"He Turned $500 Into $40,000,000" | Market Bubble #13
AnsemFaZe BanksJohann KerbratAustin BarackIvan
- Ansem said Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness fund, once among the strongest performers, grew roughly $400M to $2B and reached about $4.5B at its peak. It was levered long AI names including Bloom Energy, SanDisk, and Nebius; after a drawdown and an attempted outside-capital raise, Ansem said an announcement reported Ken Griffin’s Citadel bought the entire open book. The Fed-hike theory was described as possible but unlikely, not established fact. Bloom Energy later rose about 25% as the position cleared.
- Threadguy called the liquidation while streaming, saying it felt like Leopold was being liquidated, then suggested Ken Griffin could be the buyer before confirmation. The hosts treated his daily market-open streams and live trading as evidence that traders can become the next celebrity class because audiences can follow their decisions in real time.
- The leverage lesson was the episode’s clearest risk warning: Ansem explained that leveraged positions can be liquidated rapidly, especially when the trader is the main seller in an illiquid market. A Fidelity account reportedly showed someone turning about $200K into $27M and then losing roughly 90% in a month. The hosts stressed entering leverage before a move, using tight invalidations, and planning exits before emotions peak.
- Ansem declared that the crypto bottom was in and that onchain activity was back, including on Ethereum. He cited coins running from zero to $10M-plus market caps, novel projects on Solana, Ethereum, and Robinhood Chain, and Pump.fun outperforming major crypto assets by about 32% since July. He also said Bitcoin’s roughly 9.5% Polymarket odds of reaching $100K by year-end were too low, estimating 30%–35% if it can reclaim key levels around $66K–$70K.
- Austin Barack presented Venice as a major AI/crypto setup: roughly $90M in ARR versus $15M in January, millions of users, 45,000 new paid subscribers monthly, and about $6.5M in annualized burns modeled to reach $60M in 2027. Applying a 50x multiple gave him a roughly $38 fair-value estimate versus a token price near $12. He cautioned that Hyperliquid’s near-100% margins are an unfair comparison for a real business with staff and marketing costs.
- Robinhood crypto chief Johann Kerbrat said Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum-based L2 built around distribution and simplicity: 27M-plus funded U.S. accounts, more than 1M international customers, a wallet available in 120-plus countries, about 200 tokenized stocks, and an Earn product offering approximately 7% on stablecoin-based cash. Robinhood is prioritizing product-market fit and fair access over priority-fee revenue.
- MoonPay CEO Ivan presented Paybox as a non-custodial wallet connected to Claude and ChatGPT. He described swaps, prediction-market bets, yield, and x402 payments from a chat interface, including a roughly $400 EasyJet flight booked in USDC. He said MoonPay doubled the airdrop pool, is building in public under its “Kaizen” principle, and ultimately wants white-labeled Paybox integrations across DeFi.
- The episode’s broader thesis was monetized attention. Kimchi was described as a 22-year-old Fortnite-linked trader who turned $500 onchain into $40M, while MrBeast’s 51.6% stake in Beast Industries, Moonshot’s roughly $1B sale to Jupiter, and Trader Mayne’s reported nine-figure Kraken exit were used as examples of creators turning distribution into businesses. Ansem’s own thesis is that “tokenized attention networks backed by reputable creators” can create value for both Web2 companies and crypto protocols.
1. Leopold’s leveraged AI fund was reportedly forced to sell
Ansem described Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness as one of the strongest-performing funds of the prior few years. He said Leopold had published an early, detailed thesis on the AI trade, then built a fund around it. Ansem estimated that Leopold turned roughly $400M into $2B and said the fund reached about $4.5B at its peak, while noting uncertainty around the figures.
The fund held large positions in individual AI-related names including Bloom Energy, SanDisk, and Nebius. It was also leveraged long. After the portfolio drew down and the fund announced it was seeking outside capital, Ansem said a same-day announcement reported that Ken Griffin’s Citadel had bought the entire open book.
The discussion also covered the market theory that Citadel’s comments about a possible surprise Fed hike worsened the pressure. Ansem explicitly called that theory “not entirely baseless” but said a hike was possible and unlikely; he also noted that the Fed had said it would not provide forward guidance before the FOMC meeting. The transcript does not establish that the comments caused the liquidation.
The hosts said Leopold’s major names rose sharply once the forced selling cleared, with Bloom Energy cited as up about 25%.
2. Threadguy called the liquidation before confirmation
The hosts said Threadguy identified the setup live while streaming. On Tuesday, he reportedly said that someone appeared to be getting liquidated and that it felt like Leopold. Before the buyer was confirmed, he also reasoned that Ken Griffin might be one of the few people capable of buying the entire book.
Banks emphasized the value of repetition: Threadguy streams at market open, studies stocks and macro, and takes trades live rather than only commenting afterward. The hosts framed this as evidence that traders can become a new celebrity class because an audience can learn alongside them and potentially follow their decisions in real time.
Ansem contrasted that with traditional celebrity skills: LeBron cannot teach someone to become LeBron, but a trader can demonstrate a process while followers watch and learn.
3. Leverage turned a good portfolio into a liquidation problem
The hosts’ central lesson was that strong underlying picks do not protect an overleveraged portfolio. Ansem explained that with leverage, the liquidation threshold depends on where leverage was added and how the position was managed. He used roughly a 25% drawdown as an example for forex-style leverage, not as a universal rule for every leveraged product.
He said Leopold might have been fine holding many of the same names at 1x, but leverage made the drawdown accelerate. The hosts compared the situation with Three Arrows Capital and Bill Hwang, emphasizing the recurring pattern of being heavily bullish, adding leverage as positions rise, and then being forced to sell into weakness.
The practical rule was to add leverage when the market is quiet, use tight invalidations when a trade breaks out, and decide in advance how to scale out. If a trader waits until emotions are extreme to invent a de-risking plan, the hosts argued, it is usually too late.
4. Kimchi became “folklore”
Banks described Kimchi as a roughly 22-year-old trader who deposited $500 onchain, compounded it through repeated trades, and eventually hit TRUMP for $40M. The hosts said a Kimchi-related post reached about 26M views, while a Rasmer TikTok received roughly 270,000 likes.
Banks said he met Kimchi for lunch in Los Angeles and found him intelligent and unusually deliberate about attention. Ansem added that Kimchi had also been a Fortnite professional, connecting him to the episode’s broader gaming-to-trading theme.
Banks then demonstrated the clip-farming format himself with an intentionally fabricated story about Kimchi arriving in a Maybach, drinking only tap water, disappearing during lunch, and leaving the bill paid. He later admitted that the story was made up for content, although he said the lunch itself had happened.
5. Trading is the “world’s greatest MMORPG”
Ansem compared trading to an MMORPG: it has competition, progression, skill development, and the possibility of earning money inside the game. Banks extended the analogy by describing games and trading as systems of code with attractive, addictive interfaces layered on top.
The hosts argued that the progression also resembles gaming culture. Average traders lose more than they win; highly skilled traders can become extremely wealthy; and the best-known traders can become famous as well. They cited Fortnite-linked traders including Cupsy, Kimchi, and Orangey as examples of people moving from professional gaming into crypto trading.
This led to the prediction that the next major internet celebrity may be a trader whose audience watches the market and follows trades in real time.
6. Gamification and social trading
Ansem attributed Robinhood’s retail success to a simple, colorful interface that feels less intimidating than older brokerage applications such as Fidelity and Charles Schwab. He cited animations, pop-ups, and an accessible design as features that make trading more approachable.
The hosts distinguished between trading itself and the “PvE” feeling of being early to a new market. They gave examples such as ETH at $1 or Solana at $8, where early participants could benefit from a rapidly expanding ecosystem rather than simply competing over a mature asset.
They contrasted this with the paid forex-group boom around COVID. Ansem said currency pairs often moved only about 10 basis points per day, despite marketers promising enormous wealth. Crypto, in his view, can produce 100x or 1,000x outcomes in early narratives, which makes social trading and market content more durable.
Banks described Bullpen’s goal as bringing high-signal traders, their theses, positions, and performance into one place across crypto, stocks, commodities, and other markets. He contrasted that with TradingView, where people can post ideas but cannot trade directly.
7. Attention can become a billion-dollar business
The hosts used several examples to argue that distribution can be monetized beyond trading profits. Banks cited MrBeast’s reported 51.6% ownership of Beast Industries, described in the conversation as about 68M shares valued at $2.7B. Ansem said that if he had owned 51.6% of WIF during the prior cycle, the comparison would have been roughly similar in market-cap terms, though much less liquid.
Banks also cited Moonshot, saying two people built the app in about two weeks and later sold it to Jupiter for roughly $1B during strong market conditions. Ansem argued that it is difficult to imagine new categories before they become obvious, just as smart contracts, Solana memecoins, and Hyperliquid’s stock-perpetuals activity were difficult to envision beforehand.
Trader Mayne was presented as another example. Ansem said Mayne built trust through trading and educational content, then sold the business attached to that audience to Kraken for a reported nine-figure amount. The hosts’ point was that the business value was additive to the trading record rather than a replacement for it.
8. Stocks were moving like memecoins
Banks showed a SanDisk chart that rose from about $28 in April 2025 to about $2,300 in June 2026. He attributed the move to AI laboratories needing more memory and said the revenue was real, while warning that a 10x move in a short period naturally creates the possibility of aggressive pullbacks. The conversation cited a decline of about 30% in five days and 55% from the high.
Microsoft was also described as up about 15% in a day. When Banks asked how much capital could be required to move a company discussed at roughly a $2T valuation by that amount, Ansem answered that it would involve billions of dollars, especially once leverage is included.
The hosts’ explanation was that market volatility is not limited to crypto. Highly leveraged positions can make large stocks move sharply when traders borrow to go long and then unwind simultaneously.
9. The $27M round trip
The hosts discussed a Fidelity account that had reportedly grown from about $200K to $27M on leverage and was then down roughly 90% over the prior month, representing a loss of more than $20M.
Ansem said the same mechanism that produced the gain produced the loss. He warned against entering a 4x long on an entire portfolio after an asset has already risen 10x, 15x, or 20x without a stop. At the peak, he assumed the position represented a large share of the trader’s net worth, making a rational response even harder.
Banks summarized the emotional reality as “round-tripping,” while Ansem stressed that the exit plan must exist before the position becomes large enough to distort judgment.
10. Portfolio positioning and the onchain barbell
When asked where investors could seek safety in 2026, Ansem named large technology stocks such as Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nvidia, and Meta, while acknowledging that even large-cap equities could remain more volatile. He described cash as the portfolio cushion and said gold and silver looked attractive to him.
Crypto remained the riskiest sleeve in his framework. For onchain positions, he recommended sizing so that a total loss would be tolerable, while a 100x outcome would still matter. His suggested barbell was a safer allocation in cash, metals, stocks, and crypto majors, paired with a smaller degen allocation for early-stage onchain narratives.
11. “Bottom is in” and onchain is back
Ansem repeatedly said the crypto bottom was in and that onchain activity had returned. He cited coins running from zero to $10M-plus market caps after several quiet months, along with new mechanisms and applications appearing on Solana, Ethereum, and Robinhood Chain.
He specifically mentioned Uniswap v4 hooks as a way to create more flexible liquidity-pool designs. He also said he was bullish on Ethereum, prompting Banks to highlight the statement as a clip.
The hosts cited a chart showing Pump.fun up about 32% since the beginning of July, while SAND was down about 50%. They connected this with Ansem’s earlier call of a “memecoin top and crypto bottom,” which they described as one of the show’s strongest live calls. Separately, Ansem said PUMP was trading in a range around $1,600–$1,700 to $2,400 and that clearing $2,400 would make positioning more urgent.
12. Bitcoin’s $100K odds
Ansem said Bitcoin was trading around $65K and that Polymarket’s approximately 9.5% odds of reaching $100K by year-end were too low. He estimated a 30%–35% chance, citing a late-2024 example in which Bitcoin rose from roughly $58K to $100K in about 45 days.
He said the odds could change materially if Bitcoin broke and held above $70K. Later, the hosts also discussed a weekly close around $66K–$67K as an important level. Austin Barack cautioned that if the market bottom fell out, the odds would fall further.
The hosts also promoted a proposed Polymarket “BBC,” or Big Black Bull Combo: the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, the Sixers winning the NBA championship, and Solana reaching $600 within a year. They joked that the payout should be 1,000x or 10,000x.
13. Ansem’s tokenized-attention thesis
Ansem said it had been about 30 days since he took over the Anom token after someone launched it and sent it to his Pump.fun profile. He said he now had a content team and a social team and wanted the project to represent a community learning to trade, build AI, and make money online.
His written thesis was that “tokenized attention networks backed by reputable creators” could create value for Web2 companies and crypto protocols. He argued that his audience contains many traders and people willing to risk and spend capital, making it an attractive group for companies trying to reach that demographic.
Rather than simply accepting payment to promote projects, he said he wanted protocols to add value directly to Anom holders through airdrops and other benefits. He cited the Bullpen NFT collection as a proof of concept, saying it directed 100% of its revenue toward buying Anom and became the most-traded NFT collection on Solana.
14. Robinhood’s strategy: delete the difficult steps
Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s head of crypto, said the company’s core strength was making complicated financial products simple. He argued that many people do not want to create a wallet, save a seed phrase, bridge assets, and manage transactions; they want a product that works.
He cited Robinhood Earn, which offers approximately 7% on cash through a stablecoin product and can be accessed in roughly three, four, or five taps. He said the product is integrated into the main Robinhood app, while Robinhood Wallet supports swaps, crypto assets, tokenized stocks, and perps where available.
Kerbrat also said advanced users can export their key and use another wallet such as MetaMask, so the simplified Robinhood experience does not necessarily lock users into the platform.
15. Robinhood Chain and its Arbitrum foundation
Kerbrat said Robinhood Chain was designed to be integrated with Robinhood’s products rather than operate as an isolated chain. He cited 27M-plus funded U.S. accounts, more than 1M customers outside the U.S., and a wallet available in more than 120 countries.
The chain launched with infrastructure partners including Alchemy, Chainlink, DEXs, and wallet providers. Kerbrat also described about 200 tokenized stocks and ETFs tradable 24/7, along with support for memecoins and other crypto assets.
He said Robinhood chose an Arbitrum-based EVM L2 rather than building a new L1 to inherit Ethereum’s security and decentralization, access existing liquidity, and make application deployment and bridging easier. The relationship with Arbitrum was also described as long-term, with support for sub-100-millisecond blocks, low gas fees, and Stylus for additional programming languages.
One month after launch, Kerbrat said the chain was ranking in the top three to five for developer activity. He said the company was prioritizing product-market fit and a fair environment over revenue extraction, including by leaving priority fees off. Robinhood also supports developers through global hackathons with roughly $1M in total prizes.
16. Robinhood’s view of memecoins and social features
Kerbrat said memecoins are easy to understand culturally and can bring liquidity, users, attention, and market makers to a chain. Robinhood wanted customers to be able to trade them actively and said it kept gas low during a particularly busy weekend.
He said Robinhood Social was being rolled out in the main app, though it was initially tied to individual assets rather than allowing fully free-form posts. The company planned to study how customers use the feature and adapt over time.
17. Austin Barack’s market read and prior trades
Austin Barack introduced Relayer Capital, which he said invests in liquid digital assets and venture opportunities. He described crypto as having a difficult start to the year, with Venice, Hyperliquid, Zcash, and a few other assets outperforming while majors lagged. He said a MicroStrategy-related market event in early June caused correlations to rise and pulled many assets lower.
His current view was that bad news was no longer affecting crypto as strongly. Weak projects without a fundamental story or capital flows continued to bleed, while majors and selected assets appeared to be bottoming. He cited Venice, AERO, Zcash after a potential exploit scare, and Grass as examples.
For prior trades, Austin discussed Helium’s carrier-offload growth. He first bought around $7, doubled down near $3, and said the token later reached about $10, while acknowledging that its tokenomics still had structural issues.
He also described buying Virtuals around $0.10 in late September or early October 2024 as it shifted from an AI-waifu platform toward an agentic Pump.fun-style model. He followed that into AIXBT around a $10M market cap and then into GAME, after noticing that the Virtuals agent Luna called the GAME protocol on every response. GAME began near a $1M market cap and later reached about $400M, although Austin said he did not capture a full 400x.
18. Austin’s Venice thesis
Austin said the two main themes attracting capital into crypto were AI and 24/7 trading. He presented Venice as a private AI application with roughly $15M of ARR in January and approximately $90M directionally at the time of the show, along with a couple million users and about 45,000 new paid subscribers per month.
He also cited about $45M in annualized revenue from users purchasing additional credits beyond their subscription allowances. The team, in his description, had extensive crypto experience and included Eric Vorhees.
Austin used Venice’s token economics to build a valuation model. He said current annualized burns were about $6.5M and modeled approximately $60M of burns in 2027 through subscription growth, credit purchases, new products such as Minds, and additional burns. Applying a 50x multiple led him to a roughly $38 fair-value estimate versus a token price near $12.
The transcript gives inconsistent reference prices for the Deem token in Austin’s example: he first says it traded around $250 while providing $1 per day of inference credits, then uses $2.50 in the annualized comparison. The grounded point is that he viewed the implied credit value as materially mispriced.
Ansem added that roughly two-thirds of the supply was staked, with a seven-day cooldown and an unstaking queue he described as the lowest since December. He said that reduced immediate selling pressure and that new burns and verifiable growth were potential catalysts. He included the caveat that these were personal opinions and not financial advice.
19. Hyperliquid is an unfair comparison for ordinary businesses
Banks said the market may have overreacted toward routing all revenue directly to tokens after Hyperliquid’s success. Austin agreed that Hyperliquid was an unusual comparison because it operates with nearly 100% margins, minimal marketing expense, and a team compensated substantially through tokens.
He argued that a conventional business with staff, marketing, and other operating costs might have 40%–60% margins, or less. Such a company could not use 100% of its revenue for buybacks without eventually going bankrupt. Investors therefore need to assess the cost structure of the business rather than compare revenue alone.
20. Paybox and prompt-to-action finance
Ivan described MoonPay’s evolution from a crypto on-ramp into what he called an operating system for value movement. Paybox was presented as a secure way to connect a non-custodial wallet to Claude or ChatGPT and perform actions such as swaps, prediction-market bets, yield strategies, and x402 payments from a chat interface.
He said he booked an EasyJet flight from Spain through Paybox, paying roughly $400 in USDC over the x402 standard. The payment vault includes a policy layer, and Ivan said actions require permission through a passkey-linked mobile app. He said the app had reached the top 100 in the Finance category.
Ivan reported that a Paybox promotional video using AI versions of himself and chief engineer Niraj Prasad had reached about 9M views or impressions. He said MoonPay had made roughly 15 acquisitions over two years and wanted to white-label Paybox so other businesses could offer their own versions.
He also said MoonPay doubled the airdrop pool live, with claim instructions to follow on X, and wanted a later phase to reward people for actually using Paybox. Ivan described the operating principle as “Kaizen,” or continuous improvement, using the example that 1% improvements compounded over a year can produce a roughly 37x result.
The hosts extended the idea to local businesses onboarding customers to AI-based payments. Ansem said creatives, developers, and marketers could benefit from being early to the new interface. He and Ivan then described humanoid robots receiving money and carrying out household tasks as a longer-term frontier.
21. The late-show scam tier list
In a late-show segment, Banks and Ansem ranked alleged scams and controversial products as a host-created tier list rather than presenting a verified historical classification. They placed FTX, Pixelmon, and COVID in the top tier. Pixelmon was discussed as an NFT project that raised roughly $68M–$70M.
They placed Tai Lopez’s course-selling model, Minnesota “Quality Learning Center” operations discussed in a video, Woodstock ’99, and Peloton in the next tier. The hosts cited more than 3M possible fake Wells Fargo accounts, streaming services, and other examples across lower tiers.
The hosts’ COVID discussion was explicitly opinionated. Ansem initially said he did not know whether COVID was completely a scam, but argued that it had been leveraged in a way that disproportionately benefited asset holders through zero rates and monetary printing while harming people who were out of work and unable to invest. He then said he was willing to call it a full-blown scam. Banks was more categorical, asserting that it was a scam and potentially the biggest in history, and argued that suppressing debate could damage public trust during a future pandemic.
Other placements included Hustlers University and Fyre Festival in the middle tiers; Girl Scout cookies, Tooth Tunes, and the AP–Swatch collaboration in a debated tier; Shake Weight and Spirit Airlines lower; and streaming subscriptions, Silk Road, and Beanie Babies at the bottom. The hosts characterized Silk Road as an early practical use case for Bitcoin, while Banks said anyone who lost money on Beanie Babies deserved to lose it.
Full transcript
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 and every Thursday live at 1 PM PST on Twitch, Twitter, Kick. My beautiful co-host, Anom, is live on Kick as well.
We got Ivan giving away 25 bands to chat. I don't know what Z's going to do with Anom, but minimum chat's getting 25 bandos. I laced up the pre-show with like three, four bands.
Did you see, bro? Somebody posted my X subscription revenue. I have like 600-something subs right now for $200, and Elon has like $4,000.
Bro, somebody tweeted that you make more money on X subscriptions than Elon Musk. But Elon saw it, and then he doubled his price right after the tweet.
Well, that’s crazy.
That’s crazy. It’s fucking funny, bro. By the way, is that real? That’s how much money you’re making on X? We haven’t talked about this off-stream.
No, we’ll see. We’ll see next month. It’s actually funny for farming, but we’ll see next month. I upped it because I couldn’t read all the fucking DMs I was getting from people, and I’m like, “This is worthless if I can’t even interact.”
I thought $200 was the max.
It’s like $250-something, I think.
Was it $200 and you upped it to $250?
No, it’s $200 now. It was lower before, but during the FTX days, my shit was like $10,000, and I just had like 100 people in there. So this is kind of similar to that. I was trying to get it to go down, and it hasn’t—actually, it hasn’t gone down that much.
Everything Twitter’s building and putting into motion is super smart, bro. X is really going to be the everything app. I’m pretty confident in that.
Nikita’s doing it. He knows what he’s doing.
It’s been a crazy week, dude. Low-key, bro, stocks are getting slammed. Crypto is finally not going to zero. On-chain shit is heating up, and social shit is going on.
Was the market this crazy before we started the show?
No, it wasn’t. It was actually really quiet when we started the show.
We shake shit up.
1. The Leopold Blowup
Bro, in November we were like, “Crypto is kind of dead as fuck.” Even in the first episode, I was like, “I don’t hold any Bitcoin. Stocks are ripping. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” We were hyping Venice, and then Zcash was the only thing we were talking about. Now we finally have some shit to trade, bro, so it’s great, to be honest. It’s great.
I think we’d be remiss not to bring up this Leopold situation. I’m trying to find the TBPN tweet because production loves to fuck me every single episode of the show.
[Laughter] Can't make enough. [Laughter]
Yeah. No, the Leopold situation is crazy, bro.
Somebody in the chat said it was silent. It was silent as fuck, bro. We made this shit.
Shit's cracking now. This guy was supposed to be the second coming of Jesus Christ, the next Warren Buffett.
Yeah, bro. I saw somebody say, “Physiognomy never lies.” He looks normal. He looks like a good fucking kid.
You know what I mean? Someone said, “Physiognomy never lies,” bro.
Bro, I saw somebody say he used to work at FTX.
That's facts.
That's fucked up. That's a real fact.
I think he's going to continue to crush it, though. I think you just have to take the hits on the chin, but I think he's going to be fine.
So, Z, let me just ask you straight up: what happened with Leopold? Leopold sold—was forced to sell—his entire position. Why? What happened?
Yeah, so Leopold, if you guys don't know, his fund, Situational Awareness, has been crushing it—by far the top performer out of the funds over the past couple of years. He put out a piece a couple of years ago essentially detailing the AI trade and the nitty-gritty of it. He was like, “Everybody's not paying attention to this right now. I'm going to start a fund to make a fucking ton of money off this while everybody's not paying attention.”
If you're keeping your ears to the ground in Silicon Valley, then you know what's coming. You know what's going to happen, and he was one of those people. He started this fund, Situational Awareness. I believe he flipped $200 million into—oh no, it was $400 million into $2 billion. So, something crazy. He's been doing really, really, really well, and he's been long a lot of these individual AI stocks.
Bloom Energy was one of his big trades. I believe SanDisk was another one of his big trades. He was in Nebius. He was in a few of these specific AI stocks.
How big was the portfolio? How big was his fund?
I think it was—let me get this right. I think it was $20 billion at the top, but that might have been—
$4.5 billion. I saw $4.5 billion.
We should check that.
$4.5 billion. Was that levered or total?
Yeah, it grew as big as $4.5 billion at one point. Situational Awareness grew to as big as $4.5 billion.
He was fucking crushing it, but he was levered. He was leveraged long on a lot of his positions, and obviously, when the market turns, if you're leveraged long, you take losses a lot faster than you do if you're just 1x long. He was drawing down a lot, and he was essentially trying to raise money from outside investors who wanted to invest in his fund while the market kept drawing down.
Then they announced today that somebody bought all of their positions off them, which is fucking crazy. The person who bought all these positions was Ken Griffin from Citadel. He bought all the positions they had open in the fund. Fucking crazy.
People have been saying Ken Griffin actually set him up—like, he knew that he was in trouble—because they announced they were trying to raise capital. Then, after they announced they were trying to raise capital, Ken Griffin was like, “We think the Fed's going to hike. They could do a surprise hike.”
Baseless, right? That was totally manufactured.
Not entirely baseless. It's possible, but unlikely. The percentage chance of them hiking was low, but the Fed had said that they weren't going to do forward guidance. They weren't going to tell people what they were going to do ahead of time. They were going to wait until the actual FOMC meeting to make their decision, which is why I was like, “It could happen.”
As he said that, stocks obviously kept sliding more. Then today, they announced that he sold all their positions to one entity, and Ken Griffin was the guy who bought them off him, which is fucking insane.
This is Melo's take. Let me look at this tweet, and then we'll talk about Threadguy being a fucking genius.
He crushed it today.
Insane. Insane.
Citadel called for a rate hike. Markets panic, stocks down 50%, Leopold forced to sell. Then Ken Griffin came and bought the whole thing, which is crazy. But before he bought it, Threadguy called it.
Threadguy really understands the market, bro.
I was watching his stream this morning. I tuned in and watched his stream for a good bit, actually, because he's been doing a great job. He saw Leopold say—the first announcement was like, “Leopold sells half of Anthrop.” He was like, “Whoa, that's crazy.” Then the other announcement was like, “They're looking for external capital.”
I thought, “Okay, that's crazy, but they're probably going to be fine.” Then it was like somebody bought their entire book, and he was like—
This was hours before it was confirmed, by the way. He said this at 7 a.m.
10 a.m. Eastern time.
Bro, they watched me—I was watching him type this on stream. He was typing this live on stream while calling it.
He was like, “Ken Griffin—wait. Ken Griffin said a few days ago that they're going to hike rates, and that affected the market.” Then he was like, “Who has enough money to buy their entire fucking fund?” It's like Ken Griffin, maybe.
This was crazy. I was watching him respond to it, like—
Hype as fuck.
It feels like someone's getting carried out right now. I'm not going to lie.
And it feels like it's fucking Leopold Aschenbrenner, bro.
That is crazy.
It feels like someone's getting liquidated right now, and it feels like it's him. The 4 biggest losers are Leopold's stocks.
That's crazy. [Laughter] Bro.
Damn. I hadn't even seen this one from Tuesday. I just saw one from today.
This is fucking crazy.
That's crazy, bro. That's awesome.
He also called it being Ken Griffin. Where's that clip?
That was from today.
This is even crazier. He called on Tuesday that he was getting liquidated today. He called who bought him out of the position, too. That's fucking nuts.
That is nuts.
That's nuts, bro.
That's—I mean, listen, practice makes perfect. I feel like Threadguy is a perfect example. The fucker streams every day, market open, throws a jacket on, puts the fucking tie on.
No, but seriously, brother, you become who you want to be. You know what I'm saying?
He's the real deal, bro.
He learned the stock shit and the macro shit from just doing crypto. Now he does all of it, bro. Super sharp.
And taking the trades live, too—not just streaming, by the way. Taking the trades live.
So, again, just to wrap it up, just to sum it up for you: why exactly did Leopold have to sell today?
2. Bottom Is In
I mean, if you're levered, your entire fund can get liquidated. If you're on forex leverage, you get liquidated at around a 25% drawdown from whatever your entry was. Even if he's up a lot, depending on where he added leverage to the portfolio—if he was adding on dips or whatever—you literally have a stop where your entire portfolio will get liquidated if you're on leverage.
So, I assume he was reducing leverage and was stuck in a bad spot. But if you're the only one de-risking, and you're the main person de-risking when there's no liquidity there for you, that's where it can get tricky.
I saw so many people talking about it like, “He's one of us, bro.” It's like Su Zhu and Three Arrows Capital. They did a similar thing where they were levered to the fucking balls, up infinite, and would just keep being bullish, and then got fucking liquidated, bro.
Same.
What's the fucking Korean guy? Bill Hwang. He was another dude that was fucking crazy. Bill Hwang was—damn. I need a clip on him, bro, because he was fucking nuts, too.
By the way, this all happened this morning, guys.
Yeah, literally today. This week has been insane. The general sentiment and narrative around this guy, Lupole, was that he was the one. He was the chosen one. He was this next-generation Warren Buffett type of character, and he got completely smoked today.
Yeah. I think he'll be fine. I think he's definitely super smart. You can tell by the picks he was making.
He just was too levered today. That's the thing that'll get you, bro. Being too levered. He would've been perfectly fine if he was just in the positions 1x, bro. He's up so much. He hit—
Not every one, but a lot of the major individual AI names. He hit them before everybody else and had size in all of them, which is crazy.
But that's why every Lupole stock was up 20% or 30% today. Bloom Energy was up around 25%.
Here it is. I think Jack just linked this clip.
Citadel, Ken Griffin. Oh, yeah. He comes out of nowhere and says, “Yeah, they’re going to hike rates.” The market panics and destroys everything, chases DRM down 15%, and dumps everything. Lupole gets margin-called. He knew he was weak, and then Citadel buys the entire book.
Run it back, Turbo.
Is this what you booked? [laughter]
Is this what you saw today?
This is after he was calling it live, but this is today. Yeah, this is it.
Somebody has to go clip it. That’s a fucking clip, bro. You guys need—
I’m telling you, it’s crazy because you can see him being excited live, watching it play out in his head. It was nuts.
The next Kai Cenat will be a trader. I know Threadguy’s whole thesis on trading: traders are the new celebrity. I think, even more specifically, it’s like the new content creator. Look at this fucking kid—he streams every day. We’re streaming right now.
3. Early YouTube & FaZe Days
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, the reason it makes so much sense is, who’s the next Kai? It has to be somebody like Threadguy or somebody like Kimchi, because these people are making these trades in real time and everybody can tail them. We talked about it last week. I think I talked about it on Threadguy’s stream, actually. I was saying LeBron can’t teach people how to be LeBron. Leonardo can’t teach people how to be Leonardo. But if you’re a really good trader, learning the market in real time, and you have a following of people learning the market with you and taking the trades as you take them, that’s something that isn’t replicable in any other celebrity industry. That’s why I think traders are going to get really, really popular.
For sure.
Well, you just need a Trojan horse, brother. It’s like feeding a child medicine, right? We talk about making crypto more normie-friendly a lot—having conversations like this back and forth with somebody like me, who understands maybe 50% of what comes out of your mouth, but knows how to ask the right questions. I know how to fucking tail guys like you, or pay attention to what guys like you are talking about when you’re glued to the market. It’s been special to watch Threadguy.
4. Kimchi
But you brought up Kimchi, and that was kind of the story of the week in crypto and these crazy market conditions. This fucking tweet absolutely blew up. I saw this—
The views, bro. 26 million views, bro.
Insane. [laughter]
For you guys at home who don’t know who Kimchi is, I think he’s 22 years old. He deposited $500 on-chain and ran that up to $40 million, rotating profit after trade after trade after trade, and then hit TRUMP for $40 million. This is what Kimchi’s known for. This is where all his clout comes from. Then he just fucking logged off, bro. Just aura-farms hard.
He’s just hardcore aura-farming.
He does these photo dumps, and nobody really knows a ton about this kid, but this fucking tweet went viral. For somebody from CT, I’m not sure he knows how viral it went—we’ll talk about that in a second. I actually met up with him a couple of days ago. Me and Kimchi went and got lunch. He lives in L.A., five minutes away from me, so we went and got food, kicked it with him for a few hours, and kind of picked his brain.
The kid’s fucking smart, bro. He’s smart. He definitely understands attention, and it’s a lot more intentional than I would have expected. He’s a really sharp kid. I don’t think you can get into the position he’s got himself into without being a sharp kid. But he’s fucking—
5. Trading Is the Greatest MMORPG
He’s another one of these Fortnite pros, bro. He’s been comfortable before.
I didn’t know that. He told me that. What the fuck? It’s so insane to me. It’s crazy.
Trading is really the world’s greatest MMORPG. One hundred percent. Except you can actually win money in the game. I used to play fucking World of Warcraft, bro. Now I just trade.
Trading is the next Fortnite. We need to continue to gamify crypto. We talked about this earlier, and we’re talking to the GM of Robinhood Crypto later in the show. One of the questions I’m going to ask him is why he thinks Robinhood has been so successful with retail for the average person.
A lot of normal, average people use Robinhood, and it’s onboarded millions of people into trading who have never traded before—people who have never owned a fucking stock or a share of a company. Why is that? You kind of snapped out a response, and I won’t speak for you. Why do you think that is?
Robinhood specifically?
Yeah.
I think Robinhood has done so well with retail because they created a very user-friendly interface, unlike Fidelity, Charles Schwab, and those kinds of applications, which are very boomer-minded. People who have their Bloomberg terminals love the Bloomberg Terminal, but for your average retail normie, the way Robinhood gamifies its app—with all the colors and the pop-ups for options, and when you make money it gives you a cool animation—I think all that really entices retail.
One thing people get mad about when you say you should gamify trading is that it’s not PvE. I don’t think people are saying trading is PvE. There’s definitely somebody losing on the other side of your trade. But making it fun to make money and compete against other people on a global scale is something that’s going to continue to get a lot more popular. Social trading is definitely going to be a huge thing going forward. Everybody is really trending in that direction.
Well, if you’re there early enough—at the break of some new meta or new wave of technology—then it kind of does become PvE, right? Crypto in 2009 was PvE.
Yes, exactly. If you buy ETH at $1, PvE.
Yes. Solana at $8, PvE. Exactly.
$3, whatever the fuck you called it—PvE.
Yeah. I mean, you’re kind of just describing it again. In theory, the more gamified something becomes, the more normie-friendly it becomes. The easier it is to onboard somebody and get them on-chain to deposit $10, the more that should be top of mind. I think gaming is the obvious, no-brainer play.
Have you seen this clip?
Yeah.
I know this has been done a few times, but this is interesting. It’s very simple: you get a kill, you get $3; you steal $3 from somebody. PvP in the fucking trenches. You die, you lose $3. This is how somebody can fund their initial portfolio and get interested in trading, right? This is how you can onboard the average person. It’s low-stakes and low-risk.
Somebody comes on, and I don’t know—the parallels between gaming and trading are literally one-to-one. If you think about what a video game is at the end of the day, it’s just lines of code with design layered on top of them. It’s designed to be attractive and addictive, right? Just like trading, if you’re bad at it, you’re likely to lose more than you win.
Yeah.
If you’re good at it, you’re likely to win more than you lose. If you’re really fucking good at it, you become a Ninja or a Tfue, and you become filthy fucking rich. But not only that—you become famous. Again, what does that sound like to you? It sounds like trading.
Yeah, one hundred percent. It’s one hundred percent true.
Then you go a step deeper, and it’s impossible not to notice how successfully people migrate from games like Fortnite into trench trading crypto. It doesn’t make sense. That’s what all these kids are: professional gamers. Cupsy, Kimchi, Orangey—all these kids fucking started on Fortnite.
It’s the exact same skill set, you know? It’s fucking nuts. I don’t know. I think we’re onto something here.
Yeah. To bring it back to what we were talking about, I don’t know—Kimchi’s just in such an interesting spot.
He can do whatever he wants right now.
It’s going viral, bro. It’s going viral.
Yeah, he’s fucking lit.
This is crazy to see up close, too, because we really know these people. Rasmer posted a TikTok that went fucking viral. It has 270,000 likes on it.
What the fuck? [laughter]
Millions of views. I don’t even know how to check views. Yeah, we’ll play it. I mean—
The narrative, the lore, the aura—it just—
— is so fucking funny, bro.
I love it. I honestly love it.
The craziest part about Kimchi to me, though, is that he’s impossible to reach, bro. He’s MIA. He’s nowhere to be found. He doesn’t make videos.
He does it in the background.
He’ll just post a photo dump. He knows what he’s doing.
Rasmer’s so good at this. It’s the narrative, the lore, the aura.
It just catches the TikTok edits. There’s a world of rumors around him. He’s like folklore. Kimchi is folklore. [Laughter]
What the fuck is this one? There’s another one. He’s doing it—he’s done it 20 times—but there’s a FaZe Banks one here.
I don’t know what the fuck happened, but we go to this spot and Kimi walks in. When Kimchi walks in, I’m not even in this one. He took the air out of the room. Everybody went silent.
Kimi walks through, and everyone just goes silent. He’s got a suitcase—a big Rimowa suitcase—and this fucking rainbow Rolex. He’s just walking through and saying nothing. Everybody’s just like, “What the fuck?” The girls are like, “Fuck.” [Laughter] He walks past.
Yo, really the greatest glazer of all time.
Bro, who the fuck was that?
That’s not true. You’re a sick fuck. I didn’t plan on watching this clip. That’s not real.
That’s not real. He said, “Who the fuck is that?” It’s so funny.
But no, listen. The clip-farming thing—I actually talked to Rasmer yesterday on the phone, and he’s like, “Hey, what do you think about this, X, Y, and Z?” I’m like, “Rasmer, you just have to embrace it, brother. You’re jester-maxing. You’re clip-farming. You’re literally CT. You’re literally CT’s Lacy and Stable Ronaldo.”
He’s like, “Well, those guys are goated.” They’re really successful and they’re rich. Just be yourself. You’re really good at this, and you can tell you have fun doing it.
He also does a really good job of articulating things for a more normal audience. I saw him talk about the Leopold thing. There was a TikTok—I don’t have it here—but the way he delivers it is very easy for the average person to be like, “Oh, okay. This is what’s happening.”
Yeah.
That’s not the easiest thing to do, so it’s a real lane. You’re seeing little pockets and little lanes and little subniches in this weird crypto subculture being filled in real time. I don’t know. Shit’s going to look really crazy over the next year with content and crypto. I’m super fucking bullish about it and passionate about it.
6. Banks' Kimchi Lunch Story
We’re in a cool spot with this show. We’re obviously a little bit older, but I think there’s a significant role for us all to play in these next 12 to 18 months. Only time will tell.
I want to give this Kimi clip-farming thing a shot. I told you guys, “Listen, just bear with me for a second.”
I met up with Kimi a few days ago. He also lives in L.A., and I hit him on DMs. I’m like, “Yo, let’s grab lunch, whatever.” He’s like, “Yeah, bet. What time? What place?” I hit him with the time and place, and he didn’t respond to me. I’m just like, “Fuck it. I’m hungry. I figured I’d just go. Maybe he’ll show up.”
This fool shows up 30 minutes late. He pulls up in a fucking Maybach with a driver and fully tinted windows. I didn’t even see the driver. It could have been a fucking—you would have thought it was a Waymo.
I don’t even think there was a driver in the front seat, but he got out of the back seat alone, walked up, sat down, and ate lunch with me. He didn’t eat, by the way. I was the only one eating. I ate a fucking four-course meal. He sat there and drank tap water, bro. He’s worth $40 million, drinking tap water. Whatever.
We had a bottle of still water on the table, and he just wouldn’t touch it. I get up to take a piss, as you guys know. I walk into the bathroom, and I’m gone for 2 minutes. I come back, and he’s gone. Nowhere to be found. The Maybach is gone, and the bill is paid for. I haven’t heard from him since. Kid’s a fucking sicko. Sicko.
Yeah, that was totally fabricated. That’s not real. That’s just me clip-farming. We’ll see where it goes. TikTok, do your thing.
Nice clip.
Yeah, chat, nice clip. I did actually link with him, though. [Laughter]
So funny.
It is funny, bro. This is the state of the internet. It’s fucking ridiculous. [Laughter]
Give me a second, bro. I’m living in a Black Mirror episode.
It’s so sick. It’s so sick. Basically, what I just did is what Rasmer does, and I don’t know—we’ll see where it goes. Maybe it goes somewhere.
No, I actually did link with him. We talked for a while, and he’s a sharp kid. I’m really excited to see what he does next. I don’t think he needs to try too hard. I think exactly what he’s doing is exactly what he should be doing.
Chat said, “I ride Banks.” [Laughter]
Wait, what is it? He said what?
Chat said, “FaZe’s middle name is I Ride Meat Banks.” [Laughter]
Blowing bubbles on it.
Fuck that kid. Ban that kid. I don’t know whether to ban people like that or give them money. [Laughter]
It’s kind of like you’ve got to do both.
I know. It’s fucking hilarious.
Find that kid. Give him a ban from MoonPay. Fuck it. [Laughter] I ride meat.
I ride meat.
Oh, but no, bro. The social-trading stuff is definitely where everything is going. We actually focus on it a lot at Bullpen, too. It’s part of the reason we’ve been doing so much with these competitions. If you can figure out who’s high-signal as a trader, especially with people who are trading size—not just trading crypto, but trading stocks, commodities, and all these things—we want that to be localized in one place.
You can look at the leaderboard and see what their thesis is on the trades they’re taking, what positions they’re in, and how they’re thinking. Something that TradingView has not capitalized on is that people post their ideas on TradingView, but you can’t trade directly on TradingView.
What we’re trying to do at Bullpen is have it be a place where you also discover alpha and trade everything in the same place. We’re super bullish on social trading.
We’re onto something, brother. People are clearly interested in the content, the personalities, and the stories.
People love to speculate. I think the more people are allowed to speculate on shit, the more people get onboarded, but the more gamified shit is. We just talked about it. It feels a lot like early gaming, to be honest. It feels a lot like early YouTube.
I was here in the very, very early days. I made my first YouTube video in 2008. We founded FaZe in 2010. When you talked about doing this for a living, making money on YouTube, or playing video games professionally, you were laughed out the door. It didn’t really make sense. It didn’t sound real.
People scoffed at it. People made fun of it. People mocked it. But it’s obviously a real thing now. It’s very, very real. You see guys like—
Go ahead. Have you seen—I don’t know if you remember when the day-trading Forex shit was blowing up?
You remember Forex?
Yeah, no, no, I do. I do. Forex and shit. With Forex and day trading, there was this time period—I think it was right around COVID—
It was literally right at COVID.
Yeah, yeah. These day-trading groups popped up, and they were all paid groups, but they were for trading Forex. Forex is the foreign-exchange currency market, so trading the dollar against the yen, the dollar against the pound, all that shit.
People were selling, “You can get infinitely rich trading Forex,” bro. Forex moves like 10 basis points a day. These currency pairs literally do not move at all. But it got so popular because people thought that if they paid for this alpha, they were going to learn how to make a lot of money, and everybody was just shilling the shit nonstop—day trading.
I think that right now, crypto, the trenches, perps, stocks, all of that is going to be a similar situation where it attracts a lot of people. But you can actually make a lot of money trading these things. That’s a real thing.
You’re not going to make a lot of money day trading Forex, but you can make a lot of money if you’re early to a stock and you hit a perp trade on it, or if you’re early to a new narrative in the trenches and you hit it at a low cap and ride it up. Those are possible 100Xs and 1,000Xs that you can hit in crypto, and you cannot do that in Forex. I think that’s why social trading is going to get a lot more popular.
And my side of it—my view of it—will always be that it’s not limited to just explicitly trading. By the way, there are so many different lanes to be filled. There are so many different roles to be filled: creatives, devs, directors, product people, new products, and obviously content creators.
Bro, you see a guy like MrBeast. He’s a multibillionaire. He’s a billionaire straight off YouTube videos.
Yeah.
You know what I mean? Look at this shit. MrBeast owns 51.6% of Beast Industries. It’s not liquid, but you can’t—this is fucking nuts. He owns 51.6% of Beast Industries, which is about 68 million shares.
Shares valued at $2.7 billion. He's a multibillionaire from making YouTube videos. If you told somebody there would ever be a YouTuber who became a billionaire from making YouTube videos, even 6 or 7 years ago, you'd be laughed at. You know what I'm saying? It's crazy.
It begs the question.
You know what's crazy?
Go ahead. Go ahead.
I was going to say, it begs the question: who's going to be the first crypto-content-creator billionaire? Who's it going to be? Is it going to be you, brother?
Bro, all I know is, last cycle, when we hit Solana and WIF, if I had owned 51.6% of WIF, the same way MrBeast had 51.6% of MrBeast Industries, it would have been about the same market cap.
Which is sick to even think about, by the way.
Yeah, it would have been about the same market cap, obviously a lot less liquid. But I just think that's an interesting comp. That's what he's valued at in private markets. I think, honestly, the reason I've been saying that coins attached to popular people or creators make sense is that if MrBeast had something public that people could speculate on and attach value to, I think it would be worth more than that private valuation, to be honest. I think it would be worth a lot more.
Brother, it's insane. How many products have we seen? Moonshot. We saw Moonshot sell to Jupiter last cycle, at the peak of the bull market, right? They were building this product and app for 10 months. Two guys built this shit in 2 weeks. Fifty thousand people on Earth, especially with AI, could realistically build this product today. There's not really anything proprietary about it. It was just a sharp move made at the right time in incredible market conditions. They sold this app for a billion dollars.
They did.
If that opportunity is afforded to these guys, what does an opportunity look like for a guy like you, for a Threadguy, for a Kimchi? There is a route and a path for you guys all to become billionaires on this attention shit in this market. The ceiling doesn't exist. People will laugh at that statement, but it's only a matter of time. It's not a matter of if.
I mean, I think it's wholly true, bro. I'm not even trying to exaggerate. I really do think it's true, because if you look at something like Moonshot, which obviously hit a $1 billion private valuation, what you're discounting is that if you have multiple different apps like that that do really well and they're all connected to one thing that's public, that's when you get crazy situations and crazy scenarios. It's hard for people to envision that before it happens.
The same way it was hard for people to envision smart contracts and DeFi before ETH blew up, it was hard for people to envision Solana doing really well and memecoins doing well before that blew up. It was hard for people to envision Hyperliquid dominating perpetuals and half of its volume being on stocks. It's hard for people to envision these things before they happen, but I think that's definitely something that could play out.
I see it clear as day. I think it's inevitable. I think it's 100% going to happen. Gaming in crypto, SocialFi, the Kai Cenat of trading, whatever the fuck you want to call it, however you want to paint it, the GTA metaverse—it's only a matter of time. There aren't many people who are even attempting to do it. We talk about all of them all the time on the show: the Yeezys, the Rasmers[?], the fucking Threadguys. You know what we're doing here.
Bro, if Moonshot could hit a billion-dollar valuation, I think Thread and Counterparty could hit the same valuation.
For sure. I think we could do it with Market Bubble. I think Trader Mayne leveraged his niche audience and the content that he does—
Sold his company for 9 figures, hundreds of millions of dollars.
100%. I don't think Trader Mayne is a billionaire, but he's got some there for sure.
It's all from creating content and then creating a business around that content. He created a real business with real value for those people, but it started as just posting content on Twitter, posting content on YouTube, and being a really good trader. A lot of people learned from Trader Mayne, and the reason that people have so much trust in him is the same reason that the business attached to him did so well. The exact same reason.
7. Anthem Update
Trader Mayne could have made $100 million as a trader during his time in crypto if he never posted all of those trades on CT, posted all the educational content he did on CT, or did all those other things in addition to that. He wouldn't have been able to sell the company to Kraken for whatever he sold it for. That's in addition to the trades he was already taking. It's additive on top.
Cream always rises to the top, brother. Karma is a real thing. I've said it about myself, but this is absolutely true for you. If karma is a real thing, you're going to do it, brother. If the law of averages is a real thing, you're going to do it, too. You just need one of them to be real. It's only a matter of time. We just have to stay the course and embrace and align with people who are trying to do this content, distribution, and attention shit.
8. Stocks Trading Like Meme Coins
And, yeah, I don't know. It's exciting. It's exciting. It's wild times.
It is exciting. So, what the fuck has happened in the last 2 days in stocks? We've got stocks trading like memecoins. What is going on?
Bro, look. I'm going to pull up the SanDisk chart, because this shit is actually crazy.
The SanDisk chart is fucking nuts, bro.
Bro, as you guys know, AI stocks have been up infinitely for the past year, maybe the past couple of years.
This is fucking nuts.
This is SanDisk. This isn't even—this is—
This looks like cash.
Bro, SanDisk went from $28 in April 2025 to $2,300 in June 2026. The reason for this, obviously, is that a lot of the AI labs need a lot more memory for all these models they're running, and it's really driven by real revenue. But what people aren't realizing is that if something is up 10x in this short amount of time, obviously you're going to have aggressive pullbacks. That's what people are saying when they say, “Stocks are trading like crypto.” Parabolic advances always have these pullbacks on the way to doing well. That's never going to stop happening. It's down 30% in 5 days and 55% from its record high. It's nuts.
It's insane. Fifty-five percent. Thirty percent in 5 days, brother. This is where you're supposed to park your money when it's all said and done. You're supposed to retire and throw your money in the S&P 500 and just chill. You're never supposed to—
The volatility does get a lot lower for the highest mega-cap stocks. Obviously, Apple, Google, and all those are a lot less volatile than crypto. But generally, there's nothing in the markets that can prevent you from experiencing volatility, especially when you're trying to get super-high returns. Something that goes up 100x is going to deal with some volatility along the way at some point. It doesn't just go up forever. That's what I want to be clear about.
Microsoft's up 15% today. Microsoft.
Yeah. Again, trading like a fucking memecoin. What is Microsoft's market cap? Like $2 trillion or something crazy?
I don't know. Yeah, that's insane. So explain to the people at home, people like me: what has to happen? How much money needs to get pumped into Microsoft for it to move up 15% at a $2 trillion market cap?
Billions of dollars. Billions and billions.
Billions and billions and billions of dollars.
Yeah. I mean, it's crazy, bro. The more people who are trading, and the more retail is trading, especially as you add leverage on top of that, that's why all the leveraged stocks look so crazy. They were borrowing money to go long, and when that unwinds, that's why it's so aggressive. It's people on leverage—not just being long billions of dollars, but being long billions of dollars on leverage. Speaking of being long or trading on leverage, you saw this.
This poor guy.
Yeah.
This is a Fidelity account, bro. This looks like a—
Oh my God.
This is crazy.
Oh my God. Well, do we know what he was long?
This looks like crypto. I don't know. Must have been meme coin, right? Had to be, right?
Like—
No, for real, though, it's not. This is crazy. The dude's down 90% in the last month—over $20 million.
Yeah, you could only run up $200K to $27 million on leverage.
On leverage.
The same way that he got there is the same way he goes down. It's a really tough task to add leverage in spots where everybody else is not adding leverage and then take the leverage off when everybody else is adding leverage. That's how you make a lot of money.
If you enter your leverage positions when it's quiet, before the market starts trending aggressively, and then you have tight invalidations when it does start to break out, that's when you can make a lot of money on leverage. But when something is up 10x, 15x, 20x, and you're like, “I'm going to go fucking 4x long my entire portfolio into this thing randomly with no stop,” that's how you end up getting fucked.
The most difficult part for people is that you make all this money on leverage—what's your plan for de-risking? When do you start to scale out? If you don't have a plan for scaling out before it happens, there's absolutely no possible way you're going to be able to react when your emotions are that high.
It makes sense if you're playing with a couple hundred bucks, right? You're gambling at the end of the day. You want to run some shit up. But, bro, to trade like that, to risk that—we don't know what this guy's circumstances are. We don't know how rich or how broke this guy is.
He was all in. I probably—he was all in his net worth. He probably had $200K at the start, and that was a large chunk. He was like, “I'm going to run this shit the fuck up.” At the top, when it was like $27 million, I bet that was a very large percentage of his net worth.
It makes me sick. It makes me sick to my stomach.
Yeah, bro. Round-tripping is part of this.
So I guess the question is, if you want to play it safe, where do you go in 2026? Precious metals, real estate?
I still would say the MAG 7 is safe. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta—I would still say those are the safest stocks. It's just going to be a lot more volatility now because there's a lot more volatility in general with trading everything. I think that's going to continue to be a trend.
You always have your cash, which is the safest. That's your cushion for everything. Diversifying into metals—I actually think gold and silver look really good here. I do think they're in a great spot to be long metals, stocks, and then you have your crypto, which is the riskiest part of your portfolio. The way to hedge against volatility is to have a diversified portfolio.
You say that a lot.
Yeah. It's being diversified in different areas.
You mentioned crypto, and you've been very bullish on the timeline. The bull bottom is in, bro. Bottom is in. Are we—let me just—
Bottom is in.
Is onchain back? Is onchain back?
Onchain is back. Onchain is 100% back. I think for the first time in several months, you're starting to see coins run from $0 to $10 million-plus market cap. In addition to that, you're not just seeing coins run, but you're also seeing devs and builders build innovative things onchain that are actually novel and actually attracting attention.
Our new thing—that's what I'm most excited about. Not just on Solana, but also on Ethereum and on Robinhood. Robinhood's chain is starting to see a lot of—
You said Ethereum.
I said Ethereum, bro. I'm even bullish Ethereum right now. That's how bullish I am. I'm that bullish on crypto right now. I'm even bullish Ethereum. That's how bullish I am.
It's great. That's a clip. Clip that.
I'm not even joking, bro. For real.
9. 100K on Twitter Live
Whoever's doing clips, post that on Z's Twitter right now. That's going nuts, bro. That's going nuts. Finally throwing these guys a bone.
Hey, man, I support it if it looks good, bro. It's making sense.
Talking about looking good, bro, this Pump.fun shit doesn't even look real. This is crazy.
I know. Yeah, this is Q3. Since the beginning of July, Pump.fun has outperformed every other major crypto asset. I think it's up—what does that say?—32%. Yeah, 32%.
These aren't apps, by the way. This is Ethereum. This is Bitcoin. This is Solana. You know what I mean?
Bro, SAND is down 50%. By the way, I was getting railed so hard when I called the memecoin top and crypto bottom. They were roasting me, bro. And look at this Q3 chart.
You couldn't have been more right.
You couldn't have been more right. Honestly, somebody clip this and then roll the clip with the timestamp of him calling that. You called them on the same fucking day, brother.
I did. Same day.
Memecoin top and crypto bottom that same day.
That's got to go down as the most legendary call on the show thus far. It was live, bro.
Imagine if we go to all-time highs from here and onchain comes back right after the Anthem drop, bro. That would be insane.
You got to post that with the timestamp and pin it to your fucking Twitter forever and just—
I know. It's like, “Don't talk to me. Never speak to me ever again. I gave you guys generational wealth on a platter.”
Yeah.
Crazy. But I want to talk more about the onchain stuff, though. I think there are some interesting things happening onchain right now. Specifically, Uniswap and the v4 hooks are really cool, which is allowing people to do more creative things with the liquidity pools.
There's an interesting project—I just bought this recently. I don't even know if I should shill it, but there are a few things on Robinhood Chain that are doing well. There are a few things on the Ethereum mainnet that are doing well. I think it would behoove you as a retail trader to start paying attention onchain again.
I know there haven't been a lot of opportunities basically all of this year, but if you think crypto bottom is in—even if you think majors are going to chop around for a while—I think these are the times when there's not a lot of interest in crypto. If you position now, early in these novel coins and novel mechanisms that are happening, that's how you make a lot of money during the bull market. Once everybody comes back, it's really easy to have liquidity that pushes these things higher. So there's a lot going on. I'll be paying attention to a lot of things right now.
I think this is a pretty fresh take. This is a good approach. It's a good way to think about things. I feel like it kind of sums up everything that you're talking about.
Oh, yeah. It was dead a month ago, by the way, and now it's back.
This is bars. Be mindful of your capital. Don't chase a certain number. Just focus on winning consistently over time. Like I said in gaming, if you win more times than you lose—
Yeah.
You know—
10. The Polymarket Parlay
Bro, you have your safe part of your portfolio, which is crypto majors, stocks, metals, and cash. Then you have your degen part of your portfolio, which is onchain. With that degen part of your portfolio, you're trying to be early to all the narratives before everybody else and size in a way that you don't care if you lose that position. But if it does really well and it hits 100x, it's meaningful for you. That's how you should be playing onchain.
On that note, degen plays—not giving a shit if you lose—maybe a perfect segue into the BBC combo. The Polymarket BBC combo product. Do we have that? Is that a thing?
Can we please make this happen, please, guys?
We talked to Polymarket about opening up a market like a combo. Z tweeted out something along the lines of, “How do I parlay the Eagles to win the Super Bowl, the Sixers to win the NBA championship, and Solana to $600?” He's like, “How do I—how do I—how do I—I need Polymarket to make this possible. Please make it possible for this to be a combo.”
I know you guys have sports combos. If I can get the Eagles to win the Super Bowl, the Sixers to win the championship with LeBron, and Solana to hit $600, all in the next year, please let me trade that. Please, live. If it's not live, it needs to be live.
Please. I'm begging.
It's got to be like 1,000x, 10,000x. It's so unlikely that it will happen that the other side of it should make money. Somebody's going to take the opposite side of that.
And Polymarket, you can't get that shit right? There's no fucking way.
That should be 1,000x, by the way. You got to call it the BBC—the Big Black Bull Combo.
That’s what we need, bro.
We need this.
We need BBC, bro. We need BBC. Bad.
We do.
Bad.
Bad. Really?
I thought it was a thing already. I thought it was a market. It’s here. I don’t know. You guys need to open that, though.
Yeah. We need this. It’ll be so funny, bro.
No. Peak promo material, too. It should be free. It’s one notch below, like, “Will Jesus come back before GTA 6?”—onboard sign-up, catch a free bag, you know?
But if you’re right about that, that’s gross. That’s gross.
It’s a 100-million-view clip.
What else do we have? Give us updates on Anom. Let us know. I know a lot of people are here putting the ticker in the chat. You’ve been building the community. You just opened a Discord with over 10K members. I don’t know what it’s sitting at, but the last time I checked, it was at 10K.
BBC Banks. So stupid.
Yeah.
Yeah, on Anom. It’s been going well. It’s been about 30 days since I CTO’d Anom. Somebody launched it and sent it to me on my Pump.fun profile, and I basically took it over as my coin and started connecting everything that I’m doing in crypto and outside of crypto to it.
So I haven’t been sleeping a lot, to be honest. I’ve been doing a ton of work and talking to a lot of people. I have a full content team now and a full social team. What I really wanted it to be is a community of people who are learning how to trade and learning how to make money on the internet.
Whether you want to be a dev and learn how to build AI, or you want to be a trader and learn how to trade crypto and trade perps, Anom is the coin that represents that. Because we have so much attention, I’ve been trying to figure out ways to leverage that attention in a way that’s net accretive to all the holders.
There are a ton of people who want to partner with me for marketing or partner with me for X, Y, and Z. I put out a video last week saying, essentially, that if there were a way for Anom holders to benefit from airdrops from other coin communities and get unique benefits from other protocols, that would be valuable.
That’s been my main focus right now: figuring out how to productize that, how to build it, and how to partner with different people on it. That’s taking a lot of my time. I’m going to have more information on what that actually looks like soon, but I have a lot of really cool ideas for marketing, utility, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
I think you summed it up pretty well in this tweet. This is an underrated tweet. It was buried in replies and stuff, but it’s kind of along the lines of—
Yeah, so somebody asked, essentially, “Bro, you’re not serious about this coin. It’s just a memecoin. You’re not going to add any value to it.”
I just want to say, first, that I do think memecoins are going to do really well this cycle, and I do think Anom, as a meme, is a really good meme.
I said, “Try to give a short-format thesis: tokenized attention networks backed by reputable creators have a lot of value with Web2 companies and in crypto.” So it’s twofold.
For Web2 companies, my audience is one of the highest-dollar-value-per-user groups on the internet. Most of them are traders and willing to take risks, so they spend much more than your average consumer anywhere else. The reason everybody wants me to talk about their coins is because of this fact. It’s an easy sell to companies that are looking to market toward this specific group of people.
I truly believe this. I know for a fact that my following on X is one of the highest-spending groups of people on the internet. They’re all traders—not all traders, but a lot of them are traders. A lot of them are learning how to trade, and they’re also willing to risk their capital on different things and spend their capital on different things.
Because of that, if there were a way for companies to access this group of people, then it would be net positive for those companies and for those protocols. That was the first part of it.
This has all been proven time and time again on-chain—provable on-chain. Your influence, your ability to move markets.
What’s the most egregious example? I know your CAT—the HOPS thing went nuts—but what’s the—I mean, WIF, you can’t really quantify WIF. That was obviously huge in part due to you. How much did it run to? How much money had to get invested into WIF for it to—
A lot, bro. A lot. I mean—
Millions and millions, tens of millions. What was the other—I just want to see the crypto part. Sorry.
The tweet’s second part.
Oh, yeah. My bad. For crypto, there are a lot of protocols, real and meme, that are going to want to partner for my attention and pay money to do so.
Instead of doing that, what I’m trying to productize for people is a way for companies to add value directly to Ansem token holders through their protocols and airdrop coins to those people, instead of just giving things to me.
I think there’s a really cool way to do this, and we’ve already seen it start to happen with that NFT collection—the Bullpen NFT collection. They’ve done really well because they directed 100% of their revenue toward buying Ansem, and they’re the number-one most-traded NFT collection on Solana.
11. Bitcoin to $100K?
That’s one proof of concept for how the attention around my followers and community of people on X can be used to benefit other things that aren’t just me. I think you can scale that in a lot of different ways. Those are my general thoughts on that.
Sounds great. I have one more question for you directly that I want to ask you. We’ve talked about this internally, but it’s been a while since we hit a target for Bitcoin. I know there’s a Polymarket market for this somewhere, but is Bitcoin going to $100K by 2026?
I think the market on Polymarket right now is at about 11% for Bitcoin to hit $100K. Right now, Bitcoin trades around $65K, so it would have to nearly double—just under a double—to hit that by the end of the year.
But if you look at late 2024, when Bitcoin bottomed at $58K around November, right before Trump won the election, it went to $100K in about 45 days. So I think this is mispriced. I think it’s a higher than 11% chance that it’s going to hit $100K by the end of the year.
I think these odds will change a lot if we can break and hold above $70K. I think this is a good setup. I think it’s closer to 30%–35% that it could hit $100K by the end of the year.
Pull up the market percentage.
Yeah, pull up the market, not this. We want to see the market with the odds. You traded it. It’s at 9% actually—9.5%.
9.5%. I think it’s too low, bro. I think it’s too low.
It really is up only, though. This has to be up only. There’s no way it goes lower than 9%, or much lower than 9%.
If the bottom falls out, then it will go lower.
Well, we’re in real big trouble if that happens.
Exactly.
Real big trouble if that happens.
Yeah.
12. Johann Kerbrat (Robinhood) Joins
All right, cool. Who’s our first guest?
We have our first guest waiting in the waiting room. Would you like to introduce him? He’s ready to go, production. We can bring him in whenever we’re ready. I’ll let the cohost introduce him.
Yeah. As you guys know, Robinhood Chain has made a lot of waves in crypto over the past month or so. I think they’ve done a great job with their go-to-market, basically competing with Base and other L2s.
Johann is their head of crypto at Robinhood, leading all their crypto efforts over there. We’re excited to have him on and ask him questions about what their go-to-market is and how they’re thinking about crypto as an additional value add for their business.
If you guys have any questions in the chat, definitely put them out. But we’re going to ask him some cool stuff.
Bring him in, production.
Hey, guys. How have you been?
Amazing. What a professional W setup, by the way.
I like the cactus.
I have to tell you, you’re in frame right now. This looks—you look AI. It’s too good.
It’s good.
This is the best setup that we’ve had from a guest—
—in the entirety of the show. We have to give you that.
Thank you. I appreciate it. The team is the one actually deserving the credit, so I’ll relay it to the team.
W, Robinhood. Good guys. How do you pronounce your full name?
It’s actually Johann Kerbrat.
I’ve got to be honest with you, I was terrified of botching it. That’s why I pushed it off to the cohost to introduce you.
Messed up.
I fully fried you. But the cohost introduced you. Would you like to introduce yourself to the show and to the chat, and let them know who you are, where you’re from, and what you do day to day?
Yeah, absolutely. I've been at the company for about 5 years. I basically lead the crypto business and the international businesses, and I'm excited to talk about the Robinhood Chain. We launched it about 30 days ago, so it's been pretty hot, and we're excited to keep working on it.
You guys shook some shit up. Are you surprised about the response from CT?
You know, we were expecting a lot of excitement. Every time we did something in crypto, we saw a lot of excitement on CT. I think for a long time, people weren't expecting Robinhood to play in crypto as deeply as we've done it.
Right now, we're proving that when you actually remove some of the barriers to entry, make it accessible, and integrate our distribution with 27 million-plus users in the U.S. into our chain, you can do a lot of great things.
You guys have absolutely nailed that. You definitely have the users. You appeal to that mainstream retail audience. Why do you think that is? Why do you think Robinhood has done such a good job at doing that?
I think we made things that were complicated pretty simple. A lot of the investors on Robinhood are brand-new users to investing and to thinking about finance, so we started with them early in their journey. Now they've grown up financially, and they still use Robinhood. Thanks to that, we saw a lot of people recommending Robinhood as a platform.
It's the same thing with crypto. For a very long time, crypto was just too complicated. We were asking people to create a wallet, save their seed phrase, bridge, and do all this kind of stuff. Most people don't want to do that. They just want to use a product, make it work, and make sure that whatever they're trying to buy, swap, or do is easy to do. That's what we've been focusing on.
We've seen it with one of the products we just launched. It's called Robinhood Earn. You can get approximately 7% on your cash through a stablecoin. When you do that, you don't have to create a wallet or send a transaction or anything. We do everything for you, and it just takes 3, 4, or 5 taps in the app.
I think that's what we need to focus on as a crypto industry: making it super easy for people to use products while getting the benefits of the technology, so we can get better yield, better returns, or better transaction systems.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I know you guys have done such a great job with the retail user base in the U.S. How do you think about integrating all of your crypto products with the native Robinhood app? I know the Base guys have done a really good job of making a lot of the functions and features of Coinbase Wallet native within Coinbase. I'm curious if you guys are also thinking about the real Robinhood app versus the Robinhood Wallet and Robinhood Crypto stuff being accessible in the same way.
13. Scam Tier List
Yeah, we started to do that. The Earn product I just mentioned is in the main app, and it's starting to be rolled out to customers. You may not have seen it just yet, but it will be at 100% pretty soon. It's in the main app, so you don't have to create a separate wallet or anything like that.
We'll try to integrate more and more features. The idea of the chain was not just to be a chain on the side; it was to be deeply integrated with all the products that we have. We think that the more we can do that, the better it will be in terms of usage and getting more people to participate in it.
We also have the Robinhood Wallet. It's our official wallet for the chain, really focused on swapping assets, from memecoins and other crypto assets to our stock-token product, and also trading perps if available in your jurisdiction. We're trying to think about both sides. We have 27 million funded accounts in the U.S., so obviously we want the main app to be integrated very well with the chain.
We also have 1 million-plus customers outside of the U.S., so that's already a big audience, and our wallet is available in 120-plus countries. Basically, we think we can have almost the entire world connected to the chain through some of our applications.
Awesome. How are you guys thinking about the apps that are going to be built on the Robinhood Chain? Are you being very hands-on with supporting the actual teams building all these different applications, or are you more hands-off and expecting things to happen on their own?
The reason I ask is that we've had a lot of discussions with L1s and L2s over the past few years in crypto. I think what we've seen is that the core thing that drives a lot of activity to these new chains is a breakout application that does really well. If you're a new L1 or L2 and you don't have that breakout application or that event where people can make a lot of money, then it's hard to bootstrap and keep activity consistent. I'm curious how you're thinking about the app ecosystem.
Yeah, it's a combination. When we launched, we wanted to make sure that we had the entire ecosystem ready to go. We did many partnerships for day 1, from RPC providers like Alchemy to oracle providers like Chainlink, as well as DEXs and other wallet providers. We really wanted to make sure that on day 1, a developer who wanted to build on the chain could do it. I think that's critical.
The other thing we're doing is some of this deep integration with these providers. For example, in the Robinhood Wallet, if you trade perps, you're using one of the Lighter integrations that we have. They've customized the system to use the Robinhood Chain, for instance, and to use some of the UI and UX that we wanted to build.
It's going to be a combination. Obviously, we don't want to be part of every single application being built on the chain. We don't want to dictate what people should build. It's a permissionless chain, so the idea was that anyone could build what they think about or what they care about.
We really wanted to push, at least, on the API aspect. We have SDKs available to create your wallet and integrate with DEXs like Uniswap. We also wanted to focus on tokenized real-world assets. We've already launched about 200 stock tokens that are tradable 24/7 and give you exposure to U.S. stocks and ETFs.
The third point is all the crypto assets, from memecoins and others. We've been trying to make sure that we have people to support liquidity, from AMMs to RFQs to launchpads. It's a combination, and ideally, when we see things that are working well and exciting for our customers, we'll make sure we can support them in other ways.
Very cool. I think what Robinhood does best is what you spoke about earlier: making it easily accessible. Trading, especially crypto, can be very abrasive and intimidating. The hoops you have to jump through and the steps you have to take—removing those steps, gamifying it, and making it attractive—I think that's very important.
Speaking to the opportunity I feel Robinhood has, and what people have spent the most time speculating on in regard to memecoins and people coming and building things on your platform, is the discoverability, the attention, and the distribution. Robinhood has that. You guys have—what did you say?—20 million people?
27.
28 million? It's insane. In the world of crypto, sometimes we've been in a stone-cold bottom bear market. Some days on CT, it feels like there are 5 people left.
People hear 27 million, and I think about it in terms of the App Store. We talk a lot about who's going to win the AI model race, and we're both bullish on Apple because of the distribution piece. Everybody has an iPhone in their pocket.
When you think about what Apple has done a really good job at, it's exactly that. It's the UI, the user experience, and making it very, very user-friendly. I feel like a huge issue crypto has had, and crypto-native apps have had, is discoverability, or lack thereof, and the Apple App Store of Robinhood.
Is this kind of in line with how you guys are thinking about building things and supporting the crypto stuff?
Yeah, I think so. We'll start seeing more and more of this integration. We don't want people to have to connect a wallet manually to a DApp, authorize a transaction manually, and then, if they connected to the wrong DApp and authorized the wrong transaction, suddenly have their wallet drained. That's the worst experience that has been the plague of the industry in a lot of ways.
What we're thinking is the opposite. We want to make it easy. The Earn product, for example, has everything done for you in a few taps, and most people won't care about anything else. But if you're one of the crypto geeks or an engineer and you want to export the key and integrate it into your own wallet, you can do it.
And that's the beauty of it. You're not logged in to the Robinhood platform; you can take your key and use whatever wallet—MetaMask or anything else. And you're not locked into the Robinhood platform. So that's the beauty of crypto, but at the same time, it's super easy to use.
I think that's where we need to keep focusing, because the technology is better. We already know that: 24/7, always-on, decentralized, secure by default. You have fractionalization; it's transparent; you can verify the code of the smart contracts. All of that is so much better than the current traditional system, but because of all the issues that you mentioned and all the problems that have been in the industry, it's been slow to be adopted. So I think our goal is to make sure that we can bring this value to the product that we are building for customers, and they don't have to worry about their keys and all this stuff.
Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Why did you guys, I guess, start to do it now? Do you think the timing around the regulatory environment in the U.S. added any reason why you started to do it now? I think we both agree that the technology is better than existing systems, and 24/7 trading and all these things make a ton of sense. But as you know, in crypto, we've had a ton of issues trying to get support, regulatory-wise, in the U.S. Do you guys feel like you have an advantage there, and is that part of the reason why you decided to do a chain now?
No, I think the chain—we've been thinking about it for a long time. It was something that we wanted to build. We felt like the infrastructure of some of our services could be better on-chain. It just took a bit of time between building the right system and building the right feature on top of it.
If you think about it, the way that we were thinking about some of our products was actually more from an international angle than a U.S. angle. For example, our stock token is available outside of the U.S. The idea was really to get to a place where we can make it easier to access U.S. markets outside of the U.S., and so bring liquidity into the country, into the economy, and into the markets here.
So, yeah, definitely with the new administration and the new regulators, there is a path to better regulation, even though I think there are still a lot of doubts about clarity and all these things. The idea for us is that if at some point there is clear regulation, we'll be able to adapt our product that we've already launched very quickly into the U.S. market. And I think it's something that's very important. A lot of crypto companies left the U.S. a few years ago because they were worried about enforcement.
And so now we're seeing them coming back, and I think it's really critical for us to think about that because they bring jobs to the country, they bring liquidity, and they help the economy. Some of the platforms that are DeFi and very far away, they don't contribute to the economy here. So I think it's important to think about that.
Makes sense. Yeah, makes sense. How do you guys think about why you chose to do an L2 with Arbitrum instead of doing your own L1, kind of similar to how Stripe did its own L1 with Tempo? Why did you think it was advantageous to attach to Ethereum's ecosystem and work with Arbitrum?
Yeah, I think for us the idea was really: how do we bring what we are the best at, which is building great products and great UI and UX, and also not start from scratch? If we were to build our own L1 and get to the decentralization aspect that Ethereum has, it would take quite some time. Ethereum started as a proof-of-work chain, then moved to proof-of-stake; it took a long time to get that decentralization level. The same applies on the security side. I think it's pretty important—the time that they have spent on it and how many teams, foundations, and labs are contributing to the network. So it would have taken some time for us to do that with our brand-new L1.
The second part is we also wanted to be able to tap into the liquidity pretty easily. So being part of the Arbitrum ecosystem, but also being an EVM chain, basically people can super easily adapt whatever application or smart contract, or they can bridge extremely easily with us through one of our partners, like LayerZero, or create their own bridge. So there was a lot of value like that that we felt would really give the chain an advantage, or at least not a disadvantage.
And then, why Arbitrum, really? We've been working with them for a few years now. Initially, it was a small partnership on the wallet side. Things were doing very well, and we like the team. They're not just focused on the short-term gain or on trying to think 3 months ahead. They're really thinking 10 years ahead, and for us it was important to find a partner that thinks that way because we want the entire finance system to be on-chain. That's not going to be done in 6 months; it's going to be a multiyear project. So we wanted to find a partner that would think like that with us.
At the same time, we wanted a partner that would give us the tools to customize what we care about. We wanted extremely fast block times, like sub-100 milliseconds. We wanted very cheap gas fees because we don't want people to think that they shouldn't trade on the chain because it's less advantageous than another chain. We wanted to be able to use different languages to code, and Arbitrum has this system called Stylus for that. All these things made us feel like it was a great way to build on top of them instead of just trying to reinvent the wheel and waste resources doing things that aren't really giving us a competitive advantage.
Yeah, it's a great answer. I think the Ethereum ecosystem owes you guys a lot, I would say. There's been a lot of rollups that haven't been able to get good traction, and I think you guys stepping into that lane and still seeing it as an opportunity on the tech side and also the consumer side, why it makes sense, is really good for them generally.
But I'm curious about the economics of it. I'm not sure how you guys are thinking about this, but as an L2, the apps that are deployed on this L2—you guys don't capture a lot of the revenue from whatever the most successful applications are that deploy on the L2. So are you guys not concerned, I guess, with capturing a lot of that revenue? Or where do you see the Robinhood Chain adding revenue to your different business lines?
Yeah, I think right now, 1 month into the launch, we are more focused on product-market fit and trying to get people excited. We want developers to come in. We are pretty excited. I think we saw that we were in the top 3 or top 5, depending on how you look at it, in terms of developer activity on the chain, and 1 month in, it's pretty exciting to see that.
Yeah.
I will say for us, revenue is obviously important. We want to make sure that every bet that we take has a way to sustain itself, and we have a team working on it. We want to pay for all these engineers and people working on that. But making sure that we can get to product-market fit and making sure that people are excited to use the chain is probably the priority number 1.
For example, a lot of people ask me, “Why are you not turning on a priority fee for people to be able to pay more gas and swoop in if they wanted to do a transaction?” Right now, we are more focused on trying to create a fair environment for everybody and making sure that people are excited to trade on the chain than trying to optimize the revenue as much as possible.
So, quality control—it kind of roots back to initially how Robinhood started and why so many people flocked to Robinhood in the first place. You guys kind of flipped the entire model on its head.
Exactly.
I'm curious about your guys' plans socially on the crypto stuff and the chain stuff. Obviously, we've seen at this point that it's such an important piece—the attention thing, speculation—such an important piece in this. We've seen other trading apps find tremendous success in just offering things like trade tracking and leaderboards, and further gamifying things, allowing people to publish their thesis. Ansem could go and potentially give a live review or live reaction to a new app that's charting the leaderboards or whatever in your own personal app store. How are you guys thinking about all this? Are there plans to further lean into the social piece, which is obviously such a huge part of crypto and crypto culture?
Yeah, I think it's a bit further for us right now. We're more focused on the deep integration between our apps and the chain. We do have Robinhood Social, which is launching on the main app and is being rolled out to more and more customers, but right now it's more linked to a specific asset. You can't just do a free-form post.
But the more we're seeing how people are using it and what people are missing and requesting, we will adapt and we will change. Obviously, we want people to be excited. We want people to talk about the different dApps and apps available on the chain.
Every morning, when I check my X account, I see some of the new dApps and try them. Some of them are really cool, and with some of them, I’m like, “Maybe”—I won’t talk too much about that one. [laughter] I think it would be pretty fun to see more people talking about that for sure.
Speaking of Twitter, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you explicitly about memecoins and memecoin trench culture. You guys owned the [__] timeline that week. It was the biggest thing happening in crypto, and it was timed very well, kind of right after Z did his thing. It was just nuts—everything that everybody wanted to talk about.
Without getting into specifics, why do you think that is? What do you think is the appeal of memecoins? Why do you think they’ve been such a staple and such an important part of crypto, its economy, and its culture?
Yeah, I think people are excited about memecoins. They’re easy to understand, and it’s easy to understand what the specific asset is and what its cultural relevance is.
For us, for the chain, and for any other chain, it’s a good thing. It brings liquidity, users, attention, and market makers. It encourages other companies and networks to integrate with us. Overall, we’ve been pretty supportive, and we want to make sure that people can have a good experience trading memes on the platform.
Again, that’s why, for example, we didn’t turn priority fees on, even when things were getting a bit crazy that week, like you mentioned. We wanted to make sure that people would still be able to trade pretty actively, so we did everything we could to keep the gas as low as possible that Friday through the weekend, when things were getting a bit crazy.
Overall, I think it’s part of trading. You have different types of financial instruments. Some people want something very solid with very specific requirements, while others want things that are a bit more volatile and have different strategies to enable. We want to support all these types of customer segments and customers.
Sounds great.
That’s a great answer. [clears throat]
I know. Go ahead.
I know we talked a little bit about the developer ecosystem. Did you guys have to spend a lot of time teaching your Robinhood engineers about the EVM ecosystem and getting them up to speed on that? Do you have any grant or incentive programs for developers building on Robinhood Chain?
Yeah, a lot of our engineers were in the space before, so we didn’t have to teach them too much, but some engineers definitely needed more education. Robinhood is also a company with many different types of businesses. We have 13 different businesses making $100 million or more, so some people have absolutely no idea what we’re doing. It’s also my role, and the role of many people on my team, to educate everybody and make sure that the entire Robinhood team is behind it.
We also didn’t build everything ourselves. We use the Arbitrum technology, like I said, and we use Offchain Labs to help us set a lot of things up. It was a joint effort in a lot of ways.
We have hackathons across the globe. I think the next one is in Asia, and there’s about $1 million worth of prize money between the different hackathons. We’re trying to support the community that way. We’re also trying to give advice and things like that. If you reach out to us, we’ll usually put you in touch with our partnerships team to make sure that, if there’s something we can do to help, we’ll be helpful.
Overall, feedback is key, to be honest—from users, customers, and developers. Understanding what’s missing and what people want to see, all these kinds of things—tell us. We’re looking at X and all the channels that we have, so if you have feedback, let us know. That’s how we can improve the product.
Amazing. Well, thank you for coming on. Robinhood has been the talk of the town.
Yeah, you guys are crushing it, by the way. You’re doing a great job.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
It’s been super important. It’s been awesome having you on. We’ll have to have you on again sometime.
Stay in touch. Thank you so much, brother.
14. Chat Giveaways
Hey, man. Have a good one.
Guys, let’s get some W Johanns and W Robinhoods in the chat. Let’s get somebody paid. Brother, my chat is so [__] funny.
You’re hilarious, bro.
Guys are like, “Do it. Hit a 6-7 if you can, if you can read it.” Low-key, somebody’s trying to give me somebody. Somebody said, “Hit me with the air-blowy,” if you could see this. [laughter] Bro, you guys are too funny.
Too funny.
Let’s get somebody out of the chat. I wrote a couple names down.
Mikey Vibes, $1,000. You’re getting $1,000. I forget what you even said, but it was a great comment, and it was while we were in the thick of this thing. Just letting you guys know, I’m keeping my eye on the chat, so stay active in the chat. Great comment.
Then 0x5at gifted me—I don’t know how many subs—but here’s a [__] uno reverse card, brother: you’re getting $1,000. So, 0x5at, you gifted me subs. Thanks for that. Don’t start gifting subs now, because that’s probably going to be the last time I do that, at least today. That’s not the method, but you were the first person to do it in this stream, so it’s a little uno reverse card.
I think we’ve given away, so far, $7,000. Z, I’m going to take a piss. Give the chat—pick some comments.
All right, bet.
Courtesy of MoonPay. You could give him an emote, too. Do whatever you want. I’ve got to piss—aka, do blow in the bathroom. [laughter]
15. Austin Barack Joins
Ah, yo, what’s good, chat? How are we doing? How are we living today?
“Z, you’re so handsome.” You’re so kind, man—or woman, I don’t know which. Thank you, though.
“Hook you up, brother.” Hook you up with what? What am I hooking you up with? Okay, let’s see.
Chat, who can guess my favorite football team? Whoever guesses it first. This is easy; it should take seconds. Somebody said, “W Ansem, so inspirational.”
Tilted Throne, Eagles. We got that prediction. Tilted Throne in the chat—he was first. Eagles. First. First. [clears throat] First. First. See, the chat knows me.
“Chiefs.” What the [__], bro? Oh, nah. That’s how you get banned from the chat.
Somebody said, “Why didn’t you tell us your dad played for the Eagles?” Yeah, bro, my dad played 9 years for the Eagles and 2 years with the Raiders. He’s actually in the Hall of Fame at Texas A&M. He was a Pro Bowler in 1995 and 1996. I’m pretty sure he’s actually one of the only linebackers in Eagles history in the 20/20 club—20 sacks and 20 interceptions.
Yeah, no, my dad was a beast. He was a beast. That’s deep. That’s some lore.
“Did I play with Coach Trotter?” Nah. We were cool with Bock [?], though. Bock’s kids are cool as [__]. [clears throat and coughs]
Oh, the chat is moving so fast. Holy shit. He’s got clips, bro. Yeah, he’s got hella clips, bro. He was a two-time Pro Bowler.
“Have I seen him?” Yes, I have.
Okay, should we pull up some charts, chat? That shit hasn’t really moved, but PUMP looks incredible. I will say, I feel like I talked about this last time on stream, but you kind of have some time because it’s still in the same range between $1,600, $1,700, and $2,400.
Once it clears $2,400, that’s when you kind of have to have a position. I think the reclaim of the support was the other important spot, but in between this, you kind of have some time. It’s not that big of a rush, but you just want to have alerts set on the top side.
I’m back, Z.
Yo, how was your piss in the green room?
I didn’t actually piss. We all know I didn’t actually piss, but yeah, I feel great. I’m so fucking wired, brother. I’m ready to go. Locked in.
Ready for the show. We have Austin in the green room. Z, do you want to introduce him?
Yeah, yeah, we’ve got Austin in the green room backstage. Austin is a super-smart crypto trader. I’ve actually talked to him a good bit about some of the liquid plays that we’ve taken. We’re usually aligned on some things.
He runs his own fund—he’s a solo fund manager. He’s going to be super smart. Super-smart guy, bro.
Chat’s saying I’m back.
All right, bro. All right. All right. Insane.
All right, chat.
All right. Let's get Austin in here.
What's good, G?
Hey, how's it going?
Good to be here. Good to see you guys, man. Good to see you.
How are you? Z gave you a brief intro, but do you want to introduce yourself to the chat and let them know who you are, where you're from, and what you came here to talk about?
Yeah, so I run Relayer Capital. It does liquid and venture, but it's primarily focused on liquid digital assets. Ansem and I have known each other for a while, actually. I remember we had some good conversations in March or April 2023 about Solana. We were both so bullish, and he was trading in that $15 to $20 range. We were trying to decide what was going to kick off that run, and I guess there were a couple of things.
From Cosmos. [laughter] We got you next time. This time we got you.
Yeah, we'll do it. But yeah, I started Relayer about 2.5 years ago. Before that, I was a partner at CoinFund. I got into crypto around 2017. I started my career at a cross-border payments company that was tangential to crypto.
I went down the rabbit hole like a lot of people, and I've been a trader and investor my whole life. I started trading when I was 10, so I was just fascinated with these markets. I started a crypto startup, then worked at a crypto ETF issuer, then joined CoinFund, and now this fund. So it's been a long journey to starting a fund.
But yeah, I think Ansem and I have looked at markets in very similar ways over time. So it's fun to be on here.
Yeah, definitely, man. I'm glad to have you on. We share a lot of similar thoughts, and it's cool because a lot of the time, they're non-consensus, which is when you actually end up printing, for sure. So I'm glad to have you on and talk through what your theses are.
But yeah, how are you feeling about crypto right now? How are you feeling about the markets?
Yeah, this has been an interesting year because, for the first couple of months, we haven't had the majors participating, and there was outperformance from a couple of specific assets. Venice was doing well, Hyperliquid was doing well, Zcash was doing well, and there were a few others.
Then, with the whole MicroStrategy semi-meltdown in the beginning of June, those assets weren't able to hold up on their own, and everything started to get correlated and pulled back. I think we're at this position right now, like you've actually been talking about recently, where bad news isn't really affecting crypto anymore.
You see the longer tail of assets that people are just not interested in. There's no fundamental story or capital flows, and those are continuing to bleed. But the majors are holding up, and we're seeing some of the other more interesting assets start to bottom. Venice is one of them. I think AERO is another. Zcash has bounced really hard from that potential exploit, and Grass and a few others are doing well.
I think we're actually really well-positioned for the rest of the year. When you look at the AI equities trade, it's not necessarily as safe as it seems, so we're starting to see capital explore other areas for volatility and asymmetry. Overall, I'm pretty constructive.
Fire. Yeah, I feel like the most difficult time is when sentiment is still kind of bearish, but stuff is starting to turn and it's turning slowly. You kind of wait for stuff to come.
What were some of your favorite trades from last cycle, on-chain and also majors? I feel like I'm going to ask you about on-chain specifically because I'm curious what your thoughts were on-chain last cycle.
Yeah. So it's funny that this—I guess last cycle is technically 2024 because it all feels jumbled together. I don't know if it's 2020 or which one it is, but for 2024, there were a couple.
One of them was in the earlier part of the year, in the summer. I was following Helium really closely and the growth in the carrier offload product. People thought of it mostly as an IoT business or a business centered around subscribers, but not really as being a wholesale provider of bandwidth.
As I started seeing that take off, and Helium had bottomed around $3, I put on a pretty big position. That was one that went up to $10 and was a really good trade. It sucks to see how much the token has gone down since then. I think there are a lot of structural things in the tokenomics that they need to work through, but I love the idea of what they're building, and I want to see them be successful.
That's the tricky part in crypto, where something that's successful at one point, if you hold it forever, ends up being less profitable.
Yeah, that's true. That's been true as well, right?
Yeah, totally. When I started the fund, I was bullish on Helium, and Helium was at $7. That's when I first started buying, and it was pulling back and pulling back. Then I doubled down at $3, and it ended up being really good.
But yeah, my first entry into that trade was too early. A couple of other ones in 2024: I was really early to a trio of names in the Virtuals ecosystem. I was pretty early to Virtuals as I saw them shift from an AI waifu platform to an agentic Pump.fun. It was still really early in AI, and people were looking for ways to get crypto exposure in late 2024.
Yeah. Yeah.
This was the end of September, early October.
Really early. Really early. Yeah.
Yeah. So this was at about $0.10 before it eventually went up to about $5, and now it's in the $0.50 range. I started seeing this massive growth in new agent and new token creation. Similar to Pump.fun, they make money on volume, and we started to correspondingly see this really meaningful increase in revenue.
While a lot of the agents that were launched ended up being essentially chatbots, it felt very novel at the time. There were some things that I think ultimately laid the groundwork for some of the things we see today. So I was early to Virtuals and then was following all those launches closely.
Then I was early to AIXBT because of that. I put it on at about a $10 million market cap.
Yeah, that went up to almost a billion at one point.
And then probably my best trade of the cycle was Luna, which was the agent created by Virtuals. What I noticed was that if you went into the terminal, every single time that it responded, it called the GAME protocol.
The GAME protocol was the token that gave it contextual understanding and the ability to respond to prompts that it received. It was a very early version of how AI chat works. I saw that there was also this GAME token, and that token being necessary every single time Luna did anything seemed like, while it didn't have explicit value accrual, it would ultimately be important.
So I put that on at a $1 million market cap, and it ultimately went as high as $400 million. I didn't make a 400x because you can never time these things perfectly, but that was probably my best trade of the cycle.
All right, so you crushed the AI on-chain trades last cycle, bro. That's sick. Sick as shit.
Yeah. No, that was a really good 2024 from those. I think the beginning of 2025 was really interesting because we saw DeepSeek come out in the third week of January, and that nuked AI stocks.
The premise was, all right, if DeepSeek can lower the cost of training and lower the cost of models, that's bad for a lot of the chipmakers and other AI equities, but that theoretically should be good for agents. I think everything just sold off at once.
16. The Venice Thesis
So 2024 was great, but as you learn over time, these things go up and go down quickly.
What about 2026 and 2027? The question on everybody's mind: What about right now? What do you like right now?
Yeah. So I don't think in 2026 the names that I've been bullish on are anywhere near the top. The reason is that the fundamentals haven't decelerated at all and, if anything, have continued accelerating. One of those is Venice.
The way I look at the market right now is that, at least at the moment, there are limited flows to crypto, and I think long-term that's going to change. But the flows into crypto follow two basic themes: People want exposure to AI, and they want exposure to 24/7 trading. Those are the things that I'm generally leaning into the most.
On the AI side, Venice is a consumer application that allows you to use any AI model in a completely private way. They're also releasing a bunch of new products, one of them called Minds, that they've alluded to recently and that adds a bunch of different functionality.
They've grown, by my estimate, from about $15 million in ARR in January to directionally about $90 million in ARR now. They have a couple million users, and they're seeing 45,000 new subscribers every month.
Wow.
And yeah, those are 45,000 paid subscribers. These are people actually paying a lot. They're doing about $45 million in annualized revenue from credit purchases, where people are buying more credits to use the models because they can't consume enough just from what's included in their subscription alone.
And this is a team that's been around the block and has been building in crypto for 15 years. Eric Vorhees started some of the early Bitcoin companies, among others.
This is one that I started following in January. He wrote a tweet thread on the new tokenomics between Venice and Deem, which was tokenized compute and tokenized inference.
At the time, Deem was trading around $250, and you got $1 per day of inference credits for every Deem that you held. I'm doing the math on this, and I'm like, well, if you get $1 per day, that's $365 a year, and this is trading at $2.50. That makes absolutely no sense.
Then I'm looking at the economics of Venice, and I'm like, all right, they didn't have any explicit or programmatic burns, other than the discretionary ones where they would do a certain amount of token burns every month based on the revenue being generated. But in every single conversation I had with the team, everything they said was that they were looking to drive as much value as possible to the token.
The goal is to—I mean, you can't really burn every token possible, but if you think about it like that, that's kind of how they're approaching it.
What does Venice trade at right now—the token?
It's trading around $12. So depending on whether you look at it as FDV or circulating, it's somewhere between $500 million and $900 million.
I built a model a couple of months ago and have constantly been iterating on it. Right now, they're doing about $6.5 million of annualized burns on $90 million of revenue. In 2027, I'm modeling that they're going to get up to $60 million of burns for the year. So that's going to 10x.
That's going to come from growth in credit purchases, growth in subscriptions, and adding new products. I'm modeling out what Minds could look like, as well as new burns that they could potentially deliver. From there, I apply a 50x multiple, which you could say is a lot, or you could say is potentially conservative for something that's growing 6x year over year or even faster.
That gets me to a $38 price target for what I believe the fair value should be today, if you look at the rate.
Yeah, it was on that trajectory. If Michael Saylor hadn't nuked the markets and there wasn't all the FUD around the equity raise, I think we would already be in the $20s or $30s. But it was a healthy reset.
If you look at the unstaking queues, about two-thirds of the supply is staked. Among the staked supply, there's a 7-day cooldown period, and whenever there's a big increase in price, people unstake because they want to take profits or whatever. The unstaking queue is the lowest it's been since December, so that means there aren't really a ton of additional sellers.
There are a bunch of catalysts coming up. They just added new burns, and we're seeing verifiable growth on-chain. None of this is financial advice, and these are all my personal opinions, with all those caveats, but I think the setup is really good.
Going back to what I was saying in the beginning about the 2 areas of the market that are actually getting capital flows—AI and 24/7 trading—on the 24/7 trading side, Hyperliquid is pretty much the story. There's a scarcity of names that are really interesting, are seeing real growth, and are easy to underwrite. I think Venice is one of those names, so it's one of the assets that I think should rebound pretty quickly.
I think it's a super-clear thesis on Venice, to be honest. It's very rare to have a crypto app—a consumer crypto app—that has millions of customers, has breakout success outside of crypto with customers who aren't just in crypto, and also has a team that's been in crypto for over a decade and knows how tokens work and how to direct value to a token.
I think it's a really rare setup. I do think the pendulum has swung so far toward directing all revenue to the token because of how well Hyperliquid has done. It feels like an overreaction. There are teams that are building great products and need money to continue building those products, but are also concerned about token holders and connecting that to the business in a way that makes sense. So, yeah, I like Venice a lot, obviously.
One thing that I think about a lot is that, while Hyperliquid has set a great example, it's also an unfair comp for most of the rest of the market. Hyperliquid has nearly 100% margins. They don't really need to pay the team because the team has tokens, and the team covers the costs. They don't really spend on marketing, so 99% of the value can go back into the token.
But it's a real business. Let's say the business has 50%, 60%, or 40% margins. From there, you have headcount costs and marketing expenses. People look at the revenue of a company that's a real off-chain business and ask, "Why aren't you doing 100% buybacks?" If they did 100% buybacks, they'd go bankrupt tomorrow.
I think it's important for investors to differentiate based on the actual cost profile of the business as well.
You're very well-spoken and articulate. You should do more content. You should definitely come back on the show.
Yeah, I'd love to. We can chat more about some of my other bullish picks.
Add me to the [__] group chat, brother.
We'll do.
I need to get like you guys. I need to get like you guys. All right, cool. Thank you so much, Austin.
Later, brother. Great to be here. Take care.
How long did you—did you say you guys knew each other?
We were both bullish on Solana in March or April of 2023, and we were looking at the chart like, "When is this thing finally going to move?" We were both bullish on it, but it just wasn't moving at all. He used to be at CoinFund, and now he has his own fund.
17. Ivan (MoonPay) Joins
Maybe he can pick somebody and give somebody $5K and give you a really nice, healthy start and fund your portfolio for the next 12–18 months. Is it just that easy? Imagine that. Let me just paint the picture for you guys in the chat: $5K airdrop, Ivan Moon. Boom. There you go.
Tail everything Z says on leverage. Come out the other side in 18 months a trillionaire. Could it be that easy? Maybe it is. I don't know. At the rate we're going, it might be. But without further ado, Ivan, get in here. There he is. What's good, baby?
How are we doing, guys?
What's good, brother? Glad you're here.
Good.
How are you doing?
I'm excited. I'm excited to be on this show. This is the first time rocking with you guys, first of many, hopefully. You guys have had a crazy couple of days and have been going viral. I've been seeing a lot of MoonPay, Paybox, and these airdrop things on the timeline.
Do you want to just go ahead and introduce the chat, at your own discretion? Just let us know what Paybox is, what you guys are doing, and what you're planning on doing. The floor is yours.
I'll kick it off. I'm obviously the founder and CEO of MoonPay. When I started our journey in crypto, it was really about non-custodial. I really believe that you should be in control of your money. I love that concept, and I love the idea that the wallet can ultimately replace your bank account.
Essentially, these crypto wallets are bank accounts on steroids, right? They can do all these different actions. When we've been thinking about the evolution of MoonPay, we started as an ATM: you put your card in, crypto comes out. We embedded ourselves in pretty much every major, favorite app in crypto. Name it, we're probably plugged in.
But when we thought about evolving the business, we really saw ourselves becoming an operating system for value movement. As part of that, we're now coinciding with this AI revolution. More and more of your day is spent inside of chat. It's spent inside of Claude.
The big question was, how can we bring all these incredible innovations that are happening in crypto with this technology and have it feel native inside of your chat? That's essentially what Paybox is. Paybox is a secure way for you to attach a non-custodial wallet to your Claude or your ChatGPT.
Obviously, more LLMs are on the way, but the idea is that you connect your Paybox, you do it securely, and you can take advantage of all these DeFi actions without having to leave your chat. It's a very magical experience.
We wanted to get people excited about it. We wanted as many people to try it as possible. I had no anticipation of what was going to happen yesterday, but I think we're hitting 9 million on our AI video. There's an AI version of myself introducing the product on our timeline.
It's really great.
Yeah, so we're quite excited about that. It was pretty fun. We have a killer design team. They're called Otherlife, and we've been working on incredible AI content. We're obviously working with you guys on this Lumara festival. We're very excited about doing that with Venice.
We're all about leaning into the bleeding edge of technology, but we really wanted to build a compelling experience for people to actually see that crypto can make a real difference for everyday actions and everyday financial actions.
I booked a flight using Paybox without having to go to easyJet.com. It basically took it from my wallet. I didn't have to take my card out, and all of a sudden, boom, it found the best deal—I would imagine, the absolute cheapest.
Great deal. Yeah, I love easyJet. I'll throw one out for easyJet. I think I paid $400 in USDC over x402. It happened magically, and I booked this flight, and I was like, one prompt.
Damn.
It took 2 or 3 prompts to get there. I had to check my date of birth, check what seat I wanted, and the rest. But it was pretty magical.
That's fire.
But yeah, we're just getting started. When I think about the future of our company, the future will be: I have a prompt, and who's going to be the best executor of that prompt? Who's going to be the best person to be able to execute those particular actions?
What we see is that Paybox is, okay, if we make it easy and secure for you to link your non-custodial wallets, your card credentials, and your API secrets—and you can do this in the secure payments vault—then you have the ability to use Claude to direct it in any way that you see fit.
Hey, Claude, I need Five Guys, my typical order, and it just shows up in 30 minutes.
Yeah. Well, if it's on x402—and x402, we're very early—I think it's been an incredible innovation from Coinbase and Cloudflare, the x402 standard.
It's pretty magical, right? You can essentially do these micropayments on these actions, and more and more people are building an entire library of applications that are going to live directly inside of x402. You don't need to take your card out anymore when you go to a website.
I think that eventually will die, right? You're going to just do it directly from your chat interface.
I feel like it's to the point where removing steps, removing clicks, and limiting the number of clicks that it takes for you to perform an action or get to your desired result is always how tech and things like this are innovated. I feel like we're not really that far off from no clicks, from literally just speaking to Claude.
For real, though. You're not even speaking. You're just thinking. It's crazy.
So why is the timeline going so crazy about Paybox? Why is everyone super excited? It's very rare to see CT celebrate something the way that they've celebrated this, or be overly positive about something the way they have been about this. Why?
Yeah, so I think there's a lot of AI innovation going on. A lot of it is, how do you separate the signal from the noise of what's actually working? I think that a lot of people have built remote controls to a closed-loop application.
To my knowledge, I think we're the very first people that have taken non-custodial infrastructure, put it directly inside of Claude and ChatGPT, and then enabled you to take advantage of all these applications in DeFi. If you want to, you can swap into any crypto asset, place a bet on a prediction market, earn yield, or take any x402 action, all from one interface.
I think there's just something magical about experiencing it. The rationale behind the claim that we have going—and I'm going to share with your audience right now—is that we're going to double the pool. We obviously threw some your way to give to your audience, but we're going to double the pool overall.
The idea is that we want to build this in public. It's not going to be perfect. We're going to iterate on it every single day. At MoonPay, we have a saying in the company. We call it Kaizen, which is change for the better, continuous improvement.
With 1% incremental improvements over a year, you have a 37-times gain over a year if you manage to get that right. That's really the velocity that we'd like to be on with Paybox. We're going to build in public, get the feedback, and build with you.
The best way to incentivize people to build it is to get them to come, so that was the rationale behind the campaign. We're going to revise the claim for part 2, where we want to see actions being taken with your Paybox. We're excited to see what you guys do with it.
At this point, what's the coolest thing you've seen somebody do with it?
The coolest thing is the flight that I took just here. I'm actually in Spain right now. It was all done through Paybox. It was a magical experience to see it in my email. I just had the boarding pass ready to go. I didn't have to do anything, and it was just like, wow, this is what wallet technology can do.
That was very magical. I'm sure people are going to have way more creative use cases that come.
We should absolutely, by the way, talk more about how to market this in the content stuff, because it's just straight content. It really is magic.
I just imagine a guy like Clav going on one of his trips and flying 5 girls to Miami or whatever, and just talking to ChatGPT or talking to Claude, and it just magically happens. The viewer experience of watching and witnessing that happen is almost impossible to ignore.
You're likely to have an overwhelming majority of people who really notice what's happening be like, “Hey, I want to do that.” That's crazy.
That's the future we're about to live in. It's prompt to action, right? Removing the friction and making it simple for people.
I think this payments vault is just a really important innovation, and we really thought carefully around the policy layer. You have to ask for permission anytime you take any form of action. It's linked to your passkey.
We actually have a mobile app I also wanted to shout out. I think it's now top 100 in Finance in the App Store.
So thank you, everyone, for testing out the Paybox app. We haven't actually even promoted it on our X channel at all, but it's super slick. Anytime you want to take an action, you have the deep link directly into the app. You use your passkey and just say, “Approve,” and then the money moves.
I think I'm going to go and use it all week, and I'm going to come back.
Go crazy. I want to hear about it. I want to hear all the crazy things that you can do.
And you mentioned earlier the Luma AI Film Festival thing that you guys are doing with Venice AI, who's a partner of the show. And guys, this is just me directly talking in the chats: Ivan's a really great person to follow, engage with, and keep track of because, over and over and over, through the course of just knowing you and seeing how MoonPay moves and reacts to what's happening in the markets, you guys always find an opportunity to uplift people in the community.
Whether it be an AI artist or director, you get genuinely excited about this stuff in your own personal life. You're genuinely interested in it, which definitely shows through how you guys operate as a company. This Paybox thing is a great opportunity. The AI film festival thing is a great opportunity, and we just appreciate you breaking news on stuff like this with the show. Do you want to talk a little bit more about the airdrop with the community?
Yeah. Do you want to talk more about the specifics of the airdrop that you guys are doing?
Yeah, the claim will be on X very soon. It will be today. It depends on your time zone and what today is, but it will be today. Stay tuned for the exact instructions very, very soon. It'll be very clear on X.
But really, the purpose behind it, again, is that we just want to get feedback. I've loved the outpouring of DMs I've gotten: “Hey, this isn't working. We're having this issue.” We feed that all to our team. Our team is working nonstop. We have a war room channel on Slack right now. It's 24/7. Some of the guys haven't slept, so they're on Red Bull. They're on everything imaginable—Zyn, you name it. They're there to solve the problems. They're there to make it the best possible product experience.
This hasn't really been done before, and we're not strangers to that. We love being at the cutting edge with this technology, but we really think it's powerful. This is probably the most impactful and powerful launch that we've ever had in our history.
It wasn't an overnight thing. This has been years in the making. We spent 7 years since we started MoonPay getting regulatory licenses, figuring out how we would do this the right way, and building out the payments infrastructure. Over the last 2 years, we've done about 15 acquisitions. You've probably seen us doing a lot of M&A. Really, the mindset is that we're bringing awesome entrepreneurs to MoonPay.
I have to shout out the chief engineer, Niraj Prasad, who was actually the architect behind Paybox. He's done a phenomenal job. He came in through an acquisition, and we were going back and forth around what would be the best experience for someone inside of AI if they want to actually move their money. It was a pretty difficult problem to solve. We've been going back and forth, and we said, “How do we deliver the very best experience?” And that is Paybox.
Really excited for you guys to check it out. Please give me the feedback. We're going to continue to build in public and learn every single day.
Best of luck to you with it. It's obvious. It's inevitable. This tool needs to exist. This function needs to exist. It's where the future's headed. We talk all the time about visions of having a third cohost on the show, and it being AI—this hyper-realistic girl who can make trades for us at its own discretion. It can order things for us, et cetera. Maybe we build that with Paybox. Maybe there's some way to integrate that into what we're building.
I'd love to help you make that happen. I think it's funny. I think the AI version of me is more well-known than me now, based on the 9 million impressions we've had in the last 24 hours. I think people are going to know AI before they know me, which is pretty crazy.
He crushed it. I saw a little bit of negative feedback, as you would expect, about AI-generated content. I think it's overly forced, overly hated. But I saw an overwhelming positive response to the entire thing and the product.
If you're not having haters, you're not doing something right. We're always going to have haters, and we're always going to try new things.
It's a brand-new form factor. We want to learn from it. We've done some really cool AI content. We obviously took over the X Games very recently on ESPN, and the commercial that we ran was fully AI-generated, which is very cool.
The Otherlife team put a lot of work behind that, but it's incredible what you can do with this technology. You have to adapt to the new form factor. It's happening very quickly. We want to make sure that we're learning every single day, and we don't take anything for granted.
I think the value that creatives contribute to society and products like this is only going to go up with the emergence of AI and the tech. We talk about it on the show, and I feel like so many people feel like their only option—the only way to get rich in crypto—is to trade. But it's just not the case. There are so many ways to develop, build, and be creative.
We're talking about straight creatives here. We're talking about somebody coming in and learning a new skill. This great AI reset is a very real thing, and it's cool that you guys are embracing it so heavily. I feel like people avoid it and pander to the AI hate and stuff. It's refreshing to see you guys go the other way with it, and it reads very authentically.
Yeah, I think, again, to your point, creators and developers also being as important as traders—what Ivan is describing with Paybox being a completely new product that the world is going to shift toward. If you're one of the people who's earliest to that trend, and also the person who's onboarding people to paying this way and doing things this way, you can make a lot of money by marketing that in the correct way to people.
Because AI on its own—a lot of these AI companies have done a terrible job of marketing things in a way that seems like it's actually a net positive value-add for everybody in society, which it actually is. But the current sentiment against it has been very poor. So, I think—
Even locally, by the way—
Even locally.
Imagine just being a 16-year-old kid and being able to offer this tech to their local mom-and-pop grocery store or whatever. If you can supply them with that, if you can remove even more steps, if you can facilitate those transactions and that relationship between AI and a 60-year-old woman who owns a flower shop with her husband, you can get rich doing that. There are opportunities everywhere. And thank you.
Got it. And just to say, this is the first version of Paybox. Really, where we see it going is that we'd love to be in every single DeFi app, connect with Claude, connect with ChatGPT, and essentially white-label Paybox for businesses, right? So you can have your own version of Paybox that you can run.
This was the very first iteration. We're obviously learning in real time, but we do think that more and more of your time is going to be spent directly inside of AI. How do we make it more useful? How do we go beyond just information and knowledge, but actually take action on your behalf?
Look at this.
Making more.
This went nuts. 9 million views. I actually didn't know it was that crazy.
No, they snap, bro. They snap.
Chat, you guys should go watch this. It's fully AI. Is the guy you pass it off to AI as well, or is he? This is a real guy.
That's Niraj. That's our chief engineer. So it's also an AI version of him. I actually had AI edit his chain on there, but he does actually wear that chain in real life. We took composite videos, and then we had AI generate those backgrounds.
That background is my New York office. The background for Niraj on that couch is a—
You genuinely fooled me, by the way. I knew you were AI. I did not know he was there.
I thought this was a cheeky way of getting you on camera and being the one to announce it, and then passing it off to somebody who actually genuinely jumped in front of the camera. That's crazy.
Well, I asked my team, “Can you try to make me a little bit more jacked?” But we didn't have enough time, so unfortunately, maybe the next version.
That's hilarious. It's hilarious.
Awesome, guys. Your community—we're only here because of the community. So thank you for tuning in, and we're excited to build with you guys.
For sure. Us too. We’ve got to follow up. We’re talking about all things robots, AI, art, and Art Basel. Let’s just—
I could talk on forever. Robots are the next frontier, right? I think more and more, the next thing will be: can we have humanoids receive money and start doing things, whether it’s making you a drink or doing things around the house? I think we’re very, very early, but I think that’s the next frontier: robotics. It’s all coming together at a crazy time. I think we’re in a crazy time to be alive.
We say it all the time, every single day. I’m like—
It’s the best time ever to be jobless, have all the time in the world, and be young. There’s so much opportunity—
To be 20 years old and have no worries in the world, all the time in the world, and a computer. It’s insane. That’s been afforded to everybody.
18. Trivia & Airdrops
Unfortunately, I can’t read your comment box. I actually can’t see you right now, so you’re going to pick it for me, but I trust you.
Okay, we’re going to pick a $5,000 winner here on behalf of Ivan. Ivan, thank you so much, brother. We’ll have you on again soon. Appreciate you. Congrats on the table, sir.
We love you.
God bless.
He’s awesome. He’s very well-spoken. He’s good in content.
He’s locked in on that shit. You can tell he’s super bullish on that.
It’s hard sometimes, bro. These tech founders, these crypto founders, sometimes are shit.
I know. Sometimes you can’t tell, like, “Bro, do you even care about the product that you’re building?” They’re like, “We’re really, really excited to announce it.” It’s like—
Yeah, he’s locked in. He’s on it.
Yeah, no, he loves it, brother. He loves it. He’s a big fan of the culture. I don’t know why this is a thing.
Yeah, but that’s cool. Maybe MoonPay promoted it. That makes sense. The Market Bubble stream is going nuts on Twitter. It has 30,000 viewers.
Oh, really?
Yeah. The actual native Market Bubble thing. Maybe it was MoonPay. Maybe they shared it or some shit.
Yeah. Okay. So, we have $16,000 to give away. We need to give away $5,000 right now. We need to give away $11,000.
Should we just give 2 people $5,000?
No, no, no. We’ve got to spread it out.
We’ve got to spread it out. No, we’ve got to spread it out.
What the fuck should we ask chat? You give them something to guess about you. I already did.
I’m going to pick a $5,000 winner, and so are you. Then we’ll have $6,000 left, and we’ll pick 6 more winners. Otherwise, we’re going to pick—
We’re going to pick.
Okay.
All right, so I’ll pick somebody from the chat. How big do you guys think my piece is? First right answer—
Bro, every week, bro.
I’m just kidding, bro. I mean, I said it. I said it.
Every week, bro.
Oh my God. Dude—
I can’t. Chat, I’m so sorry. I really can’t, bro. I can’t. Somebody said 13 inches. That’s the winner, by the way.
I’m just kidding. What city was I born in? The first person I see in chat—not necessarily the first person who answers. The first person I see in chat. Oh, I’m seeing “LOL.” I’m from LOL. I was not born in LOL. Lawrence. Somebody just said it. Somebody just said it. The first person to say Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Yeah, a lot of Boston W’s from people in the chat. Boston people saying shit. Orange County and Austin, Texas—you’re new here. But yeah, the first person who said Lawrence, Massachusetts in the chat, congratulations: $5,000. Production will find you. If you were the first person who said it across every chat, you’ll win $5,000.
Okay, I got one. I got a question for chat.
All right, chat, get ready. I’m going to ask. Quick fingers here. Make it a tough one. Make it a tough one.
Quick fingers. Quick fingers. A tough one.
Something for your audience—somebody who’s followed you and the shit you’ve done on-chain. Something really niche, where it’s like, “Okay, you’ve been with me since 50,000 followers.”
Oh, damn. I might have a good one. I might have a good one.
I’m excited, low-key.
I might have a good one. What was the first meme coin on Solana I ever bought?
Oh, wow. Is this common knowledge or no?
I don’t think so. I think it’s kind of niche.
Okay, we’ll let the answers pour in. The second that you see it, announce the answer.
Nobody’s getting it.
Really?
Yeah. Nobody’s getting it.
Damn. This chat’s moving fast as fuck. Oh, somebody said it’s SAMO. Somebody said it.
SAMO. Samoyed.
What the fuck is that? What the fuck is that?
It’s actually lit. No, I’m going to pull it up. I’ve got to pull it up now.
Why did you buy that?
It was because of Sam Bankman-Fried, and that’s why it was a popular meme. I had to do some crazy shit to buy it because it wasn’t even listed on the main DEX when it first dropped. I bought this shit super low, bro.
Cool. Niche Ansem lore. I like that. That’s good.
That is a good one.
Listen, who got it, though? I don’t know how—
Yeah, they’ll find it. Whoever said that in the chat first will get it. Production will hunt you down. Whoever said Lawrence, Massachusetts for me—you guys are both going to be winning $5,000. Amazing.
Listen, we have $6,000 left to give. I have to go do blow in the bathroom, so take it away and get some bands out.
Let’s get—
6 winners. 6 winners.
6? Damn, that’s a lot.
6. I’ve been doing it all. How much is it so far? We’ve given chat $19,000 today.
$19,000. We have $6,000 left to go.
And then we’ll do our little scam tier list, and then Ansem’s Alpha.
6 people from chat.
All right, I got it. All right, chat, what kind of trivia do you want? What are y’all good at? You’re still late on this shit. Okay, let’s see. What sport did I compete in in AAU? First person gets a band. Not football. Not basketball. Nope. Nope. I don’t see—
Track. Yeah, it was track. Whoever said track first. I don’t know how the fuck we’ll get that, but yeah, somebody got it.
Yeah, I used to run track. I ran AAU track from about age 9 to 13. I actually won the 100 and 200 when I was 11.
Okay, next question. What was my minor at Georgia Tech? I don’t think y’all are going to get this one.
Finance. You got it. You got it.
Yeah. My major was computer science. My minor was finance—business finance. Shout-out T&M. Shout-out to the Technology and Management program.
Okay, a crypto OG question. How much have you given?
How much have you given?
2 bands.
Okay, like this. Save $1,000 for somebody on Twitter. I’m cooking something up.
Okay, I actually have a good one. What coin are you guys ready for? You’ve got to have your fingers ready. Don’t type yet. Stop typing so you’re ready. The chat’s slowing down a little bit. You guys are smart.
The question is: when people used to trade low caps in the 2017–2018 cycle, which coin did they use to send between exchanges?
Litecoin.
Yep, Litecoin. That was quick. That was fast as fuck. Somebody was on it, bro. We used to send Litecoin back and forth because Bitcoin was slow as fuck, and Litecoin was the only coin that was on all the exchanges. If you were trying to go from Cryptopia to Bittrex or any other exchange, everybody just used Litecoin.
That’s 3 bands.
We’ve got 2. Give chat 2 more.
What was my favorite coin in the 2017 cycle? You guys are not getting this. You’re not. You’re not—
2017, bro. Not 2021. Holy shit, chat’s moving fast.
No one’s gotten it. Nobody’s got it.
Wait, you’re low. Is it for me or—
I might—
All right, you got it.
Whisper.
Yeah, I don’t think anybody’s gotten it, bro. 2017—you’ve got to go deeper. Deep cut. Not 2021. I don’t think they might. You guys might not get this, to be honest. You might not get it.
2017.
Yeah, 2017. Altcoins in 2017. Some good guesses, though. You’re getting closer. Oh, Skycoin. Somebody said it.
Skycoin.
Skycoin. Wow.
What the fuck is Skycoin, brother?
Bro, Skycoin was—I don't even know, bro. It was a coin about the sky. It was a coin about decentralized internet, and I don't fucking know, bro. Yeah, Skycoin.
Okay, one more, Z.
What NFT did I make the most money on?
Solana Monkey Business.
Pudgy Penguins. Yeah.
Oh, really?
The penguins. Yeah, bro. I missed hella NFTs, bro. Penguins were the only ones that I bought a good chunk of early.
Where were you buying them at?
My God, like 0.2-something, like that. 0.23, I think.
I fucking hate how they did reposts on the new update on mobile. I hate it. It has its own tab. It's so ass.
I feel like I haven't been updating my—
It just does it automatically, or maybe you do. No, you're definitely on mobile, obviously.
You said repost is different from—?
Yeah, there's a new tab. It has its own tab.
What's the point? I have not seen this.
It's annoying, too. You know how you used to have to put a dot in front of an @ to publicly see it on your timeline? Now, if you just raw-tweet at somebody, unless it's explicitly a reply, it'll show up on your main timeline.
Bro, I rage-tweeted Paramount Plus last night: “Yo, your app is dogshit, and you guys should be embarrassed. How the fuck do you guys do $8 billion a year? Your app is literally garbage. It's trash. Please, for your own sake, fix it.”
I'm the fucking dream-scenario consumer. I'm on 30 streaming apps, and I don't cancel any of them because I'm too lazy. I'm like, “Yo, I cannot justifiably keep this Paramount Plus thing.” Anyway, I tweeted at them, and the tweet was blowing up. I'm like, “What the fuck? How are people seeing this?” It was literally just meant to—I was just venting. Yeah, I deleted it instantly. It was insane.
I looked—I looked insane, dude. So funny.
Yeah, it's so stupid. Hey guys, fuck Paramount.
Yeah, this shit is ass, bro. It was like 6 paragraphs.
That's actually funny as fuck.
People like Unc don't know how to use the remote. No, Paramount Plus is actually ass.
I really fuck with the notebook, by the way.
Notebook is my shit. Yeah, bro, I get clowned on it nonstop—like, the paper and the pen. I bring this thing everywhere I go. For so long, I've been writing in this journal consistently, morning and nighttime, and in every fucking meeting I'm in—obviously, the show. I've filled up 20 of them.
Oh, wow.
It did look so performative at first. I would see clips or pictures, and it looks—I look fucking insane. I do not look like a guy who carries around a journal and writes notes at all. It's like the Jacob Elordi thing of him at the airport with the book in his pocket. It's like, “Yeah, we know, buddy. Fuck yourself.” But I really use this thing.
Oh, he’s retweeting everything—retweeting clips and shit.
No, but he’s gambling, bro. Do we feed this addiction?
He’s going to go spin some.
He’s just going to go blow it, bro. You know this motherfucker’s going to go blow it. He’s like, “Oh, shit, a free…” No.
It’s all gambling. It’s all game. I think we’ve got to keep looking.
I’m sorry, Jays. Don’t gamble, brother. You were so close. You were so close.
Yeah, he’s cool. That’s lit.
Yeah, he doesn’t have the thing, but what’s his pinned tweet? “It’s not a real bull market.” Oh, I like this guy.
Oh, yo, literally what he did. Does he follow Market Bubble? Somebody check.
Wait, in 2024? Dang. Maybe we start the bull market.
Cool Monkey Soul Tech. If he follows the Twitter, it’s this. It’s got to be this guy, chat. This is obviously the guy.
Maybe we start the bull market.
He literally, in 2024, predicted that he would get sent—
10 SOL.
Yeah. What the fuck? How do we even pick him out of all the people just for asking in the comments? Literally, this is crazy. I like this.
He follows us. He follows us.
Okay, so this is the winner. This is the winner.
Cool Monkey. Shout-out Cool Monkey. We love you.
Borp LA. See, brother, you stayed the course, and you literally manifested this for 2 years. So, congrats. Let’s get some W Cool Monkeys in the chat. There’s more to go around, guys. Again, Z is an absolute psychopath, and he’s looking and aiming to flip MrBeast in money given away. So that’s where our heads are at. Like I said, we’re constantly talking about ways to put more and more money in your pockets. This watch-and-earn effort—we’re kind of obsessed with it at this point.
And you guys have been so receptive to it. This is fucking awesome. Seriously, we’re at 100.3K. That’s awesome. Intern F, hit him in the DMs from Market Bubble and close the loop. Respond to that tweet as well, and let him know that he won.
Wow, dude. We’ve been working on this since November, right? It’s great. It’s coming together, man. All the pieces are coming together.
All the pieces are coming together.
Bro, we’re fucking insane.
How was that his pinned tweet, though? What are the odds of that? This is also insane—68,000 people.
Yeah, it’s fire. That was the right time, by the way, to push for 100K and get a quick 3K in there. That was perfect.
Yeah, that was fire.
Wow. There you go, chat. 25 bands—26, technically—gifted to the chat during the main show.
What else? Before I hop off and let you do Ansem’s Alpha, our new intern put together a tier list for us to go through. Did you see that? We didn’t get to make it in the main show because we ran late, but should we do that?
Oh, the tier list of the craziest scams?
The biggest scams.
Yeah, let’s run it.
Biggest scams in human history, because of COVID. We didn’t talk about that in the main show yet.
Yeah, that’s right.
Where is it? All right, here we go. So, what prompted us to do this in the first place, and even think to do a scam tier list—which I think is a really funny idea—is this tweet from the White House. Did you see this?
Yeah.
It’s from truthco.gov. I didn’t read this. I’m not going to read this, but the fucking header is “Lab Leak.” This is insane. With Donald Trump in the middle, this is insane. This is not living in real life. This fool is not a real person.
We’re not real people, bro.
This is absolutely crazy. But the conclusion that I came to is that, low-key, everything’s a scam. You really can’t trust anything that you see online because of missing context. People have agendas. They want to fit some kind of narrative, especially when money gets involved. How many people do you think got filthy rich off COVID?
Infinite. Infinite.
You spoke about it pre-show—or before, I think yesterday, on a call—but rates were set to zero. Just give me your opinion on this whole thing. COVID was a scam. That was kind of the whole fucking timeline yesterday. What was that?
Take some Tic Tacs. Stay fresh.
So give us your opinion on this.
Yeah, bro. To be honest, I don’t know if COVID was completely a scam, but I think it was leveraged in such a way that so many people benefited from it disproportionately compared with the rest of general society that it’s valid to call it a scam.
The reason I say that is because the Fed was able to set rates literally to zero because they were focused on stimulating the economy after they shut everything down. A lot of people said it was not necessary to shut everything down in the way that they did. I’m not sure if you agree with that entirely, but the amount of printing that happened during COVID and the amount of people who made infinite returns on assets during COVID disproportionately favored people with a lot of money over your average consumer, who was out of a job, stuck in the house, and didn’t have money to invest.
It not only widened the wealth gap between your average person and whoever was investing during that time period, but it also fucked everything up with inflation. We’re still having issues with inflation because of what they decided to do during COVID. That has also disproportionately affected your average consumer and average person.
I’m willing to go ahead and call it a full-blown scam, and potentially the biggest scam in human history, just based on the fact that they made it impossible to even discuss it—to speculate on the legitimacy of it, how bad it was, where it came from, and so on.
Yeah. People were forced to get a vaccination, to stick a fucking needle in their arm and change their fucking biology forever.
Yeah, in a very short, limited amount of time with a limited amount of information. People got filthy rich off of that. Guys like Sneako, and anybody who spoke out against this, had the counterpoint to it, or saw it a different way were literally banished to the shadow realm. Sneako was literally banned on YouTube.
Yeah, he was banned on YouTube for 3 fucking years.
No way.
Because he said COVID was a scam. He was basically like, “COVID’s a scam. It was made in a lab.”
It’s definitely a scam.
No, it’s insane. I’m in that camp. It’s definitely a scam.
One of the biggest scams of all time.
This is why conversation and debate are so important. It doesn’t really matter which aisle or which side of the aisle you’re on. When the conversation stops, we run into issues like this.
I’ll go a step further. Humans are going to be around for a while—hundreds of thousands, if not millions and millions, of years into the future. There’s bound to be another pandemic. There’s bound to be another Black Plague, another COVID. The issue is that people’s response to this is forever going to tether back to this experience, and the closer it is to this last one, the worse it’s going to be.
If Donald Trump went live today and said, “You guys all have to stay in your house. There’s a fucking new COVID out, it kills half the people who contract it, and it’s super contagious,” we’d all tell him to go fuck himself.
Fuck yourself.
I’d be outside tomorrow. No mask. We’re not getting any vaccinations. You know what I mean? And then half the population would be dead. Fuck. I don’t know. It’s insane.
Maybe this was a long scam. Maybe that’s the actual play.
That’s the long con. That might be the long play.
Yo, maybe that’s actually the long play. “Oh, then next time they won’t believe us, and we’ll knock out half the population. Then we don’t have to deal with—”
That’s why you watch this show, because it’s reverse psychology. Now you guys are sharp to that and hip to that. So when it does happen, that’s when we mask up, and that’s the vaccine you take. The next one isn’t a scam.
They’re not going to get us with a scam list, bro.
Wow.
We’re locked in.
We’re locked.
It’s crazy.
But yeah, listen, our intern put together a tier list. Let me share this tab instead.
Scams of all time.
How do we reset this?
Because he—he—
It’s not reset.
Yeah, I got covered by Venice. You see this?
Guys, I clicked on the tier list, and it’s not reset. Maybe I just have to drag them out. Where the fuck—
What are you talking about?
Hit “Rank This.”
Hit rank this. Okay, all right. There we go. Here it is. Sorry. Okay, so here's the tier list. This is cool. W, intern, for this. Scams: Wells Fargo.
Good font.
Yeah, good font. W, intern. We have Wells Fargo on here, and this is referring to—of course, do you know what it's referring to?
More than 3 million possible fake accounts created.
This is the scam.
I don't even know about this, to be honest. Did you?
I didn't know about it. I forgot about it, though. I didn't know about this.
It's a forgettable scam.
The bank also found that people were—
I don't know, chat. Where are we ranking this?
What were they doing with the accounts? Employees were opening fake accounts and doing what? I want to go back to it. Sorry. Go down a little bit. Down. Down.
That's it. We could ask Venice AI. It'll keep it a buck, for sure.
“Several of you discovered were signed up for online bill payments without their consent.” Now, this is kind of an L scam. Boring scam. I don't know how much money they extracted. Wells Fargo is obviously still in business. It's obviously still a leading bank, so it couldn't have been that bad, right?
Yeah, yeah. Not that bad.
What are we ranking this, chat? Somebody said easy B. B is too high for this.
Really, bro? It was kind of wild, though. They were just opening fake accounts—hella of them. Millions of them. Maybe we have Shake Weights on this [__], bro. We have Tai Lopez on this [__]. We have FTX on here, you know what I mean? Yo, Shake Weights, by the way. Say it again. Say it again.
Shake Weights are lit, bro.
They are.
They're lit as [__].
That's insane. All right, [__] it. I mean, chat, C is good. I agree. Chat is saying C. I feel like C. Let's just throw it in C. It's too [__] boring to be a B-tier scam. I feel like part of a good scam is how crazy, engaging, entertaining, and insane it is. You know, Shake Weights.
Shake Weights are lit.
So you don't think Shake Weights are a scam? You think Shake Weights are valid?
They work.
Really?
You never used them before?
No. What the [__] are you talking about, chat? Someone said, “What the [__] is Shake Weights?” You're 16 or below, for sure.
Yeah, go look them up.
D-tier, honestly.
Yeah. Okay, all right. I'm fine with that. The novelty—they're funny. Maybe there is some science to it.
Tai Lopez was kind of the original course seller.
Like, “Hey, look at—”
That's B. That's B because he's an innovator.
Okay.
He's the original course-selling scammer. Chat is agreeing with you here. Somebody says F tier. We got a Tai Lopez fan. Somebody on the court—B tier.
Yeah, why? Wait, why? Somebody said F. Why? I'm curious. Somebody said S tier. I actually don't know what he sells.
Someone said S-tier super scammer.
I don't know what he's really good at selling.
But, bro, he bought RadioShack and other companies. He's actually rich. I don't know. I don't know enough about [__] Tai Lopez, to be honest with you. That's why it has to be a B: he's so good at what he does. He's rich, and I don't even know what he does. That's how good at it he is.
Yeah, he went viral in 2015 for an advertisement for his online course.
But what's the course for? I don't know. That's—
How to get rich. It's, “Look at my Lamborghini. This is how you can get a Lamborghini.”
But what's the content?
It was subject to a 2025 lawsuit by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission alleging it was a Ponzi scheme, and there was an investigation by the FBI. I didn't know it got that deep. That's crazy.
Yo, in 2014, he created an online business course named The 67 Steps. [laughter] Bro, this fool's a time traveler.
Yeah, he's lit as [__].
He's a [__] time traveler.
He's lit as [__].
This might be S tier, bro.
What? Yo, we need Bitcoin to break 67K.
What'd you say?
66, bro. It actually is the level, though. If Bitcoin breaks 66K or 67K—
What did you say? Break 66, 67?
If it breaks 67, where are we at?
I hate you, bro. Where are we at? [laughter] So stupid.
No, we're back. We are back, though. If it breaks above there, we are back. That's actually the key spot. A weekly close at around 67K—we're back. No joking.
All right, so Tai Lopez—I think we have to give him an A, at least. Maybe even S. The original course seller, brother, 2014.
Okay. A.
A.
If he's not S, though, who is? I don't know. We'll leave it there for now. FTX is automatic S.
S.
You [__] us all, brother.
S-plus.
It might be S-plus.
Quality Learning Center. Are you familiar with this?
Yeah, yeah. That's a strong A.
So this is when the [__]—is it Minnesota?
It is Minnesota.
Minnesota. There are hella of these [__] centers where nobody's in them, and they're just collecting hella government checks. That's just a—I watched a [__] Nick Shirley—what is his name? Nick Shirley. What's his name?
Have this on it.
Damn. What does that do?
Quality Learning Center. They spelled “learning” wrong. It was supposed to be a school for kids, but nobody was in the school. I guess there were, like—
Hella of them, though. There were—
Yeah, there's a ton of them. A ton of them.
“Infamous Somali immigrant-run Quality Learning Center in Minneapolis, with 20 other local operations. One of them had a misspelled sign: ‘Quality learing center.’” There are just these schools that got government grants and didn't have kids in them. They're empty buildings that looked like schools. W scam, honestly. That's insane.
Yeah, they're cooking. They're printing.
It's crazy. So where do we think with that? A?
A.
Yeah, that's a good A. Spirit Airlines.
Spirit is not a scam. Spirit is—
Yes, it is, bro. [__] Spirit Airlines.
No, Spirit is not a scam. What? How is Spirit a scam? I'm just not a fan of the product, to be honest. I've never formally flown on Spirit, but I do have a story about Spirit.
You call it a scam if you've never flown on it?
No, no, no. I tried to fly on it one time. This was before I got sober. I got [__] absolutely wasted and decided to go to Vegas at the last minute for Art of the Wild, where I eventually wound up getting banned from the Wynn Hotel indefinitely. I'm still banned to this day because I annihilated a suite and caused 6 figures in damage. It was a miserable point in my life. It was really some rock-bottom [__]. I definitely wasn't sober.
I had a suitcase filled with wet clothes because I couldn't get my laundry done in time. I was a [__] mess. What is orange juice and champagne? A mimosa. I was ripping mimosas before the flight. I got on the flight. I had forgotten headphones, so I was listening to music on my phone. This woman, an attendant at Spirit, came by and, obviously, I was being a [__] [__]. She asked me to turn the volume down. She didn't like me. She wound up [__] deplaning the whole plane and kicking me off it.
But I was wasted.
So I never formally flew on it, and I'll never fly on Spirit again. The intern said it's a scam because they charge crazy amounts for baggage. The seats are—
Yeah, bro, but the flights are like $50. It's $50, and then the bag is like $55. That's how they make money.
I don't know, bro. It's like a D, bro. It can't be—
Same thing as Shake Weight, maybe.
Yeah, yeah. I guess Spirit is useful.
Okay, [__] it. D tier.
Hustlers University. I'm going to defer this one to you. I want Andrew Tate to come on the show, and I don't know enough about Hustlers University, so I'm going to throw you straight under the bus. What do you think, chat? What do you guys think?
I'm going to say C. You know why? Even though I think the way he promotes this is extremely scammy and predatory, I do think some people get value out of it. I'm not sure to what extent, so I can't really call it a super-aggressive scam because there are some people who literally get value.
You have to give bonus points, by the way, to Andrew Tate. You want to talk about innovators, like a guy such as Tai Lopez? He literally birthed the clipping meta. Andrew Tate did that, and he funneled all those viral clips on TikTok and Instagram Reels into this course, obviously. I'm not a subscriber to it, and I don't know exactly what kind of value you get out of it, but I don't know where I fall on the course-selling meta. I saw a tweet about this that said something along the lines of, “Course selling is like male OnlyFans.” It's a pretty good—
A lot of them are scams, but the ones that are good, I think, are really, really powerful.
Yeah, there are valid ones. There are valid ones.
Okay, we'll throw it in C. I think C is fair. Streaming services.
I spoke to this earlier, but Fubo and Paramount Plus. I subscribed to Paramount Plus just to watch the Conor fight, and then I noticed, “Oh, look, they have Big Brother.” Big Brother was a really—I was a huge fan of this show back in the day. I thought, “Let me catch up with it.” There’s a new season out, whatever.
It’s the fucking worst streaming platform of all time. I fucking hate it, but I’m not going to cancel it. I have a subscription to every streaming platform: Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+. They get you in with one thing you want to watch, and then it’s just a recurring charge. If you’re like me and you’re too lazy, you’re just giving them $10, $20, $30 a month.
Yeah, I’ve got all them shits, too, bro. I’ve got Peacock.
For what?
I don’t know, bro. I don’t know why I have Peacock. I got it for—I remember getting it?
I don’t know. I know. It was some show that was on there, and I copped it. I’ve just had it ever since. But it was only on Peacock, so I had to get Peacock.
I think this is a pretty fair one to throw in F tier, and I’ll tell you why. At some point, you have to put the responsibility on the consumer. You and I are grown-ass men in our 30s. There’s no reason why we can’t go into the app and cancel the service. It’s pure laziness on the part of the consumer.
We’re slow.
You can’t expect a platform to ever sabotage a sale, if you know what I mean. This is just maybe F tier, right?
Yeah. I think it’s F.
I think chat thinks so as well. Woodstock 1999. This one’s crazy.
Woodstock?
Woodstock 1999 is a music festival. It’s like the original Coachella. They were originally supposed to only sell 20,000 tickets. There was enough space for 20,000 people. They wound up selling 250,000 tickets—12 times as many tickets as there were places for people to safely exist at the festival.
Some hippie, hippie, like, Beatles shit.
Yeah.
They price-hiked everything. In the ’90s, they were selling bottles of water for $10. People were dying of dehydration and crowd crush and shit like that. Multiple people died at this. Literal human death.
I don’t know enough about it, but I think this is a safe B or above. What do you guys think, chat?
A. Yeah, because people died. Maybe.
Yeah, this is the only one where people died.
Okay, we could throw it in F. I feel like Peloton is just a Spirit.
Look at the Peloton chart, though. Even if you don’t put it in A, look at the Peloton chart. Show me, bro.
This shit is one of the worst of all time.
Look at it!
Oh, that’s insane.
How did this happen?
It’s down.
Show your screen.
It’s down 98%.
Bro, this is crazy.
I’m telling you, during COVID, this is the shit I’m talking about, bro. During COVID, when everybody was locked indoors, you had shit like Peloton go up 100x, Zoom Video Communications go up 100x—every single thing was connected to everybody.
Yeah, bro, I didn’t—I had this on the chart, by the way. I just loaded it, and it was already on it.
Max tier, somebody said. With Peloton, they got a bag.
They did, bro.
That’s so fucking—oh, they sold. They were the ones who sold.
Well, I mean, I’m sure. I don’t know.
Yeah. I mean, you can’t pump a chart up like that without some supplier.
Well, I mean, I don’t know if they were vested. I don’t think so. I’d imagine so.
Are you going A?
Okay. Kevin, Pixelmon. This is so good.
Oh my God.
You remember this shit? You remember Pixelmon?
Bro, this is S.
Pixelmon might be S. Kevin’s ass, bro.
Kevin might be ass. Hold on. I’ve got to see what kind of source material they put in here, because hopefully it’s a tweet. They raised something like—what was it? $70 million.
$68 million. I thought it was $68 million. This is off the top of my head, by the way. I thought it was $68 million. That’s how much I remember that shit.
Oh, this is a Cobie tweet. This is funny, bro. He said $70 million. This is fucking crazy.
I’m about to retweet that.
Bro, what the fuck is this?
I’m about to retweet this shit right now. That shit is fucking hilarious, bro.
This is all-time.
This is for sure an S. For sure an S.
All right, yeah. So we’ve got FTX and Pixelmon up here. Girl Scout cookies. Bro, our intern was so passionate about this one. He was like, “Man, fuck those little Girl Scouts. I’m fucking sick and tired of it. I’m sick and tired of it.” I don’t know. He had figures for me, like, “How much money do they make? Where’s it all going?” Which is a valid question. I think it’s mostly speculative, bro.
Bro, they’re good as fuck. What do you mean, where are they going? The cookies are good as fuck.
Yes, brother, but they’re exploiting child labor.
It’s like you don’t know that.
What do you mean? The girls are sitting outside the grocery store with the little table, like, “Hey, buy my cookie.” These girls are 10 years old, and it’s like, “Fuck, I want to support this labor.”
That’s summer camp.
That’s—see, that’s the workaround. That’s the scam. All those kids in the Chinese factories are at summer camp, too.
I don’t know about the—I don’t know.
Who is that?
You know who it is.
That’s so stupid. Girl Scout, Girl Scout. Let me just see what he has here for this.
New Jersey girl.
Girl Scout cookies are good as fuck. I don’t know why this headline is funny: “New Jersey Girl Scout troop in hot water.”
Priscilla comes outside a pot shop to meet high demand. That’s fire. That’s a W scam. That’s good shit.
I think the Girl Scouts—I think the real—
Real revenue, real product.
That’s a real product.
I think F tier, bro. Let’s give the Girl Scouts F. Somebody said A tier. You’re crazy.
Maybe D. Maybe.
I don’t know, man. I feel like the child-labor loophole is such a premium. This might be our first good B tier. I feel like we throw this in B, bro. There’s no other thing here that’s exploiting children, you know?
They’re not exploiting them. They make money.
They are, bro.
No, dude. What? I’ve never seen one of these little Girl Scouts at the top. We’d be seeing some—who’s the Kim K of Girl Scout cookies? Show me, because there should be one.
There should be one. I’ve never seen a 10-year-old girl driving an R8. I’ve yet to see this.
None of these girls at the tables are rocking Van Cleef and Cartier.
Van Cleef with the Girl Scout cookies.
Oh, no. They could, though. They make so much money. I wonder how much they make. How much do you think they make a year?
The chat is so split. People are saying F, D, S.
Can we guess how much, bro?
Yeah. The prize for 100 sales is a chocolate bar. These little girls are getting scammed. That’s why this has to be higher.
No, but if they get paid in Girl Scout cookies, it’s worth it, because the cookies are good as fuck.
No, then they all end up being fat, and their lives are really smoked. Listen, we’re going down. I’m going to throw it in B because B is empty. We’re just going to move on. COVID is here.
They generate—wait, wait, wait. They generate $800 million to $1 billion in gross revenue every year.
Where’s it going? Show me.
Oh my God.
It might be A, bro.
C.
It might be A.
I think the quality of the business is that they make a billion a year and don’t pay their employees. That’s crazy.
I think the quality of the product—yeah, their employees. Exactly. Who are fucking eight-year-old girls? It’s nuts. It’s actually nuts.
That’s crazy.
We’re throwing Girl Scouts—we’re just going to keep Girl Scouts in B. It’s too much of a—
Holy fuck.
Too much of a toss-up.
COVID. I think COVID is S-plus-plus, but maybe we just throw it at the top of S. Do you agree with this?
Which COVID-19?
COVID is S.
Yeah, for sure. S tier.
Silk Road. I think Silk Road’s F. I know people were getting scammed left and right on Silk Road, but that was just a by-product of early crypto. People were getting scammed; the internet was a scam back then.
Yeah, I can’t—I don’t know. I don’t know what people were thinking. I think it’s in here because people would buy fake drugs and stuff and get scammed a lot on it, but there was a review system. It was like eBay—an eBay where you could buy mushrooms and acid and guns and stuff. I think Silk Road—
So lit.
Yeah, it was lit. It was really the first use case for crypto. It was the first real place where you could have a centralized market, where you could spend Bitcoin and actually use your Bitcoin to buy shit.
Damn, Silk Road. Silk Road is low-key important. Someone said Silk Road, no list. I agree. I think Silk Road’s F, bro. F, 100%. I agree. We’re going to throw it in F. Tooth Tunes. Do you remember what this is?
No.
The little tooth—the little toothbrushes that played music, but they didn’t actually play music. It was a trash product, but it went viral. Who was it for?
Kids.
Yeah. Scamming kids again.
Yeah. B. Automatic B, right? Kids scamming kids.
Fyre Festival. I think Fyre Festival, if you just look at it as a production—straight entertainment, movie, documentary—it’s no list. We like what Fyre Festival did for culture in that regard. I think it’s a net positive. I know a handful of people got scammed and went to some shitty music festival and—
You know, ate baloney sandwiches off of Styrofoam when they were promised—
Yeah, the documentary is a must-watch. Must-watch. But I think this is also kind of middling, a safe B or C. You know why I think it should be lower? I think it has to be the highest C because the people who got scammed are celebrities and rich people, and we can’t feel bad for those people, right? Just as a society, that’s kind of how it works. Nobody gives a shit when you and me get scammed, let’s be honest.
Yeah. To be honest, they don’t give a shit.
They don’t give a shit, right?
That’s fair.
Yeah. So this might even be F tier, I think, on that. I don’t know. C or D? Let’s go C. Let’s go C with it. Beanie Babies. Beanie Babies are like millennial NFTs, or a better comp, I feel like, is Labubus. Remember all the hype around Labubus? I think Kevin O’Leary, who’s 80 years old, bought one for millions of dollars—a crazy rare one.
Yeah.
What’s the market look like on Labubus right now? When’s the last time you guys heard anybody talk about Labubus? I think something similar happened with Beanie Babies. They were going crazy, and there was speculation. Some were selling for crazy amounts of money, and now the market’s down infinitely.
I feel like Beanie Babies were lit, though. They’re a cultural artifact.
Yeah. So no list, like Silk Road.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don’t—
An actual good, innovative, culturally relevant, pushing-culture-forward type of product. Obviously, Silk Road and Beanie Babies. The last one—
If you lost money on Beanie Babies, you deserve to lose it.
I agree with that. I agree. But the same could be said for NFTs, which I think people have that opinion of. Pokémon cards, Labubus—I would stand on that. If you’ve lost money on Labubus, good.
MoonSwatch. This is more recent. Obviously, the Swatch AP collaboration went viral. I think this is a scam on both sides, to be honest. I think it’s a scam to all AP holders because it just dilutes and devalues the brand, in my opinion.
But also, they hyped this thing up, and people literally sat in line for days and days. It was an unlimited product. People thought they were going to come up.
Yeah, bro. People thought they were going to sit in line and make—
No, I think—or, like, very—I don’t know.
Swatch AP is A or B. Somebody said S.
Not S. I think maybe B. I think people actually made money if they sat in line, just not enough.
B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, B.
Yeah, I think B is fair. I think B is fair.
Yeah.
19. Wrap-Up
And that’s the tier list, guys. This is our tier list. We’ve got FTX, Pixelmon, and COVID in S tier. We have Tai Lopez, Quality Learning Center, Woodstock—people died—and Peloton in A; Girl Scouts, Tooth Tunes, and Swatch AP in B; Wells Fargo, Hustler University, and Fyre Festival in C; Shake Weight and Spirit Airlines in D; and F tier is streaming services, Silk Road, and Beanie Babies. Obviously, S tier is reserved for the biggest scams of all time, with COVID being, in my opinion, the number-one biggest scam in human history.
That about wraps up the show, man. Great show. It flowed like butter. We hit 100K. I know you’re going to do some TA stuff and some Ansem stuff. We gave chat $25,000, which is amazing. We really have to get that counter somewhere. We have to have a live counter.
What’d they say?
Oh, sick. Sick as shit.
What’d he say?
He’s at 100,000. You just haven’t said what you said.
They do.
Yeah, that crazy fat airdrop. They came in and—
Yeah, this is cool.
I was talking to Malcolm about this yesterday, and when it comes to the macro-wide view, you’re really second to none. This show is doing such a good job at cutting through the shit and really stamping it. You’re doing it live, bro. You’re doing it live with your face and your voice, and you’re killing it, dude. You’re killing it.
Appreciate you, bro. No, it means a lot. Honestly, I appreciate you.
And chat—the people who come here with a good attitude, want to be productive, and have their brains turned on—listen to what he’s talking about and saying. I’m speaking from my own experience: I’m learning more and more every week and every call, and I’m super hyped with where this show is going and the direction of everything.