The Best Day Crypto Has Had In Months | Market Bubble #16

Welcome back to Marketbubble, a show all about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today live on twitch.tv/fazebanks. We're also live on Kick with my boy, my tall, handsome co-host, Ansem Z, say hi.

Yo, yo, yo. What's good?

Also live on Twitter. I can't breathe, bro.

I can't fucking breathe, bro.

Brother, I fucking sprinted to the bathroom.

Jesus Christ. I don't even know how the fuck you pissed that fast.

I squeezed it out. Squeezed it out.

What the fuck?

I went as fast as I possibly could.

That shit is definitely still leaking right now.

I'm covered in piss. Covered. I'm covered in piss. I'm going to wear a fucking diaper for the show. This is insane.

1. Everything Is Up

Wow. Crazy couple of days. Great day yesterday.

Insane, bro. I don't even think—I don't care to remember the last time we got that much good news for crypto all at the same fucking time. It's been a minute since we've had that.

What was it? I mean, Bitcoin's up. It's all up.

Bro, Trump talking about Hyperliquid. Bitcoin's up. Ethereum's up like 20% on the day. Pump is up, bro. Solana is up. Everything's just up.

And we got the fucking SEC—the SEC regulatory shit—

Armstrong's talking shit in front of Congress and stuff. Yeah, it's great. It's amazing. We're randomly curing cancer, too. AI's curing cancer in real time. It's crazy.

It's crazy.

Great fucking day yesterday.

2. Ansem Launches The Z500

Before we get into that, you announced something pretty big related to Black Bull and the token, and Anom.io—the Z500. You want to take it away, expand on it, and let everybody know what you just launched?

Yeah. Anom.io's Z500 leaderboard is essentially—you know how there's the S&P 500 for stocks? The Z500 is an on-chain index for all the top launches in crypto.

People have been asking me to do my own launchpad. I didn't want to do another vanilla launchpad, but what I know makes sense is that there are a lot of teams who want and need marketing for their token when they do token launches, and they want to market toward me and all the ANOM holders.

What Anom.io is, essentially, is a way that whenever you launch, you immediately airdrop a portion of your token supply to all ANOM holders. If you want to get boosted on the Z500 leaderboard, you can buy and burn an amount of ANOM to do so—whether that's 25K for gold or 100K for diamond. If you do diamond, we'll help you with your token launch and help you flesh out the ideas for it, your go-to-market plan, and all those things.

The idea isn't to do a ton more regular token launches, but rather to have a curated list of them. For the ones that do really well, we want to airdrop those to ANOM. Essentially, you can just hold ANOM and get exposure to all these different coins. That's the main idea for it.

The entire thing stems from the fact that your attention has become extremely valuable and sought after in this market. People are constantly sending you allocations to coins. Obviously, in our chat just now, people were spamming tickers and everything else.

This is a more formal way to attach yourself to projects that show promise, have cool founders, or want to get more involved with you, your brand, the show, and your ecosystem. It's a clean, clear, easy way for them to do that, right?

Yeah, exactly. It's an easy way for people to market toward ANOM holders instead of just marketing toward me. A lot of teams want to send me supply, and I'm like, "Bro, I don't want the supply. Just send it to all the ANOM holders."

Instead of just trying to pay me XYZ for a sponsorship, you can literally buy and burn ANOM, which directly benefits everybody who's holding ANOM because it makes it deflationary and reduces the outstanding supply.

The market responded well to this.

Yeah. There have been about 1.7 million ANOM burns so far. We've had some cool launches come out. Some are doing really well, and teams are forming around them. We have a ton down the pipe, too. There are teams that have burned 100K ANOM, and now we're waiting for them to launch. We've been talking back and forth with some of those teams as well.

It's been a great few days. I'm surprised at how much volume we've had. We've done almost 200 million in volume.

Amazing. Cool. So we're up. I mean, everybody's up in the last couple of days. Everybody.

It is. It is. Oh, that's not the right tab. When's the last time we saw one of these, man?

3. The 66K Level And The Trend Shift

Shorts got liquidated, bro. Shorts liquidated. It's a lot of green. That's a lot of money—$190 billion. It's probably more now that has been added to the crypto market in the past 24 hours.

Is the bull market back, brother? Is it officially back?

The bull market is officially back. I've been saying for a long time that I think the $66,000–$67,000 level on Bitcoin is super important. The weekly close through there is really a shift in trend for the first time in the past few months.

After failing to break down beneath the range lows around $58,000–$60,000, we had Saylor selling into the lows, peak bearish sentiment, and then we bottomed and went up. I think we're going to retest the range highs around $83,000–$85,000, probably in Q3. If we break above those levels, that's when I think you can start to make the argument that Bitcoin is in an uptrend again.

It's basically the same chart for Ethereum and Solana. They're all very similar. HYPE is essentially back at all-time highs.

Yeah, Pump is fucking ripping. Pump's 3x off the lows.

Yeah, coins are great.

Thank you for that, guys. Listen, obviously this is my co-host, so I benefit in other ways outside of us explicitly doing this show together. One of those ways is that Z put Pump on my radar.

He circled back and hit me on the side and said it again. It's very rare that Z will do that. It's very rare that he will go out of his way to say, "If you haven't already, you should buy this." I think I'm up a clean 100% off that.

I know Threadguy's position in HYPE or PUMP as well. Obviously, it's the highest-performing product in crypto, so it makes sense. Everything's fucking ripping.

Ripping, bro.

4. He Bottom Ticked Bitcoin 41 Days Ago

Everything's up. I mean, you called it, brother. You called it. People need—I think it's appropriate to do some sort of victory lap—but you called the fucking rock bottom. You literally bottom-ticked Bitcoin 41 days ago.

5. Wrap Up

Nobody else on the timeline shared this sentiment or thought. People were loosely like, "Okay, maybe this is interesting. Maybe we should listen to what Z has to say because it's you." But most people had the complete opposite opinion. And yeah, here it is, bro. Here it is.

King, bro. King. Absolutely correct.

By the way, this fucker—

I like him, though. I don't know why he threw shots at me. I don't know who this guy is. I don't know why.

I don't know who he is, but fuck this guy.

Eighteen hours before Pump pops off. Eighteen hours before Ethereum rocket-ships 20%. This guy's talking about the least likely scenario. We'll see.

I'm just on everybody's minds, bro. I don't know why. Why is he even thinking about me right now? What do I have to do with what he thinks of the markets? It's just crazy, bro.

So good.

6. How To Position Your Portfolio Right Now

Crazy.

I wanted to ask you directly: What are the best long-term trades to make right now for our audience?

Yeah. Going into the bull market, I said a few episodes ago that you want to have 60%–70% of your portfolio in safer plays—majors that you're confident in holding for the long term. You can dollar-cost average into those when stuff is down a lot, and your plan is to hold them for 6 months or more.

As I said, that's stuff like Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, and HYPE. You want one in that group that's your higher-risk but mid-cap, high-conviction play. For me, I think that's Pump right now.

I would split up your portfolio in that way. I think Pump and HYPE are probably the highest-risk, highest-reward plays out of that group right now. I think Zcash is still a really strong play in that group as well, which you can lump into the 60%–70% bucket.

I would say the 30%–40% is your rotational, higher-risk portfolio. That's all the on-chain stuff. Look at the microcaps and the trends that may pop up. When you see a meme that's trending and going viral, maybe you're going to bet on that.

When you're playing perps, or you're playing with a new platform or a new startup that just tokenized leverage plays, all of that is the smaller portion of your portfolio and how you get exposure to the higher-risk things.

7. Why Pump Is The Highest Conviction Play

But yeah, right now, PUMP is definitely my highest-conviction spot, for sure. I think its revenue is inflecting up pretty strongly. It’s still underowned by a lot of people. I think institutions are underowned in PUMP, and I think retail is kind of underowned in PUMP. It’s mostly traders pushing it right now, and I think it can have a really strong run if on-chain activity continues to pick up. You can literally see that its revenue numbers have 3x-ed in the past month and a half or so from the bottom. It’s not even just that the price is increasing—the PD ratio is increasing, but its revenue is also increasing. It really hasn’t rerated yet; it’s just that its revenue has also been increasing.

So you’ve got Bitcoin, Solana, HYPE, PUMP, Zcash, and I’ve got VVV here. This is what you’re interested in right now. This is what you’re looking at. This is how you’re positioned. I just wanted to ask you directly, one by one, what is it you like about—sorry, what is it you like about Bitcoin?

8. The Case For Bitcoin

Bitcoin is the cleanest hedge against monetary debasement. You’re not going to get a better trade in that sense—digital gold. I think gold actually looks good right now too. It’s kind of a diversified portion of your portfolio from all the AI tech stuff. The AI tech names are obviously dependent on how well these companies are doing in the market, how good the models are getting, and all these other things, including how they ship. But Bitcoin is not dependent on any of those things. Bitcoin is literally just digital gold. It’s your hedge against the dollar losing its value.

So we have here: How high will Bitcoin get this year? Above $100K is 19%. I think it should honestly be higher than 19%. So we’re going to trade this. Let’s see—is it not letting me?

I think this is mispriced. I don’t see it hitting $100K by the end of the year. I think that’s pretty unlikely.

You think y’all could get closer to, like, 50/50?

9. Why X Is Too Slow For Traders

Yeah. I think if you see Bitcoin at, like, $85K, then it might get to, like, 40—40-plus percent, depending on how fast it gets there. Last time we were around these prices, in November 2024, Bitcoin went from, like, $67K to $100K in, like, 3 weeks. So it definitely has the capability of moving that fast. Nobody’s been bullish on crypto, bro. Nobody’s been expecting this shit to rip. You can see that with the amount of short liquidations that happened yesterday. There was $2.4 billion of shorts liquidated on that move in Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL, because everybody was bearish, thinking we were going to get a lower low in Q4. That shows pretty aggressively how offsides the market is.

10. Why Trench Groups Work

Yeah, and it’s like that across the board for crypto. Everybody’s been long AI. Everyone’s like, “Crypto’s fucking trash. Crypto’s never going to go up again. Alts are worthless.” That’s been the sentiment.

11. The Case For Solana

I’ve seen you talk about Solana a lot on the timeline lately. What do you like about SOL here?

Yeah, I think for SOL, this is kind of the maturation cycle for Solana. In the first cycle, Solana was proving that an L1 that was cheap and fast made sense. Before that, everybody thought Ethereum was the only way to design an L1, because all the previous cheap-and-fast L1s had failed pretty aggressively, like EOS and a lot of the other ones. Solana’s first cycle proved that you can have success as an L1 that’s structured and built differently from Ethereum.

Then its second cycle was when you saw applications start to do really well on Solana. Before, there were no Solana alts that did well in the first Solana cycle. SOL went up a lot, but there were barely any Solana alts that did well. Then, in the second cycle, you had the meme supercycle, and a ton of memes did really well. You had PUMP as an application have great success. You had Axiom as an app have great success, and a lot of these teams building around DEX trading, memecoin activity, and retail activity did really well.

12. What Solana's Third Cycle Needs

That was a great proof of concept for businesses that can spin up startups and make $1 billion-plus in revenue in a very short amount of time on Solana. So that was a great proof of concept for that happening on Solana. The infrastructure improved for these businesses to build, and now, in this third cycle, I think this is the one where you want to see more successful startups outside of just the memes and the trading.

Hyperliquid has done a great job as a decentralized perp exchange. You’re going to need something like that to do really well on Solana this cycle. I think Flash Trade, like Phoenix Trade, some of those teams need to do really well on Solana for the perp DEX—perpetual decentralized exchange—thesis to play on SOL. You need to cover all the different parts of the trading market. Then you’re also going to need applications that are not just DeFi to do really well on SOL, and that’s the most important thesis, I think, for Solana this cycle. You want to see those startups do well, and I’ve mentioned stuff like Credible. I’ve mentioned stuff like Collector [?].

But I think if you have not just PUMP, but also maybe something that’s kind of like Hyperliquid, maybe something that’s like a social app, maybe something that’s like a finance stablecoin startup, and you have all these different teams that are doing well on Solana, then Solana becomes the actual decentralized Apple, where builders can come and immediately get access to anybody with a wallet globally, find success, and find revenue pretty quickly.

I feel like Solana is crypto. I feel like it does 65% of all on-chain activity. I saw Vibhu post a tweet about this: 65% of all on-chain activity is on Solana.

It’s insane.

It’s insane.

13. Closing The ETH SOL Gap

But it only makes up 2% of the entire market cap of crypto. Why do you think there’s such a big discrepancy between those 2 numbers?

I just think the market is lagging, to be honest. It takes time for these assets to grow in market cap. Ethereum is still pretty large. Comparably to SOL, I think SOL’s probably around $50 billion right now, and Ethereum is like $300 billion or something like that. At its peak, I think Ethereum was like $600 billion.

But yeah, I think it’s really just a time thing. Solana’s caught up to a lot of the other majors pretty quickly, but it takes time. I think that gap is going to continue to close between the market caps of ETH and SOL, because SOL dominates a lot of the activity compared to ETH.

Right?

It’s really just a time thing.

Zcash—why do you like Zcash as opposed to Bitcoin here?

14. The Zcash Thesis: Private Bitcoin

I think the Zcash thesis is really strong. It’s a very simple thesis: private Bitcoin. Everybody right now is concerned about keeping their funds safe. The whole thesis of crypto being capital flight from the current system doesn’t make sense if your money isn’t private. That doesn’t mean they’re doing illegal things with it. You can report when you buy your holdings and everything, but for somebody to know every time how much you’re spending, where it’s going, and all that, that’s one of the only main negatives with Bitcoin, and Zcash solves that problem pretty directly.

It’s also one of the only coins that’s hardened against all the AI hacks and stuff. It’s fucking audited by Mythos. It has the Ironwood pool, which is the new pool that removed the issues and concerns they had with the other vulnerability previously. A lot of the people who were super early to Bitcoin have been buying Zcash this entire time. Zcash has gone through a 10-year period of accumulation—I don’t think people realize that—from 2017 to now, where a lot of the OG, OG crypto people who believed in the fundamental thesis and the fundamental reasons crypto is important were also buying Zcash at the same time they were holding Bitcoin.

I think that gap between Zcash and Bitcoin is going to close. I think 0.1 ZEC per BTC makes sense. It’s very, very, very small compared to Bitcoin right now. I think it’s closer to 0.01 BTC per ZEC. It makes a ton of sense: private Bitcoin is very simple and easy to understand. There are a ton of people who want to maintain the privacy of their assets.

Trump declares—this is so something he’d say too, huh?

This is so funny, bro.

15. Pump And FOMO Are Finally Marketing

You know what’s crazy? He was actually saying something supportive about crypto a few weeks ago—or maybe a couple of months ago. It was random, in one of his Truth Social posts, or something in a presser, and I was like, “He must have something cooking down the line on crypto.” I didn’t really know what exactly it was, but I remember I even said it at the time when you were—I think you were in St. Barts with TJR, when you were on the boat with TJR—and I was talking about this. This was when Saylor was in peak trouble, and people were like, “What the fuck is Saylor going to do?” And I was like, “Yo, I think there’s definitely a possibility that Trump just buys some of this Bitcoin off of him and gets him out of this fucking situation.”

Saylor ended up not having to do that, thankfully. Trump has said pretty publicly—he said it yesterday—that they’re considering buying Bitcoin and other coins. He said, “We’re trying to make sure Hyperliquid gets legal in the US.”

Hard-shilled HYPE yesterday.

Hard-shilled HYPE, and it went insane. Clip.

You got a call with Flood when this happened?

Yeah, that was crazy.

He had to immediately eject. Wait a second. Wait, wait, wait, wait.

It was insane. Let’s watch this clip.

16. CFTC Approves The First Bitcoin Perp

Chairman Celig authorized the first-ever true Bitcoin perpetual futures contract on a CFTC-registered exchange. For the first time, I understand that Mike is also working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant, legal fashion.

What does this mean for Hyperliquid? What does it mean for crypto? What does it mean for us?

It’s so good for crypto. This was literally the main bear case for Hyperliquid: that they weren’t going to be able to figure out the regulatory stuff.

The only bear case. I feel like that’s all anybody was talking about.

Literally, people were concerned that they weren’t going to get the fuck banned in the US. People were saying the opposite, actually—not even close to this. It’s great for crypto, bro.

Can I just take a little victory lap? I fucking basically full-ported Hyperliquid at $30.

Yeah, I know.

Let’s go. You’re up.

Great day yesterday. We’re all up. If you’re in the show, if you’re a part of the show, you’re likely up. Great day yesterday. Un-fucking-believable. Trump likes HYPE, you like HYPE. Why right now are you long HYPE specifically?

17. Why Hype Revenue Looks Flat

I think HYPE has been consolidating in the 50 to 75 range. It had its first breakout after the announcement with the Coinbase stablecoin. Essentially, Coinbase is now managing the USDC on their platform instead of the native stablecoin that was happening on HYPE before, and they’re directly adding 100% of all revenue from the stablecoins.

Cyber Leos—that’s what broke it out originally. But they’ve seen great traction this year with the stocks, HIP-3 perps, which is huge. I think it’s over 50% of their volume right now. It’s not just a crypto protocol; it’s literally the blockchain for all of finance. You can trade perps on every asset instead of just crypto assets.

People have been complaining that the revenue hasn’t been that high, but they’re currently in growth mode with all of these stocks. In growth mode, the fees they’re charging on all these assets are much lower than what they’re charging on crypto assets. If they ever decide to turn that off or reduce it a bit, they’re going to be making a fuck ton more money on stocks.

If you believe crypto is coming back and crypto is starting to turn, those volumes are going to pick up. The reason their revenues have been kind of flat to down over the past quarter or so is because crypto volumes have been extremely slow and the stock volumes have been picking up, but they make less money, revenue-wise, on the stock volumes.

18. Marketing To People Who Aren't On CT

I think Ryan Watkins had a really good post on this yesterday. He was saying that people are looking purely at the 30-day revenue of Hyperliquid instead of doing forward guidance and looking at what happens if this thing actually becomes the blockchain where everything is traded—not just crypto, but crypto, stocks, commodities, forex, and everything—on one chain. It’s extensible in a way that allows people to build exchanges on top of it.

19. Hyperliquid And Dollar Dominance

One of the most important things for Hyperliquid is that HIP-3 allows other people to build their own local exchanges for whatever purpose. It’s still super early days for Hyperliquid. They have great traction and great momentum, and if they’re getting support from the US government, that’s crazy.

I’ve been saying this. I need to actually find the tweet, but I was saying that it’s so in the interest of the US government for Hyperliquid to do well because they need USD stablecoins to be proliferated across the internet as much as possible. If USD-denominated stablecoins become a lot more popular in all these crypto applications, then USD dominance spreads globally faster than it could possibly do any other way.

All of the third-world countries that don’t have access to traditional financial systems can get access to them through crypto. If crypto’s native stablecoins are all USD, then we scale USD a lot further than we could any other way in traditional finance.

I think the Trump administration and the people around him are realizing that he has some strong crypto people on his task force. I think they’ve been in his ear about that, and that’s their biggest thing: they want the USD to be strong. They don’t really give a fuck about how. If it’s beneficial for the US, then they’re going to do that.

So, yeah, Hyperliquid getting the stamp from the US government is fucking crazy, bro.

Insane. Markets were fucking up yesterday, Hyperliquid—Trump’s talking about Hyperliquid, GTA’s talking about the GTA leak and a new GTA currency. It was just the best day ever.

Top 5 days of the year. 8/19—like the opposite of 10/10.

Did you see where it goes? Let me—I think I have this shit.

I’m pulling something up.

Yeah, no, this is a banger, bro.

Hold up.

Where the fuck is it?

Is this the fuck—what the fuck was that?

I’m going to wait. How do I share this?

That’s so funny. Yeah.

Huh?

Somebody said there’s no GTA currency. That account isn’t real. You’re fucked.

Yeah, I think I posted it by accident. Hold on. I’m going to send this shit to you, bro, so you can open it.

20. Ansem Reads His Hyperliquid Thread

Yeah, so the quote tweet was like, “Welcome to CFTC. CFTC actually approved the first USD perpetual derivatives contract.” Then Kyle was like, “This actually doesn’t matter. What the CFTC did is not what Hyperliquid is doing.” If you go down to the long one, click that one.

I was like, “Yeah, it’s silly to abide by the existing framework of laws around how financial exchanges work when you’re creating a completely new system from the ground up. Hyperliquid would not exist if they attempted to fit into the existing system. Neither would many other crypto protocols.

“There’s a reason that they have come up with new definitions in the CLARITY Act for protocols that previously did not have sufficient regulatory definitions. It makes more sense to believe that new laws will be structured to best accommodate the most successful crypto startups, of which Hyperliquid is clearly at the forefront.

“Jeff and co. have said that they have ongoing conversations with US lawmakers and continue to be surprised by how much they’re learning about how Hyperliquid works. The ICE IC has also made similar comments that have been positive.

“Yes, they are closed-source, and yes, they started with a small, colocated validator set, but it’s objectively true that they would not have been able to have as much success as they’ve had so far without those core decisions at the beginning. It’s also not as if they’re attempting to move to a more permissionless and decentralized construction. They’ve added more validators to the validator set that did not exist when they first started and that are not directly a part of the Hyperliquid team.

“I believe it’s around 25. I don’t know, but I know it isn’t all just from the team, and there are other people running validators.

“What people are under-discussing currently with the future optimistic case regarding Hyperliquid is that, for the first time, we have a pro-crypto president and a pro-crypto administration who both understand the importance of being early and supportive of these technologies, but also understand how much money can be made if they are architected properly.

“If you look at how Hyperliquid is designed, with builder codes and HIP-3, it will benefit from a large number of exchanges and front ends being built on top of its core infrastructure and utilizing the deep liquidity and work they’ve done creating a top-of-class exchange.

“The reason this should be important to Trump and the US government, if they understand it properly, is that if Hyperliquid is successful and becomes the AWS of liquidity for financial exchanges supporting perpetual futures, while USDC is the underlying stablecoin on the exchange by default, they’ll be creating a huge amount of demand for USD and extending the dominance of the dollar—its hegemony—globally.

“They want everyone using dollars in the future state of the world. A lot of that is going to be digital. The reason the CLARITY Act has been able to actually get support in Congress is because they understand the importance of stablecoins in the future and how they will continue to become more popular.

“In the same way that Trump has been outwardly supportive of companies that he believes are doing great, innovative work in their respective industries, like Dell, Ford, and Intel, it’s very likely that he’ll be as supportive of crypto companies if they’re able to effectively convey the value proposition of Hyperliquid doing well.

“I’m confident in Jeff and the Hyperliquid team to correctly illustrate this opportunity to lawmakers.”

If I can see this thesis clearly—building a decentralized perp exchange that many other countries and regions can build their own perp exchanges on top of, all using U.S.-based stablecoins underneath the hood—then I imagine it’ll be just as easy for others to see as well. We’ve already seen Trump support similar financial infrastructure with Trump Accounts through Robinhood. So, it’s not that far-fetched in my opinion.

Amen. Amen. [laughter]

And man, I said this.

So wait, is Hyperliquid going to save the U.S. dollar?

Literally, bro. TL;DR. [laughter] Yeah, it’s crazy. Okay, this is making sense to me.

God damn.

This is good.

God damn. Early, bro. Always early. What do they say?

Always early. Thanks.

Early.

It’s only because I’m next to you, brother. It’s only because I’m next to you.

You see this?

Yes. This is probably the best news of yesterday, to be honest. Moderna, again—we talk about stocks trading like crypto all the time. Moderna up around 200%. This is insane. Did they cure cancer? Do you know anything about this outside of just what you saw on Twitter yesterday?

No. I know they had—it was like a specialized trial for, I think, some individual cancer.

Skin cancer.

Yeah, this is huge, though. I think people have been saying, like, “Oh, AI is not doing anything. AI is doing nothing.” And now we’re making serious headway in cancer research, which is huge. So look at Elon Musk. Look at Elon Musk—he sniped this by a full day. Polymarket tweeted, “Anthropic CEO says AI will win the public over as it actually cures cancer,” which I agree with.

If a human being cured cancer tomorrow, they would be fucking celebrated worldwide. They’d become the fucking biggest celebrity on planet Earth, the most celebrated celebrity on planet Earth. It’d probably be a fucking holiday named after them, right? The fact that it’s AI—this is maybe something the tech needs to win over society with, because—

As you know—

Yeah, it could be a big turning point, honestly. It really could.

Musk called it yesterday or 2 days ago. It’s insane.

That’s nuts.

Great day yesterday, man.

21. GTA 6 Might Have A Real Money Currency

Great day. Did you see this? I tweeted this from a burner: “If this is true, GTA 6 is the next Bitcoin. GTA leaker says there’s a currency in-game that can be traded for real-life money.” Now, I think it’s close to a 0% chance that this has anything to do with crypto, to be honest. I don’t think they would take that risk. I don’t think that they need to. But what’s your raw, knee-jerk reaction and take to something like this? How do you think this could unravel, and what do you think this could mean for GTA 6, but also deeper people playing GTA 6?

I think it’s really cool. I think it gives credence to the thesis that this metaverse idea was early in its construction, just not correct in how it was designed. I do think you can make the bet, or the thesis, that GTA 6 is going to be comparable to World of Warcraft in that it’s going to have its own in-game economy.

It’s going to continue to grow as people play the game, and people are going to be trading back and forth with this currency and with the things they’re doing in-game. It actually tangibly returns value for your time. I think there are going to be people who spend a lot of time in GTA 6 and can make money from doing that.

22. Billionaires Will Come Out Of GTA 6

I think the metaverse thesis makes sense, to be honest. We’re very digital beings right now. We spend a lot of time on social media and a lot of time in our digital worlds, and there haven’t honestly been enough games that have found success and traction in building worlds for people in that way. Roblox is probably the main one, but a lot of the old MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft—there hasn’t been a great one like that in a while. World of Warcraft obviously still exists, but it’s not as big as it was early on. I think we’re going to see billionaires come out of GTA 6, to be honest.

Billionaires, Brian, bro. Billionaire. I really do. From zero from what?

Yes, from zero. I think—

There’s no way, bro.

Why is there no way?

How many people have a Facebook account?

Like 3 billion or something?

3 billion people. So if 3 billion active people are playing a game like GTA, or sharing a platform in a medium like GTA, and it becomes the de facto metaverse—

Uh-huh.

How is that not going to result in a few people becoming billionaires? How is somebody not going to launch some native, Nike-esque brand in-game that’s in insane demand and does millions of dollars a year in annual revenue? How the fuck—you know what I mean?

What if the online crypto-casino meta becomes, like, buildings being built locally in a platform like that? Stake’s next-biggest competitor buys the biggest fucking skyscraper in Adin Ross’s server and makes it a casino, and they’re having—I don’t know, you know what I mean? I don’t think it’s that crazy of a thought, to be honest with you.

That’d be sick as fuck. We need to be the billionaires, then.

Especially 100%. Well, that’s the fucking plan. Especially if you’re able to invest in the native local currency, too. If you can buy—I don’t know what it’ll look like, but I just don’t think it’s that crazy of a thought.

Whenever the de facto metaverse is established, everybody shares it, and it’s the size of Facebook, the size of Instagram, it’s just—I don’t know, what ultimately is Instagram? What do people use Instagram for? To signal socially to their communities and their friends what their life looks like, their real life, right?

23. Why Banks Is Bullish On Digital Status

And we know, because we’re so close to the internet and social media, that’s not the case at all. Everybody’s persona on the internet—you’re a completely different person on the internet, right? It’s very rare that someone’s fucking Instagram profile reflects their actual life one-to-one. It’s not the case at all. People have bad days. I mean, there are a ton of fucking girls out there that don’t look anything like their Instagram photos, right?

Not at all, bro. Yeah.

I don’t know. That’s why I’m so bullish on NFTs, online collectibles, and digital IP. It just makes too much sense, bro. There are people, products, and brands out there that are rooted in what they do for someone’s social status, and the only use for their product is to signal socially to other people. This exponentially grows the opportunity to do that, right?

What I mean by that is, I’m wearing a Patek on my wrist right now. Obviously, I’m on stream right now, so it’s a little bit of a different story, but in my day-to-day normal life, I put this on and walk down the street. Maybe 10 people see it and recognize what it is. You know what I’m saying?

In a metaverse where your profile is clickable by billions of people instantly, somebody can just type in, you know, “GTA 6 Banks,” and see what I own, see what my skin looks like, see what my house in-game looks like, and see how much money I have. What is that worth? I don’t know.

It’s interesting.

If Instagram had a fucking check mark—you know, the blue check mark—people pay for that shit.

Yeah.

People pay a lot of money for that. They pay a lot of money for @handles. They spend a fucking ton of money larping lifestyles in their pictures, right? Jets and a different car every day. 99% of the time, this is a lifestyle that’s rented, and it’s for Instagram. It’s the signal.

What if there was a check mark reserved just for billionaires on Instagram? A gold check mark. What would that be worth? What would someone pay for that to pretend and LARP as a billionaire? [laughter]

I don’t know. Definitely 5 figures. At least 6 figures.

Definitely 5 figures. Yeah, maybe 7. I don’t know.

I don’t know.

24. The $40M Electric Ferrari

I saw this fucking $40 million Ferrari sale—an electric car. It’s the highest-priced electric car ever sold.

This is so fucking ugly, dog.

It’s so bad. I’m so glad you said that, by the way. A couple of people who work on the show were talking about how they liked it.

That shit is ugly as fuck. Look, it looks like a Volvo.

It looks like a fucking Roomba, those little things that clean your rooms and clean the kitchen. [laughter]

Fucking cleaning the highway, bro.

Seriously, literally, though, it looks fucking awful.

I know it does. It looks awful.

The rims look like plastic.

It looks slow, bro. It looks like a fucking toy. I don’t know. Play it.

At $1 million.

$2.5 million. $3 million. $3 million. $4 million. $4 million. $5 million. $5 million here with RJ. $5 million. $10 million.

There’s no fucking way, bro. Let’s wait.

$10 million.

Why even go so fast from $5 to $10? What’s going on?

$10 million—sorry, $15 million.

What? $15 million.

No, there’s no way these people aren’t—

16 million.

For charity. It’s for charity, too, by the way.

16 million.

Makes it make more sense, but it’s still ridiculous.

20 million. $21 million.

More than the SP3 yesterday, ladies.

25 million. 26 million. The future.

That shit’s so fire, though, to just be bidding $25 million on a car just because. Just ’cause you can.

32 million.

Just ’cause.

Just fuck it, right?

32 million.

That’s hard.

$35 million.

He’s losing energy. He’s getting concerned. [laughter]

36 million.

What the fuck?

$40 million.

40 M’s, bro.

Going for the third and final time here. It could only be done at RM Sotheby’s. The car is sold! [cheering]

Ugly-ass car. 40 M’s, bro. Let me hold some. That’s fucking crazy.

Who did that? Can we look it up? Who the fuck did that?

I got it. This fucking guy. What a sicko.

He looks like a sicko, bro.

He looks like a sicko.

Think about what this guy’s sex life must look like.

Spending 40 M’s on a fucking [inaudible].

He’s doing all types of shit, bro. He’s doing everything.

He’s doing anything and everything with everybody.

Duct tapes and butt plugs and—

Fuck, he fucks animals, bro. He’s doing all types of shit, bro. It’s all happening in his house. He’s got mad rooms, and he probably has a labyrinth in his basement.

100%.

100%. [laughter]

That car’s shit. That car is butt-ass ugly. You know what this is? You know what this car is? It’s the AP Swatch of cars.

Is this fucking car? It’s some fucking LAR [?] supercar. It just looks like ass.

Why does every electric car look so beta?

I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s a thing. It’s definitely a thing. It’s so weird. It doesn’t make sense because Democrats hate Tesla. I don’t know why that’s a thing or why that’s where it went in my head, but—

I don’t know.

It can’t be beta because Democrats hate them.

It doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense. Who are you marketing it to?

I don’t know, man.

25. Is VVV The Sleeper AI Play

Is VVV the sleeper AI infrastructure play on-chain?

VVV is a sleeper consumer app play on-chain. I think VVV is one of the sleeper plays in crypto. They have around 4 million users right now. I think they just hit around $100 million in annualized revenue.

VVV is one of the applications that has found breakout success and consumer success, which is extremely hard to do, with a domain of customers that aren’t even really crypto-native customers, which is awesome. I think the narrative for them as uncensored AI is just great generally going forward.

I think for the same reason that Bitcoin made a ton of sense—uncensored money that nobody can get access to, and you can store it however you want—you should have uncensored access to AI, especially if AI is going to continue to get a lot more impressive over the years. You’re not going to want to be dependent on these centralized companies.

You talked about it on the first show. It was around $8, and it’s at $14 now. Do you think it’s still a trade?

It’s a great trade. It consolidated for the past few months. It was a really strong leader this year; it went from $1 to $20. We first mentioned it around $8, and it’s been consolidating for the past few months. Now it’s starting, I think, to trend up again.

They just had a recent round at a $1 billion valuation, but their numbers are through the roof. They’re crushing it. I think it’s rare that a crypto app is crushing it outside of crypto and also has a token attached to it. The team is focused on delivering value to the token as well.

So, yeah, I like Venice a lot. There’s not really much that they’re competing with, I would say, in the AI space right now in crypto. It’s definitely a good spot. Good shout.

26. Should We Be Worried About Robots

Cool. What else do I have here? Should we be worried about robots taking our jobs? Is that a real concern? Should we actually be worried about this?

I think it’s just too far away. I don’t think it’s as close as people are saying, bro. I see some of these videos of robots and I’m like, bro, they’re not taking my job. They’re not taking our jobs right now.

I just feel like the intelligence side of AI is going to outpace the physical robots. For physical robots to go out and replace construction workers, mailmen, fast-food window attendants, whatever, I just feel like AI is going to solve for this and figure it out.

It’s just going to figure out how humans don’t need to work jobs like that, which I think is a net positive.

Yeah. I definitely think that with the displacement of some menial labor jobs, we’re going to see some new jobs pop up, and hopefully they’re as fulfilling or more fulfilling for people. I think that’s definitely something I can see a thesis forming around.

But, yeah, I don’t know. We’re so new in the robotics space. I’m curious what industries are going to take first. It seems to me that the robots specialized at certain individual tasks, like the assembly-line stuff, are what’s going to get replaced first.

I think humanoid robots are going to lag behind a bit. That’s my thesis.

Somebody said AGI itself will advance robotics pretty fast. It’s going to advance every market really fast. That’s kind of my point: I just feel like it’ll solve for us not being as worried.

People shouldn’t want to work these jobs. If you do, cool. If you enjoy building houses and beating the shit out of your body every day, cool. But if you can fish with your family every day rather than do that, I don’t know. I feel like people shouldn’t be as worried about it.

Shit’s curing cancer, right? I’m sure it’s going to figure out some of the issues that are lingering around humanity, like inflation and—

And other things like that.

Riff for a second. I’ve got to take another piss, and we have someone coming on in 10 minutes, I think. Right?

10 minutes.

Talk to chat.

What’s good, chat? How we doing? How we living? What’s good, Kick? What is popping? Are we making money this week? I feel like we’ve got to be making money this week, right? We have to. We have to.

27. Se From FOMO Joins

Yo, what’s good, Hanzo? What’s good, Amdur? Mad, I don’t know how to say your name. Amadoul Call, what’s good? DBC, what’s good? Watchful Web3, what’s good? What’s good, Zesaw One? What’s good, Finesse Farting? What’s good, Junior 805? What’s good? What’s good? What’s good?

It has water in it, but I’m not sure.

Somebody said, “Literally jerking off to my Anom bag.” Yeah, you don’t need to do that. You don’t have to do that. It’s not necessary that you do that. But, I mean, great. I’m glad you’re happy. Whatever makes you happy, man. Whatever makes you happy.

What’s good, Zo Birds? Yes, bro. Football’s finally fucking back. Finally. Finally, bro. The first game of the season is September 13th. I think we play the fucking Commanders. It’s a home game. I’m probably going to pull up to it, to be honest.

Yeah, I’m excited. This is my favorite time of the year, bro. Fuck summer. I like football season. Fuck summer.

Oh, no. No, dude. What phone do I use? Why are you asking me that? Stop trying to hack me, bro. I have enough. I have enough of these people.

28. Bitcoin Miners Were The Greatest Bagworkers

Shadow coins. So, at 100xes, bro. Anthem is up a 1000x. What else do you want from me? What else do you want from me?

Thoughts on bag working?

I think bag working is—

How crypto has gotten a lot of its value in it since—

Its origin, bro. Like, the Bitcoin bag workers were the greatest bag workers of all time. You know how crazy it is to mine a coin on your computer that nobody has even put a value on and just run that shit from zero to $100,000?

Bitcoin bag holders were the greatest bag holders of all time.

I want recommendations on buying a Google Pixel. Do not buy a Google Pixel. That phone fucking sucks. I had one before. It’s awful. Do not buy a Google Pixel.

Thoughts on Stock Fund. I think Stock Fund is cool. I think the stock pairs with memes is interesting, especially because the RWA narrative is so new and popular in crypto. I think innovation around there makes sense. It’s also part of the reason I like Stock Broker so much.

Yeah, Stomp Fun is cool. They have Anom Paris, which is cool.

Bro, why do you guys spam the chat like I can’t read? I don’t understand why you do this. Why? What’s the best iPhone? The best one.

When does BTC become stable? I feel like BTC is pretty stable. Ansem to the moon. I agree. I agree. I agree.

Have I—what the fuck?

Yo, can you hear me?

Oh, shit. Holy shit, skinny brother. How are you? Holy looksmaxxing. You're handsome as fuck.

Ah, stop it. Stop it.

Looksmaxxing—you look good.

Thank you.

You do look good, man. You do. I like that blue mic, too. Hey, brother, what's up? I mean, markets are up.

Everything's up.

The mic is up.

Everything's up.

How are you living, brother?

29. AI Brain Rot

I'm doing good, dude. I have to give my props to Ansem real quick. I think this is actually the first time we're meeting, but you were a very key, pivotal part of what got me into the trenches. I remember living in a house with my boys, and whenever you would tweet something, we'd be like, “Holy shit.”

Wait a second. For real?

This is the first time you guys are meeting each other?

I think it's the first time we talked.

30. Last Time They Streamed Was The Pico Top

What the fuck? This is like some Marvel Cinematic Universe shit—Spider-Man meeting the Hulk. This is crazy to me. I spent a lot of time with both of you guys in front of cameras. Orangie, the last time you and I were on a stream together, it was the fucking Pico Top. It was just getting started.

Yeah, for real.

Yeah. Actually, it was just getting started. What do you think about the market right now, bro? What are your thoughts?

I mean, I don't think I was ever wrong, right? My timing was a little wrong, but fundamentally—

If you just extend the time frame a little bit—no, it's facts. If you just extend the time frame a little bit, crypto would just get—

I agree with that. I think that's a good take.

31. Ansem As The Blueprint

If you weren't wrong, you were just 18 months early. That's awesome, bro.

It's fine, dude. Anyone who paid attention to me then and used these 18 months to learn about it is fine now. It's all good.

Talk your shit, baby.

And now they're ready to crush.

Yeah, hopefully, right?

Who would you guys be as far as superheroes? Who would we all be? Let's play this game. That's funny. Ansem would for sure have to be Captain America. You're just the guy, right? Like, who would we be?

Damn, this is—I've never—

You're Tony, bro. You're Tony. You're like a fucking—

Tony Stark.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dang. I like Tony Stark. I like Tony Stark. That's fucking lit.

Fucking gigabrain. He builds hella cool shit.

Yeah, I'll fuck with Tony Stark. I like Tony Stark. I'm taking it.

I'll be War Machine. I'll be the other one that's way less cool—definitely less rich—but he's got the suit on, too. Who are you, Orangie?

Dude, me and Thor look pretty similar.

Someone said Orangie's Rocket.

I said Thor.

Rocket Raccoon, bro.

Dude, me and Thor look pretty similar, you know.

I like that. That's good. Thor is strong.

So Orangie is Ned from Spider-Man. That's good. That's really good. Wow, I did not know you guys had never met. You guys have never met in L.A. or at any sort of event? That's so crazy to me.

That's crazy.

Actually, there was this one event in Dubai where—I mean, I was a nobody back then, but I was a really big fan. I tried saying hi to Ansem, but everyone was trying to, so it was super corny.

32. From Fortnite Amateur To Meme Coins

That's awesome, though. That's sick.

You said you were directly inspired by Ansem to start, in some regard, what you're doing.

Yeah. I pretty much got started with memecoins—obviously, trenching, the CT Twitter-tracker type of plays—and Ansem was pretty much the guy who ran that. Anything this guy would say would just be—

Real quick, just for chat, for anybody who isn't specifically up to speed with who you are: before that, you were a Fortnite amateur or pro?

Yeah, I was a Fortnite content creator. I won some money playing and stuff.

And what year was that?

From 2017 to 2022.

In 2022, you started to migrate over to trenching and memecoin trading.

Yeah. Well, actually, before that, I won $500,000 playing Dookey Dash. Remember when Mongraal won? I got third place.

This is how you and I met, because I was farming that. I was fucking buying keys.

Yeah.

What is Dookey Dash?

Dookey Dash was a video game that the Bored Ape Yacht Club hosted. I was dominating the whole game, and then Mongraal came out of nowhere and won. I remember Banks hitting me up. I was with my girl, and I was like, “Holy shit, Banks just hit me up, and he wants to have a conversation about a potential FaZe Web3 thing.” It never obviously happened, but I remember being so geeked. I was like, “Yo, babe, I'm going to join fucking FaZe for Dookey Dash.”

33. Why Gamers Become Traders

By the way, can we just talk about this? Obviously, in hindsight, it's so clear and obvious there's some sort of correlation between playing Fortnite, being good at gaming, and trading crypto.

Talk about being early, bro. I was buying keys on this shit. You needed Bored Ape keys for Dookey Dash. I was buying keys and hiring ex-Fortnite pros to play. This was before Orangie even existed, before this was a thing, because it was a physical game. It was a little rocket-ship game. I was like, “I know gamers. I can onboard gamers to this, and we would have some sort of edge there,” which we did. I farmed that. I don't know how much money we ended up making. We made $30,000 or $40,000 farming that. You made $500,000. Mongraal made over $1 million.

I think the key sold to Adam Weitsman for like $1.3 million. He probably made over $2 million doing the whole thing.

34. Building Potion

That's insane. To this day, you started 2022 with a nice, healthy initial $500,000 win. What have you run that up to with all your other stuff? I see the FOMO logo in the background. Obviously, you've become this character. You've onboarded a bunch of people. I saw some stats somewhere that you have over 10,000 signup codes on FOMO. Is that true?

Yeah, yeah. Dude, there's a fucking spider on the floor right now. What should I do real quick?

Brother, you're a grown-ass man. Maybe just fucking step on it. Oh, not Cupsy. No. Cupsy. Is that Cupsy?

Yeah.

All right, I killed it. Shout-out, Cupsy.

Shout-out, Cupsy.

That's so gross. All right, anyway, how much did you run it up to?

Yeah, how much money have you made?

The fuck—

Just fucking say it, man.

I've made a few million dollars.

A few million dollars? Why are we pocket-watching? What is—

That's what the fucking show's all about. People are interested. You're a kid who came from Fortnite. You found yourself not only trading at a high level and finding great success, but you've also worked with a ton of brands and stuff. You've owned products. You've seeded products early. I don't know, it's just—you’re fucking incredible. How old are you now?

I'm 23.

You're a fucking incredible example for these kids.

Yeah, it's just—

And you guys don't act like you all don't measure each other's success, dick-watch, and rank each other based on P&Ls and shit. I know the game. I'm 40 years old, but I know it matters. They care.

Yeah.

Eight figures.

My on-chain P&L is like $3 million, I think, across all my Blex wallets and stuff. I made that much from trading.

Yeah, plus Potion, plus fucking business shit, too. I want to hear more about what Potion is. I believe you sold it, right? I know you did really well with trading before you were doing the gaming stuff, but I think the combination of those two things is rare. It's rare to see somebody build a business around these things in this industry and do well with it. Talk about the trading side and then the business side.

35. Content Is The Best Trade You Can Take

100%. Okay, look, my main thing has always been content. I've always known that was the king thing. I didn't focus on being a Fortnite pro and try to win $500 a week playing a Cash Cup, because honestly, it's really stressful and a lot went into it. But I knew content was king.

Look at it—it's been very, very obvious. You look at the top Fortnite guys, and it's Nick Eh 30, it's Ninja, it's those guys who made the most amount of money. It's clicks, right? You can't tell me who got first place in FNCS five FNCSes ago. It doesn't matter. Content's always been king.

For me, I really wanted to document my crypto journey, so I started doing that. I obviously grew the biggest memecoin YouTube channel in crypto. It has around 200,000 subscribers, and I’ve been documenting my memecoin trading journey since February of 2024, so it’s been over 2.5 years now.

With all this content, I had this whole influx of people who were interested in learning how to do this stuff, but I obviously wasn’t qualified enough to teach it. I was paying $3,000–$4,000 a month for the different tools I was using, like CT trackers and stuff, and I wanted to monetize a group enough to pay for the tools themselves. I was like, “Why would I pay $3,000–$4,000 a month if I can funnel people into this Discord, we can all split the cost of the tools, and I can charge whatever—$50 a month?” I think it started at that.

Obviously, it grew super [__] quickly, and a lot of traders were actually really mad that I put these tools in the spotlight. I remember Profit texting me, like, “Yo, what the [__] are you doing? Don’t do that shit.” I respected Profit a lot as a trader—I still do. That’s my boy. But I was like, “Holy [__]. Should I actually see this through?” I’m glad I did, obviously, because it grew into one of the biggest crypto alpha groups, I guess.

Yeah, this has kind of been our shared point of interest: this content-attention thing. Obviously, my history and career are all rooted in that. I have 15 years of experience doing it, and crypto, for whatever reason, sparked my interest. I really jumped headfirst into NFTs and everything.

I’ve always felt like this market is super underdeveloped. All the content attached to it is super underwhelming, really difficult to navigate, and difficult to sift through. There haven’t historically been any really good filters, so that’s where my interest in you has always been, too: the content thing.

Do you want to talk more about how that interest in content and establishing this platform has led to these crazy lucrative opportunities, what those look like, and how much more money you’ve made from the content and the byproducts of the content than you have on-chain? A $3 million P&L is [__] incredible. It’s super impressive. It’s life-changing.

It’s so much better if it’s documented. That’s the thing people don’t realize. What a lot of people don’t think through is that you can make millions of dollars trading, but if you do that publicly and document it in a way that’s understandable and digestible for people, you can make 2, 3, 5 times that from the content and everything else.

Yeah, you’re setting yourself up and documenting yourself becoming a brand authority. Content is the best trade you can take at any point in the cycle. There’s literally no competition in the space. Crypto, for some reason, is seen as such a bad industry that there’s no one here to compete with you on content. You could literally press record today, make a video, and probably go viral tomorrow.

We kind of saw it with Rasmer, right? Rasmer just started making these shitty but funny little skits, and he blew up off of it. Obviously, now he’s become this more-produced, good content creator, but the people here in crypto—there’s obviously not a lot of content to be made, and it’s been very obvious that there’s a lot of money to be made.

36. Potion Was Doing $2M A Month

For more context, I was pulling in a couple hundred thousand views on YouTube, and I posted this publicly on [__], on their YouTube channel. Potion, at one point, was making close to $2 million a month.

Insane. Yeah.

You can really leverage it. How many people did you have in Potion?

We had around 120,000 free members. I don’t remember what the peak paid membership was.

Oh, wow. Damn, that’s a [__] lot, bro.

It’s actually not that much, bro. I did a really bad job because I didn’t know what I was doing. I just started another Discord that’s a free thing. I’m not looking to monetize it like that, but there are already almost 40,000 people in there, and it’s been a month and a half.

I acquired the Discord username @memecoins, so it’s been getting a ton of organic traffic.

Are they coming in as Orangie fans, or are you noticing people flowing in who don’t even know who you are yet?

37. Crypto's Brand Problem

Both. There are definitely 90% Orangie fans, but the fact that the other 10% is almost 4,000 people who have no idea who I am—they just know about memecoins, and they see a Discord memecoins group—is a crazy way to introduce these users.

We spoke about how poor crypto’s brand is, and the narratives and connotations around crypto. What do you think the solution is? I totally agree, almost to the point where I don’t even really like saying the word. I think the word carries so much baggage.

38. Banks On MLG And Top Blasting

We talked about this yesterday on Call Z, but there are really only a couple of industries with a worse reputation and brand than crypto. It’s the porn industry and the casino and gambling industry. I don’t even think alcohol and drugs have as bad of a brand or sound as bad in people’s ears as crypto does. Why do you think that is, first of all? And second of all, what’s the solution? It’s not good for anybody, obviously, and there has to be some way to fix it, right?

I don’t know why, to be honest, because it’s had a bad reputation even before I was introduced to it. But the best marketing has always been green candles. As prices go higher, more people start to talk about it and wonder about it, and people making money make it seem like it’s legitimate.

Even when things are good, I feel like there’s this level of cope where it’s like, “The only people who are actually getting rich over there are [__] scammers and grifters and [__] horrible people,” you know?

Yeah, but the higher everything goes, the less and less of that there is. If Bitcoin rips to $300,000, it’s all over the [__] news. You go to the gym, and I remember Bitcoin hitting a $120,000 all-time high, whatever that was, and it was on [__] TVs. It’s just more of that.

I think Bitcoin has a relatively good brand. I think Bitcoin—

I think Bitcoin’s clean.

Yeah, I think Bitcoin has kind of broken off from crypto. I think crypto—the word carries all the negative [__]. I don’t know. Maybe we need a new word.

Yeah. That’s why I like this whole trading thing.

Trading is cool. Trading is clean.

Yeah. Traders are the new celebrities, right?

I like that narrative. I’ve liked leaning into that a little bit. Kimchi is someone we’ve obviously seen blow up, and he’s been on a [__] rocket ship, man. Everything that kid’s doing is going viral. I saw you farming the Gunner thing. I farmed it too off a burner, and the internet went [__] crazy for it. But you knew him before all this.

Yeah, he was my best friend in my OG trenching friend group.

39. Knowing Kimchi Before Trump

Wow, that’s insane. So you knew him. Can you walk us through it? You knew him before he hit on Trump?

I knew him from the Fortnite days.

He’s also an ex-Fortnite pro.

Yeah. Kimchi, Fortnite dude.

It’s insane. So crazy. Can you walk us through it?

Yeah. I used to trade with this group called Honor. These were my OG Fortnite friends, Frosty Jays and all these guys. Then I got introduced to Cubsy because my friend Wy told me, “Yo, you have to invite this guy into your trenching group chat. He’s super cracked.”

Cubsy had a $1 million P&L in his trenching wallet, and I was like, “All right, sure.” So I got introduced to Cubsy. Cubsy invited me to his VC—super OG—and there was Kimchi, Kenzo, Dev, and the OGs of what became the group called Pioneer. That’s where I met Kimchi.

Then we obviously became friends and went on many trips together. We recorded that video before any crazy trading things happened, but, yeah.

So you met him before or after the Trump stuff?

Before.

Before. Can you walk us through that trade? Where were you, and when did you realize that Kimchi had hit that size of a trade? I’m just curious about your perspective because you were friends with him beforehand. Obviously, millions and millions and millions of people are being educated on who Kimchi is and his lore. A lot of things have been assumed, but you knew him before all this. So, just from your point of view—

Yeah, I knew Kimchi before the Trump coin dropped, and Kimchi had already made millions of dollars on-chain. I wasn’t with him when the Trump coin happened, so I don’t know.

But this guy was already a super-paid trader.

Right?

Yeah.

Go ahead.

I think it’s pretty cool how the group spawned in the trenches. I think that’s one of the coolest things that happened last cycle: the same way you had your core group of friends that you would play games with online and do all the back-and-forth PvP with, but with trading. I think it was rare for that to happen last cycle. People were like, “Oh, this fucking trench game—we can play together and play against other people, and make a lot of money doing it.”

I think the popularization of that is going to be really cool to see going forward. It’s kind of like they call it “the trenches,” being in the arena. It’s very PvP, but I think it’s very skill-based. That’s why you see so much interest from young men in this industry: it’s the same reason we like to play video games, and the same reason we like to play sports. Trading is that exact same thing, where it’s super competitive, but you can get better at it the more time you spend on it, and you can do it with your friends. So there’s a camaraderie aspect to it.

Something I’ve definitely gathered over the last several years is that it’s obviously +EV to be a part of a group. All the most successful traders I know are inside some sort of group and consistently communicate their thoughts, ideas, theses, and trades with another group of people who also have really high P&Ls and are sharp kids as well. So, is trading a team game, Ansem?

40. Missing Cash Cat At 20K

100%. Bro, what, you need comms, dude? At my peak of trading, I would have 20 different Discord groups open. But really having that key, niche group of friends who are doing infinite DD or degening coins, you know, that’s such an edge.

It’s the same people. Two years ago, I was a really big fan of all these Grand Finesse traders, like And Profit, whatever, whatever. Then, obviously, not to shill, FOMO released the Clans feature, and now they’re the number-one clan in P&L. These traders have still been around cooking while people thought that all these guys had retired.

41. The WIF Call

Fucking sick, bro. Sick as fuck. I had the Manlets Telegram back in the day, and I dropped it right as Solana was breaking. I was like, “Yo, we need a place for everybody to congregate and talk.” The Telegram had 20,000 people in it, I remember, in late 2023. But actually, I’ve never really been that much of a group-oriented person. I’ve done a lot of my stuff individually, actually.

And you became pretty famous for hitting WIF, right? That was your thing.

Yeah, it was. I think WIF was the biggest one because I was super bullish on Solana, and then Solana started moving. I hit BONK, and BONK went from around $30 million to a few billion. Then WIF was the one after that. WIF was sitting basically at zero when we found it in the Telegram chat, but I was the one who was super loud about it on socials.

Public wallet?

No, it wasn’t a public wallet.

Okay, okay, okay.

No, yeah, it wasn’t a public wallet.

You just started bull-posting it? What market cap was it at when you started bull-posting it?

It’s hard. Probably around $5 million, I think, on the timeline.

Then it went to $5 billion, and your reputation was just aura for you.

Yeah, yeah. It went to $5 billion that cycle, and people were like, “Who the fuck is this dude? How the fuck did that even happen?” But it happened at the same time that I had also called Solana and Coinbase basically from bottom to top. So I had the core thesis around actual fundamental coins and companies, and then it was also the meme shit on top of it.

The traders who had been following me for a while respected my calls in that way. The 2021 cycle was when I first started blowing up. That was when I first hit 100,000 followers, because I had a trading journal where I was writing all my perp trades and my on-chain trades. I did well that cycle, and then Kobe asked me to come on UpOnly.

When Kobe asked me to come on UpOnly, that’s when my account went crazy, because everyone was like, “Who the fuck is this dude?” Then in 2023, I already had some followers, and I was super loud on Solana again and hit it back-to-back cycles. So that was kind of my compounding.

42. Selling A Coin You're The Face Of

I don’t know if this is public, but how much did you realize on WIF?

It’s not public.

Dude, the reason I ask is only because I’m super bullish on some particular coins, and I’m just curious about how it plays out—being vocal about something, but also eventually looking to take profit on it.

Yeah, it’s really hard to do, to be honest. It’s really hard to do because if you’re the main face of something and you’re talking about it nonstop, it’s hard to be de-risking as stuff is going up. It’s near impossible.

I think you just kind of have to be transparent with people if you have a position and you’re going to be selling. You’re like, “I’m just going to be de-risking on the way up.” You don’t try to hit certain levels where you’re going to just slam the fucking chart all at once. You kind of just, over time, scale out.

You’re obviously not going to scale all the way out. When you talk about something so much, you’re always going to have a position in it. I don’t think it would be normal for you not to, so you’re not going to full-clip the whole bag.

Have you guys ever had anybody manage positions for you?

No.

Never.

So obviously, we all know what happened with me and MLG, and how my face and entire brand got wrapped up into that. I kind of became the mascot and the face of it. It went on some fucking crazy, historic run from $3 million to $250 million.

I was very, very vocal about taking profits at $100 million, but I was so actively in it that, rather than starting to sell at $100 million, I was just top-blasting. The dopamine of being involved at that level made it really impossible for me to sell.

So when Trump and Melania happened and the Adin Ross stream happened, obviously a rug happened, it spiraled out of control, basically crashed to zero, and I wound up losing money on that trade. That obviously makes no fucking sense, but it does make sense in the context of what we’re talking about.

43. Letting Someone Else Manage Your Position

That’s why I asked you guys if you’ve ever had anybody else manage a position. You remember Cross, right? You met Cross.

We lived with him—me, Malcolm, Thread, et cetera. I think you’re muted, maybe, potentially, but we lived with—no, no, you’re not. You’re not. You’re good. Cross was super bullish on MOG right before it really went crazy. Whatever year that was. I think it was the end of 2023. Was it the end of 2023?

2024, maybe.

I think—

When did BONK happen? When did BONK happen?

MOG was definitely 2024. It was the beginning. It was early 2024, though.

Early 2024. Okay. So around that time, he was super bullish on MOG. This was before shit started to heat up again. He sold me on it. He pilled me on it, and I just sent him USD. I was like, “Throw me in with your position, and however you sell it, sell it.”

I think MOG was one of the best-run brands ever in crypto. I loved the way it was branded. I loved the way the community moved. I loved the little cat pointing and laughing—whatever. I got super involved in that.

I participated at that level, kind of front-facing, but Cross managed that whole position and was de-risking all the way up. We realized a bunch of profit there. I think I made close to 7 figures on MOG. I put around $100,000 into it, or something—maybe $50,000 to $100,000—and it wound up being a great trade.

But just from my own experience, the only thing I’ve ever made any sort of money on, in terms of these culture coins that I’ve ever been vocal about, is MOG. Everything else has been a loss. Everything else has been for the culture, and it’s never made any sense.

44. Chasing One Public 1000x

Yeah. No, yeah. I actually spoke to someone who made 7 figures today on MOG as well, because he’s a whale in this token that I like. I was asking him for advice on how I can actually make a fucking ton of money on a memecoin, because I’ve never made a lot on one memecoin, and I want to do that so fucking badly.

It’s such social proof. This Kimchi narrative—imagine I had the same narrative, but actually on public wallets, shown. I want to hit one of those so fucking badly, you know?

Like making a mil on NEIRO or whatever, you know.

Yeah, bro. It’s fucking crazy.

I was talking to him 10 hours before he hit that trade. I was in a big call with him, Rowdy, fucking Cupsy, just listening to all these guys talk. Then the next day, I’m seeing it, and I’m like, “Wow, these guys are for real.”

Correct.

No, I want to do something like that really, really badly, because I know how to take advantage of it with the content, bro.

If I hit a multi-figure P&L, you’re just going to see Orangie for the rest of your life. [laughter]

I love that.

That’s so fucking funny. What do you think it is, by the way? Just to bring it back, what do you think it is about Fortnite that correlates to trading? What part of being good at Fortnite transfers over?

45. The Fortnite Storm Theory Of Trading

I think endgame—trying to win a game and dealing with the things that are out of your control. For example, in a Fortnite game, there’s a storm, and the zone can pull in different directions. You have to micro-adjust what your next step is in order to still try to win the game. This correlates directly to memecoins because there are so many things out of your control, like a zone pulling, that could happen when you’re in a trade. You have to learn how to adjust really quickly to whatever that next step is, which is why we see all these Fortnite guys become primarily these new-pair trenchers and completely dominate that, rather than guys who hit really nutty P&Ls on stuff. Some do both, obviously.

Who’s Klux? Chat’s saying Klux?

Yeah, Klux is probably nuts—probably the best tweet player, one of the best.

Yeah. I don’t know. Did you see Sho’s tweet play?

He hit a pretty crazy one on some tweet the other day. He got a $4,000 market-cap entry, the coin went to around $5 million, and by $300,000 he was already out. He realized around 1,000 SOL in profit.

So you’re saying “tweet play.” What is a tweet play?

Yeah, this is the way I came up in trading and what I used to push really, really hard: fishing for these insane P&Ls.

Rasmer mentioned something along these lines. He said that if he’s looking at a potential trade and thinks the outcome is 50/50, normally that wouldn’t be EV-positive for the average person. But in his case, since he’s doing it in public and winning in public, it is EV-positive. That adds another layer to it. Is that kind of along the lines? Hitting a 1,000x as ORNG is almost worth spending money on and losing money to do.

I mean, this is why I’m top-blasting every single coin. This is unrelated to the tweet play, by the way; that’s something else. But yes, I’m currently looking for this nuts play to hit in public. I’ve literally been blasting a minimum of $15,000 into $1 million market-cap coins. What am I doing? I’ve absolutely touched some of them, but it’s fine. I hit for around $40,000 the other day.

I can feel that it’s coming. I can feel very, very soon that a play like that is coming.

Dude, I’m almost $200,000 deep into a coin right now, and I think it might happen on that. I don’t want to show a coin on here.

It’s the tone one, right? You’re fucking—yeah, you’ve been—I’ve been seeing it. If you follow it, you know.

Yes, I am down a lot on it, but I don’t care. I keep buying because it’s genuinely the best meme of all time. Dude, people aren’t understanding what’s disrupted our generation: AI. AI has completely changed the way that we’re ever going to do anything again. Triple T is the fucking meme of AI. He’s the mascot of brain robot, bro. These little kids that grow up like the fucking TTT tung is embedded into their fucking head—

What is the lore, by the way? I’m fucking 40 years old.

He’s just some brain-rot character that was AI-generated by accident. It makes me really sad because he never asked to be AI, you know? [laughter]

He never asked to be AI.

I don’t know. That nigga’s ugly as fuck, bro.

No, he’s not, dude. [laughter]

You two look the same, bro. [laughter]

What? What is he, bro? What is he?

He looks like Brown Gumby. He looks like beef jerky, bro. [laughter]

He does, bro.

Brown Gumby is— [laughter]

He looks like Brown Gumby. I swear to God, every time I see this shit, I’m like, “Yo, what the fuck is this? Who came up with this?” AI had to come up with this because no real person would draw it. Literally.

Yeah, that’s one coin—one trade I’ve taken. I hit Hyperliquid pretty well, and I was pretty happy about that. Unironically, though, I hit the same thing as Rasmer. I actually ended up selling a chunk of my HYPE literally 2 days ago.

Yeah, I know. Super.

What do you think about Robinhood? Do you like the Robinhood trenches? What do you think? What are the groups saying?

Dude, Kalua was shilling me Robinhood Cash at around a $20,000 market cap, and I was too lazy to bridge. I was too lazy to bridge over because it was pretty complicated, I guess. I was just lazy. What do I think? I think Solana is still better.

I don’t know.

I agree.

At the end of the day, we all kind of return home, right? We’re chasing BNB in hopes of a Binance listing or someone talking about it, but memes happen organically. It’s just Solana right now.

Why do you think that is?

It’s just native. It’s like—

Yeah, the supercycle kind of started on it. Obviously, Pump.fun as well. Pump is Solana, and Pump is the home of where memecoins are created.

46. The Robinhood Chain Sleeper Case

I like Robinhood, bro. I don’t know. I like Robinhood. I’m obviously super bullish on Solana. I think I’ve maybe been the most bullish SOL person on the internet for the past few years, but I think Robinhood is something that is not going to go away. I really like how Vlad and them have been publicly supportive of all the activity on their chain, whether it’s meme stuff or RWA stuff. They’re also quick with the listings. Cash getting listed that fast is fucking crazy to me, and it shows that if more stuff pops up, they’re going to be supportive of that, too. I definitely think Robinhood is a sleeper for this cycle, especially because people are defaulted to SOL right now. That’s why somebody was telling you Cash got to a $20,000 market cap, but you were like, “I don’t want to bridge to this new Robinhood thing.” There’s still that friction that exists. If Robinhood figures out a way for users of the Robinhood app to be more active on the Robinhood chain in a way that Coinbase was not able to do, then it gets super interesting for them. Coinbase had around 100 million users in its main app and could not get people active on Base. But if Robinhood can do that, they have around the same user base, they’re also degens, and the Robinhood people made a ton of money on Dogecoin.

47. Why Ansem Backed His Own Coin

Yeah, people forget how much money retail made on Dogecoin through Robinhood in 2020 and 2021. I think that’s why it definitely makes sense to pay attention over there. Ansem, side question: What made you want to double down and get behind an on-chain coin this cycle, like this one?

I knew we were close to a bottom this cycle, right? I thought Solana was close to a bottom. I was like, “Okay, if Solana’s close to a bottom, I know what’s going to happen on-chain. There are going to be some memes that do really well. Let me figure out what these memes are.” So I started buying some of the memes on SOL. I bought a few of them and was just feeling it out to see what communities were responsive to stuff, where the volume was, how things were moving, and stuff started to move a little bit. But if you know how memes work on Solana, right now, if you’re buying anything over a $1 million market cap, there’s somebody who bundled it at $10,000 or whatever. There are a lot of people who are in with super-low entries, and they’re looking to exit on whatever spike of volume they can get immediately. I’ve talked about a lot of on-chain coins over the past few years, and a lot of the things people have gotten mad at me for are when I talk about these on-chain coins where somebody else had a ton of the supply. I don’t know who these people are. I talk about the coin, it goes up a little bit, and the people who have a ton of supply immediately start nuking it on the attention that I bring to the coin. This has happened with a lot of on-chain coins that I talk about, but I’m never the person in control of a lot of the supply. I was looking at Pump. I was looking at Solana, and people were telling me, “That wallet is yours. You’re supporting this coin. You’re going to do X, Y, and Z.” I’m like, bro, the wallet’s not mine.

48. AI Is Curing Cancer In Real Time

They're like, “Bro, yes it is. Why are you lying?” So I'm like, “Okay, I'm going to make a Pump profile. This is my wallet,” because you can clearly see that I just made this profile and this is mine. People started directing coins to that wallet.

At the time, I was like, “It would make a lot of sense for Pump to do their airdrop right now, because if they do an airdrop, it's going to be a crazy stimulus for the trenches.” I think stuff is going to rip. So I'm like, “I'm going to start giving out some of these creator fees that I'm making on this Pump wallet.” It was like $500K at the time, and I'm going to give it back to some people.

I posted the Pump wallet again. When I posted the Pump.fun wallet again, the Anthem coin ripped. It was one of the coins that people sent me, and I had 65% of the supply. I'm looking at it and I'm like, “I think memes are going to do really well. I have 65% of this one. It's attached to my name, and it's a meme that I'm going to be able to talk about. I know I can't get nuked on because I have 65% of the supply.” It was sitting at around $5M to $8M.

49. Every Billion Dollar Meme Had A Face

I'm looking at it, thinking about it, and I'm like, “It probably just makes sense for me to take this one and run with it, because I know something on-chain is going to need to spark activity and spark interest in trading anyway.” This is something that I can talk about nonstop and hard-shill the same way I hard-shill all these other coins, but I don't have to worry about somebody nuking it.

I also have always had the thesis that creators attached to coins in general makes sense. Every meme that went over $1B had somebody notable attached to it. You had Pepe, you had DJ Harambe, Doge had Elon, Bonk had the Bonk people, and WIF had me. All the coins that did really well had some figure or group of figures that had a lot of influence online.

SPX had its admirers. It had people rallying around it.

I have a general question for the both of you. Answer—I’m really curious about your answer, because obviously you were such a pivotal part in so many people’s journeys through the trenches. Did you ever trench? What were you trading on? What did you buy and sell coins on?

I'm not a trencher, bro.

You've never been on Axiom Terminal or GMGN?

Bro, I'm not a trencher at all. I'm not a trencher.

You never even opened the website?

I mean, I have. I've used Axiom. I've never used GMGN, but no, I've never been a trencher, bro. I was never the one scanning coins super-low. I was the one who was like, “Okay, I'm going to find the coins after they're at $1M and they have a community of people around them.” Those were my spots on Jupiter.

Those were your spots on Jupiter.

Yeah, bro.

50. What Got Everyone On Chain

Yeah, bro. But I used BONKbot early on, back in the early days. After NFTs, Unibot was actually one of my good trades in 2023. I was like, “Oh, this makes sense as a terminal for people to use.”

But people were using the other one. They weren't using Unibot. They were using—what's the other one? It was another B. Damn, I'm blanking on the name, but there was another one. But yeah, dude, I was raw-dogging it.

What do you think? Go ahead.

I had a ton of Ethereum laying around after NFTs. I did stable up a good, considerable amount. Thank God. FTX happened.

Honestly, the whole reason why I wanted to buy Solana at around $8–10 was that I didn't even know who Ansem was. I wasn't reading, and I didn't know anything about the technical aspect of Solana. I had just traded a couple of NFTs on Sol, and it was so much quicker. It was so much faster. It just felt better.

The reason why I think MW2 is the best Call of Duty of all time is because it just feels good. It feels good to click the buttons. It feels good to move through the maps. Something about it felt better. It was cheaper, and it was quicker. So I just wanted Solana. I saw it collapse to $8, and I'm like, “This seems like a good enough spot to buy.”

I bought it there. I didn't even physically buy it—I made Cross do it. I'm like, “Hey, Cross, I want to buy a bunch of SOL.” He did it for me. Cross bought Mog for me as well. Even just recently, Pump—Ansem was like, “Pump, pump.” So I went over and swapped a bunch of USDC for Pump on Jupiter.

Yeah, which I think is a pretty good trade, to be honest.

Hyperliquid, too. Obviously, it's a little bit more complicated to bridge over to Hype, so that's another one where I had Cross do it. I wanted to swap my entire USDC and SOL position into Hyperliquid four months ago.

Do you guys think that, speaking of Pump and FOMO, this is the most marketing that crypto companies have ever done?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm honestly excited to talk to Se after you.

I've only been a day-one supporter of the whole team, because without Pump I probably wouldn't be trading the trenches. But this little thing they've got going on is so good.

Sick. Very good.

It's very, very good.

I think Jackal mentioned this a few months ago: if Pump were just to throw $100K of a clipping budget into content, the trenches would grow. Now that you have these two—and not just them, either; everyone's joining the race—I'm seeing TikTok edits from Axiom. I'm seeing TikTok edits from these random other terminals, too.

Everyone's realizing that we have to step outside of the CT bubble and do some real marketing. Look what it's done to the actual trenches.

Get the bigger piece, because the pie just keeps growing.

Yeah. To be honest, if you believe in the thesis that traders are going to be as popular as other celebrities and famous people because they're good at content, they can make a lot of money, and they can teach people how to make a lot of money—

Then it makes a ton of sense for traders to be getting contracts in a way. They're getting paid for trading on whatever the best platforms are.

That's kind of what's happening right now, I think. FOMO has been crushing the marketing, and I think Pump is realizing that they have a lot of money to spend. They have $2B in their treasury, on their cash balance sheet, so they have a lot of money to spend on marketing, too.

If we have these 2 companies and a lot of other companies in crypto spending money on marketing in a way that's palatable for people, it's obviously net positive for everybody. If you were Pump, would you focus on the app? My thought process was, “They're winning the launchpad game,” but I was really interested to see the pivot.

I think it makes sense, because mobile is the stickiest place where you keep users. If you already have users in the app where they can also use the launchpad, then that's their whole reason for doing that. It does make sense.

Mobile is everything, for sure.

51. Why Is Everyone Building The Same App

Yeah. I do see your point, though. I have this recurring thought where I'm just like, “I don't understand why all of these products are building the exact same app.” You see everyone trying to do the same thing: launchpads, prediction markets, perp trading, and now social trading.

It feels like there are almost more apps and products than creators and big traders, which is, again, really good for people like us, to be honest.

Whenever someone makes something unique, it fucking works.

Like when FOMO started, that worked. When Polymarket started, that worked, right?

52. Traders Are Going Full Dox

It's just crazy from my point of view. Again, I was extremely early with regard to CT, if you guys remember the vlog that I did. It was super low effort; it cost me no time and no effort to do that. It was very, very simple.

Really, what I aimed to do with that was put in motion this network of creators who were doing any sort of meaningful content output in this market. The only person who really ran with it off the back of that was Threadguy. He moved over from Spaces to streaming, and now he does that every single day. Rasmr kind of floated around that and orbited around that for a while as well.

But it's really interesting to me to start seeing not only companies wake up, but people, right? You're seeing traders with eight-figure P&Ls like Rowdy who are fully doxxed and now trying to stream and doing shit like that. I think that's incredible. I'm super bullish on that. I'm super bullish on Rowdy specifically.

53. The Cupsy Face Reveal

That's what I tell Cubsy every single day, dude. I'm like, 100%. Cubsy has the most to gain in a situation like that. The Cubsy face reveal will be a bigger catalyst than Kimchi making whatever amount of money on Trump.

I agree. You think so? For real?

Further, Cubsy is the guy. You could be on some random TikTok, and people are just commenting, “One day when I grow up…”

Yeah, Cubsy is the only trader who has these aura edits with just shit. It's obviously not his face because he's not doxxed; it's the SpongeBob avatar. It's like—

It's insane.

He's got motion like that, bro. Do you guys know the guy? How much Cubsy made on-chain RNG? Do you know?

How much he made on-chain RNG, do you know?

I think on his public wallet it's like $40 million, I think.

Yeah. That's nuts, bro.

$40 million known.

How old is he?

He's probably made more, bro.

He's a young guy, dude. Young kid, bro. That's crazy, bro.

Twenty-two years old. He's made $40 million trading.

I talked to him recently. I'm like, “Bro, what were you doing before this?” He's like, “Oh, I was working at a gas station.” I was like, “Really?” I'm like, “What made you quit?” He's like, “I don't know. I just didn't like it, and I had this feeling.”

I was like, “Oh, you had this feeling, bro? You quit working as a gas station attendant, put shit like $1,000 on-chain, and then it showed $40 million?”

How much, bro? At 22.

Sick. Real sick shit.

Do you know how many stories there are like this? Incentus was a janitor the fucking year before he made $10 million. It's unreal. Dev was fucking working at Lifetime, and he hit a trade for like $100. He turned like $1,000.

I think the potential to really properly platform this—to point a camera at it, capture it, and distribute it—that is what's going to onboard people. That's what people are going to look at, because it's clearly cool: the market.

54. Trading Culture Is The Only Cool Thing In Crypto

Look at Kimchi. Kimchi is the best example of why this works. He's the proof that this will work. He's proof that the one definitive cool thing to come out of crypto is traders, is trading culture.

Even since the beginning of time, you look at Cobie, the GOAT, the greatest of all time, the number-one guy. Why did he—

Why did he have motion in the first place? Because he's a good trader.

Huh?

What did he do? What was his trade?

Cobie.

Oh, he made a trade. He was cycle to cycle, crushing it, bro—bottom to top, boom, boom, boom, boom. He was doing really well trading, and then he also built some shit, too.

This is my point. My point is, people didn't gravitate toward him. He didn't create this brand for himself because he was funny—

Or because he was a good trader.

Yes. The—

The same is true for you, Z. Doing it very publicly is clearly where the sauce comes from. The fact that products, chains, and people are starting to take note of that and give it its fair share of the respect and the credit—I don't know. I think that's what's on the horizon.

I think whoever does that the best is going to win the biggest. I don't know. It's genuinely super interesting. Even us talking about all of us getting excited, that's a fucking movie, bro. Incent life is a movie, right?

TM's movie.

It's a movie, but the only access to this information, or to following these stories, is tweets on a screen. It's so behind. It's insane.

Yeah.

55. Nobody Is Filming These Lives

Yeah. No, there needs to be some high-quality production of these people's lives, man. There are so many crazy trader stories out there, bro. It's nuts.

There's this guy, actually, who started watching my videos. He was homeless, living in his car—actually an old troll—and he ran it up to 7 figures just trading coins. Pretty crazy.

Homeless to 7 figures, bro. Only in crypto, bro. Only on Solana.

Not only do I think it's more interesting and entertaining, it's obviously more productive and more positive. You see so many people going viral for all the wrong things. You see Julian Newman and his sister doing this crazy media tour, and it's all over the timeline because she dropped a fucking sex tape. It's insane.

Or you have the RaKai brain-rotted shit streams and all this nonsense. People go viral for sitting in casinos, gambling, hitting max wins, and stuff. This is all degrading and not good for society. Something like this is a super positive thing. It's like, dude—

56. Winners, Losers, And Being Honest About It

What do you guys think about the other side of this? Obviously, for the very rare number of winners that we're talking about, there are a lot of loss cases, too. Do you think it's cool to showcase those, too?

I mean, bro, I think it's similar to sports. If you play sports, there are going to be winners and losers. There are people who lose in sports, and there are people who win in sports—people who make a ton of money because they're the best at their field.

I think finance is slightly different because there's obviously a monetary aspect to it. The losers actually lose money, which I think is fair. But I think if you're honest with people—this is a PvP game, it's not easy to beat this game, and you only should risk the amount of capital you're willing to lose in this game—then I think it's fair.

I think saying that trading is a way for you to leapfrog wealth makes sense, and I think it's a fair thing to say. Even if there are losers in trading, you just have to be transparent and honest about it.

I'll say this: introducing yourself to trading culture in crypto, I think at this stage it's still early enough for it to be worthwhile if you have a genuine interest in it. I think that's where it all starts and stops, right?

Like, Orangie, you have a big P&L, but at the same time, a majority of your success comes directly from other shit: your ability to build product and your ability to command attention and funnel it into that product and content, right?

57. The LeBron Analogy

My point is, in sports, take somebody who's in the NBA. You have LeBron James, who does that at the highest level of success and wins more than he loses. That's why he's successful. That's why he makes money in it. There are way more losers, way more people who don't amount to what he's done.

But at the same time, look at the entire ecosystem. There are people who build the stadiums they play in, the coaches, and the people who own the teams. They're way richer than the players slash traders, right? And that's the Elons and the founders of the world. I just think that—

I don't know. There are so many opportunities here that are outside of trading.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, bro, this is why I want to hit a $10 million trade. I don't care about the $10 million. I care about what it can fucking bring.

Yeah, that's fucking aura. With aura comes literally—dude, the day my P&L happens—

Boys. Your kids will see me on their fucking For You page.

Be a legend. You'll be a legend, bro. The legend of Kimchi? Nah, bro. The legend of Orangie, bro.

What's your $10 million trade going to be this cycle, bro? You think it's the Triple T shit?

I don't know. I don't have enough size for it to make sense—eight figures off a public trade. It'll probably be, like, I don't know—

Are you sized into majors? Do you think majors are at the bottom, too? I know you've made money on-chain, but are you—

I put $500,000 into Hyperliquid at $23.

Yeah.

Obviously, I'm up over 2x on that. But, like—

The thing is, I want to hit something crazy on a really public wallet, something new and fresh. I don't think making $5 million on a Hyperliquid trade is as cool as making it on a fresh narrative that just happened.

I want to hit it on a memecoin because that's what I am, right? I'm a memecoin trader.

58. Where The Next Trade Comes From

You said earlier—you said you feel like there are some giga opportunities, giga plays, on the horizon, around the corner. Obviously, you kind of came up alongside WIF, which, as you guys said earlier, climbed as high as $5 billion. Do you ever see a new, fresh pair, a new, fresh memecoin, running that high again?

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah. Triple that.

Now, seriously, though, I think there are tons of opportunities like this. When Robinhood launched, Kua genuinely got a sub-$20K entry on Cash Cat. He made like $2 million off it, off a couple bands, and there were many traders who did the same thing.

So, there's some sauce. I guess that's not really alpha because most people know, but USDC is launching its chain, Arc, right? I'm sure there are going to be some memes here that you can get in on. Things like this will continue to happen over the cycles.

Last cycle, I saw it directly because when Justin Sun was getting ready to blast memecoins on Tron, he changed his PFP to Sun Wukong. I made like $130K in an hour, and I just want to hit some stuff like that. Look at FOMO Pump Guy on FOMO. The guy turned $100 into over half a million bucks on this Chinese cow bull, whatever. New Lie, whatever.

The opportunities are there for the taking. It's all day. It's all day.

We hit Serhant together on a phone call.

That was nuts. Yeah, I was at the dentist.

You helped me make 100 grand.

I was at the dentist that day. That was nuts.

Serhant. I don't even remember what the drop was, but you're like—

The narrative was that Ryan Serhant went on YouTube and said, “Yeah, we're going to do...” Someone spoke about Serhant coin, whatever. I think I got in at 100K, so, like, a mil.

I don't remember exactly what I watched or how I caught it live in person, but he took this information because that's what you guys all do, right? You just trade information. You're just trading.

It's just on-chain sleuthing, bro. That's how Kua hit this Robinhood trade: by figuring out how to bridge and being super early to it. That's fundamentally what I love to do, bro. That's what Frank does, too. He just sits and he's the best at it. That's why people don't understand.

I lived with this kid for a year. I saw it—I saw him in front of 4 screens, typing, copy-pasting, dragging, communicating. I watched it, and that's why it was so tough for me. It's always been so tough for me to watch people on the timeline—

They jump to crazy conclusions, or just the cope, or the hate farming, because, bro, I've watched this kid do this shit. He's really, really just achieving—

I obviously don't know Frank that well, but I sit in the same alpha groups that this guy's in, and I'm sure he's in a lot more too. He's active all day, and so are so many other guys. These guys are actually—

DDing, dude. I don't know.

If I know Frank, he's either at his desk in front of 4 monitors, or he's got a laptop on his chest, lying in bed, or he's on his phone. He's glued to a screen.

I went to Disney with Cupsy, and Cupsy was badass, sitting crisscross applesauce down in here, trading on Photon—I kid you not. We were on a bus with Luke Belmar, Lucette, and Cupsy still on his phone. I think he made like 1,000 SOL on the bus on the way to TPT to go buy.

We have all this shit documented, bro. If I ever get the green light to post, bro, it's just going to be epic, epic.

59. Orangie Joins

We have Se in the green room. Orangie, I want to let you rap and talk to chat while I go take a piss. Just talk to chat and let them know where to find you and what you're working on.

I'm good. Anything you want to talk about?

Appreciate you guys for tuning in to Market Bubble. My name is Orangie. I'm a content creator. I used to play professional Fortnite. I got introduced to crypto and made a lot of money on memecoins. Content has fundamentally been the most important thing that's really changed my career and my life, and I would suggest you all do the same. It's super easy to pick up the camera and start yapping.

I've had a lot of things against me, but it has obviously still worked out content-wise. I still get views. For every 1 hater, there are 8 billion people in the world. You can get introduced to 10 new faces every single day, so don't let any negativity get to you. I've had a lot of negativity throughout my life, whether it was being overweight or whatever it was, in content and stuff, and you just can't let that shit get to you. Just start recording. It is super easy to hit post. Your first videos don't have to be good. What else, boys?

Honest to God, I think—and I've always thought—that we're just getting started. That's about it. Just getting started. Just getting started, bro. I'm actually excited for this cycle. I'm super excited for this cycle. I think the content is going to be way better. I think the social trading stuff is going to be a lot more exciting.

60. What The Next Cycle's Winner Looks Like

Last cycle, we had the proof of concept for memes doing well onchain. I think, honestly, there's going to be a lot more experimentation. I think the stuff that's going to catch people off guard—I wouldn't be surprised if the next coin that starts at a low cap and goes to multi-billions isn't just a meme. It's a meme with something else attached to it, or some devs doing some creative shit around it. That's kind of where my head's at onchain this cycle coming up. It's going to be something new that didn't exist last cycle.

Personally, I think it's all about being as early as possible to the most viral thing. We saw Chill Guy go to a billion because it was everywhere.

I feel very well-positioned. I would suggest you size in.

I'm not trying to give you an out, and I hope it pays out, bro.

I do actually like it. I've been shilled this thesis by Dyor. Dyor has been pilling me on it pretty good. I think it's interesting. It's super viral, but it needs some kind of catalyst that's going to break it out.

What do you actually think is important? I've learned a lot from you. This is my first time buying a lot of a memecoin at such a high market cap. What type of catalyst do these coins really need?

Somebody with a lot of influence to drive attention to the coin. A coin can have its own virality on socials across the board, but that doesn't necessarily always mean the coin has to go up. There's a second piece that needs to happen for the coin to get attached to the meme and for people to find out about the coin.

A lot of it is crypto natives driving attention to it at the beginning, but it catches fire and catches attention with people outside of crypto. With WIF, I was nonstop posting it every single day. People were raiding everybody's profile pictures. All this shit was happening all the time, and eventually we went so viral on X that Bloomberg and everybody else picked it up: “What the fuck is this dog-with-a-hat coin on Solana?”

Then all the trad people saw it and thought, “Oh, maybe we'll throw a few bands at this.” I had people DM me, “I bought a little bit just to fuck around,” because they already knew what Dogecoin was. They knew Doge went to $80 billion, and so once something goes viral and people know there's a coin attached to it, it's really just trading attention, which is what you said: figuring out what's going to go viral and what's the new big thing.

So it does need that piece, though. It does need a way to show that. Chill Guy didn't have anyone like that.

I guess Chill Guy didn't really—when was Chill Guy? 2024.

Yeah, end of 2024, like November.

Yeah. What did it go to? A few hundred?

I think it went to $2 billion. I could be super fucking wrong. It went to hundreds of millions.

Yeah, could be very wrong.

Sometimes it doesn't, but Chill Guy also had a lot of traders attached to it who found it pretty early. I think Chill Guy ran up pretty quickly, though. I do remember Chill Guy.

I'm not saying it needs to be 1 person, by the way. I'm saying it needs to be a group of people that popularize it.

Bro, it doesn't have to be this one, bro. I really want to catch one of these, and I hope it happens this cycle.

You will, bro. I have faith in you.

I have faith in you.

All right, bro. What? Oh, super nice to meet you. I hope we meet in person one day.

Yeah, we will, bro.

We definitely will this cycle. Yeah, it’s been cool talking to you.

All right, Banks. I appreciate a minute. Love, Orange. You’re the goat. Based the fuck up, baby.

I love you.

Great kid. Great kid. Super successful and really, really smart. Sharp kid.

Yeah, he’s crushing it. Crushing it. Let’s bring Se in. Z, you want to introduce him again?

Yeah, guys, we’ve got Se in the background, CEO and co-founder of FOMO. They’re crushing it right now. They just did a big round, I think, at like 575 mil. Their core thesis is very similar to what we’ve been talking about on the show nonstop, which is that social trading is going to become the next big social media trend.

This process of sharing your trades in public is basically how a lot of people are going to get popular and blow up online. If you enable trading for people not just in crypto but also across the board—anything—you’re going to do really well. They’re super focused on mobile and their go-to-market there, so I’m excited to have Se on. It should be a good chat.

Cool. Without further ado, let’s get him in here. Se, what’s good, G?

Yo, how we doing?

Yo, what’s good, brother? How are you?

Good past couple days. Good past couple days. Yeah, it’s been a good month, to be honest, bro. Good month, to be honest. It’s been a crazy time. The last few weeks have been wild. July was great. August is even better, and I hope we can continue this trend. Thanks for having me on, though.

Of course. Of course. I’ve been seeing you in a lot of content. You’re doing your tour. I saw this Murat interview with you. Obviously, FOMO is a product that’s really embracing content culture and this attention thing—marketing, UGC—and you guys have a ton of partners, people who are promoting your app, who are officially partnered with the app, creating content around the app and the product.

Do you want to just, before anything else—Z did his best to introduce you—but would you like to introduce yourself to the chat, the audience, anybody who might be watching?

No, I think Z covered it. Appreciate the intro. I’m happy to be here. Our end goal is really just to bring FOMO and trading itself to the masses, whether that’s spot, whether it’s on-chain, stocks, prediction markets, perps, whatever. I just want it to be the canonical place where you can do whatever you want and build the next greatest social media application.

61. Why FOMO Leaned Into Content

Word. As far as content, how much have you guys leaned into content and this kind of aggressive push for attention? It makes sense to me, and in my mind, it’s always kind of made sense to me, especially given the nature of your product. The social trading aspect makes total sense. But was this always part of your core thesis? Was this always part of the plan? Do you want to just walk us through that?

Yeah, we took a lot of inspiration from a lot of the players early in 2024 and throughout 2024 that were trying to onboard retail. Phantom was obviously the main one there, and then you saw apps like Moonshot come out and really take this experience from just a wallet that was crypto-native to an experience that felt like Robinhood or something similar. We took a lot of inspiration from those guys and what they were trying to do to onboard more retail users into the space.

For us, we felt like the thing that was missing was this: Let’s say you come onto the platform and invite your buddy who heard about the Moo Deng token at the time. They buy the token, they make $100—what do they do after that? They either buy something they’ve never heard of and churn, or they withdraw their money because they’re not familiar with anything that’s going on.

We felt like there needed to be this layer that combines everything going on in the space that isn’t CT, Telegram, or Discord. It needs to be very transparent, very open, and something where everybody can digest it immediately. We put a lot of core focus into some of our design principles, simplicity being one of them. We’ve always felt like this is the thing the world is missing and the next big step for crypto.

62. Deutsche Bank To dYdX

Right. Where did you start? How did you meet Paul? What were you both doing before this? Walk us through how you guys started and how you guys met. I want to hear about what Paul and Se’s early conversations were like.

Crazy enough, we’ve actually worked every job together. We interned together right after junior year in college at Deutsche Bank, doing investment banking. We both came back, took the return offer, and it was good work. We learned a lot about how to be organized and how to work hard, but there was something missing.

Paul actually left about 6 months in to join a company called dYdX, which was the Hyperliquid before Hyperliquid. At the time, before Hyperliquid’s rise, they were doing 95% of all perps market share and $1.5 billion in revenue in a year—just insane things that nobody really understood at the time. He joined dYdX as the first PD hire.

I came along about 3 months later. I was already trading on-chain, doing some things on Ethereum mainnet and Avalanche, and just trying to find some edge. I then spent about 2 years there. This was 2022, so I joined in early 2022.

63. Getting Their Lunch Eaten By Hyperliquid

I saw the company do hundreds of millions of dollars a month in revenue, and it was just the most insane thing I’d ever seen—kind of a crazy intro to crypto. We kept building for the next 3 years and tried a bunch of things. Ultimately, we got our lunch eaten by Hyperliquid for a number of decisions, but I think Hyperliquid was a better product at the end of the day.

That’s always been our core philosophy: The best product wins. Nothing else really matters. You need to build the best product for people to come and use it.

Yeah, people forget how hard dYdX was crushing it in the early days. I think people are so familiar with Hyperliquid now, but back then it wasn’t clear that dYdX wasn’t going to be the winner there. You probably learned a lot seeing that evolution happen, especially when they had such a big lead at one point. Why do you guys think it didn’t win out, just by being a better product?

There are a billion things to point to. I think the main thing was that we lost focus. When you have a company that’s doing really well, with no competitors and in its own lane, it’s really easy to feel like you’re always on top and there’s nobody who can come stop you.

There were a lot of really competent players at the time. There was GMX, Gains was pretty good, and Hyperliquid, obviously. It was this interesting inflection point where we were moving from dYdX V3 to creating our own chain, which technologically didn’t work or satisfy the needs of all the high-frequency traders who were trading perps at the time, while Hyperliquid was on the rise.

They didn’t have a token. They had a points program. They had a killer team, and they were working hard. I think it was just a lack of focus from the top down. Admittedly, Paul and I weren’t really senior enough to drive much of the direction at the time, but we did learn a lot, and there’s a lot of DNA that we’ve taken over.

64. FOMO vs Pump.fun

Competition is a good thing. We actually just talked to Orangie about this. Obviously, we’re seeing narratives form between FOMO and Pump.fun. Pump is making an aggressive push toward this social trading thing as well. You guys are both actively signing a bunch of traders and content creators. What are your feelings about that, or are you just focused on what you’re doing and not really worried about what everybody else is doing?

Obviously, you guys have conversations about this regularly. I’m just curious about your honest, candid feelings about all that.

The honest, candid feeling is that the best product will win at the end of the day, and everything else is noise. There’s a lot of stuff going on with traders and creators, incentives and rewards, and iteration. Ultimately, I think this is a very good thing for the space. Competition is good. Like you said, iron sharpens iron. It actually lights a fire under people.

It’s great for the market, too. For everybody, it’s really good for the market.

Good for the market.

100%. I think there are different types of markets, right? Traders, creators, and other people. I think it’s really letting people see that there’s value in traders, and traders are really the new celebrities. I know that’s been a common topic over the past few weeks, but it’s something that’s cool to see.

65. The Walk Where FOMO Was Born

I share that sentiment. You already know. I see it. I think we’re in the earliest innings of it, and the sky is truly the limit for all that shit. How did you and Paul decide to move from dYdX and start this? How did you guys make that decision? How did you guys meet, and what were you both doing before this? You guys are eating breakfast, and it’s like—

The market needs this product.

“Let’s go build this product.” What does that look like?

Yeah. We always knew we wanted to be founders, and I think a lot of people start a company just for the sake of starting a company. We wanted to build something generational that we would do for the rest of our lives. We spent about 2 years thinking, “What is a product that really makes sense to build?” and we couldn’t figure it out.

We had a lot of conversations where we actually considered building an EOA wallet. We were like, “Okay, the wallet is going to be the interface that everybody is operating with. It’s going to be like the Apple Wallet, but for crypto, and maybe one day it will actually integrate into operating systems like Apple and Android.” We thought about it for a while, then we looked at the market: Phantom, Rabby, and a couple of others. To tell you the truth, I thought they were excellent. I was like, “Okay, I don’t really know if you can build something that’s 10 times better than this.”

So we went back to the drawing board and thought for a while. This was right around when Ansem was doing his thing with WIF, and a lot of the tokens were going crazy. It was a time when you wanted to get everybody into crypto. I was telling all my friends left and right, “Yo, download this Telegram bot, check out this terminal. Here’s how you do it. Let me send you some funds.”

There was this crazy moment where I was like, “A lot of my friends from home work at car dealerships and warehouses. These are dudes who don’t work in New York getting $200,000 a year. I would literally give you $2,000 each to create this Telegram bot, put in your keys, start trading tomorrow, and watch this 20-minute video.” None of them did it.

So it made me realize that what we think is easy is just not easy for most people. The mental hurdle of doing something new is incredibly hard. We set out to build a better trading experience.

We take a joint birthday trip every year. Paul is one of my best friends, and we were walking down this incredibly long road. Like, think about this.

Is that the same birthday?

Similar birthdays. We’re about 2 weeks apart.

Wow.

We’re walking down this long-ass road to do this, and we’re talking about how we need to build this interface. Moonshot is doing well, but they’re missing all these things. Essentially, at the end of that road, we had a long walk back. We looked at each other and were like, “We need to build this thing because the world needs it, and if we don’t build it, nobody’s going to use crypto.”

So we took the rest of the road back just talking about ideas on how to build it, what the social looks like, what this looks like, and how we start to build it when we aren’t engineers. Then we put together this team over the course of a few months, and we were able to ship the app in 2 months.

Bro, that’s fucking sick.

Just to walk back a couple of steps, is it fair to say that Ansem, at least to some degree, inspired you guys to build this?

I would say he was a big part of it. There are a lot of cultural icons in each category. When we look back at it, I actually did this interview with Moritz that you just talked about, and the only person I put in the top 5 of creators and current traders was Ansem.

You see a lot of these people do a lot of great things over their 4-year CT careers. Most vanish, most retire, most fade into irrelevancy, and most don’t like the spotlight. I think we’ll look back at this time period and say that a lot of people drew inspiration from a lot of different people.

All of these people—you guys running the show and inspiring people every day—will be something that people look back on and say, “Okay, this was a really important cultural shift that happened live, and everybody got to see it.”

I appreciate you, man. I saw the clip from it. That was a great shout. You go for that.

100%.

66. Growing In A Bear Market

Yeah, man. You guys have been crushing it, too. I think it’s rare to see an app in crypto do really well when sentiment is as poor as it is. It cannot be overstated how big it is that you guys have been able to accomplish that even in a bear market.

Can you speak a little bit to how you think you were able to find growth when everything else is trending down, and what you focus on to be able to do that? It seems like you guys have tapped marketing channels outside of crypto that other people haven’t really been able to tap that aggressively yet. There are people on FOMO for whom this is their first time getting into crypto, and they understand it pretty quickly.

Yeah. There are kind of 2 sides to this. One is that we built probably the first cross-chain trading product that’s actually workable. Prior to this, you had to set up a bunch of different wallets, use slow bridges, and it was really impossible for liquidity not to be fragmented.

On the supply side of traders, we were able to solve a need where it doesn’t matter if it’s Solana, BNB, Monad, Base, or whatever else. You can just go and buy the thing. You saw this when Robinhood Chain launched. We have 60,000 of the 80,000 wallets that trade on Robinhood daily.

Yeah, they’re chain-agnostic, right?

They want to trade the thing, and they can do it very easily. I think that served a need in the market. We can even go as far as to say that a lot of these chains would be in bear markets because there aren’t enough people interested in that specific chain. But now, with cross-chain, you can open up a lot of doors, and liquidity flows very easily.

We did a good job of building a product that traders wanted. There’s obviously still a lot to improve, and that’s what gets us up every day: improve the product, do better things, and just make it world-class.

The user, the trader. We’ve talked about this. I feel like blockchains historically have worked in reverse, where they’re building things and trying to attract people to come build stuff rather than attracting the liquidity, the trader, and the user.

When I think about the products that have done that best, you mentioned Phantom earlier. I use Phantom, and it’s probably the product and app in crypto that I’ve used the most during my entire time here. It’s really easy to use. It makes it much easier for me to interact with and trade things.

67. Traders Are The New Celebrities

Then you think about Pump.fun. Pump.fun is a product for the trader, right? You guys obviously built this entire idea and product around the trader.

What I think is the most interesting part of your product and what you guys are building—I don’t know what this says about my POV and the way I look at things—is that I think it’s fucking insane that people are starting to find their [__], like Poor Goat[?]. We had Poor Goat on last week, and you guys are offering this platform and this medium for people to emerge as influencers, build platforms, and build followings. Then that gets funneled and translates out to YouTube and Twitter, whatever.

It’s a new medium and a new category. I think we’re starting to develop this new category, which is the trader. There are people of influence in all different ways, shapes, and forms: artists, athletes, entertainers, comedians, and so on. I think trader is a very real one.

Again, this is all from the lens of FaZe Banks. I’ve seen this story 1 time before with gaming. The earliest conversations I had were around, “Hey, we play video games for a living, and there’s this thing,” or whatever. I don’t know. It’s kind of 1-to-1, and it’s really exciting. I think it’s up only in that regard.

68. The Copy Trading Problem

Obviously, there are some pros and cons to the social-trading thing. I’m curious about your opinion on that. We’ve talked a lot about the pros. How are you thinking about the negative side of [__]? Obviously, copy-trading culture, people taking advantage of the influence and following they have, and so on.

It also changes the game. It completely changes how people trade and how markets move. What do those conversations internally look like?

Yeah, I think there are a lot of ways to look at it. The way we’ve taken a view is that this is happening no matter what. You can think about some of the best traders in the last 3 years. These are guys who have 10-second hold times, and everybody copies their wallet. They’re going to go up and down and up and down, and most people who are following them are going to get rinsed.

I think that, for that reason, we don’t have direct copy trading.

A lot of these guys just automate on-chain. I think at the end of the day, our job is to let you trade these assets. It's to educate you, give you transparency, and give you all the tools so you can make the best-informed decision. I think, like everything, there's good and bad. Our job is to be this guardian that lets you do these things, lets you do them responsibly, and helps you grow as a user through your own user journey over time.

69. Clans, Thesis, And Social Scores

Got it. What are some plans in the future to further develop things like voice chats, obviously communicating ideas and theses? I saw you guys rolled out this Clan thing. What are some things to be on the lookout for? How are you guys thinking about all that stuff?

Yeah, the possibilities are endless. I think Clan is a good example because it's one of those things where you can just find your community, right? There are all these top FNFs, but if you think about your early days of trading, how do you actually get to meet people? How do you actually find the right community where you guys do things together? It was really hard. You had to DM random people. Somebody had to find your talent, or somebody had to find you on a timeline.

I think we're just making that easier because if you're a guy on the app and you hit a few trades, chances are you're at the top of the leaderboard and somebody's like, "I want you in my clan. I want you in my group." You find this community, and you can actually better yourself through the community.

On top of that, it's education: scam warnings, theses, social scores, comments—the ability to actually go in there and tell people exactly what's going on, where it's not just going to be biased because it's the one post you see on Twitter that goes viral.

Well, historically, all we've had for DD is crypto Twitter, right? It's pretty close to impossible to filter through.

I don't know, even just—you can watch, and you could see somebody bull-post something, and you have no idea how they're positioned, right? Adding as much context as possible and giving people fewer steps to communicate ideas and consume ideas—I like it. I obviously see it. I think social trading is definitely—I think you said it best—it's going to happen no matter what. It's going to happen regardless.

Yeah, I think X has been a really good medium for sharing theses on majors and high-cap trades: your swing trades on Bitcoin, swing trades on Solana, swing trades on HYPE, Pump, all that stuff. It makes a lot of sense to share on X, but for the on-chain coins, it's just too slow. It's way too slow for sharing information in a way that people are going to be able to make money off of it, and also sharing updates on the risks and information on all these coins.

I think that's why stuff like FOMO has done well. These traders don't have time to post long threads on the coins they bought at super-low market caps. They're like, "I'm aping this now," and you just see it when it happens. They're already trained to react to things and respond pretty quickly, but that's the signal. The signal is the actual trade, and X isn't going to highlight that. FOMO does a really good job of highlighting that, so I think that's the key difference there.

70. Would You Pay To Listen In

I think it makes a ton of sense. We go a step further, though. That's what I'm saying: What is the development of this idea, and how is this idea being built? I lived with Frank DeGods for a year. I've seen somebody up close physically do this shit, and it's fucking insane. It's a movie. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen.

With the voice comms and, obviously, the Clans and stuff, are you guys thinking about offering more and more features for traders to build shit native to the app? What does that look like? Will there ever be an opportunity for me to listen in to a Grand FNF voice chat? Maybe pay for it—pay for that access? You know what I'm saying? I would pay for that. I would pay to listen in on a conversation between Porgo[?], Rowdy, Quarterty, and Flipping Profits. Are these the kinds of conversations happening? Is this where we're going with this?

Yeah, 100%. Essentially, the end goal here is that FOMO is the only place you need to be as a trader. All your comms happen there. All your discovery happens there. All your monetization happens there.

What I mean by monetization is that you're a creator on a social platform, right? Think about all the people who create value for Twitch, YouTube, or X. You're making a lot of money, right? You're monetizing your brand, and as you grow on the platform, you have a better way to monetize and get ads, sponsors, and direct revenue.

That's our main goal: As people grow on FOMO, you should feel like this social network is so valuable that you're actually going to be able to monetize, make a living, and commit full-time. For that to happen, we need a lot of things to go right. We need a lot of tooling, and we need a lot of support.

Maybe a cool idea is that Grand FNF has a newsletter you can subscribe to, right? Every week they come out with the top trades that happened, why they did them, and a walkthrough of those trades. You have a line to them, almost like Friend.tech, where you're able to communicate back and forth with the people you look up to. I don't think any platform really lets you do that at scale.

X has these locked posts where you subscribe. I think that hasn't gotten as much traction as they probably would have wanted. But imagine it's a big trade, and you can pay them $10 to say, "Yo, walk me through that process. What happened?" You get more access to their thoughts over time and learn from them.

Well, it's all relevant in the context of the fact that, at the end of the day, these kids are trading information and narratives. That's really what's happening. That's what I see, at least.

To offer as much information and context as possible, and as many relevant channels and conversations as possible—what Orangie did with Potion, what's happening on X, what's happening in these private FNF groups—all that shit is scattered. It's all over the place. For the average person coming in, it's been impossible.

Not only has it been hard, if not harder, as you talked about, to remove steps and make the experience for users and traders as easy and frictionless as possible, but the information process has, in a lot of ways, been even more difficult.

Yeah, 100%. That's why we have things like theses, right? You're not going to read this long-ass post about why somebody bought a coin and why it's the future of finance or whatnot, but you might go look at Rowdy's thesis, and it's like, "I bought this because there's upside here that is not captured, and people aren't thinking about it the right way. Here's why." That might compel you to buy the thing.

I think what we're trying to do is—when you start investing and trading, a lot of people think you need to have all these resources. You need to read all these books and look at all these videos. But really, the best way to learn is to do it, right? We make it seamless for you to come in and try it, and then you'll learn as you go. You'll end up much better off than if you were to do all the prep beforehand without any real experience.

Yeah, I definitely agree. I liked Friend.tech a lot. I was the fucking number-one Friend bull, bro. I was top, top one on that platform. I thought the social—

—trading and the people made a ton of sense, and they just didn't execute it well. But that idea makes a ton of sense.

Are we almost at the point where the market's ready for something like that, where you can trade an individual? Where you can take a bet on someone like Porgo[?], trade the idea of their P&L, or trade the idea of them blowing up in terms of followers and attention? I don't know.

It's twofold. I'm obviously the biggest example of this right now with the Ansem coin, which is kind of my bet on that. One side is that you have people who are really good traders publicly, and their influence attracts a ton of people to follow them on different socials. They monetize that influence through sponsorships and all types of other things.

The other side is tokenizing it and seeing if that works. It hasn't worked at scale yet. I think it can work and will work, but it's definitely the same idea: There's this intangible value around people who are really good at trading and really good at whatever their profession is that people want access to. However you provide access to that value is why FOMO is doing so well.

71. 100M A Day And 75K Daily Traders

You guys have reached escape velocity at this point. Se mentioned earlier that you guys just raised at a $550 million valuation. Congrats, by the way. Since you guys did that, do you want to get into a few of the metrics? This last month, as Se spoke to earlier, has been a really crazy, monumental month for you guys.

Walk us through that. Why do you think that is?

Insane month, bro. [Laughter and gasps]

When we did that round—I think we announced it in late June—we actually concluded the deal sometime in May. At the time, we were doing, let’s say, $30 million of annualized revenue. We had maybe 6,000 or 7,000 traders, and we were doing around 150,000 trades a day.

We were able to raise on the vision that it was going to be much bigger than it was at the time—not just on-chain, but as we started to verticalize into different products. I like to think that Paul and I are pretty good at pitching our story and our vision, and we were able to get a valuation that we wanted to grow into.

I think now we’ve really grown into it and beyond. We’re doing probably $100 million of volume a day. We have 70,000 to 75,000 different traders every single day trading on the platform, and we do 1 million swaps every single day. We’ve grown anywhere from 6 to 15 times on all the metrics that they benchmarked us on.

It’s just been an incredible time. We’re scaling the infrastructure, building new features, and the team is locked in. I’ll leave the office at 8:00 p.m. to go to dinner and come back, and everybody’s still here. There’s never been a more exciting time to grind, because you get one shot to become one of the biggest companies in the world. When you have it in front of you, you want to do everything in your power to make sure that happens.

Is that what life looks like for all of you guys right now? There’s nothing else? You guys are just glued to this? There’s no life outside of this? [Laughter]

What’s your idea of fun? You’re going to the gym.

72. The 21st Mile Of The Marathon

We do cool stuff. We’ll hoop, we’ll do a HYROX workout, we’ll lift, and we’ll go hike. But pretty much, I was just listening to Travis Kalanick, the Uber guy, on a podcast, and he was saying that building a startup as a founder is like—have you ever seen somebody at the 21st mile of a marathon? Their faces are in excruciating pain. They’re literally about to fall over. But do you know who decides the winner of that marathon? It’s those last 5 miles.

For us, we feel like we’re in this 21-mile stretch where we’re going to work harder than everybody else. We’re going to ship, we’re going to be focused, and it’s going to be painful, but it’s going to become less and less painful over time. You’re just going to learn to deal with it.

That’s what you have to do as a founder. You have to always break new walls and go through bigger hurdles. You have to be sure that you’re able to influence and inspire the rest of your team to continue doing so.

You said you guys hoop.

Yeah, we hoop together, bro. I dropped a fucking 40-ball last night.

Yeah, I did. We’re going to have to play. You guys are based in New York too?

Yeah, we’re here.

How often do you guys hoop? A couple of times a week?

Honestly, not that much anymore, just because of how things are going. But once a week would be a blessing.

Pull up to New York, bro. We’ll pull up.

We’re going to have to.

I’ll be there at the latest for Fashion Week, which is in September, right?

That’s late September.

I think it’s early to mid-September.

Yeah, we’ll set it up.

We’ll have to, obviously.

Wow. Congrats. I mean, it’s fucking crazy. You guys are young. How old are you?

I’m 28. Our third co-founder is around 30.

I mean, we kind of feel old because we have a lot of these 20-year-old kids in college. [Laughter] I’m not even kidding. This new generation is just a different breed. I don’t think they sleep. They don’t even know how to eat. They just know how to work, and it’s crazy. It’s honestly such an influence.

73. Scaling Beyond On Chain

It is. It’s nuts. How are you guys thinking about scaling outside of just on-chain? I know you said you want to be able to trade everything, and it seems like TradFi has attached itself so heavily to Hyperliquid as a thesis because it’s really easy for them to understand: perps on stocks, perps on crypto, and perps on commodities.

I think you guys are the social layer for on-chain right now, but how are you thinking about that for stocks, perps, and everything else too?

I think we want to do the same thing for stocks, for perps, and for everything else that we did for on-chain. The reason I say that is because all of these different providers—whether you’re Hyperliquid, TradeXYZ, the Nasdaq, or Securitize—you don’t want to work on distribution. Your game is to build the technology or the settlement layer that everybody’s using, and you want everybody else to distribute it for you.

That’s kind of how things work in the traditional world. For us, our edge is distribution. We’ve been able to do it for on-chain, and we’re going to be able to do it for perps, stocks, prediction markets, and everything else.

We like to think that the gateway to speculation is going to be FOMO. It’s going to be the only place where you can do all these things, trade transparently, learn, and level up. For example, yesterday, when things started to blow up, we went 10 times overnight in 24-hour perp volume because people were like, “Wait, I can do this on FOMO as well?”

It’s been a product that we haven’t marketed at all, but we’re a top-5 builder code every single day. I think we’re the fastest Hyperliquid builder code to get to $100,000 in revenue. It’s there when the market turns and people are ready for it. I think there just hasn’t been a lot of volatility, but it’s another product that we’re incredibly excited about. I think the winner of that market is a multibillion-dollar company alone.

74. Plumbers vs Zoomers

I definitely agree, bro. I think it’s interesting that it’s rare to see traders who are really good at both things. CT is kind of fragmented. We’ve seen the boomers-versus-zoomers argument, and it’s because a lot of OG CT made a lot of money on perps.

The people who started out on BitMEX, on XBT, and in those chat rooms were primarily leveraged-trading Bitcoin. As crypto has evolved and on-chain stuff has picked up, a lot of the OG people aren’t as active in these OG trenches, which is why I think they speak so poorly about memes and all the low-cap stuff. They made money on perps, trading higher-cap coins.

I think it’s interesting that you’re going to see traders like Cordi, who’s probably a really good example of this. He made a lot of money on a new L1 meme, and then he also flipped and made a few hundred bands on Hyperliquid right after, at the exact same time.

He’s such a beast.

He’s cracked. I think it’s going to be really, really good to have both of those things in the same place, because it’s going to attract both sides of CT and people external to CT.

Some people are really good at stocks. Some people don’t know what the fuck a memecoin is. Some people are really good at memecoins, but they don’t know which AI stock they want to invest in. If you’re the place where those two people can congregate and speak to each other, you’re not just the place that facilitates that trading. You’re also the place that facilitates learning from other traders and from people in areas they might not know that much about.

Yeah, I mean, 100%. You think the top perp traders are going to look at Cordi flexing on the timeline that he made $300,000 or $400,000 on HYPE and just let him do it in peace?

I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to see a lot of these guys come out and be like, “Hold on. I just hit this seven-figure perp trade. Nobody’s giving me my flowers, so I need to go into the arena and show everybody that I still got it, or that I’m still the guy who can do it.”

That competition is something that, like we mentioned, brings out the best in people. I think we’ll start to see a lot of bigger perp traders come out of their shells and say, “I’ve been doing this for many cycles. I’ve been doing this for years. I can trade every market, and now it’s time to showcase that.”

It’s going to be wild when we start to see a lot of these perps guys who are doing seven- and eight-figure P&Ls every day. I’m excited to see it.

Yeah, I’m excited too, bro. I think they’re kind of super low-key. People don’t know how much a lot of the perp traders are making. What is the dude? I think—not GCR, the other guy.

75. The Perps Guys Are Coming Out Of Hiding

The Smartest Money has a close to $100 million Hyperliquid position, I think, right now. Yeah, [laughter], it's like a close to $100 million Hyperliquid long right now that he's been building for a pretty long time. But I don't know if he cares as much about the social side of it, him specifically as an individual. There are people like that who just don't care about the social side of things. He's like, “Bro, I'm making eight figures on my trades. I don't care about sharing the shit.”

But I think there is going to be a flip where you're going to see more of those people start to trade publicly and trade socially. I'm just not exactly sure what's going to drive it. But as you said, it's probably the competition piece.

And then all I can think about is FaZe Banks pointing a camera at it and just editing it up, chopping it up, and putting it out to the world. It's just the craziest thing that's happening. There are so many insane examples. We talked about Cupsey earlier. Obviously, we talked to Orangie.

A huge share of ORNG's success can be attributed to his ability to create content and command attention, and there just aren't enough people doing that. I don't know. It's crazy. I feel like we're at a real, serious turning point.

76. The Michael Jordan Endorsement Math

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, athletes have always made more money from their endorsements and outside sponsorships than they have from playing in the league. If you look at Michael Jordan, he's a billionaire because of the Jordan shoe, his Nike deals, and all that. If you look at LeBron, his deal with the Lakers this year is like $53 million, but he's going to make $100 million from his sponsorships off the court and all that.

Jersey and [__] and all that. I think traders are the same way: you've made 8 figures-plus trading, but if you productize that and the content around it, you're going to make even more from the deals that you get as trading becomes more popular. I think that's what a lot of these guys haven't realized yet. They don't know that that's even a thing that can happen.

Once they realize, “Oh, I can be making 2 to 3 times what I've made trading because I'm building something, because I'm building content around this, or because I'm doing this sponsorship with these people,” then I think it makes more sense for traders to start doing more things. So that's at least my thesis.

I think it's happening right now, and I think it's going to explode. I think it's going to explode. We talked earlier about you guys, Yours, and PUMP's competition being very healthy. While it's healthy for the market and the product, obviously forcing you guys to be even more serious and dialed in and build the best product possible, you guys are both working hands-on with creators and traders. You must be realizing the opportunity that you have outside of the scope of just trading.

77. The Mount Rushmore Of Traders

The nature of trading is so competitive. You see it: these guys all want to have the biggest P&Ls. They're all doing it in public. They all want to be these goated, legacy, Mount Rushmore traders, right? A huge part of that equation is absolutely going to be the brand that they build, the lore that they have, their public perception, the narratives around how they did it, all that [__].

I just think we're at the ultimate inflection point of trading culture, traders, and content in trading.

Negative, toxic [__], scamming, et cetera. People have more or less made up their mind with that shit. But I think trading is cool. I think trading culture is the coolest thing that's come out of crypto, and it's existed in every era, in every generation—Gen Z, COVID, et cetera.

Watching it evolve in real time is crazy. It's cool. I feel like right now, finally, everyone's waking up to how important that is and the role that it's all going to play.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you think—or why do you think—Robinhood specifically hasn't done as well with social trading? I would think that they would be the de facto place where people just crushed the social-trading aspect, but it seems like they just haven't focused on it or capitalized on it much.

Do people have public profiles on Robinhood? Sorry.

Yeah, you can now. There's Robinhood Social, which they've rolled out to some people.

But did that get introduced recently?

78. Why Social Trading Has To Be On Chain

They've been talking about it for about a year now. They rolled it out to, I think, a handful of people, and you can get access to it right now if you really wanted to. You can just go on your app and request it, right?

But the issue with that is, I think, this has to start on-chain. It has to be on a blockchain where it's fully transparent, where you can see everything happening. You can't just obfuscate what you want to tell people versus what you don't want to tell people.

I think with Robinhood Social and other similar apps, there's a confirmation bias, right? Because of regulatory restrictions, they can't just turn on everybody's account. They can't just say, “Good luck, now everybody sees your $100 million stock portfolio. Good luck. Here's your name. Here's your whatever else.”

So they need to get everybody to opt in and confirm it. For better or for worse, if you're losing a trade, you're not going to post about it, right? If you're winning a trade, you're going to post about it. So it creates this really weird incentive where you just don't know where the next thing is going to come from.

We think it has to happen on the blockchain, where you see everything: wins, losses, good times, bad times, poor sizing, great sizing, great execution, round-tripping. It happens all here, on-chain, natively, and it's always happened, right? Guys like yourself and me and others who actually track wallets, you see that through the years.

Not everybody sees that, but now you get to have a platform where that's very transparent. I wrote this article on Twitter about why the next great social-media platform has to happen on-chain. It's because there are core principles of the blockchain that just can't be replicated anywhere else. A lot of this is global distribution from day 1, transparency at the most primitive layer, and the ability to actually do things permissionlessly.

So it has to happen here. If it fails to happen, I don't think there's going to be another social-finance app that actually works out.

It's a really great take, actually. I think that's the most cogent thesis I've heard on why crypto social actually makes sense. Crypto social, historically, and people have said, has been a really poor investment. But my take is that I think crypto social hasn't done well because you've stripped out all the most important parts of what makes crypto entertaining, which is the speculation aspect of it.

You can't just do, “Oh, we're just going to copy-paste X on the blockchain.” It doesn't make sense. The reason crypto is cool is because of the speculation piece. So I think combining those is what makes crypto social cool. But what you said is 100% true.

100%.

Yeah, 100%, man. And I think there's going to be a lot of competition in the space, right? As people start to realize that this is something that's inevitable, you kind of think about: What are the biggest companies in the world?

There's Robinhood, a $100 billion company; Coinbase, $80 billion. Then you have the next tier, which is banks, who play the AUM game. They might be $100 billion, a few hundred billion, maybe half a trillion, whatever.

79. The Greatest Businesses Are Ad Platforms

But the greatest businesses in the world are advertising platforms—Google, Meta, multitrillion-dollar stocks. Why? They don't touch any of your money. They don't do any of these things, but they are where all the information flows, right? So they're able to monetize all the attention, all of the ads, and all of the direction of where people spend their money and where they go.

You can think about what's even more powerful than just a broad advertising platform: it's one where you can actually do the thing, but also execute, buy, and do all the things that you want to do that you see there.

So I think FOMO started off as a trading app. It's like, let's make trading easier. It's evolved into, let's become the social graph of finance. But I actually think over time, with AI commoditizing content and it being so easy to go viral, the only real thing that's going to exist here is risk: who is right, who made the most money, and what are the returns transparently over time.

I actually think you're going to see the biggest celebrities in the world be people who are right publicly over and over and over again. You saw Leopold[?]—he's made a few billion dollars publicly, and he's probably one of the most famous people of the last few weeks. That's not a one-off. That's going to be the norm, where every single person who you hear about in the news is going to be the next guy who made $100 million in public, who did it 5 times, who did it 10 times.

And you get to this point where somebody has to control that distribution. I think it’s going to be FOMO. We’re going to be the biggest social platform in the world, and that’s a multitrillion-dollar market, if not tens of trillions of dollars.

I mean, it’s kind of where all Trump’s success in politics stems from, right? His ability to be successful in public brings me to the thought of Elon Musk. Elon Musk has done it over and over and over, and obviously has this insane global brand. He’s one of the most famous guys on planet Earth because of how well he’s done in public.

I have here: Was Elon Musk supposed to invest in FOMO? What is that? Why is this written down here? [laughter]

I have no idea, man. I can’t deny or confirm that statement, but I don’t know why they have it there.

80. Orangie's Message To Chat

Got it. Got it. [laughter] I had to ask. They wanted me to ask. But, yeah, listen, we have Austin in the green room. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you. I think social-trading traders are the new celebrities. I see it. I see it very—

Trillion-dollar opportunity. I agree, 100%.

I’ve thought about what’s happening on-chain. I got the exact same feelings in my bones, the same as when I discovered Xbox Live for the first time and saw this whole underground thing happening, and nobody realizing it or paying attention to it. It’s developing and evolving in kind of the same way, at a much faster rate. I think this next year is going to be explosive for all things related. Is there anything that we missed or anything that you want to say before you head out?

No, not at all. I’m obviously very grateful to be going on a platform to contribute to the space. At the end of the day, this only matters if we can meaningfully onboard more and more people into the space. People think too much in this echo chamber of Crypto Twitter, but the reality is we get flamed for saying we have 1.5 million users every day—or, sorry, in total. Every day we get flamed for it, but it’s like, bro, there are 8 billion people in the world.

There are so many more people in the world to onboard, to market to, and to get invested in this platform that actually democratizes access to markets. That’s an exciting prospect, right? Why are you going to build toward something where you want to build for 50,000 crypto users? That’s not exciting. There’s no legacy there.

For us, it’s really about the legacy and impact. If we don’t do it, somebody else will, so why not us? I’m super excited to just continue to build and try to make the market as big as possible. Honestly.

Speaking for myself, this is a great conversation. You’re super articulate. You do very well in content. It’s part of why I was excited to have you on the show. You don’t see a ton of founders—tech founders—who carry the cadence that you do. Props for that. I think that’s lacking in crypto as well.

I’m excited to see what you guys do, man, and where all this is headed. It’s exciting times. Everybody’s up. It’s been a great past couple days, but this month has been transformative. Thank you for coming on, sharing, and articulating yourself. I appreciate you, bro. We’ll have to have you on again sometime, maybe with Paul.

Yeah, 100%. Appreciate you guys. Keep crushing.

Of course. Later, brother. Appreciate you.

Love. I did not know they were friends like that. They worked regular jobs together. That’s sick. That’s kind of—I don’t know. You love to see that. I don’t know why.

That’s cool, too. I’ve met him before, too.

They’re both young, articulate, personable people. You don’t see it a ton in crypto.

Yeah, they do. They do have aura, and they’re young. They’re young.