Why Streaming Is The New Meta | Market Bubble #15

Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show 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 at 1 p.m. PST live on twitch.tv/fazebanks as well as by Twitter as well as Z's Twitter and my boy Z.

A little bit of a different setting and backdrop. Where are you at, brother?

What's good, bro? I'm out here in Tokyo this week. I'm actually meeting with some devs in person, and it's also my shorty's birthday, so I just hit 2 birds with 1 stone. But yeah, I'm out here in Tokyo, bro.

We're working. We're cooking. Talk to him, bro. Talk to him, because I talked to him a little bit in the pre-show, but I know we've both been really hyped up and amped up on Market Bubble. I know what we've shown people. Obviously, our audience in chat is familiar with us as this 1-off show, but we have much bigger plans than this, right?

We have much bigger plans than this, and we're working constantly in this effort to pretty much CTO this entire industry. I feel like, generally, conversations around crypto—and even the word we talk about it all the time on the show—are generally negative, and I think it's in desperate need of a rebrand and reform.

I think we've kind of accidentally done it with kicking off this show. You've obviously accidentally reignited the market with Black Bull and [expletive], so who better to do it than us? I've been doing media and content for so long, so these new-wave kids who are trying to make vlogs—Rasmer, Rowdy, kids like that—we're in talks with these guys, and we're all collaboratively working toward building a culture that people can appreciate here.

I know.

I'm super excited, bro. I feel like crypto over the past few years has had so many success stories that haven't been highlighted enough. There are a lot of traders in the trenches, and people don't know that there are kids right now who taught themselves how to trade and spun up $1,000 balances into millions, which is crazy.

I think in traditional markets, you've seen a lot of people do really well with AI stocks, but nobody really knows who these people are. Even though Robinhood has made it so easy for people to trade anything, and they're crushing it with their retail numbers on the social side, there aren't really highlights of the best traders.

What's really cool about crypto is that it's very social. The crypto community is very tight-knit, and I think on Crypto Twitter, everybody kind of knows everybody. Now, with this content thing, you're starting to see people who are really good traders also start to do content, show their experience with trading, and show what they were doing and how they were doing it.

Before, it was people who were just well-capitalized and doing well in the markets. These are young kids who are also cool and are also good traders, which I think is extremely interesting for the general population.

With the streamer [expletive]—you've been talking about it on your pre-show—streaming has gone crazy since COVID. But a lot of the streamer meta has just been people who are entertaining, traveling, doing weird [expletive] in person, or just streaming live, going out drinking and doing drugs, and all this other [expletive].

With trading, these people's real lives also have a financial aspect to them. That's why I think it's a lot more entertaining for people to watch and follow, because you get the entertaining piece of the life stuff, and you also get, "Oh, I can actually learn how to trade and make money from these people," which hasn't existed before—ever, by the way.

It's obviously super interesting, exactly what you just said. It doesn't exist, and nobody's platforming it or highlighting it in the right way. You're starting to see Rasmer share his lifestyle a bit. Guys like Rowdy and Sentos share their lifestyles a bit. Obviously, TJR has the big lifestyle and short-form thing, but I feel like what the industry and guys like that are missing is properly articulating and telling the story: How did this happen? Walk us through this. How does your family feel about this? Where were you before this?

Get into the explicit details. Cupsy's all-time earnings on-chain in the last 2 years are, you know, $20–30 million.

Yeah, for real. Cupsey goes, bro. I didn't know that.

It's insane, brother. It's absolutely insane. Rowdy's up there, too, flipping profits like these guys. Obviously, Kimchi.

1. New Market Bubble HQ

And that's the thing, too, right? The market is telling us and showing us this is what we're interested in. This is what's most engaging. This is what's cool to us. It's trading culture.

It's kind of always been like that, right? Guys like Cobie, guys like you—you guys blew up in the first place and have these big brands and are the biggest people in CT and in crypto. You guys were a bit early in that regard, building brands and identities in it, but you guys are good traders and successful traders, and that's what it's always been.

I don't know. We've been obsessed with it. We've been talking a lot about how to properly articulate this [expletive] in content and work with these talents, products, brands, and stuff. We're both super passionate about it. Obviously, it's kind of always been the role you've played, Z. We're going to get into it. You really are the signal.

Rasmr had a cool take. I don't know if you've seen this, because I know you've been on vacation and stuff, but we're going to get into it.

Before we do, I apologize. I need to pick someone from this because I told him I would, and I just don't want to [expletive] it up. We'll go with someone recent in chat. I'm going to pick somebody recent—somebody random.

Oh, I like this, even though it's AI. I [expletive] with this. You win. It jumped out at me. Wanda airdrop pre-show. Cool. Awesome.

But yeah, lots to be excited about and lots to talk about here. I wanted to lead with a little bit of drama off our last episode. I feel like there's been a lot of debate and back-and-forth. Obviously, we interviewed Tushar last week, and I saw you tweet out something along the lines of, "This is the best clip that we've produced from the show by far, and it was his advice." You remember that?

Yeah. Yeah.

Let's watch it. This is really good advice.

I have to agree, but let's just watch the clip for anybody who might have missed it.

2. Preshow Airdrop Tweet

Yeah. I don't think intelligence matters anymore. I don't think it's economically an important input for humans. Just think back to pre-Industrial Revolution: How physically strong you were was a major input into how much money you were going to make, right?

When everything was manual labor, how physically strong you were was a major input into how much money you were going to make. Between the Industrial Revolution and the AI Revolution, how smart you were was a major input into how much money you were going to make.

Dude, you're really smart. This is really goofy-ass. Wow.

So, the question is, what's going to matter, right?

I have an answer. What's your opinion? What do you think it's going to be?

I think it's going to be agency. It's your ability to make up your own mind and then be relentless in the pursuit of the thing that you want.

Absolutely bang-on the money. Obviously, Z and I fully, 100% agree. Why I'm bringing this up again is because this is advice coming directly from a multibillionaire, hyper-successful guy.

The initial prompt was, "Hey, we have a bunch of young guys who are aspiring to be successful who watch our show. We preach investing in yourself. What's a piece of advice?" That was his advice.

I didn't know too much about his lore, though, and there was a response from Kyle Samani. He—

Bro, Kyle and Tushar have mad beef, bro.

Can you please explain it? Can you explain?

I got you. Multicoin—it was Kyle and Tushar, the 2 co-founders of Multicoin. They were together for a really long time, basically a duo. That's what people knew Multicoin as: Kyle and Tushar.

But they had a falling-out recently. I want to say last year, or a little bit before last year, over conflicting opinions on some investments they wanted to make. Kyle, as you know, is super bullish on Solana—one of the biggest, probably the biggest, Solana bull, if not the biggest Solana bull, on Crypto Twitter. Tushar wanted to do a Hyperliquid investment, and Multicoin's liquid fund was also interested in doing a Hyperliquid investment.

Kyle's been very vocally anti-Hyperliquid and didn't want to do the Hyperliquid investment. He's a big Solana guy and led the charge for Solana. But yeah, I think that's part of the reason they had a falling-out. You can see pretty publicly now that they do not [expletive] with each other at all.

And Kyle, I’m the one who made money for the firm. You didn’t do anything. So they beef a lot on the timeline.

This looks like me with the FaZe kids.

Yeah. I wonder who found all these kids. This goes deep. I could just read—I don’t know really much about all the nuances of it the way you do—but Kyle Samani, you’re more than welcome to come on the show. I think you’d be a great guest to have on the show.

3. Complex's Top 25 Streamers List

Honestly, Tushar, if you’re watching this too, I think debate is healthy and obviously super engaging, and I think it can be used as an opportunity to educate people. I love watching a good debate, so guys, come on the fucking show and go back and forth. If you guys are going to argue on Twitter, come argue on the show. It would be lit. The fucking chat would love that.

Sick. We would—I would love to platform that. That would be amazing.

Yeah, for sure.

And speaking of debate, did you see this tweet from Frank?

This tweet.

This shit is so funny. This shit is hilarious, bro. It’s like—I don’t agree with it, by the way—but I think the reason that this sentiment exists is because a lot of the old heads have been talking so much shit about on-chain traders, nonstop. Like, bro, these kids are just bundling. They’re just dev traders. They’re scammers. They’re farming their followers. And it’s not true.

There are people on-chain who are farming users, for sure. The devs and bundlers are doing a lot of shit, but there are also really good on-chain traders who have been printing over the past year. If you were not trading on-chain, you missed a lot of the alpha and upside in crypto over the past few years, especially the past cycle. And I think the reason Frank has been pushing back hard against these people is because he’s the one who got a lot of the flak for the blowback.

He’s the epitome of what you’re talking about. He’s the epitome of what you’re talking about. People were really—there’s a collective and community of people who try to spin it any which way they could to paint Frank out to be X, Y, and Z. I mean, this shit got blamed for LIBRA going crazy, like, bro—[laughter]—for LIBRA.

Yeah.

I think what happens with on-chain is, if you’re a good trader on-chain, it’s all public. Once your wallet is public and people know who you are and what’s attached to you, you get a lot of copy traders. Obviously, if you’re somebody like Frank, you’re not just going to hold positions because people are copy-trading you. It’s not going to stop him from taking profit on stuff that he’s up on.

A lot of the time, when on-chain traders become popular and become public, it seems like they’re farming their followers because they start picking up copy traders. But that’s just the way that on-chain works. You need to be able to change your thesis pretty quickly and take profit on stuff because of how volatile it is.

I think it’s why you built such crazy trust with the market, because you just tweet all day long. I think people don’t talk enough about this. It’s okay to have a position and have an idea early in the morning and completely flip your opinion and the idea at night, as long as you’re articulating that clearly and fluidly, like what you just said.

I’ve been watching Frank tweet the past couple of days. You could just tell he’s feeling himself, and he’s just like, “I’ll fucking sell my positions whenever I want, however I want. I don’t give a fuck what anybody’s doing.”

I’m a trader. I’m trading markets.

I think the only way it gets tricky is when you say you have really, really high targets for something and then sell immediately after. What Hayes has been doing, I think, is pretty fucked up. He’ll say the target is 100x from here and then change his mind in a week.

You can say that you’re bullish on something and have parameters for why you’re bullish on it without being like, “This is going to go to infinity.” [Laughter] I do think that’s fucked up.

Chat, is the quality of my stream bad? It looks bad on my end. As long as it’s good for you guys—it looks really choppy. See? Yeah, it says Ricky’s webcam is laggy as fuck. That’s not good production. I’ll try to fix that.

Turn off Wi-Fi. I’m in a new office. I’m on a new set. By the way, we got a sick Market HQ in LA.

This whole office I have—it’s a really sick setup.

Yeah. Fire. Let’s watch this original clip, though, from Thread Guy.

Okay.

4. Why These Lists Are Engagement Bait

They were trading against plumbers, bro. Bro, they were trading against plumber alt season, fabled alt season, bro, where every altcoin goes up 20x and it just has to happen this way, bro. They were trading against plumbers. They were. Some of them were the best, don’t get me wrong, but alt season, man—that’s a concept of the past. It doesn’t exist. 2017 ICOs.

It’s, bro, it’s like Ansem, wake up, send it at 60%, and he’s drilling on your head top, and every new narrative is controlled by CT. It’s like the game has—

I want to say this, and this is obviously the most FaZe Banks take or POV on this: Thread Guy is developing in real time as a creator and a streamer. This is him creating an engaging back-and-forth and conversation, and he’s farming. Expect to see a lot more of this from guys like Thread Guy, because they’re waking up to the meta and how to play this game. This is one of the biggest things that has come out of Thread Guy’s stream in recent time, and it’s all about creating a conversation.

I don’t know how much he stands on this or believes it, but I don’t know if you saw this yet. I went and asked them. I said, “Yo, TG, Frank, Rowdy, do you guys trade every day?” You’re watching Thread Guy, obviously—he has his eyes glued to the market. Frank’s still banging out half-a-million-dollar P&Ls month to month publicly. He’s such a psycho.

“You guys tell me right now if the NBA comparison is 1-to-1. If all these lists have historically been Hall of Fame, all-time—give me CT’s version of the current best players in the NBA.” What I mean by that is, LeBron’s top 2, undisputed, right? All-time GOAT. But today in the NBA, what is he? Top 10? Top 20? So you guys tell me who you think are the top 25 on-chain traders today.

They gave me a list. They went back and forth. I think Rowdy started the list, and then Frank sent it back with some changes. Frank and Rowdy put Frank at 6 or 7, and then Frank moved himself down to 19. It’s the most Frank thing to do. I’m like, “Frank, you took yourself off the list.” He’s like, “No, I just put myself lower.” He put himself at 19. What do you think about this list?

Are you familiar with these people?

Bro, to be honest, I do not know the trenches very well. I’m not going to hold you.

Are we old heads? That’s what I’m saying. It’s crazy, bro.

I genuinely know the old, old CT—the swing traders. I know the perp traders. I know all the people who are best at that. But these on-chain traders who are trading sub-$100K market caps, making money on shit that goes to $5 million and consistently doing that on a daily basis—the people who have $100K daily P&Ls, and it’s coins that aren’t even over $10 million—I’m like, bro, how the fuck are you trading all these different coins and making money on those? It’s a completely different game.

I know some of these guys, though. I know Change is on FOMO; he’s been crushing it. I know Asta is good. I know Profit. I know Rowdy. I know you.

Honestly, brother, the response to this generally has been very agreeable. People are looking at this and responding like, “Yo, good list. Thanks for—”

I think I need to do more highlighting of who the best on-chain people are, because in on-chain, it seems like there’s one group that’s farming people really aggressively. There are people in that group who are also building a following and doing content, and the more that they do that, the more they’re going to farm people.

Then there’s a group of people who are actually trading in the trenches and doing really well. The second group is the people that I would like to highlight and find out who are doing it. You have, in fact, highlighted some of them. Obviously, Poor Goat is a familiar name and face in Ansem’s community. You kind of gave birth to this kid, and chat, I just want to show you chat for a second.

As far as announcing guests to come on the show, this kid’s announcement tweet has more engagement and more comments under it than anybody’s—maybe probably all of our other guest announcements combined. This kid has real emotion, and the chat was just spamming “Poor Goat.” You’ve created almost like a little mini you.

Yeah, it’s crazy, bro. It’s happened in past cycles, too. There are people I found who had barely any followers, and I was like, “No, this is a good trader.” It actually happened with Art School last cycle.

5. Asmongold On Creators Complaining

Art School bought with under $100K. She bought Popcat super early, and she bought a lot of the on-chain coins super early when the Solana trenches were heating up, and nobody really knew that she was a really good trader. I was like, “Yo, you guys should follow Art School. She’s actually doing really well on-chain.”

Now her account is at about 100K followers. Obviously, that’s not all attributed to me, but I have been able to figure out and find people on CT who are good traders and doing well.

Poor Goat’s cool, bro. He’s one of the only people who held his entire airdrop. He was in the OG Ansem community, and I sent him some coins. He held them; he didn’t sell any of them. A lot of the other people sold most of theirs. So, yeah, I felt for Poor Goat. He’s the goat. I think it’s funny—

Somebody go ahead.

6. The Tweet Banks Regrets

The plumber conversation—I just want to comment on the old CT and plumbers. I think it’s really important for CT in general to respect the old generation and also respect the new generation. I want to speak on this because I think it’s actually really important going forward.

In the old days, we had a ton of shit altcoins that also went to zero. The take that we were trading as plumbers was that we were getting fucking wrecked trading on Bittrex, trading on Cryptopia, trading on all these sketchy-ass exchanges.

You could sometimes send Bitcoin or Litecoin to the exchanges and not even know if it was going to show up so you could actually trade there. We were getting rugged on EtherDelta, entering the wrong price per coin, and then swapping and getting 100 times fewer coins than we were supposed to get because of how the fields worked. The UI was terrible.

Yeah, exactly. By the way, I haven’t heard this take yet, or anybody mention this, but it’s 100% a valid response: maybe the game is more crowded. Maybe there’s more competition. Maybe it’s become more efficient and more solved in a lot of ways. But technically speaking, you can’t argue it—it was obviously a much harder game.

Bro, infinitely harder.

You had to do shit. It was literally like a fucking Easter egg hunt.

7. How To Actually Relate To An Audience

Like, bro, I saw something from King BGC. He put out some tweets on this. He was like, “Bro, in 2013 and 2014, you had to download .exe files to fucking run.”

8. Crypto Needs Real Culture

Oh, no. Legit, legit, legit. Like, going on—

—to buy the coins, bro. You were literally getting— You weren’t getting rugged by bundlers; you were getting rugged by devs, literally hacking your computer. It was a crazy fact. I just want to say—

Easter egg hunts, side quests, with 80 different tabs open. You have no idea. This was brand-new technology. I think that’s a really, really, really fair response.

I just want to say that the people who were trading altcoins back then—there were altcoin seasons where a ton of alts did really well and went up a ton. But during those altcoin seasons, there were also a lot of altcoins that literally went to zero and people made no money on.

The reason that a lot of the new guys don’t even know who a lot of these OGs are is because a lot of them didn’t make it to right now. Cobie and Trader Mayne are 2 of the only people who were around super early and are still here because they were able to survive cycle to cycle.

It’s not easy to survive cycle to cycle. It’s really not easy to survive a cycle. Cobie’s had 9-figure exits, and so has Mayne. So, if you want to talk about how hard or impossible something is, let’s see how many of these guys do that, you know what I mean? Because that’s—

That’s as impossible or difficult as it gets.

So, I think it’s important to respect the older generation, but the older generation also needs to respect the on-chain guys right now, because that market is not going to slow down. It’s also going to start to pick up a lot.

I have to think a lot of the experimentation on the dev side is going to come from these low-market-cap, on-chain launches. If the old guard is like, “No, all this shit is scams,” and people external to crypto will be like, “Okay, well, this shit is all scams.” But if we are together and say, “No, we’re actually going to support experimentation on-chain. We’re not going to support the people who are farming others, but this is a real part of the market that’s going to keep growing.”

Yeah, it’s obviously not slowing down, right? This is where all the attention is funneling as well. It’s kind of like, yeah, it’s a fun conversation to have regardless. Everybody gets involved and people have their takes.

It’s funny because Complex just put out this top-25 streamer list. That’s why I decided, you know what? Fuck it. Let’s do another list, because there’s this conversation happening: old heads trading against plumbers. Appropriately timed, right? It’ll always be an engaging, interesting conversation to have, but that’s a really good response, to be honest.

Yeah. On that note, more debate, more drama, bro. This shit is turning into FOMO versus Pump.fun on the timeline, which is sick. It’s the sickest thing ever.

It’s so sick. It’s so good for crypto in general.

So good. So fucking good. So good. FOMO raised, I think, $75 million at a $575 million valuation, which I don’t even know how the fuck they pulled that round off in the bear market, to be clear. First of all, I don’t even know how the fuck they pulled that round off, but they’re crushing it.

Pump.fun, as we know, has $2 billion in its cash treasury to spend. Both of these companies are seeing a lot of user growth on the mobile side and in their main applications, and they’re spending aggressively to try to continue that growth.

But this is great for crypto because they’re both great apps, and they’re both great mobile apps. If you have FOMO and Pump.fun doing really well, then you’re going to see a ton more volume and a ton more attention coming into crypto.

I think what Pump.fun has been focusing on for the past week or so is really getting people to share their trades on the app the same way that people are doing on FOMO, like the callouts and callout rewards.

The social-trading thing is the future. It’s so on the money, and it’s so in line—

—to go infinite. If you look at how well Roaring Kitty did with GameStop, that’s the proof of concept for this.

9. The $82K Down Payment Tweet

Roaring Kitty was super loud about his GameStop trade. He was streaming every single day. He was on the fucking WallStreetBets forum, being like, “Yo, this shit is going infinite. All these people are short. This is my thesis on this idea.”

A ton of people rallied around him, probably the most ever in stock market history. That was in 2020 and 2021. But it’s very obvious, because of how social trading works and how much this younger generation is on social media and so interested in trying to make money in all these different ways.

On-chain is an environment where that makes it an even better environment for that to happen, because of how early you can get into these coins and how little you have to spend to get into them. Social trading in crypto is going to go infinite, for sure. It’s great to have competition between 2 of the biggest mobile apps right now in—

100%. It’s super healthy. I share the exact same opinion. You love to see it, especially for where the market’s at. What the fuck does this shit look like with Bitcoin at $200K? Position yourself accordingly and pay attention.

I shared this in the group chat, but I wanted to highlight it again. I saw this tweet, and it blows my mind. All we’ve heard about is Robinhood season. RWA is the new meta, Robinhood this, Robinhood that—obviously Robinhood crypto.

Seyoung, one of the founders of FOMO, tweeted this out: 1 in every 2 active wallets on Robinhood comes from FOMO. That’s insane. It’s an insane stat—

Bro, it’s fucking insane. It’s an—

—insane stat. Yeah, that’s nuts. What do you think? Where do you think this goes?

I feel like what FOMO and Pump.fun are doing is something that we’ve seen historically. We won’t say who it is, but Polymarket, for example, against their biggest competitor—we saw them play the same game and have the same sort of energy, releasing the same features around the same time.

Obviously, Polymarket was infinitely better and was first, always, but we saw it with that.

What do you think should be the focus?

For which? For both of the companies?

Either one. They're kind of trying to do everything. I feel like everybody—every product and platform—is trying to do a little bit of everything.

10. SBF's $500M Anthropic Miss

Yeah, I think this is a good question. I'll say for FOMO, you want to highlight the biggest success stories on their app, which they've done a pretty good job of doing. But they want to highlight the biggest success stories, because that's how everything goes viral. If you made a [__] ton of money on FOMO because you were trading X, Y, and Z, you'll be able to gain a following there, and then you gain some reputation. Basically what Poor Goat has done.

For Pump.fun, they have such an advantage because they have $2 billion in cash. They also have a token, and they also are the launchpad. So they can spend a lot more, and they have a direct way of people benefiting from their mobile app continuing to do better. They just have such a strong flywheel around it: if people are in the app and launching coins in the app and they're immediately there, then obviously the people who are doing callouts are also the people who are seeing these coins launch immediately.

I think for Pump.fun, they need to focus a lot more on highlighting the best traders who are not farming their followers.

The social part—the information part.

There are a ton of people who are farming their followers on Pump.fun, but if you can highlight the onchain traders who actually have good calls and consistently are making money in markets, then that's powerful.

Right now, for Pump.fun, the best traders on Pump—I don't think they've been really public. The guys who have made these multimillion-dollar P&Ls, like Cupsy—you couldn't... It was difficult for your average person to copy-trade Cupsy or know what Cupsy was trading. If you were an onchain sleuth and paying attention in crypto, then you could figure out what Cupsey was trading.

But what they're trying to highlight is, no, there are actually really good traders using the Pump.fun mobile app or trading onchain, and we want to highlight those good traders. I think they need to focus a lot more on the social piece, and they just have a lot of money to spend on doing that.

Obviously, fees and making money is good. We're talking about companies that make millions of dollars a day or are on their way to doing this. But I think people aren't pricing in or talking enough about exactly what you're saying: the social, attention, and communication piece.

It's going to go so viral, bro. It's going to go so viral. If people are like, "Oh, [__], Cy made $20 million onchain," you know how many people are going to download the app because they know this kid made $20 million onchain and he's giving his calls publicly to whoever's trading? It's insane, bro. There are a ton of these people who exist. It's not just him, and I think that's what's really going to make crypto.

That's my answer, too. I think—go ahead.

No, I was just going to say: double down on that—the social thing, the content thing, the attention thing, highlighting these stories, sharing as much information as humanly possible. Really leaning into the social aspect of it and the communication, communal aspect of it. Focus on users, because now they have this [__] crazy distribution.

I don't know if I'm [__], but this move up happened after their most recent raise—the half-billion-dollar raise, right?

Yeah, it did.

11. The FaZe Mount Rushmore Debate

So you squint your eyes and you're starting to look at a company that's, at least on its way to being worth—I don't know—this could be the next [__] Coinbase. You know what I'm saying? It's all because—I agree—the social, attention, and communal communication piece. It's interesting to see.

I really think the best comp you had was Polymarket and Kalshi, right? Polymarket and Kalshi were competing with each other very aggressively. Obviously, we're big Polymarket supporters, and they went to, like, $20 billion or whatever in a private round of private funding, but there was no way for you as a user to benefit from that massive growth happening, right? That happened as their user count went crazy, as the volumes went crazy, as the attention went crazy.

I think right now with Pump.fun, it's one of those situations where, if they do execute, you have a liquid token that you can bet on and see your upside as that growth is happening. But I think the same competition between these 2—the same we saw with Polymarket and Kalshi—is really good for crypto in general.

Last cycle, you had Coinbase and a lot of the big centralized exchanges. They missed a lot of the onchain run-up. Coinbase had [__] 100 million users. How many of those 100 million users were actually doing things onchain with us? Not a lot. It was probably under 100,000 people actively trading stuff onchain. I think WIF was one of the biggest onchain coins. It had like 250,000 holders at the peak.

But if you think about what's upcoming for this week, Coinbase, who's focusing heavily on their Coinbase Wallet on Base and basically allowing anybody to trade what's happening onchain directly from the centralized exchanges—all these other centralized exchanges are also trying to do the same thing. You have Robinhood listing things extremely quickly and focusing on the Robinhood Wallet. You have FOMO. You have Pump.fun. I think you're going to see a lot more retail traders trading onchain this cycle than you've previously seen in any other crypto cycle—a lot more, because prior to this there was just a lot more friction.

You had to set up a wallet, save the seed phrase, do X, Y, and Z, search on this app, and then open this site. If you can do all these things in one place where it makes it easy for you to 1-click deposit and then 1-click buy anything on every single chain—not just whatever—

That Apple-esque UI—slide, click, buy. It's nice. It's crispy. It feels clean. It's easy.

This is literally the Robinhood moment for stocks that we saw in, like, 2020. It's happening right now for crypto.

Just kidding. Discounting that a [__] ton.

It's going to get crazy. I genuinely believe it's going to get crazy. I really do.

So good. Agreed. It already is. Again, I think bang on the money. I'm noticing what these guys seem to be highlighting and care about. Obviously, these guys are also aggressively going and signing new talent. Pump.fun's whole [__] thing has turned—their whole timeline has turned into, "Welcome this person to the team. Welcome this person to the team."

I had a side-by-side, but I can just show it here. Their Twitters look pretty much identical, too. It's funny. It's clearly—these guys are directly competing with each other.

Yeah.

Look at this bio. Look at this banner: little, clean, little one-bar, "A trading app for the rest of us." Then let's just look at Pump.fun's. It's literally exactly the same. You know what I mean? Their whole timeline is signing traders and working with traders and doing deals with big [__]—yeah, Cupsey and stuff.

I know they've used you and your likeness a lot. I know you don't have a [__] deal with them or whatever. It just comes with being the guy. But these [__] FOMO guys seem to be taking attention and content extremely seriously. I think that's the move. If there's any edge to explore or trend to lean into, it's that one.

They just did this. This Moratz guy, by the way—shout-out to this guy—this kid did a really cool sit-down interview with one of their founders, and it's really well-produced. You can tell this Morratz kid understands content. I wouldn't take any advice from him. I don't know if he's a reliable source of information or advice on where you should put your money. But content-wise, and being adjacent to this market, shout-out to this kid. I'm keeping my eye on him.

12. Ansem's Top 25 On-Chain Traders List

This is one of the founders in a 45-minute interview, and I just feel like this is super important. We talk about it on the show, too, where we bring on a lot of founders, and I feel like there almost needs to be a new role at every startup and product in crypto where it's a chief speaking officer. We send him into the interviews, and he represents the company and talks about the product. Some of these founders are obviously a little bit more technical. Do you agree with that?

13. Preshow Winners

Yeah, I do agree. I think it's a very important role to fill. Sometimes you have cracked founders who can fill that role, and I think he's one of the founders who has been able to do that.

I do think it's really important. I feel like I played that role for Solana a little bit during 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, because it's really, really hard to do the technical work behind the scenes—obviously, to build a blockchain that can support hundreds of thousands of different applications.

And then, from my perspective, I’m the one actually trading all this stuff on-chain. I’m the one using all these applications. But for me, I can talk about whatever app I want. As a founder, it’s way different for you to support certain applications on your chain, talk about certain coins, or talk about certain shit that’s trending. But as a trader, I’m able to do these things.

I think every blockchain ecosystem needs traders who are active on-chain and talking about products that are good or actively using things. You need active users in crypto who are vocal about what they’re doing, because—

Otherwise, people who aren’t in crypto aren’t going to find this stuff. How would they find it? On that note, while we’re talking about Solana and active users, Vibhu tweeted some shit out that kind of blew my mind a little bit, and I just want to get into it and talk about Solana, because this kind of blew me away as well.

You see this: 65% of all on-chain activity in crypto. Solana does 65% of all on-chain activity in crypto, but only 2.3% of the market cap. Is that because the story isn’t properly being told? It’s absolutely the craziest thing. Solana is crypto at this point. You know what I’m saying?

Again, we’ve talked about this a little bit, but I feel like the opportunity is in that. As bad as it’s been for us, and as hard as it’s been to navigate through these negative narratives and connotations, and the label being so negative with crypto, why don’t we just erase that word and replace it with something like Solana? Then Solana takes it upon themselves to tell the story, you know what I mean? And basically CTO crypto. Does this make sense?

It makes a ton of sense. I think Solana—I’ve always been super bullish on Solana since the early days, to be honest. It’s probably been 5 years going on now. I think what Solana does really well is 2 things. The first thing is that they continuously iterate on the tech side of the L1. Their L1 gets substantially better year over year, consistently more than any other L1 by far.

Then I’ll say the second thing is that they’ve done a great job fostering community on the developer side and also on the trader side. There are people who are die-hard Solana builders and die-hard Solana supporters because, obviously, they made a lot of money on-chain with Solana or directly with SOL. But it’s a community of ecosystem applications on Solana that do really well, and they stick together pretty aggressively.

You saw that after FTX. Solana very well could have died after FTX, and it didn’t die because of how strong the Solana community is.

14. Where The $600 SOL Number Comes From

I’ll say the third thing is that they’re active in thinking through how to grow the pie. What I think Ethereum did a really poor job of over the past few years is that they didn’t really focus heavily on trying to grow the pie. A lot of the focus, I think, was too much on decentralization, too much on the core ethos of crypto, and not as much on trying to get people who aren’t currently in crypto into crypto and building better UI/UX experiences for those people who don’t know what a seed phrase is, don’t know how to store their funds in the right way, or don’t know X, Y, and Z about DeFi.

I think Solana focusing on stuff like the WSOP—the World Series of Poker thing—and continuing to do marketing to people who aren’t currently in crypto is super important. What Mert said is that he wants Solana to be the Silicon Valley Apple for the entire internet.

Yeah.

He wants anybody to—

Last episode called it the internet of this industry.

Exactly, like the open internet. He wants anybody to be able to build on Solana, and to do that, you need to—

15. Main Show: Ansem Live From Tokyo

Do a lot of outreach to people who aren’t currently just in crypto.

So I think them focusing on growing the pie is super, super important.

That’s what I’m saying. Is there an opportunity here for Solana to kind of swoop in and steal mindshare? You’re already responsible for 65% of activity on-chain, right?

By the way, is this where you got the $600 number, or are you just that goat?

Did you not? That’s not where I got the number. But see, it just shows that I am right.

This graph is fucking nuts.

Yo, yo, look at this. This is miserable.

That’s so fucking shady. Vibhu is shady, bro. That’s—

That’s fucked as fuck.

Crazy.

That’s so shady.

But is there opportunity in that? Is it focusing on this next generation and making sure that 12-, 13-, and 14-year-old kids, who are obviously eventually going to discover this trading culture that’s happening online, making money—everything that we talk about on the show 24/7—do they just drill into culture and mindshare? Do they replace the word crypto with Solana? Just have it be Solana because Solana’s cool and the product’s cool. Like you said, it’s—I don’t know. I just feel like the writing’s on the wall.

16. Nobody Tells The Trader Come Up Story

Obviously, little things like the WSOP thing show that they’ve taken an interest, to some degree, in the content stuff and the culture stuff. That’s what I feel like it needs. I feel like crypto needs real culture. We need to meet the audience where they’re at. They’re interested in this trading shit, so let’s give it to them. Let’s show them that. Let’s celebrate really successful examples of that.

Because, also, I feel like blockchains sometimes focus on attracting builders to come build products, but people are going to build where there’s activity, where people are trading, right?

Good point.

It actually usually happens that way, to be honest. On-chain speculation typically precedes a lot of devs coming on-chain. Like, you have—

This is what I’m saying right now. Robinhood’s hot because it’s hot on the timeline. People are migrating over. People with platforms are talking about doing this and showing themselves doing this. Is it really a technical thing? Are people really that hung up on what the tech has to offer on Robinhood? I can tell you they’re not.

No, of course not. But that’s what I was saying. I feel like historically crypto has focused on the technical stuff because this industry is filled to the brim with super-brilliant tech people, but the attention and content side of that shit—I don’t know, there’s something there, and it’s interesting. I do think Solana front-runs on that.

From my point of view, as bullish as you are just because of how good of a product it is, I see it from the other angle, and I like it as well. I’ve been stacking SOL. I’ve been buying SOL. I’m back in—

Yeah. I think SOL’s in a great spot because right now crypto is kind of seen as uncool to the general populace. But if Solana is able to be like, “No, Solana is cool. There are cool people building on Solana. There are cool traders making a shit ton of money on Solana.” And Solana is a place where you can make generational wealth on the internet, that pitch is a very easy sell because it’s literally what we have been doing.

It’s what I’ve been doing the past few years, what all these other traders have been doing the past few years. People just don’t know that. People don’t know that there are young people making generational wealth.

It’s because the story isn’t being told the right way. The wrong way to do it is to sit in front of a camera and explain all the technical jargon, why this technology is beneficial, and why it’s head and shoulders above the rest.

No, you build up and highlight examples of people who are successful, who can articulate themselves the right way, who are attractive in one way or another, and who are relatable in one way or another. That’s the culture. You build the culture, and then the tech people will peel back the layers and find that and look for that and ask for that, you know?

And I think you do both at the same time, to be honest. You can’t lead discussions on—

Why Solana is a better chain to build on and also do the attention and marketing piece. I think they are aware of that and are starting to focus a lot more on that.

We’re on the same page. Obviously, historically you’ve made most of your money in trading and everything else, but recently you’ve been getting rich all over again, making millions of dollars on Twitter.

It’s so stupid, man.

I know. This shit is fucking nuts, bro.

So, if you guys don’t know what X has been focusing on recently, over the past couple of years, they’re trying to compete with all these other social media platforms where creators are making money. They’re like, “Okay, why aren’t people making money on Twitter? Why aren’t people making money on X?” So they implemented this system called ad revenue sharing, or ad rev.

Typically, they sell ad space to companies or whatever on Twitter, and they place these ads under certain people’s tweets, under certain people’s posts on the timeline, depending on whatever their algorithm is. But what they never did before is give the actual creators who were contributing these eyes and this attention a piece of that ad revenue sharing.

And so now X has this program, which is its ad-revenue sharing. You can sign up for it if you do a certain amount of impressions, and I signed up for it. I've currently made almost $200,000 just from tweeting—literally just from posting.

On top of X's ad-revenue sharing, there's Pump.fun. As you guys know, I made a Pump.fun profile after people were saying a wallet was mine that isn't mine. I was like, “Yo, this is my actual wallet. If you want to direct fees from coins or send me coins, whatever, you can send them here.” Pump.fun has the ability to direct a portion of the creator fees, when you create a coin, to a certain wallet instead of you taking them for yourself. It does some percentage of the trading volume that the coin does, and you get a portion of that in cash. I've made $1.5 million just off that in creator rewards on Pump.fun.

So, I made $1.5 million on Pump.fun, and I've made $200,000 on Twitter. Both of these things are still scaling exponentially, by the way. They're both still trending up. I think it's really cool as a creator in crypto that I'm making money off traditional platforms.

It's the coolest thing ever. I think it's the coolest thing ever. It can't be understated: you're literally a Twitter millionaire, you know? [laughter]

17. Tushar Clip: Agency Over Intelligence

Yeah. Seriously, though, you could have started from 0 2 months ago and you'd be in this spot where you're on pace to be a multimillionaire—8 figures—on traditional media. It's really, really cool. Historically—and correct me if I'm wrong; you would obviously be the expert here—I don't make a lot of money on Twitter. I've never seen anybody make that much money on Twitter, ever. I've never seen that.

I've got to be in the top 5% or something.

5%? No, brother. I can almost guarantee it's 0.001%. Top 5, I would say—probably top 5 accounts this year, in the last quarter, for sure, the last 90 days. I mean, I'd be blown away if that weren't the case. It's fucking nuts.

That's why I'm so excited about Ansem and what I've been doing with the coin Ansem, because I think that, traditionally, creators haven't been able to share this upside with all their followers. If you follow Kai Cenat when he had 0 followers and now he's at, what, like 30 million subscribers and followers—

I was just talking to my manager about this.

There was no way to benefit from this upside. You don't get a portion of any of the sponsorship deals that he's making. You don't get a portion of any of the ad revenue that he's making. But what I really think is cool with Ansem is that I have a ton of people, businesses, and partnerships that want to partner with me. Instead of just partnering with me, I can figure out ways to have them partner with the entire network of people who are Ansem holders.

As my network grows and as I start making more money on socials, the people who are holding the coin obviously benefit from that as I'm going viral and getting a lot more attention. I'm super excited about it. I don't think it's been done by anybody in the right way before.

18. Kyle vs Tushar And The Multicoin Beef

The creator economy is literally projected to go to $2 trillion by 2035, so I think it's one of the things I'm most excited about in crypto. Specifically, the tokenization aspect is one of the only things that makes something like this possible. I think it's really cool.

19. Starting The Block In 2018

My manager and I, literally minutes before the show, were having this conversation, and he said something along the lines of, “We need to find what's the new clipping. We need to find the new meta before it becomes a thing, jump on it, and take advantage of it.” I honestly think that it's exactly what we're talking about here. I think it's some sort of mechanism to invest in somebody early and scale with them, and to take a bet on the outcome of someone's success.

Why clipping works—it's not that clipping is going to slow down or get replaced anytime soon. It's streaming. Streaming is the meta. The question is why? It's because, 1, obviously, the output. You're streaming 8 hours a day, which gives you way more opportunities to get clipped, which is the meta today.

But also, 2, streaming communities are super invested. They're parasocial. They sit in 8-hour-long streams, they're typing in chat, they flock to and follow their streamer everywhere they go, and they champion their streamer. They become this super-ultra-loud, rabid, active fan base.

I mean, you see our whole fucking chat today has been this KATE coin, Poor Goat—fuck, that's real emotion, you know what I'm saying? It's valuable, and it's why these streamers are so fucking valuable. I think it's adding tools and mechanisms and little systems: “Watch and earn. Come here and take a bet for me. Ride for me. Back my brand. Back my stream.” You know what I'm saying?

There's this clip from Thread Guy, and it's Glaze Bank City, and it's glazing you. Have you seen this?

The Trump one?

Yes. Have you seen this?

Oh, bro, I was actually live watching him say this. I was in his Twitch stream.

Let's watch it with the chat so they can see it too, and then we'll talk about it.

I think whenever I think too hard about on-chain, I'm—you know, I'm so bullish on on-chain because I think the dynamics around celebrity, trader, social—I think this stuff has just captured the Friend.tech animal spirits better than anything I've ever seen. This stuff is so sticky, and I see people get addicted. It's just so good.

But whenever I think too hard about on-chain, I get bearish. I was thinking too hard about it last night, and I was in this chat. Ansem has Ansemies on, obviously, and Ansem retweeted something about this. Then everybody was freaking out: “Let's go, Ansem retweet!” They were selling coins to buy the new Ansem retweet.

I went in my Telegram and I was like, “The bear case for on-chain is literally just based off how Ansem feels right now. If Ansem lost cell service, we might have to pack it up and be done.” And he goes, “Counterpoint.” [laughter]

The entire macroeconomy is based off how Donald Trump feels in the digital world. Gigafaces having outsized influence is closer to the norm than the outlier.

20. Frank DeGods And The Copy Trader Problem

It's bullish that we have Ansem in the first place and probably a requirement for us to go higher. I sat here and read it and thought to myself, “You know what? That's a really good take.” What Ansem is to on-chain, Trump is to the AI trade. He's just like, “Okay, we're going to go higher now,” and then everyone's like, “Okay, now we can buy.”

The stock market is genuinely like this. The bull case for the stock market is, “We are at war, but Trump won't let us go down.”

Hard agree, obviously. You know, it's funny. We can't give these guys too much credit. We can't give TG and Raz too much, because we have said this. This has been a bar that we've set in the show since pretty much episode 1.

Ansem being the Trump, Donald Trump being a KOL—we've kind of talked about this and had this take. They've just been a little bit more direct and labeled you as that guy because, honestly, you are. How do you feel about this? What are your thoughts around it? Is Ansem the Donald Trump of on-chain trading and internet capital markets?

I think a little bit, bro. The reason I say this is not because of me personally as an individual, but because I've accumulated such a large following over the years. There are a lot of really rich people who follow my account, and a lot of really rich people who trust the things that I say. That's because, in part, they've seen me make calls in the past that have done really well and made money on those calls, or people respect me and missed calls that they didn't take in the past and want to take them now.

I think that I do have a voice that's kind of respected in that way in markets. I'm not trying to toot my own horn that much, but I do think it is true. When you command such a large following, you actually do impact the market because people think, “This dude's bullish, this dude's buying. I'm also going to be buying as well.”

Trump is obviously doing the exact same thing with traditional markets, and with the companies he supports. Intel from 20 to 120 is fucking insane. The president was like, “This company is super important for our future national security. We're investing in this company, and this company's going to do well. I'm going to keep saying that I think this company is going to do well.” Everybody's like, “Well, okay, we're also going to buy this company.”

When you have people who have trusted voices in markets, there are a lot of people who aren't able to do their own research on markets. A lot of people aren't able to spend 24 hours a day looking at markets and researching them. I've spent a lot of fucking time researching crypto.

You find 25 hours, bro.

Bro, I've spent a lot of fucking time trading these markets. I've lost my own money a lot of times in markets, learned how to trade, figured out how these cycles work, and figured out what I think is going to do well.

And the reason I'm able to hit these trades is because I paid my tuition to the market. I've spent my time in the market trading.

21. Thread Guy: Trading Against Plumbers

On that note, I want to say somebody in the chat just said it: billionaires definitely follow Ansem. And it pairs well. It pairs well a lot. Talk your shit, brother. It pairs very well with this tweet from Kyakbt, who's a sick clipper, but it's another Thread Guy clip. We won't watch the clip because we have Mike in the waiting room, but Thread Guy says, “Ansem might have the richest audience of any influencer in the world.”

True, by the way.

It definitely might be true.

It's true, by the way. I don't care. I stamp it—100%. Tulip quoted this thought from Murad, Ansem, Saylor, and Thread Guy: “Over the next decade, content creators will only increase in prevalence,” et cetera. Tulip, who works at Counterparty and works on Thread Guy's stuff with Malcolm, says this is correct and adds detail: “The retail is going to cannibalize Wall Street like YouTube is cannibalizing Hollywood.” Retweet.

Wow.

This Tulip kid's sharp. You should follow this kid. He's really, really smart. When you combine the rising trend of financial content creation with retail wealth accumulation, you start to see why TBPN sold for 9 figures and why Counterparty won't sell under 10 figures.

Talk your shit, boys.

I like that.

Let me just ask you straight up: is Market Bubble a billion-dollar company?

100%. Without a doubt.

Wait, wait. Say it again. Say it again. I couldn't hear you. Production, turn up my fucking headset. Is Market Bubble a billion-dollar company? Are we—

Without a doubt. Without a doubt, brother.

God willing, man.

We're not going to go away. We're going to continue to do the work on markets, continue to do the work on AI, and continue to do the work on the attention and social piece. When you combine all these things and you are correct on them over a sustained period of time, that's how you're successful. I don't think anybody has been able to combine the markets piece—being a trusted voice in markets—with the attention and marketing piece. We can say, “No, we actually can add value to how you can grow your brand,” whether you're growing your brand as a personal creator, as a person, as an actual company in crypto, or as a company outside of crypto.

My God.

Because we're not—we can't always say the same. Listen, chat, we want to show big love. Z, do you want to introduce our guest and let our chat go into Banks mode for him?

We love Ansem. But introduce our guy. Let chat know who's coming in here in a second.

Got you. One of the most legendary VC investors in crypto currently, they crushed this last cycle. They led, I think, the earliest Pump.fun round. They also led our round at Bullpen. Great investor. They also have a liquid fund, and they do venture—one of the few VCs who is active on-chain and realizes what the market cares about and what the market is doing, and doesn't just say things because he thinks they're going to be received well by everybody else.

I think he's very true to his beliefs and true to his opinions on the markets. They're crushing it. They're one of the best funds by returns, for sure, over the past few years.

Cool. So, without further ado, let's bring him in. What's up, guys?

What's good, Mike? How are you?

How are you? Wow, what an introduction. By the way, I'm humbled to be on with the future billionaires here.

That was going to be my first question, Mike. Is Market Bubble marketing you?

I sure hope so. As an investor in Bullpen, let's do this.

I think you got a shot. I think you got a shot.

Oh my God. Please, Mike. I'll do anything. I'll get Mike tattooed across my forehead. I'm just kidding. Thank you so much for coming on. I watched a couple of interviews with you, and we're honored to have you on. All jokes aside, you're great. You should do more things like this. You're awesome, and authenticity radiates out of you. That's my initial impression of you. It seems like you're here because you love being here and really enjoy talking about this stuff and sharing the ideas. Obviously, like Z said, you're one of the best to ever do it. Do you want to just, in your own words, introduce yourself to our community in chat?

Yeah, so—Mike Dudas. At this point, I'm elderly in the crypto industry. I think people call me an OG. I've got my golf polo on, so I can go to the country club this evening. At the same time, I really do, as Z said, enjoy doing things on-chain.

It goes as far back as NBA Top Shot. I collected cards as a kid, like I'm sure you guys did, and NBA Top Shot was one of the first ways to do it digitally. That's what got me. I obviously bought Bitcoin many, many years ago, but the first thing that got me really doing things on-chain was NBA Top Shot.

NFTs were a precursor to what we're doing today with memecoins. NFTs were scarce. The entry price was hard. They weren't as liquid. Memecoins, I think, are a better form factor of what that was.

For the last 5 or 6 years, I've primarily been doing 2 things. One is spending a lot of time on-chain, as he said—having fun, speculating, buying things, launching projects. Everything from a golf-related NFT project called LinksDAO, helping out with a memecoin on Solana called Bonk, to investing in some of the best projects on-chain today, like Pump.fun and Bullpen. But also, on the super-serious side, stablecoin projects like Dakota DeFi and projects like Upshift.

22. Was The Last Cycle Actually Easier

We're having a blast. We invest pretty heavily in the Solana ecosystem and the Ethereum ecosystem, but not much outside of those 2. Our belief is that blockchains are public, open, and permissionless. That's been the ethos from 15 years ago. I get really uncomfortable when people start getting prescriptive about what people should be doing on-chain, and I get really excited about the fact that people are just doing what they want to do on-chain. It often isn't what you would expect.

I think we're seeing that over the past month. It's been a really exciting time in crypto. Energy is coming back. Robinhood launched, and I love that they're mixing some of the degen stuff with some of the RWA serious stuff. I could go on and on, and I'm probably 7 steps past the original question you asked.

No, no, we love that. That's what you're here to do: yap and teach us a thing or two. You were originally a media founder.

Yes. It was very different than this type of media. I wish the world would have been receptive to this type of financial media when I started a company called The Block. The tagline was “Crypto Simplified.” The idea was, “Hey, can we come explain this super-complex stuff?”

Remember, it was right when the Binance ICO era was exploding, and candidly, it wasn't that different from what's happening today. Z was there. It was just that the stuff was happening on centralized exchanges, in Telegram groups, and people were trading Dentcoin and all these memes, effectively, with BS stories behind them.

Candidly, it was less authentic than the stuff that we're trading today, where you generally know what it is. But the media around the industry was much more serious. It wasn't suited to what was actually happening, and people didn't understand it. That's why they got washed out so quickly.

I'm pretty excited about what you guys are doing because I think we now have a chance to really explain and translate the activity that's happening on-chain, why people are spending time on it, and how it ties to the things that we're seeing in the real world: how people behave, their attention spans, what they're interested in, and so on.

Lifestyles and just the culture. I think that's what's been missing here for a long time, too. I think it's super valuable, and whoever comes close to capturing that, front-running that, and spearheading that is going to win on an unfathomable level.

That's really cool. You came from media. Do you want to walk us through that transition from media founder to fund manager? How does that happen?

Yeah, and even the one before that. I'd started a traditional tech company before that. I was a Silicon Valley venture-backed founder.

You know, we raised more than $50 million for the company that I co-founded before The Block, but I was just so passionate about crypto. I worked in fintech—I worked at Venmo, PayPal, and Google Wallet—and all of those products felt like putting lipstick on a pig. The products weren't really innovative. Then you come into crypto and you can just do anything. It's like the Wild West: I can send money to anyone, anywhere, permissionlessly.

23. FOMO vs Pump.fun

So I wanted to jump into crypto. It was scary, fun, exciting, thrilling, but I was not an engineer or a fund manager. Basically, that's all I perceived was happening in crypto in 2018 and 2019. So I thought, "Well, I'm just going to be myself." What I am is, I think, a pretty good storyteller and community builder. So thank you. I appreciate it.

It was awesome. I started—actually, it's cheesy—a Slack group. It started with a couple hundred people and turned into thousands. People basically asked me, "Just start a company." I was trying to figure out what I was going to do in crypto. Again, I'm not an engineer, I'm not an investor, and nobody's going to give me money to invest. So I just started telling stories.

We started with news and media. I hired a couple of really young folks—journalists who really understood and were in the trenches, working on projects and governance. I hired some researchers, and we started putting out really authentic, good research and news. We went from 0 to basically rivaling the number-one crypto news site, called CoinDesk, within about 9 to 12 months. It was super exciting.

What I will say—and you guys experience this day in and day out—it was intense. So intense. It was like nothing I'd ever experienced. I had CZ basically threatening to sue me, this multibillionaire threatening to sue me out of existence. I was getting memed like you've never seen, and I know both of you experienced this.

It burned me out. It was my first foray into that, and I had to get used to what it meant to be at the intersection of information and money. It is so intense, man, when you're trying to translate money stories and financial stories to people globally who you don't know. Yeah, I spent 3 years and sold The Block because I got burned. [laughter]

I feel like I have a very interesting, unique perspective on this because, historically, I come from traditional internet media. I don't even know if that makes sense, but YouTube, Twitch, and these more mainstream, normie-friendly things. I've built really thick skin, and I know what it is. I've mentally been able to separate FaZe Banks front-facing from Ricky in my personal life.

24. One In Two Robinhood Wallets

I've learned not to take either too seriously. When you're celebrated or booed—cheering, booing—I think it's all the same at the end of the day. It's just noise. Staying baseline in the middle is the way to go. I'll say this: I'm about as vetted a pro at this shit as you can be. But when you introduce money into it and people's risk and livelihood are in the mix, it can be brutal.

Some of the toughest battles, mentally, have been in this market. I wouldn't change it for anything. I think it's very, very worth it. Anything worth doing is going to be hard. You are a really good storyteller, and that's very rare in this market, in this industry. Would you say it's safe to say that's kind of what your edge was?

25. What Each Platform Should Focus On

Yeah. I was comfortable mixing money with my identity, with storytelling, and with getting other folks involved with what I was doing. It's scary, right? There are lawyers—ambulance chasers—who want to sue anybody who talks about money at any time. There are angry hordes who, if they lose money because they made a poor decision, freak out and accuse you of being the devil. It can be scary.

But I think we're moving into an era when this stuff will be completely normalized, and when financial decisions and financial flows are merging in a permissionless way. The things that happened with finance, where we moved from, "Hey, only banks interact with money," to now things happening on-chain—historically, CNBC is a circus, right? These guys are moving the market day in and day out, giving you bad information, and Jim Cramer is wrong all the time. Everything goes the opposite way from what he says.

I think we're moving to a much more authentic age of mixing money, ideas, attention, and entertainment. It's going to be a really uncomfortable period while we untangle how that's happening, because there are so many different categories. I know Z is working on this explicitly, right? Working across purposes. Those are all different assets, but every one of them is being thrust into the 24/7/365 media-attention and live-commentary cauldron. It's going to be wild what comes out the other side.

Given the attention spans of humanity and the amount of information that we all have at our fingertips, it's only appropriate that the transfer of value moves at the same pace and lands in that same context.

Look at our chat, Mike.

So, at the lowest common denominator, [laughter] I've been supporting or working on this project called CODE. It's a memecoin that was launched on Pump.fun. I think the folks knew that I was coming on Market Bubble, and so the lowest common denominator of that is just endless spam of a ticker.

They call it bad work. They're calling it bad.

Yeah. That's not the kind of bad work I like.

Levels. Everybody plays their role, you know.

And the tough thing is, that's kind of what that extreme is—what people see, right? They're going to see that in the comments and say, "Hey, look, it's not serious." But at the end of the day, that particular project, but also many of the things I've worked on over the last 5 or 6 years in the quote-unquote meme and community space, have been really meaningful to the people who participated.

I think a lot of people from the outside would look at us as quote-unquote weird, or call us all kinds of things, but we've had a tremendous amount of fun, and many of us have made a tremendous amount of money. I think that opportunity is available to a broader set of folks as we move forward. I just hope people embrace it.

But they need good information. The same way that I thought The Block was important to simplify crypto, I think folks like you are important, because 99 out of 100—or 999 out of 1,000—projects these days are scammy, spammy, or bad. You truly need those trusted filters to walk you through it.

And by the way, while you're being the trusted filter, you're going to be attacked by all the—I don't know what you guys call them—the old heads or the other people who are like, "You're a scammer. Don't listen to that guy. You lost money on this." It's like—

By the way, again, from my point of view, it becomes even more impossible because my broader audience—99% of people—don't understand the nuances of this shit.

I could be farmed and hate-farmed, and the label "scammer"—the word "scam" goes really, really far online, right? My face—I have a household name in internet culture. Those 2 things pair well together when it comes to creating a narrative or a story and getting lots of views, but it's almost impossible to explain these nuances to people.

I don't even think you have to anymore. I don't think so. We're moving post-scammer. That label doesn't mean anything. It's not credible. In many cases, it's actually a reflection on you, the person who's shouting it, versus the person you're shouting it at.

Just look at Elon and Sam Altman. Elon is calling him "Scam Altman," and guess what? We know Sam Altman is not a scammer. OpenAI is one of the most profound technological creations a man has ever made, and he spearheaded it. Look, I'm sorry if Elon didn't make money because there were a set of steps that were necessary for this thing to get out, and Elon probably wouldn't let that happen.

But when people at that level start calling each other scammers, the word loses all meaning. I think the actual real people, the quiet people, look and start to evaluate for themselves: "What do I believe in? What's interesting to me? Who should I listen to?"

I think it's unfortunate in a lot of ways. Sorry, go ahead, Z.

You said a little bit earlier that in the past there were a lot of altcoins, like Dentacoin and all these random coins that were basically memecoins, but they weren't called memecoins. They had fluffed-up white papers and all these other things. I think now—I agree with your take—you have an honest reflection of the market with memes.

But I see a lot of people say that memecoins are a net negative for the industry, for crypto. I'm curious what your thoughts are on memecoins as a new asset class that the younger generation is going to trade regardless, and whether that detracts from other businesses that have real revenues and are building in crypto, building on-chain.

Does it take away attention from them, or can they coexist? What do you think the value of attention and memetics is, not just for memecoins but also for these other startups?

Yeah, absolutely. I think any normal portfolio should consist of a bunch of different assets that do different things. If somebody is putting 100% of their portfolio into trading memecoins and thinks of them as investments, I would say that's probably not a winning game of life.

Right.

26. Pump's Valuation And The Buyback

But if they're experimenting with a portion of their portfolio while investing—if we're limiting it to crypto and a set of crypto majors, maybe a decent chunk of their portfolio in DeFi, and then they're experimenting and doing things on-chain with a small portion of their portfolio, 20% or 30%, as we enter a bullish market—I think that is interesting, healthy, and fun. Even if they don't make money on the specific memecoin trades, they're learning the psychology: How do people think? How do people trade? When I lose money, why am I losing money? When I make money, why am I making money?

But to get back to your original question, I think that memecoins are a larger asset class today, in terms of market cap, than NFTs, for example.

Yeah. At their peak, they were massively larger than, for example, VC-funded infrastructure. The notion that they're zero-sum, or that everybody loses money on them, is completely and utterly misguided.

The folks who lose money are certainly the loudest. You're not going to hear many people who made $50 million or $100 million on memes shouting it to the high heavens. Who wants to be wrench-attacked, right?

But there are a tremendous number of people who have made money. Do I think investing in memecoins is the best way to generate predictable returns and live a fulfilling, long-term, profitable life? Not as your core strategy, unless you have some unique edge.

As something that's really interesting to do, though, it's fun. I don't go to Vegas thinking I'm going to invest and leave much richer than I was when I arrived. I think I'm going to have a tremendous amount of fun and meet really interesting people. Some of the people I met there, we're potentially going to do interesting things with. That's happened to me personally: I've launched projects with people I've met through this industry.

I do think memes and NFT projects can coexist with the other things that happen on-chain. Frankly, they have to, because the other things happening on-chain aren't interesting enough as a standalone to bring users to download wallets and take the number of steps necessary to—

That's true.

—to discover the fun stuff.

It's crazy, because a lot of the people who are so bearish on memes also invested in all these other plays in crypto. There are a lot of L1s and L2s that are literally down 98%. The worst investments, potentially, in the history of mankind are in penny stocks. If you invested in a basket of Binance-listed VC L1, L2, and infrastructure projects, you're homeless at this point. That was not a good basket.

Yeah. A lot of the L1s that piggybacked off the success of Ethereum and the success of Solana, raised money, and didn't find product-market fit are down a lot worse than many of the top—

27. Why Pump Owns On-Chain Activity

I don't like to justify or analogize that by saying, “This thing we're doing is interesting because that thing would leave you destitute if you did it.” What's interesting is the moralizing you get from the people who launched and invested in those projects, who then moralize and say, “People shouldn't be doing this thing on-chain,” whether it's memes or speculation.

The other thing I don't love is the use cases, like perps. Perps are fun, and you can make a lot of money with them, but they're risky as all hell. For most people—for nonprofessionals—it's gambling.

It's largely gambling. Prediction markets.

It's largely gambling. You should systematically lose if you invest in prediction markets and aren't a shark. Yet these things are glorified in many circles as some sort of different thing.

I look at them all as things that the general public likes to do to express themselves as humans and have fun. I'm watching the Knicks game, so I'm going to use a prediction market to place a bet on the game. It's going to make it a lot more fun. I'm going to live, enjoy myself, and either win or lose. That's what most people do.

These stories of people going destitute are the outliers. Most people know how to responsibly have fun with these products, and they add to their lives in many ways—just as eating a big, unhealthy burger or having a glass of wine or a drink probably isn't going to extend my lifespan, but it will allow me to live in the moment and have a good time, giving some depth and richness to life.

What I like about what happens on-chain is the community piece, this part of doing something with other people. It's a lot more fun and a lot healthier than just clicking a slot machine.

Yeah, I agree.

And you can improve. You can get better at it, too.

Yeah.

If you're disciplined about any of the different categories I mentioned, you can get good at all of it—

100%.

—and if you have the discipline—

You can't get good at spinning slots.

Yeah, you cannot. It is programmatically destined to defeat you. You will not win at those.

To bring it back to what you said earlier, what's the solution? As unfortunate and daunting as it can feel to exist in an industry that we all love and are passionate about—crypto—if we're being honest with ourselves, that word carries an extremely negative and oftentimes cringe connotation.

It's exactly what you were saying earlier: What's the solution? Is the solution just to CTO crypto, highlight the people who should be highlighted, and share information more thoroughly and articulately in shows and programs like this? Should we embrace and platform storytellers like yourself, or some of these young kids who have gotten really good at trading and had real success?

Not only people who are building, but people who are living it—the culture of it. It is cool and interesting, and I feel like it's not shared the way it should be. If crypto were presented in the way that we see it, if people saw what we saw in it, it would be celebrated. It wouldn't be labeled as something negative.

Unquestionably. I think it will be. I think crypto-native people are better at the market-structure stuff, the speculative stuff, and the community, consumer, and collective excitement and celebration. I think it's going to start to eat some of the similar things happening in the real world: the Whatnot pack breaks, collectibles, and things like that.

Right now, I look at some of those things and think, “That's not professional.” There's not great market structure around them, but the behavior is very similar to what we're talking about. The entire world is becoming entertainment-financialized. It's happening at a very rapid pace, and it's unstoppable.

As people have more time, as the cost of basic needs decreases, and as we enter this post-AGI era, all this stuff is going to emerge. I interrupted you, Banks.

Oh, no, no. Off that point, 100%, I agree with everything you're saying. People clearly are more interested in speculative trading and narrative trading—trading narratives, information, and human habits. This is becoming, and proving to be, more and more valid.

You saw guys like Chris Camillo break in and create this meta, almost to great success. Now this is what all these kids are doing.

So here's what I want you guys to think about. I'm thinking a lot about how we structure what people have access to and are made aware of in a way that allows them to profit off the totality of their involvement in entertainment finance.

In collectibles, for example, the entire space is still degen gambling: “Let me get in on this Whatnot pack break.” I think what's really interesting is that we should start offering some beta funds that track the increase of these asset classes alongside entertainment finance and encourage people to get exposure to them. We were talking about this before. It's part of Z's vision.

I'll let him speak for himself. And Z, I want you to answer this and articulate it right after I'm done, in your own words and from your POV, because we look at things differently. Z has such an insane understanding of markets and how they move, and I feel like I have an abnormally good understanding of attention and how it moves. When we come together on stuff like this, this conversation, for example, gets me really hyped the fuck up because we were just talking about what you just said right before you got on. I become obsessed and get into this infinite thought loop about this watch-and-earn effort.

Let's highlight good products, founders, and projects. Let's create a fucking pool where we have someone like you come on, or Ivan from MoonPay last week, and add some stuff to the pool. Let's let people take a bet on this early. Let's let them come in and connect their Twitch accounts and their Twitter accounts, and let's track your view time and how many words you type in the chat. If you share a good idea or you're right about something, if you're a productive, positive part of this community, you help us build it from the ground up, you should fucking win with us.

My manager, who comes from more traditional media, was talking to me earlier about how we need to figure out the next meta: what's the next clipping, what's the next streaming? I honestly think it's some version of that. We're actively kind of building it. We're manually doing it now, but I'm obsessed with creating this thing, and it's totally in line with what we do.

It would typically be minus EV for your average streamer or YouTuber to pay their audience to watch them. But in our case, that's what everyone's here to do, right? So, to fund people's ports, encourage trading, and encourage the flow of money between all of us as a community ecosystem, I don't know. I think it's plus EV. It's cool. Watch-and-earn. I'm obsessed with it. Z, what do you think about all this?

Yeah, man. I think it's a megatrend, bro. I think we're at the beginning of a megatrend that's going to continue to grow extremely fast. I think you've seen the start of it with streaming culture in general and how much the younger generation really tunes in to these streamers and gets attached to their personalities. All they're doing is purely entertainment, but none of the educational aspect.

28. Ansem's Twitter Ad Rev

When I wrote about Market Bubble at the very beginning, I used the word edutainment. It doesn't exist as a real word, but it's education and entertainment both in one thing. The reason I think entertainment finance is going to grow to be so big is because you get both in one thing. It's usually difficult for people to grasp the concept of learning how to trade because the people who are putting out content teaching them how to trade are not relatable to them and are not doing it in a way that's easy for them to understand.

But if you're able to do that in a way that's easy for people to understand, and they're like, "Oh, I can also make money from following this person, and they're also entertaining," I think it's a megatrend that's going to go crazy on the internet. One of the reasons I'm so excited about it is because tokenization can play a really, really, really important role in that. The people who are growing in this community are obviously very incentivized for the creator who's being tokenized and whom they're attached to to be doing well.

If you're following somebody who's trusted in markets, and you're taking the trades that they're taking, and they're making money, what's not really reflected in a lot of the creator revenue that they're making is that, if you're a trader and people are also tailing the trades that you're making, the revenue those people are making from the trades is not reflected in any real financial document at all. It's never been documented in a way because it's not easy to track.

I don't know how many people made a lot of money following me on SOL from $20 to $200. I know a lot of people did, and whenever I go to these conferences, people come to me like, "Yo, I bought my mom a house because I tailed you on the trade. Yo, I retired X, Y, and Z because I tailed you on the trade. Yo, I made money on WIF. Yo, I made money on BONK." There are a lot of these people whom I know exist, but I have no way of contacting them or knowing who they are because I have a million followers now. I can't interface with these people directly.

But if you have something that's tokenized, like I did with Ansem, then all these people who made all this money from following these trades are like, "Yo, this is something that's reflective of that with this person." I think the meme aspect of it is also just easy for people to relate to, like bull markets and the black bull in general. That's my general thesis on the creator economy, how it's going to make entertainment finance grow, and why I think tokenization is actually a really cool piece of it.

29. The Case For Creator Coins

If you add on to that, a lot of creators have done a great job of creating businesses around themselves. I think MrBeast is probably the best example of this. If you look at what he's done with Feastables chocolates and all of his other companies that also make money, what he does is leverage the attention he's getting from his community, and then they go and buy products.

You have this X amount of attention that generates Y amount of buying pressure or demand for whatever these different products are. You can also build businesses in that way. If you have a really strong brand, you can scale in a way that nobody else really can because you don't need to be the core operator. There can be other operators that are really strong and want to use you for marketing or for attention.

If you have this network of people, you don't only have yourself and your audience, but you have real people with real financial stakes in this network who are willing to spend capital in a way that's accretive to them. That's my general thesis on how it scales.

It's incredible. This is what we're talking about, really, just to simplify it: building community. This opportunity is afforded to us in this niche and in this market because of the nature of what we're talking about and what we're building. I don't know; I just feel like it can't be understated how much of a compounding, exponential effect this will have.

30. Streaming Is The Meta, Not Clipping

Again, this shit's up only because we're in real time creating success stories that don't exist yet, right? Poor Goat. We're going to interview Poor Goat later. This is somebody that Z had a huge hand in highlighting and funding his initial positions in PORT. He held—

Funny name, by the way, bro. Poor—

It's hilarious. I fuck with him, bro. But he's becoming a little mini-me. He has all this motion. There are people who follow him. He's curated this community, and it's such a cool example of someone who has been successful in this and started here.

How cool would it be to be like, "You know how my port got funded?" You hear stories like Kimchi, where he put $500 on-chain and traded up to 6 figures, then timed the market right and traded TRUMP and made fucking $40 million, and everyone celebrates that because it's cool as fuck, right? Logs off, goes into rural farms, whatever.

Let's fund somebody's port with fucking, you know, VBVAI[?], and this is exactly the community and type of person that you want to hold your token and participate in. Everybody in retail will come in—your moms, your cousins, your best friends—and be like, "What's the trade? What am I buying?" because they want to come in and make money.

We've seen celebrities time and time again historically come in here asking, "How can I make as much money as quickly as possible?" They drop a coin and do it the complete wrong way. These people, if you're watching this stream right now, if you're this far into the stream, if you're here right now, this is who we want aligned with us. This is who we want to hold our shit. What do you think? What do you think the future of that looks like?

Yeah. [laughter] I think the next iteration of it probably is a little more speculative. You're starting to see it where all the sports-betting sites are obviously adding video directly to the apps, and it's basically like watch-and-gamble. Banks, what you said was—you were talking about speculating on the moment, right?

We just invested as Fan Ventures in a company—I can't name the company—that does prediction markets around live-streaming games, real-life events, and occurrences. "Is this going to happen? Is that going to happen?" That's really early, but I think it's a really ripe area.

People are spending so much time streaming, watching streams, just watching other people do things. They're going to want to fill those moments with a little more meaning and emotion than just mindlessly watching them. So I think it probably starts out as speculation, gambling, and prediction markets, but I really, really hope it evolves into something more.

I hope it gets into what Z was talking about: this notion of being able to invest in the output of the creator, the community that they're creating, and the products that they're affiliated with. In the near term, I like the idea of tying it more to a meme than to a Hyperliquid- or pump-style profit-buyback mechanism. That's not going to work. You can't securitize people. It just hasn't worked, and we're not going to make that zero-to-one leap instantly.

So I think what people will be comfortable with is, “I align with this brand, or I align with this individual.” It's not going to work for a lot of cases, so that's going to be scary. But I think it will work for folks like Z. I'm obviously biased because I know him, I like him, and I've invested in Pump Fund, but I really just hope that voices like you guys, who have been through cycles and dealt with the highs, the lows, and the arrows, will pull people through.

People want to invest in something that's tied to the people they spend time listening to, following, and, in some cases, taking financial advice from. I think it's healthy and natural for those people to have assets that represent that attention and time spent. In fact, it would be insane if that didn't happen.

That being said, I think it will start out heavily criticized and will continue to be. The celeb-coin meta didn't work out because those people were not invested. It wasn't their primary thing. You need people who are both the main character, and they're the main character because this is their thing. That's like Z. That's human being. That's like the people, you know. It would be me if I wanted to do that, but that seems really stressful and deep.

Let's face it, Mike, you don't really need to put yourself through that pain because you're the sole seed investor in Pump Fund.

We're running over time. I could talk to you forever. Honestly, brother, not to gas you or overly glaze you—I glaze everybody—you're the fucking GOAT. It's become an ongoing meme, but you are my favorite guest that we've had so far. You're welcome to come on the show any fucking time you want. It's been so cool to talk to you. I'd love to talk to you off the show as well.

I have 2 quick questions I do want to ask. I did want to ask about being the sole seed investor in Pump Fund. You're also clearly a really good trader, but clearly a fucking incredible investor. Do you want to walk us through that—why and how you were able to play that?

So, one is, it was a perfect fit. It was authentic, right? I was fortunate. The founder, Noah, DM'd me. I met him through Twitter, and he was courageous, a little bit out there, crazy, and schizo. He just DM'd me, and I was one of the few people he DM'd. He probably DM'd 200 investors, and I directly responded.

He's persistent, and I was into memes. Like I said, I'd worked on BONK. I'd been investing in or having fun with memes personally. But I met up with him, and immediately he pulls out the app. He creates a coin, almost—not with my name, but something I liked—and was just so in love with the idea and the product. You're like, “I have to back this person,” because, again, in creating things, as you guys know, founder—it's all about the people. The idea is secondary.

Anyway, that team—it was the 7th idea they'd worked on—but it was so clear that they were the brilliant, perfect people for that idea, which was to tokenize everything and launch it. We were fortunate. It was the right place and right time. I saw the message, and we jumped at it. It's been wild. They didn't want to raise any more money, which was great, until they obviously did the ICO, so we were very fortunate.

Now, they are complex individuals. It's been one of the most complex investing relationships of my entire career, and I am a boomer, pre-boomer, whatever you want to say. But I've learned an incredible amount, and they're half my age, less than half my age. I've learned an incredible amount from them, and I think they probably have from me. So it's been really fascinating.

Insane. Really cool story. Maybe we need to invite you into becoming the sole seed investor of Market Bubble.

I mean, if you guys are raising, I was getting pretty amped as I was talking and listening to you guys. I'm happy to talk to you about what the business model is.

I love you, brother. I'll give you a little slice of my fucking life just to have you. You're fucking awesome. Is it appropriate and okay to ask how much money you guys made on the Pump.fun investment?

It's pretty public. You can look at it.

Yeah, it's on.

Help us out. Well, before we get Simple in here. All right, cool. Mike, that's all I have. Z, is there anything else you wanted to ask?

No, I think that was it. Appreciate you coming on, man.

It was awesome. Awesome.

All right. Thanks, guys. Really appreciate you, man.

Love, Mike. Thank you, bro.

Cheers, chat. Let's get some W Mikes in the fucking chat. Some goats, whatever the fuck you guys do these days.

31. Mike Dudas Joins

Mike kept calling himself a boomer. I don't think he understands. After the age of 30 on the internet, we're all just the same age. We're all pushing fucking 50. We're all on our deathbeds. That dude is awesome. I fuck with bro heavy. It's so refreshing because it's not often that we run into a guy of that caliber who can speak that way. I don't know. Cool.

Yeah, he's cool.

Up next, we have 0xSimpleFarmer. I do want to say, Veriloo, W. I picked you out as the winner. I didn't want to interrupt the conversation, but you're winning. You said something along the lines of, “Invest in me. I'll run it up to a B.” So, Veriloo from Twitch, congrats—little $1K. I see you in the chat all the time. You deserve it for staying engaged through interviews like that and staying on top of it.

Speaking of, we have 0xSimpleFarmer teed up and ready to go. He's on Facecam as well. Z, you talked a little bit about Stonk Brokers last week and highlighted it. That's all I've seen on my fucking timeline this week. It's very complicated and complex, but I'll let you introduce him and the project first, and then we'll bring him in and let him do his thing. So, cool.

Yes, we have 0xSimpleFarmer coming on, founder of this protocol called Stonk Brokers on Robinhood's new L2, their chain. It is pretty complicated. Let me see if I can give a simple overview. Essentially, they have an NFT, but they also have a token attached to the NFT. So each NFT is worth a certain amount of tokens.

They built their own AMM to swap back and forth between the NFT and the token. Essentially, you get a cut of the fees that you pay when swapping back and forth. You get airdropped stocks for holding these activated NFTs, which is pretty cool. They're building a ton of other stuff, like a DEX and a launchpad, along with a ton of other things on Robinhood Chain.

It's really cool. It's one of the newer projects doing a lot of experimentation on-chain, which you usually see at the beginning of bull markets and in some of the most interesting spots. So, yeah, happy to have him on, and he'll explain it a lot better.

The entire vibe of it—Stonk Brokers airdropping people these RWA assets—is totally in line with Robinhood. I'm going to ask you this, and I'll ask him also; maybe I sound fucking stupid, but is it fair to call it a Robinhood beta play because it's kind of capturing everything at the beginning?

I mean, yeah, I think it's one of the best beta plays on Robinhood. And then Cash Cat, obviously, which got listed on the main Robinhood app. But, yeah, I think they're definitely one of the—

What I mean is that that's clearly just straightforward: the meme, the face of it, the mascot of it, whatever. This is kind of covering all bases, right? We saw their NFT flip Bored Ape Yacht Club in a week. That doesn't happen. That's not normal. We're in the big 2026 talking about fucking NFTs, right?

The success of all this can be rooted back to something. I don't know. Obviously, my room-temperature IQ: I look at it and I just see a beta play for Robinhood. You're seeing your timeline filled with Robinhood, all these exciting examples of products. It's like, “I want to get a little bit of exposure to all this. How do I do that other than just explicitly buying Robinhood stock?” Which is fucking boring.

But without further ado, let's bring Simple Farmer in. Let's have him introduce himself.

What's good, brother?

Hey, GM, guys. Thanks for having me on.

GM, GM. I don't know if you heard, but we introduced you a little bit. We gave our brief opinion on what we feel like you're trying to do. Do you want to introduce yourself and speak for yourself?

Yeah. I'm 0xSimpleFarmer.

I'm the founder of Clutch Markets. I got into crypto in 2021 during DeFi summer and was trading decentralized options when gas made it impossible to really do so properly through platforms like Dopex back in the day. Then I started developing because I was getting disappointed with a lot of token launches that I was speculating on, so I said, "Let me just do this myself."

I've been developing things like prediction markets, essentially. I created the first Polymarket parlay platform, which got a grant from Polymarket, as well as Arbitrum One. Then I worked for ApeCoin as head of DeFi. That ApeCoin sub-branch on ApeChain under Yuga Labs shut down about 4 months ago, so I decided to continue with my own work and my own project.

In January, I actually did a testnet deployment of Stonk Brokers on Robinhood Chain. The team there said it was the most fun launch on their testnet, so I thought, "Let me bring this to mainnet as well." That's where we are now.

Cool. If you can summarize what Stonk Brokers is as far as the product, the brand, the effort, and the mission that you're on for our audience, give us a few lines about that.

I think Ansem said it well. The core product is the token-NFT AMM pair. The NFT and the token can move between each other, and there's some fee capture during that process that powers rewards yield for users who have activated those NFTs.

To activate those NFTs and get rewards yield, users actually have to burn a percentage of the token, which is nice because then we get deflationary pressure. Also, if those NFTs ever transfer hands, that activation status is nullified. Anytime it's sold, it has to be reactivated again. So we get essentially perpetual deflation, theoretically, with that.

We're also building a full product suite on top of this. There's a DEX options exchange and a launchpad coming in the very short-term future. One of the most exciting things—and like you mentioned just a second ago, Banks—is that it's nice to have exposure to many things going on on Robinhood Chain, and that's what I see this special projects sector as.

Virtuals kind of did a lot of AI agents building on top of them that were paired with them by LP. With Stonk Brokers, I'm trying to build out a full DeFi ecosystem. We've partnered with a team that's building a DEX aggregator like Jupiter. We partnered with a DEX called UP, and we partnered with a team that's doing cross-chain bridging and privacy swaps called Yard.

We're going to keep developing these platforms and helping the special projects partners set up that infrastructure so that hopefully we can be the dominant DeFi layer on Robinhood Chain, because we have really good distribution now.

You could say that again. You guys have been absolutely crushing it. I feel like a lot of these crypto protocols, products, and founders struggle sometimes to explain what their product is and what it does to a normal, average person.

Let's say I brought my grandma on stream right now and introduced her: "Hey, this is my friend Simple. He has a really cool product that I like a lot and enjoy." She goes, "Oh, well, hey, Simple. What is this?" How do you explain it to somebody like that?

It's a new financial primitive. It's financial technology built on-chain.

You can hold it, and essentially it lets you slowly DCA into either regular crypto tokens or RWAs over time. It's kind of like a slow-drip 401(k) for you.

I feel like a lot of the narrative on CT has been that RWAs are the new meta and what we're going to look forward to moving forward—Robinhood season, et cetera. So it's totally in line with that. Do you think it's fair for me to say to my normal friends, "Robinhood beta play"?

I think that's fair.

Okay, cool. Why Robinhood? I know we kind of already answered it, but why are you building on Robinhood as opposed to anywhere else?

I'm very aligned with Arbitrum One. Those are the people I'm closest to in crypto, and I've worked with them closely. Essentially, they said, "Hey, L2 is coming. Robinhood Chain—you might want to try something on their testnet. Then when mainnet goes live, build. You know what to do."

On testnet, they gave us 4 stock tokens and ETH to build with. I'm like, "Okay, I know what these guys want. They want us to use stock tokens in the products on their chain." So I started working out processes with that.

The key aspect was really: how do we create something cool that has that hook with the RWAs, that's useful, but also pushes distribution and marketing really well? I think, Ansem, what you're doing with Black Bull is really great for distribution.

That's what I think most founders miss, especially early-stage founders. You can make a great product with zero distribution; it doesn't matter. It's cool technology that nobody uses.

The NFT layer is what helped me unlock that. I learned that actually working at ApeCo, as the subsidiary of Yuga Labs. I thought, "Damn, these NFT people are super active." They have big Spaces, they like to talk on the timeline, and they like to market. If you financially incentivize them to do the work, they do a good job.

Yeah, it's really—

Yeah.

Yeah, I really like—I always commend you. I really like the way you're going about the project from first principles, not only saying, "Yo, I want to do things that benefit this entire ecosystem," but also being aware of the speculative aspect of crypto and how attention, marketing, and all that works.

People very rarely hit on both things, so I think you're doing a great job of hitting on both things.

I appreciate it. I'm very aware that things get stale fast in crypto, right? I think that's where that special projects piece is really cool, especially if we can become a decentralized, on-chain Y Combinator for super-early-stage financial technologies.

That's really cool.

That is the long-term scaling thesis, essentially.

That's how you keep getting upside and keep that revenue going into the process, without just that first layer that is the NFT-token AMM.

Definitely agree. You've been working in crypto for a while, you said. What are some of the things you've learned from your past products in crypto? What were those past products, and what were your roles there?

On the development side, everything was a lesson. I built a couple of really cool products, but I was struggling with gaining users, and I didn't want to go down the classic path of going for a raise either, because if you already don't have users, doing the raise doesn't make much sense.

That taught me to focus on distribution, focus on distribution, and then continue to aggregate those people. Essentially, anytime I would have one experiment and be ready to move on to the next thing, I'd tell people, "Just burn the last thing and join me on the next one." Burn the last thing and join me on the next one.

So I aggregated up to 300–400 people, and I think they were the ones who really started the early spark where we began gaining momentum and attention. Then, working for an L2 like ApeChain, I learned what it's like to be behind the scenes, essentially running the blockchain, how they look at the people in their ecosystem and the builders, working with people, and also BD.

I started talking to a lot of people on a lot of different blockchains because we were doing cross-chain functionalities for the ApeCoin token. I met a lot of people, including people who work for Solana and Base, as well as the team at MetaMask. I think that gave me a lot of experience that has allowed me to successfully deploy this.

Very cool. Makes a ton of sense. I feel like in crypto, you get your experience over time, and the more time you spend in crypto, the better you get, whether that's developing, building, or trading. You continuously get better and better if you stick to it.

32. CNBC Is A Circus

What's your opinion on things that maybe haven't been explored yet on-chain that you're interested in or think we may see more of in the future? I know you talk about the special projects piece.

I think the RWAs are the big unlock. It's the carrot that everybody wants, and not enough people talk about it. When you look at revenue, I think Collector [?] posted something today that just broke $1 billion in revenue. It's just RWA. I think that's people hedging against crypto on decentralized rails.

The Stonk Brokers asset is kind of a hedge against crypto, too. I'm trying to build up LP on it slowly by giving it more pairings with NVIDIA and stuff as well.

The RWA stuff is sick, and it's very cool because that's something that's easily understandable for a lot of these institutions and institutional capital. I think that's a piece that's definitely been missed with crypto.

If we can get people excited about that, I think we're going to see a lot more money come on-chain, which I think is going to be really cool.

We talk a lot on the show about how bad the rep crypto has and the connotation around that word and around that label.

33. Toad And Bagwork

And obviously, NFTs are debatably even worse and more cringe as a term and a word. How do we cure that? In this example, I feel like the answer is going beyond speculation and getting to what you guys are talking about right now. Ultimately, what is it? It’s utility coming back and betting on teams that are building real products—things that actually have value and scalability outside of speculation and attention. I don’t know. I’ll let you answer: How do we fix that? How do we make NFTs cool again? I fucking hate even saying that out loud. It sounds gross to say it.

Well, I think you try to look at crypto like a little Silicon Valley, where you get these early startup financial technologies. If you start lifting those to the very top, and those are the things that get listed on centralized exchanges, then the users and consumers coming through are normies who still have upside, essentially, because they’re businesses or technologies. For example, I think it’s difficult when we push up a lot of the things that maybe shouldn’t be at the top, and then those people buy in and everything dumps on them.

The CEX-listing moment has been a top signal, and that has to change, because that’s the top of our funnel as well. So that’s problematic. And then, for the naming of the asset itself, I kind of wish cryptocurrency was called smart currency, for example, just because of the programmatic nature of it.

A rebrand. It needs a rebrand. 100%. 100%. We spoke on the phone, and I told you the only other place I’ve seen the prefix “crypto” used is in cryptozoology, and that’s the study of animals like Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster and stuff. It literally means “hidden” or “fake.” It has a bad connotation to the word.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Money. I like that. Smart currency, smart money. It’s all kind of blending itself together, right?

But this is a cool example. I mean, listen, for what it’s worth, Z’s talking to me because we did the show local. He’s in Tokyo now, but I’m based in LA, and he was in LA last week. He’s on my couch, and he’s kind of going through this and reading something about it, just thinking about it—thinking through the stockbroker stuff in real time. And I got that feeling inside me that I’ve had in previous moments in my life where I’m like, “Dude, I gotta go scoop one of these things.”

I’m finding myself buying NFTs in 2026, and then I’m brushing my teeth later, like, “Why did I just do that? What about this made me do that?” I don’t know. It’s got to mean something, right? The only 2 times that ever sparked up that feeling inside me were originally when I was buying CryptoPunks at the end of 2020 and then again when I was buying Miladys in late 2023. You know what I’m saying? Both of these things happened before shit really got fucking crazy.

But that’s how I’ve been explaining it to my friends. I have 2 of these things. They’re staked, and I’m making passive income. You know what I mean? It’s just fun. It’s like $500 has just appeared in my wallet, and it’s Apple and NVIDIA, et cetera. So I think it’s a cool little starter pack and place to begin your journey if you want broad exposure, whether it’s to Robinhood or just trading in general. That’s at least my interpretation of it. That’s how it resonated with me. It’s got to mean something, right?

34. Are Meme Coins Net Negative

You guys are nuts. Guys like you are my target audience. I would love a bunch of Stonk Brokers to be guys like you who have streams, who do X Spaces and stuff. Then, when special projects come through, they’re on your radar early. We get these unicorn technologies, and we kind of fast-track them to the top if they’re quality, essentially. I’m sure there’ll be things that are good or bad, but I would love for Stonk Brokers long-term to be a thing. Every cycle, you know you’re going to get 3 or 4 blue chips coming out of the Stonk Brokers ecosystem.

I mean, my first thing, by the way—obviously, after trading and purchasing it, you should probably go in and peel back the layers and do your research before you fucking put money into anything. That’s not how I always operate, but after buying these NFTs, I’m doing the research, searching, and looking at it. The first thing I thought of, I’m texting Z like, “Yo, you gotta figure out how to get Black Bull incorporated in this.” These are some really cool ideas that this guy and this product have that you could pull over. There’s just a lot of overlap, and it’s along the same lines. It’s just community curation at the end of the day.

Yeah. Yeah. We’ll definitely figure out ways to collab. We’ll talk after, but I agree. It’s like—I was speaking on this the other day with somebody. There are so many coins launched on-chain now, and a lot of people have been complaining, like, “Oh, there are too many coins. This is the reason nothing goes up. There are too many options for people to choose from.”

I actually don’t think that’s the case. I think what the case is, is that you just need more people building cool shit, and you just need to highlight the people who are building cool shit. Then you focus on those assets instead of the fucking hundreds of thousands of coins that are launching. But there has to be a correct process for doing that, and that’s the more difficult thing that I think people are going to try to solve.

Last cycle was like anybody could launch a coin, but none of the liquidity was locked. So a lot of people would buy these coins and get rugged. Pump.fun solved that problem. Every coin that launches on our platform has locked liquidity. You may be dealing with the issue of devs and bundlers and all that, but that solved a big problem—a big pain point—for people and made it super easy for everybody to launch a coin. Now it’s, “How do we solve the curation and innovation aspect?”

Right, yeah. No, I agree. We’re fully aligned, bro. We’re fully aligned. It makes a ton of sense.

Sharp guy, man. This is really cool stuff, and it’s fun, too. It’s fun.

I appreciate it.

Cool. I think we have Poor Goat ready in the green room, and Simple, it’s been a fucking pleasure having you. I’m looking forward to seeing what you do next and what the next steps are.

I have 1 question. I don’t know if you can share, but I know you’ve launched—or not launched, but I’ve seen some projects that have come out in the Stock Brokers ecosystem. Do you have any that you’re most excited about, or that are your favorites?

35. The VC Token Basket Is Down 98

Yeah, I think that depends a lot on those teams, because they’re kind of independent developers. What I try to do is structure their token infrastructure and their revenue model the best I can based on my experience, to give them a high ceiling. So as long as I give them a high ceiling, I think they all actually have really good potential upside. I think they’re all interesting, and the devs are already starting to tease, but it’s very much a white-paper era. Think about this like DeFi Summer meets NFT season.

Oh, that’s fire. Mix in some real-world assets. I like that, too. This is good stuff. Thank you, brother. I mean, this is thick, dense material, and it’s a very complicated protocol product, but I think you’ve done a really good job of explaining it. If I can understand it, I mean, yeah.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, bro. We appreciate you coming on.

As humans, you know, we make better and better tools with time, and crypto is no different. You start with the hammer, and eventually you’re building airplanes. An airplane is complicated, but it’s a much more impressive tool than a hammer, right?

Amen, brother. Exactly.

Amen. I’ll show you guys a hammer on stream later after Simple. I’m just kidding. I’m sorry.

Wait, let me—[laughter]—let me stay on stream for that part, then. Awesome.

Simple, thank you so much, brother. You’re the GOAT. Appreciate having you on. We’ll definitely have you on again in the future. Stay in touch. We’ll hit you after the stream. Thank you, bro. Peace.

Thanks.

Chat, let’s get some W’s for Simple in the chat. That was great, dude.

I feel like that was the best explanation I've heard so far. I watched his interview on Rasmer's stream, I've watched some people talk about it, and I've obviously read some tweets, but that felt good.

Yeah. It's really easy to understand. I think it's cool.

Production, can I get a water before we bring on Poor Goat so I can properly glaze him and blow some bubbles? Cool.

Without further ado, this is a long-awaited and much-asked-for guest. This must be our most-asked-for guest, which is crazy to me. It's so interesting to me. I asked production for the metrics on this: 3 weeks ago, our chat was spamming this ticker. Okay, I'll speak for myself—it was the first place I saw it. Z, was the chat the first place you saw KATE?

No, I saw it on the timeline, I'm not going to lie. I saw it on the timeline from Go.

It must have been that day or the day before, though, right? I think it was around a $3 million market cap coin when I first saw it in the chat, and we don't see a ton of tickers in the chat. I feel like our chat is usually pretty good about that, but you guys were fucking spamming KATE.

The total number of messages was 35,980, which is absolutely absurd. There were 1,600 to 1,800 individual messages mentioning the ticker. It was insane—5% of our entire chat was KATE that day. I kind of ignored it again. It's tricky. But then I went home and saw this thing going crazy, saw this whole Poor Goat arc. Obviously, it has deep ties to you, Ansem, and the lore. I would love to hear you guys, from both your perspectives, walk through the birth of Poor Goat.

This fucking thing has motion, bro. He's a little mini-Z.

He does have motion, bro. I love Poor Goat. He's cool. He's dope.

Okay, so without further ado, let's get this sexy fuck in here.

Yo.

Dude, your PFP is iconic.

Make America Bullish Again. Facts. We're bringing the bull market back.

Big black bulls in one frame. Who would have thought?

Who would have thought? What's up, guys? How are we doing?

Amazing, amazing. You heard us introduce you. I don't know a ton about you.

Too kind.

Yeah, I don't know a ton about you. Do you want to do yourself the justice of introducing yourself to our chat or communities?

Yeah, for sure. I've been in the space for a bit of time. I mean, never full-time in crypto, but I've always loved it and always had fun on-chain. Obviously, I saw—I wasn't trading a ton, honestly. I saw Ansem coming back into the market all bullish, which encouraged me to start looking again.

I saw this Ansem coin, the OG one, and I was like, “Fuck it, man. This could be sick.” So I was pushing it with a buddy really hard for 3 weeks, and that's how this whole story started. Ansem obviously chose—or went with—the one where he had the supply control and airdropped me some. I saw the vision very early on of what it was going to be, and obviously did not sell any.

I would say prior to that, I probably had around 2,200 followers or something. People have known me in the space, but not widely; it's been my close circle. I never really spent a ton of time trying to build up my Twitter persona or anything. Then, obviously, this FOMO situation, because I held all that Ansem publicly, really blew it up.

So it all happened very naturally and organically, and fair to say, unwanted? This wasn't part of your goal or mission at all.

No, I didn't even know, bro. Before—no idea, bro. I just saw the match going on on the timeline, and I was trying to figure out what to do when I posted my Pump.fun profile for the second time. I was like, “Well, I can't really do anything with one of these. One of these is higher. Help me figure out how to make as many people whole as possible,” and I just did it in the best way I thought.

But yeah, it's very organic and very random.

It sounds a lot like you, Z, in your come-up. Again, it's kind of what you've been experiencing in terms of growth and motion. He's experiencing it on a smaller level, but it's still a very, very real level. It's just interesting, and it's cool to hear it straight from your mouth, too.

You saw Z getting bullish about the market, and that's what prompted you to hop on. Now you're holding millions of dollars' worth of positions publicly on an app like FOMO. It's absolutely insane. Your username is Poor Goat, and your avatar's ridiculous. It's what we all love about crypto and the culture here.

I mean, dude, what's next? What are you doing now? Were you a millionaire before this?

36. The Watch And Earn Obsession

I mean, this is the thing, and part of the reason I was able to hold my position on Ansem to whatever I held it to and back where it is now—and I'm still holding and very bullish—is that I have a real career in traditional finance. I work every day and—

And you still have your job?

Yeah. Oh yeah, a little bit. It's a little bit dumb. I love my job. It's super fun, and it's what I love. So when this crypto stuff blew up, it's like, I'm not going to quit my job, but I can do them both at the same time.

I'm in real estate specifically, so my goal eventually is to combine them—use crypto money to buy my own real estate and do that whole ordeal. So yeah, I still have my job. The last month and a half has been fucking crazy, obviously. It kind of started to spiral with the whole FOMO thing.

I was growing followers faster than I could even count. Every day I'd wake up and there'd be 10,000 more followers. Since it was also new to me, I was still reading all my DMs and all my DM requests. I didn't have a ton of X followers right off the bat, but all these followers were—I’m serious—new to crypto, and they were like, “Dude, how do you have 7 figures in your wallet?”

So cool, bro. It's so cool.

“Can you mentor me? This is sick.” And I'm like, “There's something here.” We haven't seen new traders really experimenting in the space in a while, in my opinion. I noticed that it was happening through FOMO, and they were doing a lot of this on TikTok and through different marketing to bring in these new people.

That's what got me to really step up and take over this KATE project. I saw this vision of all this retail coming in, and we're not going to keep them if every project they buy just gets rugged. So, yeah, I was like, “Fuck it.” I don't really have much to gain from taking it over, in the sense that my wallet is public and, obviously, I can't really sell.

By the way, we've all been there. I can relate heavily. You know what I mean? We've all been there. It's pretty miserable. You're being very modest about it, but it's a pretty miserable, daunting thing to do when, in your example, it's rooted in a passion for this—seeing potential in curating a community and an audience and developing some real motion.

I agree, by the way. I think you're just a success story, right? These people are flocking to you, finding you on FOMO, which also just blows my fucking mind. They're seeing it happen in real time: “Hey, this is a guy just like me who just got rich publicly on-chain, is a multimillionaire because he made a couple of right moves and aligned with the right communities. I have to do this.”

37. The Trade Tailing Nobody Prices In

I have to give you flowers and KATE flowers again. I haven't done a ton of digging on this. I have no aligned interest in saying this, but this community is as rabid as I've ever seen. They're showing up in our chats, I see them all over the place, I see them replying to everything, and they are fucking everywhere. You know what I mean? So do you want to just walk us through that? Why do you think that is? Because I don't see—

Yeah. Well, I can kind of give you the story of how this came to be, but—

I'm not seeing this with Cash Cat. I'm not seeing people spam in waves, in droves, in a unified, collective effort to go do this. I'm not seeing that.

This is—I'm telling you—old-school vibes. This is what makes me so excited and makes it so much fun to do, even though the other day the entire timeline was just shitting on me. Basically, what happened is someone launched this coin. I hadn't been trading a lot because my FOMO wallet got a lot of motion, and I'm not someone who's going to buy something and then just dump on my copy traders.

I kind of lost the art of how to trade with this new motion, so I took a step back and really stopped trading. I was just fucking around at my girlfriend's house on a Sunday, and I saw this KATE coin at around $150,000.

I was like, “Fuck, I’m gonna buy this. This is funny.” I didn’t even really look into the lore or anything, but I guess the Doge owner adopted a cat, and then there were 3 separate PvPs that popped up. There was an Ethereum OG one, a BNB one, and one where the narrative was, “This belongs on Robinhood,” or, “This one deserves to give fees to this charity.”

I was like, “Fuck this.” So I just started using the motion on FOMO that I have, because I can click a button on FOMO right now and broadcast to 280,000 people, which is what I did for this. I just threw it up on this podcast and was like, “Pull up.” But I realized there was something really unique here.

So I tweeted on the timeline. I was like, “Wake up. The next billion-dollar cat just arrived on Solana.” And Ansem, you randomly responded. You were like, “What do you mean?” That solidified it for me. This thing went to $10 million in about 6 hours.

I was just mind-blown. I didn’t even know what to do, so I was like, “All right, this is sick.” I wasn’t going to sell because I couldn’t, or else it seemed like everyone would sell. So I just rode it, and then the next morning I woke up and saw it down at around $3 million.

We had a lot of holders—20,000 holders in 24 hours. I realized a lot of these people were new to crypto, so I was like, “All right, if I let this thing just bleed out to 0, this is going to be bad.” But I was also thinking, “Do I really want to step up and take over a project right now?” I know what it’s like. I know what I’m signing up for, and I really don’t have much to gain.

So I was kind of just sitting there, and I posted on FOMO, “Hey, does anyone want to CTO this? I have 3% of the supply. I’m happy to give out 1% or 2% if a real, professional team wants to run it.” Nobody really stepped up, but 3 people DM’d me and were like, “Yo, I’m in it. I’m down to run it. I’m down to help you out.” So I was kind of just like, “Whatever. I’m gonna run it.”

We were at $3 million for about 2 days, and I was DMing everyone because, as you can imagine, I can get in contact with most people right now just because of the come-up I’ve had. Most people will respond to my DMs or at least read them.

That’s crazy, by the way. We were just talking about how I feel like people are sleeping on FOMO, or not really pricing in properly the fact that it’s a social media app as well. It’s a conversation tool and a social tool.

People are obviously super focused on and putting emphasis on the fees and how much money they make—the trading stuff, obviously—but this part of it is really next-level for me. It’s really cool to see somebody in this beginning stage, because it sounds like you’re figuring it out as you go, which I think is totally fine and cool as long as your intent is good and pure.

It sounds like yours is totally in line with being a man of the culture, enjoying the culture part of it, and the idea of onboarding people, curating a community, moving people, and educating people. If I’m getting all that right, it’s a cool story.

Yeah. And I think a unique piece is—I’m not even kidding—I can almost ratio anyone on Twitter right now by just commenting on their post and blasting it on FOMO. We do it. We ratio Dogecoin. We ratioed all these things, because I’ll literally ratio McDonald’s. I’ll just post a comment.

So it’s kind of like a social experiment in a sense, but it’s garnered all this retail attention because we ran up to $80 million in about 4 days or whatever, or 5 days. And the snowball effect, as you can imagine, when you have new traders, everyone’s saying, “Holy shit, I’m up 100% on this cat coin. This is the next Doge,” and telling 10 friends.

We’re at 70,000 holders right now, and we’re down 70%, or whatever.

I love you speaking from the perspective of, like, “Crazy 70,000.”

Dude, it’s no joke. And I didn’t airdrop anyone. It’s real. It’s real.

Sick.

It’s become my persona at this point, and I love it, dude. There are ups and downs, as you guys know, but—

You guys—I’m saying “you guys,” and it’s cool that you’re saying “we, we, we.” You’ve properly CTOed this thing clearly, and you’re spearheading it. But it was on a rocket ship, and then something happened.

We were at WSOP, and there was this big sell-off and this big, crazy candle. What happened there? Just the original—

I don’t know, to be honest. I know, obviously, FOMO went down during all that, so they were looking into it. There are a lot of people who have looked on-chain into it. There was just a series of sell-offs, and I still, to this day, haven’t gotten a real answer for what happened.

But at the end of the day, I’m not some blockchain wizard, so I’m not going to spend 48 hours trying to learn the ins and outs of everything to figure out what happened. The way I look at it, it’s behind us.

A couple of the people who are involved with me in this project now have done very deep dives on the holdings. The crazy thing is, most of the holdings are public right now. They’re mostly held on FOMO. We have 45,000 holders on FOMO, and we have whatever on Pump.fun, so these are public holdings.

It’s a lot harder to sell a coin when you’re going to have the FOMO thesis looked at and get ripped apart by 50 people when you sell. So it’s really a social experiment in a lot of ways.

I think it was just the right time, the right place, and taking advantage of the attention I had on me and on the memecoin industry right now. But yeah, I have big visions. I am not going anywhere. I think this is fun. This is my pet project now, and I really do believe we could pull it off.

You look up cat on TikTok—it’s everywhere.

Yeah. People are handing out business cards in real life. It’s crazy.

The social layer and this new generation coming in and telling us what they want to engage with is changing the entire landscape. Again, obviously, it’s cool to hear it from your point of view, but I honestly think it’s as interesting from Z’s point of view.

38. How Dudas Ended Up Backing Bullpen

0xSimpleFarmer, from your point of view, please tell us the story of Poor Goat, how it relates back to Ansem and BlackRock, and how you feel about all this.

Yeah. Originally, I was like—it started when I bought some memecoins on Solana for the first time in over a year, and everybody just started spazzing on me, like, “Bro, what memes are you talking about?” and all this stuff.

The reason I said that is because I wanted to see which memes on-chain people were actually interested in. I had bought some; I just didn’t tell people which ones I had bought yet. So that’s how it started. It was kind of like a heat check, or a test for what the trenches were good for.

But I knew—I was very confident—that Solana was, if not at the bottom, close to a bottom. Like, okay, the bottom’s here. There’s going to be some stuff on-chain that pops off and does really well.

It’s the same thing I’ve seen every single cycle in crypto. When Solana and the majors do well, there are going to be coins on-chain that people rally around that also do well. When people want to bid smaller-market-cap stuff as beta to the majors that are running, and there’s a ton of people with a shit ton of capital and cash on-chain, they’re going to bid these coins. So I thought, “Okay, I’m going to start looking for whatever memes I think are going to do well.”

As I was doing that, people were like, “We’re going to figure out which coins he’s buying. We’re going to track his wallets and follow him.” One of the wallets people were tracking was this dude, AVA Wallet. Really good trader, by the way.

He tailed me on a lot of trades last cycle, and people thought it was me because he was so aligned on all the trades I was taking. He made a good amount of money last cycle on WIF. He made a lot of money, I think, on Fartcoin. I think he has a $10 million-plus P&L from last cycle, the dude.

So people were like, “Yo, this is Ansem’s wallet.” Then they started sending me coins on Pump.fun with all these different tickers and stuff. There were 2 Ansem coins.

When I posted the pump, I didn’t endorse any of them. When I posted the pump the second time, people obviously ripped one of them super high. I was like, “Well, if I don’t say anything, this is obviously going to bleed back to 0.”

My original intent was just to give back some of the creator fees that I got to people. But what I had seen on the timeline the past week was some of the people posting or trying to get me to endorse certain things. Then, when that day happened, I saw people who had been bag-working and doing all these things.

It was a conflict of interest because, obviously, there were 2. One, I had a lot more supply control on, and I didn’t know who had supply control on the other one. If I talk about something and I get rugged immediately, that’s obviously going to hurt my reputation a lot.

I can protect my reputation if I have supply control or something, which makes a ton more sense. I was like, “Okay, this makes sense. I’m going to give some supply to the people who bought the original.” Poor Goat was one of the people who was in the original and had been bag-holding and doing all the things for us. I was like, “Okay, this is cool.”

Let me help some of these people out. And then I airdropped a shit ton of the supply to basically all the OG holders later, also. But yeah, it's been cool to see.

I think it's really good that Poor Goat has a job outside of crypto because it allows you not to need to fucking overtrade the shit on-chain. On-chain, when you're trading, it should be 0 or 100x, and then Solana and majors you can trade more aggressively on shorter time frames. But for the on-chain stuff where it's super low-cap, the social proof of it means a lot more than trying to make a small amount of money early on.

I think he's realized that. If you have income coming in from other places, you can be a lot more strategic with how you operate with a public persona on-chain, which I think is really smart. So I think continuing to do that is cool. Yeah, it's been cool to see.

It kind of reminds me of last cycle. I blew up because I was talking about WIF a ton and BONK a ton, and I hit on BONK and smashed that. Then WIF popped up, and then I hit on WIF. People kind of saw me do both of those things, and that's obviously why now we know that if this dude's talking about something on-chain, he's going to be able to attract a lot of attention to it.

We trust what he says on markets generally, so it's going to do well. I think he could be one of those people where it's like, “Yo, this dude hit on this. He hit on ANOM, and it's still holding.” So I'm still doing well with that. It's like, okay, we're going to trust his opinion and his ability to influence and generate attention on other things, too. That's kind of what's happening.

It's cool. I need to highlight and add emphasis to the fact that we talked earlier in the main show about the average Ansem viewer being likely the richest audience in the demographic and a high-IQ audience. He's just—this is proof, right? He's like, “Well, I saw 0xSimpleFarmer talking about it.” Clearly, you were following him, a fan, and engaged with what 0xSimpleFarmer was saying before this all happened. Safe to say, right?

It prompted you to get back on-chain. You were, like you said in your own words, able to hold ANOM to [inaudible]. Your current position in memecoins is multiple millions of dollars. You can't do that unless you're already successful. You're already a successful guy. You're making money. You're probably already in the 1%.

It's one thing to have motion and to have—because that's what you're experiencing now. You're experiencing people who are new to this, whatever. It's just layers to it. It's cool to see an example of this going the complete right way in the shape of ANOM today, and then you're just kind of beginning this. Is there any advice you have for him directly on how to navigate this? [laughter]

39. 0xSimpleFarmer Joins

I got a lot of advice, bro. I got a lot of advice, bro. I will tell you one thing. I think, honestly, that being anonymous is good. I wouldn't necessarily say you need to go public if you want to keep your job outside of crypto anyway.

If you're public and your main thing is crypto, it kind of makes sense because obviously you can do a lot of things with your public persona. But if you have a job that you want to keep and that's your main moneymaker, there aren't a ton of advantages to being public and talking about a coin where people are going to be mad at you if it goes down.

At some point, shit is going to go down. Whether it goes up a lot first or not, at some point it's going to go down, and people are going to be down money because they saw you talking about it. That is going to be annoying to deal with in general.

I will tell you very directly, very clearly: there are going to be a ton of people who are just mad. “Oh, you scammed. You did.” It doesn't even matter if you're the one selling or impacting the market at all. It's purely the fact that you talked about something that went up and then went down. That happens with CT and Crypto Twitter in general, so you have to be aware.

40. How Stonk Broker Actually Works

Don't take that to heart, because it's obviously not a reflection on you or something that's in your power. Other advice I would give is, yeah, man, have fun. Have fun with it, bro. It's definitely fun to have a community of people rally around you.

You see my account now. A lot of it is because all my takes were public. I just had a lot of my trades public. I made money on SLOP. I made money on HYPE. I made money on these other things. I made money on-chain, and people saw me do it. Now they respect me and trust me for X, Y, and Z.

It definitely scales, and you can do a lot with it going forward if you're able to command attention online. Even if you aren't a public individual, if you're anonymous, the ability to command attention is worth a lot of value. I would think about it in that way, too. You don't necessarily need to make money on the trade. You can make money growing your account also, which I think you're probably aware of. That would be my advice, too.

Yeah, I've realized that. That's why, even though I don't really have much financially to gain if this coin goes to a billion because my wallet's sitting in a public account that anyone can watch and probably will kill the chart, I just know what happens. If I pull off what I want to pull off, there's going to be a lot more retail between ANOM and K. That's bringing new eyes to crypto, and I think that is worth infinitely more in the long run for me than making a couple dollars off a trade.

I realized that really early on, fortunately. But yeah, man, it's the beginning. It's going to be a long road, and I'm excited. Every now and then I'll forget that my tweets get a couple thousand views in seconds now, so I'll just throw up some shit and be like, “Shit, I don't know.”

Brother, Z has live-tweeted his real thoughts in real time since I started following him. It's the method, brother. Lean into it. Fuck it. Embrace it.

It. Embrace it. [laughter]

Yeah.

Poor Goat, do you have any advice for the people watching here who found crypto or found this show via you?

41. A Robinhood Beta Play

Yeah, yeah. We do a lot of Spaces and VCs within our community, and a lot of people ask very basic questions because they're new to trading. They're like, “How do I find a coin at $50,000?”

My biggest advice across the board is that you're trading against professionals who have been in the space for 3, 4, or 5 years, bundling coins and doing everything in between. I would just avoid new pairs if you want to trade and make money, or do it with very little money that doesn't affect you. That way, you can learn, and then, if you get good at it, you can up your bankroll.

Do you think these apps, like FOMO, should offer some kind of demo feature where you can speculate with a fake balance?

Honestly, that's a great idea. They should. They do that on some traditional trading websites, right? I think that's a really good idea.

It's a hard game, right? If it were easy, everyone would be rich. It's naturally just not an easy game, and there are a lot of skilled people at it who have every tool, too. Also, you have to find the right people to trust.

I tell these guys who get into our community that it's a unique community. Not every community has 70,000 holders with 10,000 people in a VC or a Telegram who are showing up every day and dropping off posters at 7-Eleven. That's not normal, so you have to find it.

I will say this, too, just from personal experience: you have to find your edge. If you go in with no sort of edge or angle, then you're just fucked. You're going to lose because there are people with an edge and experience, and you're going to get fucking smashed. I'll say this again, just speaking from my own experience: early on, in NFTs, a huge part of the draw for me was the community aspect of it—joining these communities and group chats and learning.

That’s what I found to be my edge. I just feel like being part of a rabid, very active, tight-knit community is an edge in and of itself. It's really the only edge you can find as a brand-new trader or somebody who's interested in these markets. Do you guys agree with that?

100%.

Yeah, yeah. Just have fun with it, right? I hate to say it, but if you're trading with money that you need to pay your bill at the end of the week, and you're going to get pushed out of a position because you're down 30% and you don't have the money to pay for what you need to pay for, that's how you get wrecked.

I'm in a very fortunate situation where I have a job and income coming in, so it's not how I'm paying my bills. That's what's unique about me, and I think a breath of fresh air for some people who have just been getting completely scammed.

Setting rules for yourself and, like—

It happens to the best of us, by the way, though. Leopold just got forced out of a fucking multi-million-dollar position, right? This guy was forced to—it's about habit and structure, how you structure things.

Set guardrails, set rules. Don't put yourself in a compromising or dangerous position. Go low risk early on, if at all. Learn as much as you can.

Watch shows like these. Follow accounts like 0xSimpleFarmer and Poor Goat. I think we've said it time and time again.

100%.

Well, cool, bro. It was really fucking cool to have you. I follow you guys.

And I'm eager to see where the journey goes. If you ever have a moment where you want to dox, I'm obsessed with that—the content and the attention. It's been fun talking to you. I've been engaged, so I feel like more people definitely could be.

Yeah, reach out anytime, brother. You're a friend of the show, for sure.

Appreciate it, guys. Thanks for having me on.

God bless, brother.

Later, bro.

I know you guys have probably already said it 300 times in this stream, but W Poor Goat in the chat. Thank you for coming on. That was some shit that I was genuinely eager and interested to learn more about, because it's just like, that's the shit. Stories like his are a movie.

Yeah, he's cool. I never talked to him, bro. He's cool.

See, how crazy that is is crazy to me as well. It speaks to what the fuck this industry is. It's so insane. You're such an important part of not even his lore or his public persona, but his life, bro. You changed the fucking guy's life. You changed the course of his whole life—his bloodline.

His bloodline is going to be different because of you. It's crazy.

It is pretty crazy.

It's insane.

Damn. I never thought of it like that, actually. Pretty crazy.

42. RWAs And Institutional Onramps

It's all I can think about in regards to this shit. It's so fucking crazy. Chat is firing. This community is nuts. But yeah, that's all we got for the main show. We had 3 interviews planned. Brad is in the green room, and this is a guy that 0xSimpleFarmer is going to interview and kind of go back and forth with. He's been waiting.

The main show and main program are over now at 4. I'm going to stay live on Twitch and Twitter and kind of let 0xSimpleFarmer do the postshow with Brad.

I don't know, man.

No, bro. This was lit. I literally am on zero, as you know. Zero prep for this. Literally zero.

Zero. Zero. I haven't been on one.

43. How Do We Make NFTs Cool Again

By the way, I'm going to Tokyo tomorrow. We were literally Googling time zones and stuff in real time. 0xSimpleFarmer was like, "Oh, fuck, we're running the show at 4:00 a.m. It's insane."

Bro. Look at me. I'm sleepy as fuck.

You always come through, though, brother. You always come through. And listen, chat, for what it's worth, 0xSimpleFarmer and I were very, very busy and had so much going on in our own personal lives before we came together and did this show.

We have turned so much focus and so much attention to this because we feel like it's that important and that worthwhile. So that's what you guys mean to us. Thank you guys for being here, and the chat's been great. The guests were awesome this week. Twitter's been great.

44. Call It Smart Currency

I feel blessed. I feel incredibly—gratitude is the word. Gratitude is the word of the day, folks. Chat, everybody who won an airdrop, congratulations. Um, and without further ado, I will pass it off to you guys. Let me do a little outro on the main the main show. Guys, that was Market Bubble episode 15. I am out. I'm going to I'm going to leave my Twitch and my Twitter live for Z. um he does a post show where he goes a little bit more deep technical analysis, markets, trading, etc. Um he has a really special guest coming on with him for that segment. So, thank you guys so much. We will see you next Thursday. W's in the [__] chat. Thank you so