users that's usually what it does okay next up pudy launches overpass ID this is a separate product from pudgy Penguins but it's by the pudgy Penguins team and they just launched it in beta and so basically what this does is it allows nft holders communities and Brands to execute licensing deals in a super simplified way especially on the legal front so right now the platform is launched in beta and it provides an opportunity for 88 pudgy Penguins 50

bigs and 38 little littles for chapter two of their merchandising plan so this is after success of chapter one if you remember in chapter one pugy launched uh I can't remember it was 16 or 20 different pudgy toys in Walmarts in 2000 Walmarts all around America and they sold 750,000 toys in seven months through that program which was an incredible success so now what they're doing is they're saying okay the issue with that program was in order to make those toys they licensed the nfts directly from the holders right but the issue was legally doing that is a nightmare you have to involve so many

middlemen a lot of Contracting a lot of management issues well that's the whole point of smart contracts right isn't that why we have Smart contracts so that you don't have to you can remove middl man you don't have to worry about a lot these legal issues you can just embed it within a smart contract that's exactly what overpass IP is is it's a platform that makes it very easy to license your nft to somebody who wants to license it from you so right now if you have a pudgy you can go on overpass IP it's just in beta right now it's not at full launch yet and you could apply like if we look here right now I got overpass IP pulled up on the site if you have a pudgy penguin there is 50 spots you get

a 20% royalty if you are chosen so if your nft is chosen so far 1180 Pudgies have submitted an application for their pudgy to be chosen so pudgy Penguins will choose 50 of them and they will get a royalty percentage because their nft will be turned into a toy we've talked a lot about IP within nfts and how you manage IP licensing and we have not seen a solution yet that there's been Solutions but none of them have caught have made it big and have made it into the mainstream and this feels like the first one that'll actually be able to do that because although this is just pudgy toys pudgy penguin nfts right now the

plan is this is for any nft collection could use this right now it's just supporting ethereum but their plan is to support assets on other chains as well in the future so really exciting to see nice to see companies building through the bear love to see it what's going on over at Bitcoin Kai they getting a marketing budget over at Bitcoin yeah I it's just at the office the Bitcoin office there talking to the marketing team H kidding so but speaking of marketing Bitcoin does now have a marketing budget which is really cool and this comes from the largest traditional finance companies in the world so one of the things that is really good about the Bitcoin ETFs getting improved is you know we talk a lot about the demands in the flows and is there a bunch of you know people going to buy Bitcoin and blah blah blah

but forgetting that I think that's more of like a secondary effect although like that is a big deal especially down the road the biggest thing is like it really legitimizes Bitcoin and hopefully in crypto in general but definitely Bitcoin and so companies and institutions can now start to build in Bitcoin and work with Bitcoin companies and do things and so for example especially when you have something like Black Rock who's powering the way well uh as soon as all this got approved um they went to Google and they actually did this before it was approved because this was there was already rumors that this was going to happen and they went and talk Google and said hey we want to be able to advertise our Bitcoin ETF Google notoriously has not had very favorable uh policies around running ads that have to do with crypto

and so they basically went to them said hey we have the CTF it's approved it's legitimate we've got the okay by the SEC we want to run ads for it and Google has changed their policy as a result to allow them to do that and so now if you type in Bitcoin ETF if you're in the US maybe another another jurisdictions as well you will see vanx ads and you will see I shares which is Black Rock Running ads so they're paying Google to promote their Bitcoin ETF black rock is literally spending money and a [ __ ] ton of money at that for people to come and buy Bitcoin uh and I think that is a really great thing what I like to see is Black Rock just will go and force other companies to become friendly towards Bitcoin and crypto overall so that they

can continue to push their products which sure that's good for Black Rock maybe other people don't love that so much but ultimately it's great for adoption of crypto and this is exactly what's going to happen when ethereum ETF gets approved as well also gets a marketing budget it's incredible to think about them as having marketing budgets but this is why there's so much attention that is going to come towards these Bitcoin and ethereum in the next few years okay let's go to network effects this is Network effects that play right here right when something has Lindy it's been around long enough there's enough people relying on it you have enough people that will spend money to make sure that it grows even more

even further that is what networks Network effects we talk about all the time but this is it in reality which is there are network effects to bitcoin BlackRock the biggest institution in the world for assets Center management is part of this and is now pushing it and spending money to push it that is very strong very strong Network effects ethereum will also get this very soon okay next up is openc see for sale so openc CEO Deon finser said in a email to a media personality that the nft platform is open-minded towards Acquisitions including its own so look whether or not this is news or not is is

debatable because he didn't say this in an interview he didn't say this publicly but he also knows exactly what he's doing when he's emailing some a reporter he knows that they're going to take this and run with this it's on the record so I think that you know I'm no surprise open had its struggles they haven't done great over the past few years despite being the absolute Behemoth that they were during nft Mania a few years ago and I think this is a strategic move by them to sort of leak that they are open to he said they're open to acquiring others but also saying indirectly hey if somebody wants to acquire us we're open

for business hey Tim Cook over at Apple or Elon Musk Twitter what do you think let's talk if they were to be acquired it would not be a crypto company that's acquires them because I mean they have hundreds of millions if not billions I forget of money that they've raised slash generated Revenue now obviously they've spent a bunch they've had to fire I think half their staff or whatever but they have a big big treasure as far as I know it's not public information so we don't know for sure but I imagine that they do they also are still the market leader at least on ethereum and a polygon a few other chains like they still are a big deal but like you said their team has just made so many bad moves I I don't know who would be big enough in crypto to buy this maybe

coinbase but they've already launched their own Marketplace and it didn't go so well so like I don't know if they care to do that like you said Apple I don't think Apple does this but maybe this is the play for a web two company to make their way into web 3 whether it's a Shopify or an Amazon I don't know we'll see very interesting I think that the reason that they did this is this is their way of signaling and I bet you they get a bunch of offers now that's my assumption but let's see let's go to usdt announced that their profit hit all-time highs so this is tether the company behind usdt the largest stable coin in the world and they made profit of 2.85 billion in the fourth quarter of

2023 let that sink in un willable there's a I guess a crypto company that could buy openc right there they're just printing money and actually because they will not be printing money once interest rates go down but that means bull market which means nfts go crazy and all of a sudden openc has a way to make a bunch of money so it would be a great idea for tether to buy open C or Circle but anyway I don't think they will because that would be just completely out of the blue but anyway tether is just I mean they have how much usdt is there 150 million or sorry billion billion dollars in yeah it's something like that I got to check out the market cap actually I'll do it now but it's somewhere around there so they're just I mean they make their money off of interest rates right

so interest rates at 5% they're making 5% on whatever that is about 100 billion is how much they have in usdt and so they're making 5% on that which is massive the other way that they make money because that's not 2.85 billion but the other way that they make money is they own a bunch of Bitcoin and is there another asset they owners mainly just Bitcoin oh gold they own gold they own but I mean gold has gold hasn't done much so I don't know why they own gold but anyway they also own a bunch of Bitcoin which obviously has done really well so they count this 2.5 billion as the unrealized profits that they've made on their assets that they hold as well I think they hold ethereum and things like that too so technically those are not like profits that they actually made

because they would have to sell to do that but either way there is for this perspective there's only 50 employees at tether and yet they're making $22.85 billion do in one quarter if you Ann annualize that that is over 10 billion doll and they have 50 employees that is the most ridiculous company in terms of profit I have ever seen and probably that has ever existed I think so that's nuts now again that's not going to last for forever because interest rates will have to go down but I mean obviously then their Bitcoin Holdings will go up like crazy so it's wild stable coins it's the future still waiting for the rest of the world to catch up maybe the circle IPO will attract more attention this year

obviously this is very beneficial for Circle to be able to show this number as they lead towards IPO yeah Circle makes I think somewhere between 200 and 300 million a quarter if I remember correct correctly we I looked at this a while ago so those aren't for shures but I know it's much less than tether but still really good and it's much smaller right there's 27 billion in market cap for usdc so tether is almost 4X the size of it but if usdc can gain some of that market share and grow because I think that market in general is going to grow massively and then if it can also take some market share from tether like that company could just be worth so much so yeah stable coins massive all right time for air drop Like It's Hot Kai it's air

drop season that's for sure bring us up to speed what's going on with various aird drops this week yeah so let's start this off talking a little bit about the biggest air drop that we've had in a long time if not ever and just sort of what it did and how the tech sort of worked alongside of it so I'm talking about Jupiter it launched yesterday January 31st interestingly what they did is they're also launching a Launchpad so that other tokens Can launch On Top Of Jupiter which makes sense because it's an exchange and what they wanted to do was test before they launched it was to a million wallets just under a million wallets the Jupe token and so obviously if that happened on ethereum or something you know a lot gasp would be crazy would apps be able to work would they be able to actually do their swap

to sell it and buy it and all this stuff like they had to kind of test this because you never had something this big on salana their last one which was pretty big was jeto and it was just 10,000 Walt so it wasn't very big so what they did is they launched a mean coin from the Jupiter team five days before Jupe and this meme coin was called when they gave it to everyone who's ever used Jupe so it was like a million plus people and you had three days to claim it that's it and then they were going to burn everything that was unclaimed and so their goal was let's just try to get a bunch of activity and see what the heck happens does salana work do the wallets work do the rpcs work does Jupiter work like what happened it went actually fairly

smoothly when everyone claimed when now they didn't have a million people claimed like they did for for Jupe it was much less because it was only I don't know like 10 bucks or something you could claim so it wasn't a lot but you had a definitely a reasonable amount of activity and salana did fine Jupiter did find what did happen though is Phantom the wallet that most people use broke and actually it happened when I went to go and look at my own Phantom Wallet not realizing what was going on with when and all of a sudden it said I had nothing in my Phantom wallet and I almost had a heart attack and turned out it was just because their servers were overblown and so all was good they fixed that and they were like okay we are working hard for the next 5 days to

figure out how to fix this for jup and so the Jupe air drop happened salana did well it did not go down in terms of like its transactions so if you actually go to the next one here their transactions continued as as normal so there was not really issues on the salana side however there was a lot of load on like the rpcs which is what I don't even really know how to explain it um but basically is um part of like what your wallet's going to use to make this all happen there was some increased load there and so bunch of people couldn't get their transactions through if you knew to switch to another RPC which there's a bunch you would have been fine most people don't know that so it looked like salana was down it was not but there was a bunch of transactions that didn't work

because of those rpcs so they need to fix some things but otherwise like fees for the most part were pretty good Phantom was completely fine but their competitor Soul flayer I think it's called they had issues so it went good but not great but ultimately like it was super cheap and as long as you were on the right RPC you could claim your tokens and all was well so the system the is working amazing which is great we haven't really had that before ethereum would always break binance would break l2s we haven't really had a big air drop on so we don't know what's going to happen there but overall that is really really good to see in terms of the tokens themselves people made thousands on Jupe some made way more than that the token did fairly well but then it's kind of gone down ever since so it's sitting

at 58 cents at the moment it was up by like 70 cents or more for a little bit there part of why this is happening is there was some fud or some confusion I think around those who were claiming the token so you can look on chain so you can see the Jupiter wallets and what's going on there and they actually sold something like 200 or 250 million dollar worth of Jupe so a significant amount and people were like what the hell like this token should have went much higher but the team themselves sold hundreds of millions of dollars this makes no sense I haven't been able to look through all of it yet because we just haven't had time before we started recording here but basically from what I read is they had a race that they were doing throughout this and they had said this

publicly that they were going to be selling a certain amount of tokens because they're raising it for the treasury Etc and it would not exceed 250 million or whatever the number was and it stops after seven days so like this was publicly announced and known most people obviously don't read the details Al they didn't know but all of a sudden people saw it was happening on Chum and started flagging it and everyone started going nuts on Twitter they're like guys we told everyone this just most of you didn't actually pay attention and it seems like what they're doing is like some new way of raising I don't fully understand it just yet but they think that this is going to be a new revolutionary way for people to like raise capital and whatever I don't know honestly I don't know enough so I'm not going to say an opinion either way seems

a bit odd that they would sell this much on the day of the launch so I don't know a lot of people are like well they just kept the price lower than it should be and so I think there's been a lot of fun people have been selling look jupe's an amazing company amazing product I would assume that if youve have your tokens or you are going to buy them now probably going to go up from here I would assume but I don't know honestly we don't really know what's going on right now so bit of a weird situation going on over in Jupiter with that we have more aird drops a bunch of airdrops and if you guys are not currently trying to farm aird drops it doesn't take that much of your time and it is so worth it people were asking in our Discord like Kyle why

are you doing it you say not to risk things like what are you doing like why are you trying to risk some of your capital and I just want to say like I only use a little bit of my Capital so like less than 10% of my e or less than 10% of my soul kind of thing I'm using to farm air drops so it's not a significant amount by any means and also like the returns you get so like in the last two months I made $110,000 on jup or sorry not on Jupe on um jeto and that came from just putting hundreds of dollars in jeto now that's not going to happen very often so like that's too much I wouldn't expect that but then for example Manta I made $2,500 on and I used four eth so less than $110,000 an eth for about 60 days which made 25%

return on that in 60 days even though eth has not moved in the last two months as I talked about I made 25% right and so that's pretty damn good and then I've had some other ones of just like alt layer I think it got like $250 not a lot but like whatever then when was like a hundred bucks in total after and I don't know a few others I can't even remember and so like it adds up and it's not that big of a Time consumption by any means and again it's a small amount and then the other thing is the ones there are million air drops the ones that we share with you are ones that have backings from like the big players in the space and so like the risk of these ones is very limited there's risk that maybe you don't get a bunch of your airdrop but

like whatever doesn't hurt you just unfortunately you wouldn't get a bunch unless you pay a lot of fees but so like I take the very lowrisk ones and again it's with a smaller amount of my portfolio so it's not that big of a deal but there's potential to make a lot of money right now so it's it's wild to not do that anyway let's go over a couple new ones that are happening this week Meteora which we talked about in the salon airdrop guide in our newsletter they have finally announced that they are doing this we kind of guessed they were going to theyve announced that it's now starting it doesn't show on their site yet so I don't know what's going on but they're launching a token called me I forget the date that it's happening but the points should show up soon and

if you're riding liquidity it's another like margin fire Camino that we've talked about a bunch it's basically one of those so tokens will be coming from that you can use your salon jeto soul to farm that air drop so I would recommend that The Ether fi which we've talked about a bunch which is a reaking look what do you call this an R st whatever it is whatever the word is here but liquid staking tokens but reaking liquid tokens I can't think of the name right now but you get it if you want to restake you can do it but you can use ether five you get E eth Liquid reaking token that's it gez anyway they've been around for a while we've talked to them about them a bunch and but what they're doing now is what's called a mega week so from January 31st to February 10th

they are doubling down and distributing three million of their igen layer points so when you hold e e using either fi you get to farm The Ether F points and igen layer points right but they've made a bunch of igen layer points and now they're redistributing that to their users so if you put e in or you already have you're going to make extra points as a result extra ethery points and igen layer so if you haven't used I ethery yet I would highly recommend you go do it it's one swap for your eth into ethery and boom you're farming two air drops and you get to hold it in your wallet so it's a great opportunity I'm using a bunch of that there's a link in the show notes for you to do that watch out there will be a bunch of spam links

so probably use that link it is a referral for me so it does help me but more so just don't get your wallet drained and click the wrong links and then the last one we'll talk about today is mode another L2 we talked about Manta andall that one and that was pretty good for anyone who did that mode is a new one that exists that just launched yesterday and they're doing some kind of cool stuff so we talked about all the Innovations that's going to happen on l2s mode is basically doing this thing where they are going to be sharing sequencer Revenue so fee sharing with the apps that are building on top of mode so if you're a developer and you're building an app you will make a revenue stream from people just transacting on top of mode networks on top of that L2

which is really cool and then also people that refer others to bridge on they can make uh Revenue as well from the sequencer so from transactions so they're now sharing the revenues with the users and the developers on the L2 which is really really cool something we haven't seen before they are built using the op stack and uh a bunch of cool stuff that's going on but right now you can if you've used layer tws in the past or you've bought nfts or you've done things on ethereum or l2s you already get points you then have to bridge over to mode Network to access those points and then you'll be farming from there you can use things on their L2 whatever if you want to get more points so this aird drop's coming in April and so you've got a couple months to farm that

all you gotta do is move some ether across there also a link in the show notes so that you don't get spammed just do that and you can Bridge across it's pretty straightforward so that's really cool and that's it for all the air drops but there's so much love it thanks Kai let's go to the final segment of the show and our favorite agree disagree explain where we go through tweets and hot takes from the past week and we talk about whether we agree disagree with them or some of them we need to explain first up this is a tweet from aror he says staking is the key to making six figures in the next six to 12 12 months so it is the key to definitely getting the most out of this

cycle one because obviously if you're staking you're making an extra apy if it's salana you're making 7% to 8% apy if it's eth you're making three or four it's like okay those are good but really the reason that this is true right now is those that are staking a lot of the newer tokens like Tia and adom and I don't know whatever else injective you get a bunch of aird drops right those who are reaking their eth gets a bunch of air drops we' talked about that and so staking tends to be the way that one it forces you to hold on to the better assets the good assets and so like I don't think staking anything and everything is a great idea especially if it's in some random di5 protocols but staking the big assets like eth and soul and maybe Tia Tia or sui like yeah

you're GNA hold these assets anyway why not get the extra API and potentially aird drop Farm now what I would say is if you're staking in random D5 protocols not the greatest idea if you're using the sort of native way to stake which you can do with soul or whatever holding liquid staking tokens or doing it natively yourself then I would say this is much safer a lot less risk and you definitely have potential to make a lot of money the sixf figure side of things like it just depends on how much Capital you're putting in so I don't necessarily agree with that but there's no doubt that in a bull market you should probably be staking these assets why not okay next up this is from qw he says I'm slowly Coming to Terms the idea that anticipating memes and narratives over a 3 to 18month time Horizon is the most

important skill to succeed in public crypto markets very difficult to appreciate for the idealists or former trafi folks yeah I actually agree with this completely I mean Jay and I used to really be against memec coins and all the speculative stuff and then about a year ago is we sort of changed our tune and we're like you know what this is actually a feature not a bug of crypto and I mean uh in the cycle last year it was all about narratives if you're in a bull market if you were early to any narrative you did really really well now I don't trade frequently so like I don't try to jump in and out of all these narratives at all sometimes I'll do it with a small like very small amount of my portfolio just more for fun and because it feeds my inter inner de gen

and because I do that it makes me not do it with 99% of my portfolio which is great but I like if you are trading and you're trying to like get some Alpha in this space understanding memes and understanding these narratives is just so massive now this isn't true in a bare Market you need to probably just hold on to the majors and not do anything or get out completely and just hold on to stable coins but in Bull markets these narratives especially when retail comes in which they're not fully here yet these narratives just they move massively and if you can be early in them like the AI narrative that's happened over the last six to nine months like these tokens have just gone nuts and so if you can get early in those like it's a massive way to make good money in this space but again I

don't trade frequently so to me the crazy thing is you never previously if you wanted to be an investor in a company it had to go public and a company wouldn't go public until it was a large respectable company but now with meme tokens you can have a company and I'm putting company in air quotes that Launches on basically just a photo of a dog or a photo of a cat or a photo of a dog with a hat and if you can get enough people talking about that then you can create a narrative and that narrative can fly and a lot of people can make a lot of money and that never used to

exist so I really agree with his point that this is very difficult for trafy folks to get their minds around it's a different way of trading and understanding how markets move which is going to be difficult for them to understand yeah and also this this idea of crypto is just so like I mean it's so Global and just like it never closes and so there's just the game never stops trafi Game Stops from you know like after 8 to 12 or or sorry 8 to five or whenever the stock markets are open after that it stops right it never stops in crypto and it's completely Global so like these money just moves so freely and so the they can jump around from different narratives to memes and if you can be on top of that it's a hell of a skill but not easy that's for sure

fulltime job okay next up a great tweet from Hayden Adams the founder of Unis swap he says can't believe the current industry meta is tokens but we removed the transfer function and tracked them all in an off database yeah I mean do I agree do I disagree look I think points are a great thing I think they've brought a lot of fun back into the space I don't want to say loyalty it's just a nice way to gamify people using your products and bring liquidity around and so like it makes sense did it need to be on chain no I don't know why people or like token or points have to be on chain like who cares it's these points are just points they're not things that are going to last for forever it's a game to

get people to come use your app and then you reward them afterwards why does that thing need to be Unchained as long as the reward is Unchained that's the purpose of this I don't know why people care if points are on chained I don't think they need to be on chained it's just an add up cost for no reason I recommend everybody go listen to our podcast that came out on Tuesday with Zach her wagen from snag Solutions where we talk all about points and why everyone is launching points right now tldr tokenomics are very difficult it's social science as much as an economic exercise to nail tokenomics and what points allows right now offchain points is delaying tokenomics it allows you to

test different actions in order to see what works with points and what doesn't work and then you can nail your tokenomics it also allows you to delay regulatory issues because if you're an American company and you go straight to tokenomics There's issues that you might face with regulator Regulators whereas if you just do points it's offchain and the also we also talk about how the way a lot of people are designing points is with the vision of bringing them on chain and turning them into tokens in the future so I don't know I kind of disagree with what Hayden Adams is saying here yeah I mean aird drops are only a couple years old we don't know

them that well yet we still need to experiment and learn and like you said you don't necessarily want to do that on chain where it's mutable and you can't go back it'd be like you want to get a tattoo and you're trying to figure out what you should get and you just start actually tattooing yourself while you figure out what you want like no you draw it first until you come like oh there's the good idea now I'll get the actual permanent one like I see points is the same thing completely agree okay we got next one from nft stats he says I'm a bit surprised by the headlines going around celebrating that 3% of all Bitcoin is held by ETFs according to Hill Dobby Dash below that was already true before the ETF was approved because GB gbtc already had so much Bitcoin since then total BTC and ETS has gone

from 616,000 to 618,000 hardly up at all yeah I mean that's the explanation for those that didn't see there was a lot of people around Twitter that were sharing this chart it wasn't even really a chart just a number saying that 3% of Bitcoin is held in ETFs and people like well that's fast that happened in you know two weeks or whatever we are already at 3% so nothing changed nothing changed okay last one vo wrap here this is from Tang Yen he says being relentlessly optimistic even when nothing seems to be working right or when people tell you otherwise is key to success not just in crypto but also in life optimism always wins bullish op

token just kidding um I completely agree I think I don't see why anyone would live their life in a pessimistic way it doesn't really make sense to me bad things are always going to happen but you should probably just be optimistic about them because good things are also going to happen you can choose your mindset and if it's pessimistic just seems lonely and sad whereas if it's optimistic one you're probably going to sort of attract the energy of more optimistic things and more optimistic people and like more of that energy so I think like more good things probably happen to you because you're sort of attracting that and you're think through that if you're pessimistic you're saying no to a lot of things you're saying no to a lot of opportunities and like maybe you said no to something bad that could

have happened so like okay that's one good thing but like for the most part I think as long as you stay optimistic good things are going to continue to happen to you and it's just like a lot less stressful way to go about life I also saw a tweet that's funny that you did chose this one Jay I saw a tweet this morning I think it was and it was like does anyone know any Rich Bears I don't know any Rich bear like people that are bears in markets he's like they're not rich they don't make any money right if you're if you're a bear all the time you're not making any money which is true because markets go up over like the long term they they end up just going up so you might as well just be optimistic I don't know where this quote

came from initially but I heard I first heard it from Elon Musk he he says I'd rather be an optimist and be wrong than be a pessimist and be right and that exactly sums it up perfectly for me that's a wrap everybody thanks so much for listening and if you're still listening we appreciate you if you want more discussion on any of today's topics join our Discord where we chat every day with our community about how you can get in on airdrops how to stay safe what news matters and how to stay on top of this crazy onchain world that is in constant transformation we appreciate you all we hope you all have a fantastic weekend we'll see you next week thank

you for listening to web through Academy your one trusted source to capitalize on the next big phase of the internet if you enjoyed this episode please share it and subscribe or follow so that you don't miss the next one while you're at it there's a link in the description for our free newsletter where we provide timely and relevant web 3 insights so you can confidently build and invest in web 3 make sure to subscribe today one final note this podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice crypto and web3 are risky and you should never invest more than you're willing to lose thank you friends and see you in the next one