The Memecoin Dilemma: Fueling Adoption or Derailing Progress? | Analyst Round Table

Transcript

it's offering like 30% apy and you're seeing like 18% of that return or 18% apy is sitting in ether fi tokens we got to restart this this I got to put this cat outside meowing up a [Laughter] storm the cat thinks the valuation is too high yeah before we get into today's episode just a quick disclaimer the views expressed on this podcast by either myself or any guests are their personal views and do not represent the views of any Associated organization nothing in this episode should be construed or

relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice all right let's jump into the episode what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerox research the blockworks research team is back to bring you another episode of an analyst round table today is Monday March 18th and today we are joined by Ryan a new face of the block research team and ZX pibbles um Ren how about I kick it over to you to discuss some of the latest news and governance updates definitely thank you Sam so for the first news and governance update it's zerion I don't know how to pronounce the name zerion announc announces an L2 uh I'm not really sure what a wallet needs an L2 for but apparently they're going

to subsidize users transactions I also don't think zaren is like a that wide to use as a wallet but it seems like everyone's launching in L2 so I guess it'll be interesting to see a wallet um sort of launch in L2 to sort of new jerk reaction is that a wallet does kind of have like the distribution in crypto because everyone interacts with crypto through a wallet so you know if like metam Mas launched an L2 I think it would actually be pretty powerful and you can think of I guess a coinbase wallet they launch your 02 base so this might be a fun experiment but yeah we'll see um another news governance update is that Starbucks shuttering or is shuttering their nftd Odyssey platform it's going to close the last day of

March I think it was one of the relatively hype deals that occurred in the last bull market I know there was a lot of like talk behind the scenes about like how much was really spent on that deal and I do think it was quite a high sum but yeah um NF customers could earn through the AY program and then they could earn stamps I know this was a crowd favorite for Sam um but yeah these n ofs are now going to be transferred to the NFD platform Nifty Gateway where they can continue to be bought and sold I think it's a bit disappointing that they're shutting this down I feel like it was a fun experiment but I feel like we're going to see a lot more of these like Customer Loyalty fan engagement type of like nft programs in the coming yours any thoughts on those two news

updates I feel kind of attacked here I know pibbles is a sucker for Starbucks LTE as well so I'm I'm definitely going to call you out there two pibbles but uh yeah kind of disappointed in this one obviously there just like wasn't very good traction to be honest the ux was like super clunky like the last thing I want to do is log into my website browser check out my wallet on polygon and like trade these little stamp nfts so I I definitely understand why they're shutting it down it there like wasn't product Market fit there like the most you got was like a free coffee and that that took like a ton of stamps that you had to collect I'm pretty sure I paid like $1,000 dollar for one of these stamps too that are probably worth nothing now but nevertheless sad to see

it but uh at least they gave it the old College try I guess the Odyssey was a lot of work too like it was like watch this 2hour documentary on the origin of our beans and then take a quiz about it to get a stamp and like you have to get a ton of stamps to get the slightest reward so um I I quit after the first week yeah as did I uh I I admit that I didn't use used the product I like logged in once I picked I think I became like a tiger or something and then I immediately logged off um I think the takeaway for me though is that um these like Web Two web 3 Partnerships are really hard to pull

off especially on the consumer side like I think about like gamei and Defi and the reason that they worked to any degree I think is that they were built by crypto native teams and if you look at like early internet or early mobile apps the really successful ones were all like the native teams like early internet Amazon eBay Yahoo PayPal right like Banks could have easily entered payments but they didn't uh a net new startup had to like enter that Marketplace and same thing on mobile like Instagram WhatsApp like Spotify right like apple was Miles Ahead of Spotify in terms of like music distribution and streaming and they still lost out uh they were beaten by um like a mobile native startup and um and

and Starbucks just wasn't native enough I think I do think that there's an opportunity to try this again but maybe a few months down the road with like a much better user experience I'm sure we gave people like a free pumpkin spice latte and then they can create like a wallet to like ZK login instead of like creating their own wallet with like a 12w seed face like that'll probably be a much better user experience and make it like like like a Robin Hood Type interface you know like you like swipe to like sell your nft you don't need to like approve transactions and whatnot um but yeah I guess good luck Starbucks a few other news and governance updates um the My Lady treasury was drained of 110 nfts as a result the floor price I think

is 20% lower than where it was before it was drained a grab which is sort of like uber of Southeast Asia allows for crypto onramp options now via triaa you can use BTC e x SGD uscc and your C and I think that's like a pretty nice uh uh a pretty nice option for a lot of people because a lot of the time just the offramp process is quite a pain in the ass to be honest so just sending it to a product or service that you use commonly and being able to pay for that in crypto is a pretty big unlock and another thing that occurs along that front is I think the nosis pay cards are starting to go out and so far I've heard like relatively okay things about them I know some people have mentioned like they're

getting like really really big slippage when they're transferring or swapping from like another sort of stable coin that's in another currency but it'll probably take some time before those really take off polyhedra CL a 20 million strategic funding round at $1 billion so this feels like another like really high valuation for sort of like middleware infrastructure and I wouldn't be surprised just looking at the state of the market and where the worm air drop is probably going to launch at um but yeah any thoughts on those three bullet points I got a question on Paul hedra what even are they building exactly it's like been too long I'm almost afraid to ask at this

point so P just main product if I'm not wrong is uh ZK bridge and the ZK Bridge basically operates across multiple networks and it's not just like one VM it's across like evm chains um and also Bitcoin so for example I think they're going to leverage igen layer to sort of build build out interoperability between Bitcoin and ethereum if I'm not wrong but yeah it's like ZK bridging think of it as like Wormhole is interested in like a ZK sort of like end game so I think probably he just like trying to work towards that right now I guess but yeah ZK bridging is the tldr but all right

moving on to some last news and governance updates 444 was finally implemented congratulations eum with a pretty minim hiccups outside of a slight uptick in Miss slots and vorks and I think the cost of L2 transactions has dropped at least in order of magnitude across all rollups which is pretty pretty damn good you know uh I feel like it's always very very impressive when ethereum pulls off these like live upgrades considering ethereum's this massive Network it's a complicated system and you're just upgrading it on the flight it's like really really impressive another news in governance update is that the Avo airdrop is underway so if you have go and claim your AO token and lastly the BTC micro strategy pair

trade Michael strategy has absolutely ran it up turbo in the last few weeks um so micro strategy is up while BTC was down likely due to traders long BTC and shorting micro strategy as Market participants expected the premium applied to micro strategy would dissolve post ETF approval but that just has not happened as Michael sailor announced his private offering after private offering it kind of feels like a infinite money glitch I know it's not an infinite money glitch but it kind of feels like an infinite money glitch any comments on those yeah I had sailor on the the cool Throne last week it's just pretty wild that he's able to run up the equity price and then do more you know

convertiable notes and essentially leverage that high Equity value in order to basically Finance more Bitcoin purchases so good on him over there in terms of 4844 my main takeaway is if you're not experimenting at the VM level as a rollup then you need to start if you're not like the arbitrum or optimism of the world because obviously they've established some T of some type of uh Network effect in community but if you just look at Raw performance like we're still seeing fees at the L2 level grind higher just because of the constraints of the evm at the execution layer and not necessarily the L1 settlement costs of these l2s so very excited to see things like manad uh Eclipse there's all sorts of other uh projects kind of

experimenting a little bit in the VM space at the L2 level so excited to watch this play out over this cycle I think they'll be big Winners yeah following on that it feels like we've hit a point with celesa and Igan da probably coming online sometime later this year where perhaps da isn't constrained for l2s anymore it's execution so it'll be interesting to see how L2 sort of like tackle that as especially considering that most l2s have like a centralized sequencer today and it'll be interesting to see if they sort of like boost up the execution component of the L2 but all right uh we're going to move

on to our dydx segment this week and this week we have skip protocol all right guys welcome to this week's dydx segment this week we have mag co-founder of skip thank you so much for coming on mag thanks friend appreciate it all right so getting straight to it skip received the ground from dydx to Monitor and analyze Sovereign me within the dydx ecosystem could you talk a little bit more about the partnership and the efficacy of the order book discrepancy dashboard that you guys have built yeah sure uh so I think a large part of it was just realizing like what is meev on an order book right this was a question that I don't think anyone had really explored prior to us looking at it with dydx research and I think what

we discovered was you know when you have a chain with multiple different validators the difference in how those validators order their orders or how they process them is actually very indicative of how much me is being extracted so this concept of order book discrepancy actually serves as a very good proxy for figuring out what me is and the dashboard you know has been live for a while and I think one really cool thing that we've noticed is validators have come to us asking us how to reduce their amount of order book discrepancy which one decreases meev but then two just makes for a better trading experience and it's come to the you know there have been a couple cases where people exceeded the you know socially allowed amount of order book discrepancy

and those folks have taken extra measures to make sure they've reduced it so at a minimum it served as a great way of like making these metrics more transparent and for folks to realize how they're doing along these lines okay that's super interesting I wouldn't have guessed um that badad would come to you asking how to reduce their discrepancy but that that kind of makes sense whether that's like malicious or not malicious another super exciting thing that you guys are working on is stinky which you guys announced earlier this year could you walk us through what that is and why it's so important yeah so we're big Believers in building tooling that allows for Sovereign chains more powerful and Slinky is exactly that right so

basically what Slinky allows you to do is to uh build your own restak native Oracle that uses your own validator set to run and retrieve your own Oracle prices um it's also heavily geared towards performance and so it can deliver you know upwards of a thousand uh currency pairs on a per on a per block basis with very little latency and so in many ways it was almost custom designed for DDX uh it was built with their needs in mind and you know we're we're actively working with the DX team to explore you know whether it's a viable option to actually run the Oracle on bdx um but at a minimum what it should allow for is tons and tons of new

permissionless markets in a much more uh in a much more uh verifiable and Safe Way and so that's one thing that we're really excited to work on with the idx is how do we get the idx from you know 75 markets to over 10,000 yeah that's super exciting I think permissionless listings are a great thing and I think reducing the sort of like trust assumptions that you need to have for example like most prexes they need to have like another set of trust assumptions with the oracle and so just bringing that inhouse and trusting the same batt data set seems like a very natural thing to do I think one last question I wanted to ask is what's the update on the Block SDK you guys released that a while back and I was super interested in the entire

concept of it and it seems like etherum like slowly trying to move in that direction and so I want to ask has anyone adopted it and how are applications using it right now yeah uh so the block CK was a little bit of a departure from our normal way of Building Product uh it's a fully open- Source SDK that allows for chains to you know split up their block into different lanes that have different ordering and execution rules um we've seen two chains adopted uh so osmosis and neutron are both you know uh shipping with the block SDK in their most recent releas or their next release and the main use case we've seen for it right now is enabling for enabling free transactions so basically uh having a

dedicated amount of block space that is given to uh types of transactions and types of actors that should be sub that this the network wants to subsidize right we've also seen a lot of use for the meev lane so the concept of you know Sovereign me or recapturing me profit for your community instead of letting it leak out of the system has been very popular and the way that that's implemented in the block SDK is via top block auction so those two things have been very uh popular I think the Hub is right like right around the corner from launching with the block SDK to have an EIP 1559 fee Market um which should you know reduce some of their congestion issues and especially in periods of high

load makes it a lot harder to Doss the network gotcha that's super exciting to hear unfortunately that's all we have time for today but thank you so much for coming on mag and now moving on to our hot seed C drone segment moving on to this week's hot seat Kone segment uh zerox pivos I'm going to throw it over to you this week first yeah I'm going to start with a cool Throne it's ethery which is liquid reaking so I just wrote a report uh probably about a month ago on um liquid staking for ethereum and how it's a cash flow machine and today was a good morning to wake up and see The Ether fire a drop they just raised like 35 mil

a few weeks ago in their second round and then they launched this ether fi governance token uh at like a four Bill valuation I think it's like around 400 mil circulating market cap um but ether fry has just been like a really great product to use over the past year for staking ethereum um particularly because you get IG layer points as well as ether points which have now converted to a token they also launched a new um it's a new strategy I think it's called liquid and it auto deploys your Stak eth in ether into like various defi strategies I think I saw a tweet that was like ether's launch price today is like a

20,000x return for for seed investors which is pretty insane um they also launched a new like defi strategy today so you can take your staked eth and ethery and it will go into a vault and it auto deploys into various defi strategies like on Pendle um it's paying 30% apy where 18% of that is is more ethery tokens and then 12% of that is like actual native eth and you continue to earn more ethery and Ian layer points so it it's kind of like a nice suite for like people who want ethereum exposure but don't want to have to actively manage what they're actually doing with that yeah I feel like that felt very fast I felt like I

would have expected a lot of these like LRT protocols to sort of push out or like prolong the tokens as fast as possible but I mean like if you're just looking at all of the valuations that a lot of these air drops are launching at and I feel like considering the amount of tvl in their protocol they're probably thinking that you're not going to get much more like marginal tvl even with like additional incentives or additional points or whatever so you might as well just launch the points now and be sort of like the first LRT protocol with a live token and everyone will look at that and then they'll probably go okay this is the only LT with a token I'm going to ape it because this I need like my LRT protocol like exposure and so yeah I think overall it's a good move it's interesting to see

them launch that sort of like automated yield strategy uh I think over the past year we've seen protocols such as like Somer do quite well with sort of like yield Vault and yield management so it'll be interesting to see how much people ape into the yield strategies and I think it makes sense considering that you're depositing e into all of these protocols and I can layer for yield anyway that's kind of the whole premise that you're providing security and in return you get like some tokens which you can think of as yield and so they might as well like manage that e or the e e for you and sort of try to generate additional yield on top of it I'll be really interested to see once I can ler launches how these LRT protocols

differentiate themselves will they have like a different basket of abss will they ultimately all have the same basket of abss since there's probably like a soci like good basket version of ABS is like it'll probably be obvious to most people like which ones are like BS and which ones are good so it'll be interesting to see those Dynamics play out and whether it'll be like a winner take all Market or there'll be for example like 10 LT protocols one year from now I just pulled up the Lio chart just kind of like looking at the market cap at two and a half billion versus ether F's 4 billion pibbles would you say this is like under or overvalued if you had to put a put a rating on it ethery probably

overvalued it it just depends like like Ren said with like the AVS strategy so like obviously this like liquid strategy Vault they just launched it kind of lays like the preliminary architecture for a managed ABS Vault where you just deposit your eth to be restak and then they kind of like Auto pick depending on like your risk Tolerance on like what ABS is you want to help direct your eth to secure on a similar note for um liquid reaking I'll talk a little bit about one of my hot seed Cru drones then um swell which is another liquid reaking protocol they have around 840 million in tvl um and they both have a liquid staking

token and a liquid reaking token so between those two in total they have around one billion in tvl uh rather than launching a token theyve decided to launch a restake rollup um so like everyone else is rollup season and I think this just keeps on happening as much as our friend and analyst Dan Smith is so sick of l2s launching again and again um but yeah the spe R has a few benefits which I I think this part is like relatively interesting for what it's worth um since it's a restake roll up and they I guess will be able to provide like several I'm not sure if ABS is is the right term here but several like features within their vake devel up so for example decentralized sequencing decentralized verification and using

sort of IG layer for a fast finality there I think it'll be interesting to see what that looks like I feel like all three of these are a little bit of like buzz wordss that we haven't seen go live into production yet um although I know n has like a fast finality later but yeah I mean if you just think about it from like a logical perspective if blast was the L2 that's built for like native taking yield then the obvious evolution of that was that there was going to be an L2 built with Native reaking yield I think it's really obvious that that would have happened sooner later I wouldn't be too surprised to see blast like eventually incorporate ltis of some sort um down the road once it's sort of like a bit more established but yeah I

think SW has mentioned that they're going to have all of like the familiar D5 Primitives but they're probably also going to have primatives built on Native staking and reaking yield and the native gas token of their chain will be rwe which is their liquid raking token not their liquid staking token and I feel like that that was an a relatively interesting choice to be honest cuz their liquid staking token has a TV of 840 million versus their liquid reaking token of that has a TV of roughly 150 million so it could be a bid to sort of increase the TV of the liquid sing token increase the adoption and sort of its utility around its own defi Eco system

but I'll be really interested to see what type of dabs launch there to be honest I'm struggling Beyond like the normal like you know dexes money markets maybe like a per Dex with liquid resing token as collateral uh but yeah let's just see how this experiment plays out and um it's going to use ion da and it's going to be built using the polygon ZK evm yeah I can't wait to farm the swell swap air drop and swell end it's going be good stuff um it it's cool to see them launch this L2 strategy along with every else and I know like ether fight also put an L2 in their road map uh I think it's pretty safe to say blockworks

research is going to have its own L2 uh by the end of the year just for fun I think going completely off topic here but another thing that you're seeing or you're starting to see is l2s not just on ethereum like on salana too and I feel like just L2 season is going to get CER and CER like everyone on even if it doesn't make sense it's just going to launch an L2 I think by the end of the year mer probably can to get brain damage of some form if he already doesn't have any damage from all of the l2s that of launched but for example Zeta markets is launching his own L2 on salana grass is launching its own L2 on salana I think you can make an argument

for like those two like kind of make sense um but you know on the other hand you've also seen people sort of take the svm and build out their own kind of L1 so for example like piff piff has their own network built using the svm so it's interesting to see that choice between l2s and L1 and I don't think we have a lot of salana l2s today if any at all so it'll be interesting to see what that user experience looks like compared to sort of like ethereum l2s yeah I think the biggest question here is do they actually work um like if if you're seeing like tons of transaction is getting dropped on salana and every block right now what happens

when you're an L2 on salana and you're trying to like just function as a chain yeah I I got to go back and like study up on this but I feel like I've like seen Anatoli say multiple times like I don't know why you would build an L2 on Sala like you you don't like you wouldn't get any benefits per se but yeah I I don't have enough knowledge on why you would need to build a salana L2 to actually have like an intelligent take here to be be honest I think the reason stated for at least the grass L2 is that the amount of data or transactions they will need to process in order to support the entire like decentralized AI like information

gathering stack is just orders of magnitudes larger than whatever like salana is able to support today and so that's the reason they need an L2 cuz I mean like sure sana's like put is pretty good today if off the top of my head just trying to think of like the TPS non-vote tps's it's probably around like I want to say 800 to a th000 and I can definitely see like there's some crazy use cases out there which require a much higher DPS than that um but yeah that sort of set of protocols or applications that really need that level of like performance and through is probably very very limited and I know there's like a number that's thrown out there in terms

of sana's like da capacity um and I know that number is wrong but I think the number that was thr around was like 150 uh mb per second but I know that specifically refers to like something else so realistically it's probably a lot lower than that um but yeah like da probably definitely is not the constraint for salana l2s it's probably going to be execution too roping this back into swell too like what is the difference between ether and swell are they more or less competing within the same vertical would you guys say yeah I think they're like basically the same um the only difference right now is like ethery already uses obal to

implement like DVT I'm not sure if swell has something like that gotcha well I can take it over with my cool Throne this week I've got Shuffle uh it just concluded its LBP it launched with about $10 million of liquidity paired with usdc on ethereum mainnet Shuffle is a gambling application that supports like Casino like games like slots and crabs Blackjack Etc as well as a sports book for things like college basketball NFL NBA Etc all the sports you'd expect to see on a traditional book it launched at a $35 million market cap or roughly $600 million fdv apparently a jump tagged address uh participated in the LBP and

deposited 1 million into there so they're basically running in my eyes the dydx Playbook kind of like a low float high fdv in order to keep the value of incentives really high and keep volume coming back uh and trading for more to get those incentives and I view that as kind of attractive in relation to other gamble five projects that we've seen in the past it's either been yes they have a token to use for incentivization but they kind of have that cold start problem and can't really get the volume uh and the the incentives value therefore suffer and then with roll bit we saw them obviously explode around six to 12 months ago but they do not really have a token that they can use to incentivize so I've been looking for a project like this and I feel like

Shuffle checks a lot of the boxes they did about $150 million of volume the other day this is likely inflated due to the airdrop occurring but nonetheless $150 million of volume is a lot I also like the way they designed their airdrop so basically if you uh um bet on the platform between February 2023 and February 24 you got an air drop based on the amount of volume that you actually beted but what I liked about this is that 20% was available on tge but then the remaining 80% vests over three months with the exception that if you bet more volume then your airdrop vest is expedited and you can actually use

the shuffle tokens to bet on the platform which uh in my opinion just ultimately means that people who received an airdrop will likely gamble it away as opposed to selling it on dex's because gamblers like to gamble um 15% of the non Shuffle denominated Revenue will be used to buy back and burn the token and 30% of the shuffle denominated Revenue will also be used to buy back and burn the token so just running some backup napkin numbers if you assume like a 5% or even a 1% margin on the 150 mil volume that'd be you know $7 million of Revenue in seven days so I think people are underestimating the the amount of Buybacks in Burns this hasn't

actually taken place yet I checked the burn address this morning but I think that we will see people threading about this one in the coming weeks could definitely be wrong not Financial advice but I've just been looking for a gamble five project because I find the product Market fit with crypto to be absolutely perfect and just no one's kind of nailed this on the head yet but curious if you guys have any thoughts I think it's looking pretty healthy uh strong on liquidity this is my first time looking at the chart um disgustingly low float like I think this is a a banger play I would like to buy this security I I got a quick question um you mentioned that 20% is available post tge

and 80% investing then in the over 3 months for the speeding up part is it only with uh volume that you wager like post tge or is it like looking at the volume that you had pre tge yeah just post tge volume so you're kind of incentivized to bet more in order to get your tokens you probably lose you get your tokens you're like all right I'm going to make it all back in one bet and then you lose that then all of a sudden Shuffle tokens are getting burned that's kind of that's kind of the thesis in a nutshell gotcha and then is it like um it accelerates the burn based on like uh sorry it accelerates the vesting based on like cures if you bet more than like $10,000 it like vest like two weeks earlier if you bet more than $100,000 it

vest like like one month earlier like what does it look like it's something like that I'll be honest I haven't looked into it cuz I didn't personally get the airdrop because this is like they're very very strict on their terms of services like they will kick you off of the platform if you bet more than like 500 bucks so that's another reason why I'm actually kind of bullish on this project like it seems like they are actually following the rules unlike a lot of other you know competitors so I I would just like to see a well-run and actually compliant gambling platform that integrates crypto and and Shuffle seems to be the number one Contender there I also believe uh the Founder's brother is the founder of manad I'm I'm pretty sure I don't think I'm messing

that up but that's like kind of another good sign you know this guy's well connected and knows what he's doing in the crypto space gotcha gotcha and I don't gamble it at all so I'm G to have a lot of questions one more question I want to ask is you mentioned that you can wager sorry I gamble but I don't do like gambling in terms of like Shuffle type Gam let me let me clarify that um you mentioned that you can use um Shuffle to wager so for example like I don't know you want to bet on like yesterday's like FA Cup match between Manu and Liverpool are there two separate po there like one is like a shuffle denominated like order book and there's another like USD denominated order book or like what does that look like specifically or is it just like

using Shuffle as a collateral you would use Shuffle as the collateral and all the bets are Deni nominated in USD so I'm not sure how that actually operates under the hood I'll be completely honest there's a good bit of opacity in the the design of Shuffle like that's another one of the main tips with rbit it's like we can't actually see what's going on here they're supposed to be releasing an analytics dashboard that gives more insights into the specific types of wager volume Revenue burn Etc things like that so definitely looking forward to that but in terms of how it works on the back end like it does give me mango like Vibes like letting people you know bet on your platform with the native token so not sure how they actually translate that into dollars on the back

end whether they sell the tokens for dollars right when they receive them because there is like a deposit and withdrawal like you can deposit from any chain you can be on salana you can be on ethereum Etc just deposit into the platform and then you have a dollar balance but that dollar balance does fluctuate while it's in the platform as well so not sure if they're like transferring it to Dollars and then not taking on the price volatility or if they're actually holding the underlying assets and wallet addresses I would assume the latter but not 100% sure sorry Ren yeah no worries and I think another interesting point that you mentioned was that they're like mostly following the rules and they're for example like limiting the amount that you can deposit or wager I think is you mentioned I think that might be like a

really good thing obviously both from like a regulatory standpoint they have to follow the regulations but also for their market makers if that's the correct term um for like a gambling protocol because if you think about it like you kind of don't want adverse selection you don't want to be the market maker on the opposite side of like someone being 100x long with on vit like that'll be a pretty disastrous outcome but if you limit like the size to like $500 then I think it's safe to say like chances are you're getting like pretty silly retail flow rather than like super gig Chad like uh whale flow and so that's probably like another reason that will help sort of like accelerate the fly re between like volume liquidity and

activity yeah I guess it's worth noting too that like obviously there's quite a bit of inflation from airdrop one there's going to be multiple air drops coming in the future the vests and cliffs are like relatively short so the question is kind of going to become like is the amount of Revenue they're bringing in offsetting the inflation I don't know if it really matters because we're in a bit of a bull market right now and all it takes is like a narrative to start up but there's definitely like some question marks given the high inflation early on yeah I think on the market making Point like if someone just wins too much you just don't let them withdraw that seems to work it's a pretty good strategy in crypto yeah their terms of services

definitely says like we reserve the right to just rug you essentially so I wouldn't try like going on there with significant sums of money it's it's more of something that you should test out out and and have fun with just as a a casual hobby I have a question for you guys do you think like gambling protocols gambling in terms of like you can do like sports betting blackjack poker like that type of gambling do you think that takes a backseat in the bull market just given like sort of onchain like meme coin activities or do you think I'm not sure if this is the correct magic but like gambling market share increases versus like meme coin volume I guess cuz

I I feel like I could see it both ways to be honest on one hand I feel like you know like if it's a complete like bull market you're getting at Le like 100 X's every day on Salan like maybe I don't want to like do sports betting and gambling and like play poker onchain instead I want to go like eat all of these meme coins but I could also see just like overall degenerate activity increasing in a bull market yeah my guess would be meme coin volume maintains its dominance over traditional gambling volume by by quite a mile to be honest but I think it's two separate cohorts of users like if you're using Shuffle you can hardly even tell that you're using crypto at all really the only crypto component is depositing

assets and I think that giving like kind of a a universal like global system where you can deposit from any chain and have like a clean front end for gambling I think that has like an actual chance to onboard new users as opposed to just just the same people playing musical chairs on salana today in mem coins I think is a perfect spot to pass it off to uh Ryan for his hot seat at or Cruses because I know it has something to do with me coins totally yeah so my cool Throne is uh memec coin legitimacy so we all know that as memecoins are becoming the bulk of crypto Market activity activity today we're actually seeing the market uh investors traditional Finance even begin

to intellectualize and um legitimize mcoin trading in this Behavior Uh we've seen Bowden and Trump uh Being Framed as continuous prediction markets which is a metaphor that I love uh we're seeing with Pepe Bon uh being referred to as cultural spot assets by VCS and we're seeing uh even protocols like Bon uh a meme with the team and Bon bot uh actually generate real revenues uh I think they hit over I think it was over 120 million in trading volume and generated 700,000 in Revenue yesterday or 1.1 million in Revenue yesterday just

from Trading fees um that's like fundamentals right um this activity is being legitimized you're seeing the VC think Pieces come out I even saw on Twitter yesterday a legal argument for the legitimacy of M coins right that the teams that make these like they don't stick around there is no team uh the thing has no utility so it can't be a security right so it's completely legitimized uh I'm not a legal expert don't take my legal advice it's just a tweet I saw um and what's interesting is that like potential hot seat when we start to legitimize these things when we start saying that you know defi is the Future

Finance or game BU as the future of gaming kind of a top signal so my cool Throne uh Is MeMe coin legitimacy but it could very well also be a hot suat as well yeah I think um meance right now it's it's like making me increasingly more uncomfortable in holding anything besides Bitcoin because it's the only one with like true institutional flows like if if meme coins keep blowing up like this then you you're kind of like creating a horrible image for crypto like we just beat out the the criminal image and like the moneya laundering image and I was

like okay we are just a giant Casino it it makes me want to distance myself from that entire sector and like just hold Bitcoin because this is definitely not helping us in the public eye at all I don't know I feel like okay sure like gambling and being the general like probably isn't that good for the Public Image but I feel like a lot of like Society at large just like to speculate on like the most stupid or ridiculous things sure like maybe we shouldn't be speculating on like which dog is the best or I I feel like people definitely want to speculate on for example like who's going to win the presidential

election but for example if you made a meme coin for every single like boyfriend that Taylor Swift has had and gave that to like the Taylor sft crowd to speculate on I bet you that would probably like assuming like you abstract the weight off the complexities of like interacting with crypto like that would do an insane amount of numbers like every time tayor sft switches a boyfriend um but yeah I I don't think I'll go so far to say like you know like meme coin super cycle but I do think that there's like a long-term Trend and narrative there both in terms of like just Society at large wanting to be degenerate you see that and like increase gambling volume like year over

year I think last or this year was like the largest like betting volume for Super Bowl like ever by a wide margin gambling is an industry it has like a 20% like year on your growth rate the amount of volume traded in zero Daya expiry options which I think is mostly driven by retail also has exploded in the past few years and I think those are like long-term trends that just continue to hold and as right mentioned you know rather than trying to speculate on that in like a prediction Market where right now if you bet on PO Market the best you walk away with is like a 2X after the election happens you might as well just go ape into like Trump or like V in you know because there's that continuous

element to it it'll probably still trade after the election happens for example all the way into like the fouryear terms of these like the new president but also like the upside is quotee unquote Unlimited um so I do think there's something to be Sav for like the long-term staying power of like maybe not meme coins in terms of like dogs and cats but like meme coins that like represent certain cultural events for lack of a better term I don't know I'd take pibbles as side on this one I see like just New Meme coins with hundreds of million dollars of volume and they acrew these ridiculous ftvs or market caps and it's it gives people this false sense of

wealth when in reality it's only a handful of people who can actually Cash Out given the amount of liquidity on the asset that they're trading so it it makes me feel like it's incredibly frothy and it scares me this early in a bull market as if like we need to reset back down to like 55 60k Bitcoin somewhere around there but it's just a game of musical chairs I just think people need to be aware of the game that they're playing because I think a lot of people have made a ton of money on these meme coins and they're still sitting in them and once the Music Stops like the liquidity dries up pretty quick and those paper gains can run away in a hurry so makes me nervous too pibbles yeah and people will say like oh crypto has found like pmf but I think we

live in a vacuum and I think we're spending like eight hours a day subconsciously on crypto Twitter and we're like oh this is the future like everyone's doing it what if no one outside of crypto is touching these because who has that much money in crypto to throw $5,000 at a mcoin besides us like I think we're just getting really detached from reality here and like it's blatantly obvious but everyone's going to continue continue to ignore it so you're telling me that people sending pre-sale soul to random addresses is in a top signal I mean come on we saw what $30 million sent to like random addresses is this bom I I actually have not even caught up on the

bom stuff so if anyone can shed some light on what happened there that'd be great too yeah I can shed some light on sort of like the prale situation that's my hot seat for uh this week so bom is I don't even know what it is basically a s like book of meme um it was created by this Twitter account called Dark farms and they're known for like the Pepe meme um but yeah people send I don't know the numbers here but they send like a lot of money to this guy um and basically it has a ridiculous amount of liquidity just looking at it right now it has $66 million of liquidity and that trumps like most assets uh on salana at some

point it traded at roughly like a two billion FTV and it went from zero to 2 billion in like three days I think it's one of the crazier if not the craziest things that probably a lot of us have seen in crypto in a very very long time orever and that was like just the start as soon as like that overnight success occurred I think you saw over hundred million sent through various pre-sales in the last 48 hours and basically how it works is like some K some influence on Twitter mentions that they're doing a pre-sale um it's a minimum of like one Soul sometimes there's a maximum for example of like three so you send it to this address and then all of that so is used for liquidity you get like a

percentage allocation of the initial token Supply most of the time it's like 50% is given to people who like bought into the pre-sale the other 50% is deposited into the liquidity Po and most of these people uh burn the liquidity um but yeah I I feel like it's gotten pretty crazy I think the craziest example I saw on my timeline was some person raising $30 million in 30 minutes and sometimes you think to yourself like how did these people just have so much money that's sitting around and they're just waiting to just give it to like a random person person in hopes that they don't get completely rugged and another example of this or sorry another example of getting rugged

is this token called slurf S slurf I don't know how to pronounce it but they raised 10 million dollar um they burned the lp but they also burn the tokens that were set aside for the pre-sale allocation uh and this guy basically revokes the Min Authority so there's nothing he can do like quite literally nothing he can do it's just like a big oopsies and $10 million and so is just now gone forever um I feel like there's some legal liability there for whoever did this but yeah it definitely feels toy when a hundred million dollar in so has been sent to random Twitter accounts in the past 48 hours I'm not sure how you don't look at

that and like sorry how you look at that and don't think it feels like a little Toppy and a little frogy in the markets right now it certainly feels toppy um but let's fast forward four years to the next cycle is mcoin activity larger than it is today or smaller than it is today I would take today today I would say larger I feel like every cycle it just gets larger it probably increases like by less orders of magnitudes every cycle but if you look at like Doge it hit 80 billion market cap last cycle and ship was like a fraction of that I don't think it's too crazy to like CS go like

1X or like sorry 2x like higher than that what we did last cycle just looking at the state of the market right now but when you multiply the number of coins just naturally like the volume and market caps of these coins tends to go up so it's a bit like people taking nfts and being like Oh the floor price is one you got a collection of 10,000 the market cap is one e times 10,000 in the collection it's like okay yes that's the market cap but is it really is there really 10,000 eth worth of liquidity on the other side of that trade like probably not I think I don't know if this like the right way of thinking about it but

yeah obviously a lot of people are sitting on like paper gains of like 5 million 10 million 20 million whatever in their like wallets but one way I like to look at a lot of these meme coins is just look at the liquidity and then if you divide it by like half so say like a mecoin has like 50 billion in liquidity and then if you take half of that that's like 25 million in liquidity sorry 25 million of like Soul or like usdc and then the other 25 million is like the mean Point itself and that's like how much money people have spent buying that Meme coin you know rather than like these like sort of like artificial paper gains and I'll be quite curious to see what the total amount of like liquidity divided by two for all of these salon

meme coins is because it sometimes it doesn't take that much like net dollar spent buying to like push these meme coins to like ridiculous like proportions for example if you look at like whiff it has like $21.1 million in liquidity so just from like a number standpoint oh sorry 71.1 million in the largest poo so just from like a number standpoint like only 10.5 million so has been spent in like net buying pressure on whin that's not that much to be honest from my point of view like in the grand scheme of things considering like 100 billion has been sent to Sal on mcoin free sales in the last 48 hours yeah the thing is you don't need a

lot of new capital to really make market cap accelerate like I know that there's um a a pretty tried andrue paper in trafi that shows that um for every $1 in ETF inflows you get you get three to five increase in market cap I imagine it's way higher you know with these small cap coins uh and it doesn't take a lot of new people playing the game to really push these things especially when they're price and sensitive but yeah I know there's like a lot of like meme coin boo posting on the timeline I feel like Andrew Kang is probably one of like the larger mem coin boo posters and I think his prediction

is like with and like one or two of like the presidential coins like ends up in the top 10 and I don't think that's outside the realm of possibility just because like this election feels really contested and you know like it's sort of like interesting to think about the Dynamics you know there's like Maga SL Trump on like ethereum and then now there's like trp and Bin on salana but there's also like the OG Biden on ethereum but that has like a super duper small like market cap stash FTV so I'll be really interested to see like how these tokens trade up the election you know does Bowden do well only when like Biden says like something stupid um or for example like how would he token straight after the

presidential elections assuming they all don't just like go to zero straight away it's also like a nonzero probability that Donald Trump references his meme coin that that'll be a big moment for crypto markets uh the the all-in guys are already referencing their meme coin um you know telling people not to buy it but at the same time like accidentally legitimizing it just by um you know putting it in front of people and getting people's attention um I think that you know a celebrity sees a meme coin of their name or image or likeness trading uh just their nod to it on a social platform I mean that that's like that's potentially new users into the

space um it's um kind of the Trojan TR it could be a Trojan horse for crypto adoption in some sense it cuts both ways though you know someone sees it they cond doned it or didn't condone it they shed more light on it they buy it and then it goes to zero it's like like kind of goes back to what pbes was saying it's like this kind of it's like two steps forward or one step forward two steps back like yeah maybe you get a marginal user onboarded but is it really for the better like I I just worry that people don't know the games they're playing essentially all right well that's a a depressing note to end on but uh Ryan pibbles thanks for joining zerox we will see you guys here next

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