I kind of thought it almost more like, like the end of Apocalypto when it's like Jaguar Paw and whoever, they're having their little battle on the cliff and then in the background, the Spanish show up and it's like, all right, daddy's home.
And I feel like that's about that where we have this weird woopolistic semi not really top tier competition and staplecoins in crypto and now it's like all the big players.
Players are here and it's serious now.
Not a dividend.
It's a tale of Tuuan.
Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways.
Um, unnamed trading firms who are very involved.
I like that E is the ultimate p.
D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem.
Hello everybody.
Welcome to Chopping Block.
Every couple of weeks, 4 of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day.
So quick intro is first you got Tom, the Dei Maven and master of memes.
Hello everyone.
Next, you got to ruin the Giga Brain and Grand Puba at Gauntlet.
Yo, Joining us today, we've got Jordi, trading titan at Cellini.
Hey, Jordi.
Trading Titan.
Thank you for the amazing intro.
I think we've tried to schedule this many times over the years, but this is my first chopping block appearance, so I'm excited.
I know it's been, uh, we, we wanted to bring you at the moment of Max Pay, and I'm glad we were able to make that happen.
So, uh, I received that hypeman of Dragonfly.
We're early stage investors in crypto, but want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice.
Please see chopping block.
XYZ for more disclosures.
So, speaking of Max Payne, actually, I wanted to talk about something just at the top of the show that Tyrone and I were talking about off camera, is that, um, so I, I, I had a tweet a couple of days ago where I was calling out some VC for dunking on a founder.
And uh I sort of said like, hey, this guy is being very unfair to a founder who's paying himself a salary and is winding down his company.
And Tarro quote tweeted me, and he said something along the lines of, this guy is like a low rent DI VC who's hawking all these DI shit coins.
He deserves to get pilloried.
And apparently it was unclear if you were talking about me or if you were talking about the person I was quoting.
I did and I ran into.
You did put OP.
I, I ran into a couple of people here at this event, at this Goldman event in London, who were like, what's going on between you and Tyrone?
Why is Tyrone, like, what's, what is, why is there a beef going on between the two of you?
What happened?
So to explain the beef.
There is no beef.
I was really just dunking on the guy that Haib was quoting because that guy during the like, very tiny, we should name who that guy is.
That guy is the founder of Moon Rock Capital, Simon Dedek, I believe is his name.
It was really shilling a lot of Ponzi Deci coins that were just like, stake your DI coin and maybe 1% of these assets will maybe go to scientists, the other 99% go to pay inflation for anyone staking.
It was like real low level Ponzi stuff and like.
I don't know, it's sort of weird to me that the guy who's shilling the DI coins is like getting mad about someone getting paid.
I'm like, what do you think is going to happen in science investment that you're going to make, you're always going to have an ROI that's positive.
99% of science investment goes to zero.
So, I think that was more my slightly inebriated schadenfreude when I wrote that tweet.
OK, I see.
All right, well, I'm glad to know crusade continues.
Yeah, I'm glad to know that I was only collateral damage in your, no, no, sorry, so there is no beef.
I was more pointing out that Hassib was.
Choosing a a a worthy victim.
OK, good to know.
My targeting algorithms are, are, um, Tarro approved.
But OK, there's, there's other pain going on beyond just, uh, the personal pain of DSI, which is what's happening in the markets right now.
The big story is around strategy, also known as micro strategy.
If you recall last time on the show, we talked about their, Preferreds, which are called stretch, were significantly impaired.
They were targeting a $100 price target and they fell all the way down into the 80 cents territory, which seemed to belie an enormous amount of weakness and incredulity in the strength of the capital stack that Michael S Saylor has built up over the time that he's building micro strategy.
Uh, it hit a low of $71 last week, relative to the $100 that it was historically trading at.
MSTR is down about 30% in 5 days, currently sitting in the, you know, low $80 range, um, and it's -82% from July 2025 peak.
The MNAV is now well below 1%, meaning that it's now trading below the value of all the Bitcoin held in reserve.
So it's a very, very challenged time for micro strategy.
Now, in response to all of this, Sailor came out and announced a new framework called the digital Credit capital framework.
And his whole thing, which he's he's said many times now is that look, micro strategy, we're not a debt, that's not how he positions himself.
He is a digital credit company.
His job is to issue very attractive forms of digital credit and do this kind of capital transformation from risky Bitcoin into this beautiful uh menagerie of financial assets that are backed by Bitcoin.
And so he's now announced that he's going to do a large cushion, a larger cash cushion than he currently has, 2.5 billion that he's going to be setting aside for just dividends and interest, which should give them roughly 18 months of dividend coverage.
Uh, that's, you know, significantly up where they are today, which is closer to, uh, 12 months.
Uh, he's announced that he's increasing the dividend for stretch.
It was previously at 11.5%.
It's now gone up to 12%.
These usually he's hiking at like, you know, 25 basis points, 50 basis points.
Um, so this is, this is significant, you know, you, you think of it like the Fed, this is significant jumbo.
Uh, a jumbo raise in the dividend rate for Stretch.
And he's also announced that he's going to start buying back some of the original, some of the other preferreds up to a billion dollars.
Uh, Stretch is going to take priority in these buybacks, as well as MSTR buybacks when he feels like it's trading below par, up to another $1 billion there.
And he announced that he may sell Bitcoin in order to fund this if necessary.
And something on the order of about 2.5% of holdings are up for sale potentially, if he needs to monetize some of the Bitcoin.
Now, on the announcement of this, Bitcoin, uh, he announced this yesterday.
Bitcoin actually seemed to hold pretty well, uh, yesterday.
It was, it was roughly in the 600 neighborhood, didn't, didn't weaken too much.
He apparently sold about 1.15 billion via MSTR, uh, ATM sales.
So he's selling common shares in order to recapitalize and, and, uh, build up his war chest.
And we saw a significant recovery in stretch stre.
Went from $75 up to $84 yesterday, an increase of about 12%.
Uh, the yield obviously has, has gone up to roughly 14% on that math, and MSTR went up 12% yesterday.
Now, MSTR has weakened today, but stretch is actually looking pretty strong today.
Uh, Bitcoin is back below 58, or sorry, sitting around 580.
So, market's weak.
It's jittery, but we can see in the stretch prices that there's some confidence in this new framework that Sailor has proposed and the fact that he's now buoyed his cash reserves, which should allow him some leeway in being able to hold up this capital structure and still use the the the chain of preferreds that he's put together.
So, Jordy, you announced that you thought this was a masterful stroke in this whole digital credit framework.
Give us your take, uh, especially now seeing the market weaken a little bit on the MSDR side with stretch still holding up pretty strong.
I mean, uh, I, I've never been an MSTR holder, so in terms of why people buy that instead of Bitcoin.
They're kind of betting on his alchemy to, I guess, compound the Bitcoin per share, you know, these metrics that he's targeting.
Obviously, the most important thing is Bitcoin doesn't go to zero because then his whole balance sheet is worthless.
And then all the other products that he's kind of built up on the balance sheet also don't matter and the stock doesn't matter.
I think what he's done is sort of one, like, get a huge amount of cash suddenly, which, Again, he's had to sell a lot of stock and I'm not one of the stockholders.
So you know, I don't, I guess that that's what those guys signed up for, right?
Like sometimes he has to dump on them in order to keep, keep the game going.
So that was quite a large amount.
The previous month, previous weeks, he was doing sort of 3, 400.
This was over a billion.
He's kind of made a statement that he's going to protect stretch, which I think is the right decision to do because ultimately, You know, he's put so much of the, of the kind of flywheel into this stablecoin.
I never thought stretch was a bad idea, even though, you know, people are dunking on him for using clouded, make no mistakes, you know, which version of chat GBT are you using?
I think ultimately, it's similar to other instruments that we've seen.
It's even, In essence, it's a long term bet that Bitcoin will grow at more than 11, 12%, which I don't think is a bad bet.
And as long as he's shored up where he doesn't get liquidated before that binary outcome plays out, or you know, you need, you need at least a few years to kind of see that long term rate is going to hold or not.
Honestly, I thought the whole thing was overblown in terms of the Luna thing because Luna was worthless and you could print infinite Luna, while Bitcoin, you cannot print any Bitcoin.
And at the end of the day.
Time and time again, there are always people around the world that have a lot of fiat that at certain prices will want to convert it to Bitcoin.
And so this loop of like death spiral, I never really thought was credible.
And I think with the cash shoring, people are going to forget about this in 6 months, and no one's going to talk about it.
And he's got enough cash to ride it out.
So I'm very confident that people's, you know, time preference will, uh, will, will win over here.
Tarun, you were the, you, you called MSTR uh or stretch, I should say Luna for suits last time.
What's your, what's, what's your take?
Do you, do you stand by that?
Or do you feel like, OK, he's tamed, he's tamed the beast, and he's gotten the death spiral under control?
Just because it's marketed to suits doesn't mean it's not, it's, it's more of the fact that, He has to constantly keep selling at the money MSVR, like at some point that, how long is that charade going to last?
I, I do agree with you that.
You can probably make this last for a while, but I, I think the other weird thing was they opened up the amount, their maximum amount of Bitcoin they're willing to sell.
Beyond just like the dividend coverage, and, you know, I agree with Jordy's point, as long as they still have Bitcoin in the balance sheet, but if they start actually selling, it does feel like it's turtles all the way down, cause like, How, who's the, who's the marginal MSTR buyer at that point?
It, it really is like kind of crazy to me.
Although I, I guess they are in a bunch of indices, so they do have some like support in terms of like daily ADV of rebalances, but obviously if they lose their place in the index, in terms of like their market cap goes down too much, they're gonna have a lot of trouble selling the app monies as well, so.
There is a version, I agree with you, it's not like Luna where it's like single asset goes down, full death spiral, right?
There, there's like multiple assets are like kind of coupled together, and hopefully they, the Rube Goldberg machine continues, but.
There there's something about the way stretch is marketed that feels a lot like anchor, that's like a little hard to not.
It's the marketing in particular that's like, very hard to, to not.
The picture of that woman who says she's never going to be stressed again or whatever, thanks to buying stretch, like, I don't know, that part is the part I can't really get over, you know what I'm talking about the, the, yeah, the AI woman, yes, that's, that's canonically also, also, also one of the stretch AI generated pictures is like a picture of the Titanic sinking and sailor riding away on a lifeboat.
And it's like I'd like, I like that was pretty bad.
That was pretty bad.
The iconography of this is, this is like anti cult.
Bitcoin.
There may have been signs.
There may have been signs.
You know, the difference being with anchor, of course, that, uh, you know, with anchor, the rates are too high and with stretch, you know, rates are just going to keep going up.
So, uh, if anything, you know, isn't, isn't it more attractive?
Aren't people getting, getting paid more?
The rates are too damn high.
Yeah, no, they need to, need to jack those up.
I, um, I do feel like, uh, I mean, this feels like a good outcome.
It's kind of like there's adults in the room kind of speaking the language of the market, like, you know, cash reserves, hey, here's how we think about this going forward.
I think the other unfortunate thing obviously is just like.
You know, macro is looking worse and now it looks like, OK, maybe there's actually gonna be like a rate hike this year and then obviously it's gonna trickle down into, you know, the market that stretches country is trying to tap into.
And so it feels like the gamble of, uh, you know, tap into credit rates go down, buy, buy Bitcoin on cheap leverage is, I mean, the market's is working against you and, you know, unfortunately, it's not a great trade to be in right now.
Yeah, that and the destruction of private credit, I think also just kind of weakens the demand for this kind of stuff because Trades that looked like, oh, this is very cheap and safe, and this is going to be great because Blackstone is striving, that's uh people have less and less confidence in things that are shaped like that.
Well, I do think it's interesting.
Sailor spends a lot of time marking himself as distinct from private credit, but it does sort of feel like it's the same buyers at the end of the day of, so it's like that that part I don't really know how to, I guess like the question is, do you, do you guys think that you're going to be on the show talking about, uh, you know, how much, Stretch months there are in, in like, you know, in 6 months, it last week, Laura should force us to talk about stretch last week for the record.
Yeah, I, I really didn't want to talk about this, but I think we are unfortunately now in the stretch cycle that we have to talk about it.
Yeah, it does feel we are, but like, are we still going to be in the stretch cycle some months from now, because he doesn't have to do anything now.
Now at this point, he can sit on his hands.
He's got the ability to, you know, if something de pegs and like stretch goes to 60, you can buy that if MSTR goes to like 0.6 M nap, you can, you can buy a little bit, you know, here and there and keep it going and do nothing.
And in 6 months.
Are people still going to be thinking about this or like, you know, to be clear, to be clear, if he's buying back this stuff, then his cash reserves start to really run low.
And then he's got to do another ATM or he's got to do something like that, we're we're right back where we are.
If, if stretch goes to 60, we're in bad shape, because the dividend coverage is going to decrease as well, if he's actually buying it back.
No, well, he said he'll, he'll sell up to 1.25 billion of Bitcoin, which is not that much Bitcoin.
I mean, in the grand, you know, the amount of 10 billion kind of blocks we've had go through over the last 12 months.
That's, that's really not a lot of Bitcoin.
And you know, he sells a billion of Bitcoin and repeg stuff.
It's not that scary it's not a lot, but it is reflexive.
That's the problem is like I think it is genuinely reflexive if the market knows more selling is coming because Stretch is de-pegged, which means he's going to sell more Bitcoin, which means that maybe Stretch to pegs a little bit more, which now MSTR goes down a little bit more.
Now he's gonna go buy back some MSTR like, all of a sudden, the liabilities are getting away from him and he's signaled he's going to defend.
I guess the question you have to ask is like, is every Bitcoin buyer.
Just trying to like, avoid MSTR sales or that's the problem.
I think the answer is yes.
I think right now, like he is, he is so much of the market.
The market is so weak right now that he is so much of the market.
And so many people, so, you know, today at the uh this, this Goldman event, um, if Guinea was talking about how so much of what he sees on his desk is people positioning around around micro strategy.
Is that just trying to understand when are they going to buy, when are they going to sell?
What are they doing?
Because they're the marginal, they're the marginal flow in the Bitcoin market right now.
Well, that's definitely like why we went back from 80 down to 60 is because the amount of people that were trying to front run sailors buys, you know, every month he was buying 2 billion on the 14th, and you just kind of knew it was going to happen.
And like all, including us, like everybody was just like, oh, we're getting away a week away from the dividend, let's just pile in and then pile out.
And then I think.
On that last time when it didn't, it was kind of clear it wasn't going to repeg, and we don't have another one coming.
It was kind of obvious how much money was just waiting for the next one.
I had to, had to get out and that kind of brought us back to 60.
But at this point, the front runners are out.
Obviously, like no one's like front running buys anymore.
And I think we're back to like, You know, who wants to buy this digital gold, and, you know, and the answer is there's not that many people.
I mean, that's the, that's the problem, right?
Is that outside of strategy, the ETF complex has seen like 5 billion of outflows, like the, the single largest run of outflows that we've seen so far in the ETF complex, which tells us like, OK, well, who's left, retail's not here.
The ETF seem seem not to be buying, sailors not buying.
And so we're kind of, you know, sitting around waiting of like, OK, who's, where, where's the marginal firepower going to be coming from without the market regime fundamentally changing?
That is, that is the bare case and the bare case is that stocks are probably.
Maybe you're gonna do like a bit of a double top and, and, and, you know, we, we might have a pullback potentially going into midterms.
That is a little bit kind of top of mind for Bitcoin buyers, like, you know, is liquidity really going to be good um right now.
But it's one of those assets that when it's cool, everybody just wants to, wants to get in.
And then when it's not cool, everyone's like distancing and uh it's very streaky.
I think it can be like very reflective up and down.
Right now, obviously, we've already had a lot of reflection down.
We'll have a bit of a bottoming.
Now whether we go a little bit lower on the bottoming is unclear.
I'm not sure who's still selling it.
You're right, the ETF seems to be the main seller right now.
There's like some somebody Twapping every day.
Somebody really large, but.
Hopefully that, that kind of bottoms out.
And then the, the really, really good time to buy is when people start worrying about the dollar's value again, but that's not going to be probably for at least a month.
OK, that was a, that was a very, very traitor podcast to change his name from game theorizing to macro theorizing after that, yeah, no, that was good.
We don't, we don't usually get into these waters on the podcast because we're all completely out of our depth.
But I appreciate, I appreciate the call.
If you had to guess, where would you say, You're a buyer of Bitcoin.
I, I, I, I assume that you guys are pretty non-directional at Cellini.
Um, but where would you say you're a buyer?
Oh, you guys are directional.
OK.
Yeah, I mean, there's different parts of the business.
There's like the very non-directional quoting stuff.
And then there's like, you know, we do venture in liquid bets and quite, you know, directional.
Stuff and we're definitely buying.
I mean, we've been buying, we bought a bunch of stretch on the announcement.
I thought the announcement was good.
We managed to buy a bunch under 80 and kind of holding it maybe until like high 80s.
We've been buying Bitcoin here, I think.
It's not a slam dunk, but just kind of keep, keep buying a bit more every.
Every time it ticks down more.
Where do you think it is a slam dunk?
What's the price that you're like, that's, I'm piling in there.
I don't think it's about price.
I think it's either when like stocks have kind of puked and you're like, OK, there's no macro headwind here, like we've kind of gone through a bit of a deleveraging.
That's, that's when it's a slam dunk, because I think it'll, it'll uh recover very well once.
So the critic uh gets back in.
OK, fair enough.
Well, there's been another piece of news that has gotten people quite surprised.
There's a new stablecoin on the block called Open USD abbreviated OUSD.
OUSD is a new consortium, uh, but this consortium is not like other consortiums we've seen.
There doesn't seem to be a single company behind it, but rather a true consortium of something like 140 partners.
The CEO of Open USD is going to be Zach Abrahams, who is the co-founder of Bridge, which of course was previously acquired by Stripe.
But the whole idea of the open uh standard stablecoin is that it's a single stablecoin with no fees.
Uh, the mint and redeem is at no cost, there are no volume caps.
Everybody who is a member can mint the stablecoin.
And they get the, the, the yield for the stablecoins that they mint.
So it's in a way kind of similar to the partnership between Circle and Coinbase, where each of them gets, you know, some of the economics based on how much they contribute to the underlying issuance, and is governed collectively by this open standard board of partners, no single entity.
Now, these 140 partners, That signed up for the Open USD standard or Open Standard USD was a huge mammoth list of some of the largest companies in the world.
So we saw Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Stripe, Addien, Pfizer, Klarna, Affirm, Ramp, Brex, Western Union, MoneyGram, Remitly on the FinTech side.
Then on financial institutions, we saw BlackRock, BNY Mellon, Standard Charter, DBS, US Bank, BBVA, Mizuho, ICE.
Tech companies we saw Google, Samsung, IBM, Shopify, Mercado Libre, DoorDash, Grab, Rocket, and then the crypto side.
We saw Coinbase, Tempo, Solana, Bibi, OKX, Ripple, Crypto.com, Gemini, Ave, Morpho, Polygon, Aptos, Plasma, Stellar, Fireblocks, Metamask, Anchorage, Bridge, Rain, among others.
I saw about 6 different announcements of chains saying, we are official partners, uh, and we're stablecoin is launching on our chain.
So, no less than Solana, Base, Polygon, uh, Aptos, uh, and Plasma, I'm sure there are others that are going to be initial.
Mint partners.
And of course, notably absent from this list were Circle, USDT, PayPal, each of which have their own stablecoins.
And I saw Circle was down something like 7, 8% on this announcement.
So unsurprisingly, this being kind of a shot across the bow at, hey, do we believe that we can actually challenge the duopoly that we see in the market today between Circle and Tether.
So, this looks like a very serious consortium.
Right now, it's pre-launch, not gonna go live until later this year.
They said they were kind of vague with the uh the actual timeline, uh, but this looks like it's gonna be very serious.
And of course Stripe being that Zach Abrahams is gonna be CEO, uh, Stripe is positioning themselves as this is going to be the default stablecoin for all activity that's gonna be running through Stripe.
So, we saw a lot of people kind of, Back patting and, uh, you know, handshaking each other and high fiving and saying, great, this is great, stablecoins are gonna take over the world with this new initiative.
Uh, Jordy, I see you nodding your head.
What's your thoughts on OUSD?
You know, I thought some of us on this podcast will be inside the cabal, but clearly we're not, we're not in the cabal.
No, we, we did not get a phone call about OUSD unfortunately, we are, we are, this, this cabal did not include us.
But I mean, the circle thing, I completely understand.
They first took the hit with the, you know, this, this situation with Coinbase and Circle has always been very complex.
And even the hyper liquid USDC ended up being more of a Coinbase deal where they kind of ended up being the issuer into all that USDC and capturing a lot of the economics and it seems to be a continuation of their.
Strange bed partners, but I don't know.
I don't know exactly what the conversations are between bedfellows, bedfellows.
Sorry, sorry, you know, I'm not as good.
Well, no, no, you're very DEI friendly with that.
Yeah, yeah, that's very, very forward thinking of you.
Yeah, bad persons, bad persons, persons.
I'd love to see how this goes.
Obviously, you know, those of us who have been in crypto for a long time, I've seen hundreds of stablecoins take a shot and come and go.
Obviously, this, as you said, this looks like quite a consortium.
But at the end of the day, will they take over perpetual denomination pair.
That it's always kind of stayed tethers playground except for, you know, some of the USDC stuff.
Will they get into, I mean, a prediction markets has been uh USDCs.
Will they break into that or this is going to be like a visa kind of background thing?
I'm not sure.
Yeah, it's, it's notable because the big stablecoin consortia in the past, right?
So obviously, the original stablecoin consortium was Center, which was the original thing that Circle created, of which originally was going to have a bunch of members and then the members ended up being just Circle and Coinbase.
Uh, but the original idea was a consortium.
That was how it was supposed to be structured.
And my understanding is that that kind of changed over time.
It's just become this, you know, duopoly or dual issuers of Circle and Coinbase.
And then of course, there was Libra.
Which was, you know, the whole idea was that, well, you know, it's the Libra Foundation, uh, it's not Facebook, it's, you know, all the, you know, whatever the 30 ring of companies, uh, which are a bunch of financial institutions that were part of the, the Libra Foundation as well.
On some level, Tempo also presented itself as being a bit of a consortium or having a bunch of partners.
Um, now, this seems to be kind of in the real original center model is that it really is a consortium and there is no company at the center that's supposed to be driving it.
That's, that's the way it's very clearly positioned.
It's not like, OK, this is the stripe consortium, or this is the, you know, whatever.
It it it does strike me that like, it's really hard for consortia to succeed, uh, without there being a very muscular presence at the center.
Maybe that's what Zach Abrahams is going to be playing here, but there's so many players here, and it's really not obvious who's going to do the heavy lifting.
You know, with, with Libra, it was obvious, OK, Facebook, yeah, it's a consortium, but like it's Facebook.
Facebook's doing all the work.
Here, who's doing all the work?
Because it's not like these 140 partners are going to do that much work.
So, you know, if you think about Visa, OK, Visa was a consortium, you know, the Fed was a consortium, but there's always this like very muscular it's always like down to the, you know, it's like the cliche thing of it's, it's, it's all going to be down to the incentives, like who's actually going to be making money here.
And so we had to have to kind of pull on that string.
And you said that right now it's whoever mints it.
Keeps it, he who smelled it, dealt it.
But then what if somebody like un minced, what if it, I meant a billion and you meant a billion.
And we, you know, we trade it and Tom has it.
And then he burns.
That's a good point.
So like, who, who's interesting.
Like, I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
How do you do the fungibility thing?
So it's like, OK, we, we know who minted, but when I redeem through a different channel, do I get decredited or does the original guy get decredited?
You can't try, you know, it's not UTXO based.
So how do you actually track which ones are which?
Is it will be UTXO based so.
Maybe, maybe, maybe I saw Agora.
Agora was saying that one of your report codes, they were saying that this is kind of similar to what they're, they've been trying to do, maybe.
Kind of like that, but I think they're just paying the apps that hold it, so it's a little bit different.
Right, right.
It's, it's, I mean, having, yeah, paying the balances that are held by different applications.
I mean, that's what Circle does de facto today, where it's like, OK, I'm gonna share some of the revenue that I attribute to hyperliquid by just looking at what's in the bridge.
I'm not counting the mints or the, OK, you minted, but then later somebody else redeemed those coins.
That's obviously very hard to do in an asset that's completely fungible.
Tom, what's your take on OUSD?
Yeah, I think, um, I mean, obviously people's kind of first, I think reaction, like you said, is, hey, this seems like, you know, a serious competitor to someone like Circle, but, you know, Coinbase was also down 5, 6% today.
And obviously their stock price right now is heavily tied to Circle because they're getting these um interest payments from, from USTC or from Circle for USTC on their, on their platform.
And so, I think if anything, I, I kind of thought it almost more like, like the end of Apocalypto when like, you know, it's like Jaguar Paw and whoever, they're having their little battle on the cliff and then like in the background, the Spanish show up and it's like, all right, it's like, you know, daddy's home, and I, I feel like that's that's about list where we have this weird, you know, duopolistic, you know, semi not, you, you know, really, really top tier competition and stablecoins in, in crypto, and now it's like, oh, you know, all the big players are, are here and it's serious now, although.
I think to your point, I mean, there, there is a history of consortium backed payment methods, payment, payment networks.
I mean, even, even Mastercard, you know, as well was was a consortium.
But in crypto, it's, it's really struggled to take off.
I mean, even, I think of, or I think of just like corporate stablecoins in general, like PYUSD.
They've been trying to get that thing off the ground for years.
I mean, famously, you know, we had the bet on the show like 2 years ago about PYUSD.
I, I don't even think it's.
Surpassed that that peak, even though they're obviously offering a lot of incentives for it.
And you could argue, OK, well, PayPal, you know, they don't really have the user base or the distribution, but they do have, you know, the incentive.
It's, it's their own thing.
They have a lot of different channels.
They are like the payment app in addition to every other property that they own.
So it's like if they can't get it off the ground, what's the chance that, you know, these other players are getting off the ground?
I don't know, it feels kind of, kind of low, although I, I do think, you know, a consortium-based model.
Is the most likely winner of any sort of competitor because it is actually how you get a real network off the ground and you get everyone to cooperate versus you have a million different fragmented stablecoins that end up not being interoperable and therefore like a bad experience.
You guys see that Paulo from Tether tweeted saying, yeah, that I was about to bring up that that was like kind of what Tom's statement of like, basically dunking on circle is like, oh, finally, a player number 2 has shown up, basically.
Oh, wow, wow.
It was, it was like, I was like, wow, the, the, the, the, the vengeance between the two of them is probably has to be the highest of anything in crypto.
But he's also praising at the same time, he's praising this new competitor.
He's like, oh, this is going to be like a player too.
I feel like he did something like that when Libra came out too, though, where he was like, finally a real competitor.
This is like a joke he keeps bringing out every couple of years.
No, no one, no one did this for WLD or USD one rather.
This is, this is really the first time when people there's a real competitor.
So it's true.
That's true.
I guess I'll say like, normally the idea of like, OK, this is a, this is a true consortium where there's no rent seeker at the middle or it's not like, OK, Facebook is going to be the primary beneficiary of Libra.
It it it does seem like this position is there's no rent seeker in the middle.
And it's almost like commoditizer compliment, which is that, OK, all these people really don't want there to be a stablecoin duopoly, right?
Like if you, if you think about what is the incentive of all these people.
The consortium, that might be the single tying incentive is that, look, maybe I'm not going to own the stablecoin, but I just don't want those guys to own the stablecoin, because that's going to make it a lot more compelling for me to be able to build my business and integrate the stuff and like really make a push for it.
If it's Tether that owns this, or if it's Circle that owns this or somebody else, that's really bad for my business long term, whether you're Western Union or BNY Mellon or whoever, right?
I can see that being the rationale for this.
That said, I feel like I am skeptical when the consortium is too big.
I'm almost like more bullish if it's a consortium of like 8 people or 10 people.
A consortium of 140 people is basically like, you know, we all went to a concert together and like we all signed a petition.
That's kind of, that's sort of what this feels like to me a little bit.
It's the anti hyperliquid model.
You just go from 11 people and you guys go to like, everyone.
We're all building together.
Right.
I remember the story about the Libra, right?
Is that like the Libra, historically, when people saw like the, the 40 partners of Libra, like, you know, checkout.com and Mercado Libre and Visa and blah, blah, blah.
And like, then the later reporting about, about the, about the Libra showed that like, most of these people didn't really understand what the Libra was.
They had Cleared it with their boards.
They like, they were, it was like kind of they signed a petition or like an LOI or something.
I mean, to be fair, it was Libra, like, we don't really know if they would have managed to find a PMF.
It sort of became like a legal blocking, right?
Like they didn't really manage to get, get it out.
Maybe it would have.
Being good.
I don't know.
Right, but my point is that with the Libra, all the names that we were so excited about of like, oh my God, I can't believe Visa is behind this and, you know, these banks and whatever, is that we later learned the banks actually weren't that committed to Libra.
And what they've been asked to sign was pretty watery of you guys agreed to make a best effort to maybe do something if we put this thing together.
And like, no one's going to say no to that because it's like, OK, well, I want to make, you know, I want to have the optionality to do something if I like it.
You guys like all interact with like all these.
Firms and you know that they have like a crypto guy, like each of these firms needs to have a crypto guy.
And that crypto guy needs to win every year.
You know, you got to do, you have to show to the bosses, like, you know, we did a partnership.
We did something.
So they, they kind of, they need to sign up.
And, and that's kind of like how it plays out.
And I don't think it's a signal or counter signal.
That's just going to be like the default, you know, they're all going to sign up so they can show that they did something.
Right, right, agreed.
I mean, we haven't seen any actual governance structure yet.
There's this idea that there will be many groups that are a part of this governance structure.
I'm presuming it's not going to be 140 or like the fucking UN or something.
So there will probably be, we'll probably get more visibility into what is the actual governance structure here.
Who are the real parties who are signing up to be, I imagine if it was representative democracy and the the delegated to a representative company.
Imagine if it's a Dow and they have to go in the forum again and start it's just going to be, you know, it's going to be like the UN if they do have a really do 140.
It's going to be like there's going to be a Security Council and it's really going to just be that multi-sick.
Everything else is thrown away.
Yeah, it's gonna be Black Rock and BNY and Solana, you know, making all the calls.
They'll be like, they'll be like Russia, you know, it's like, oh, no, sorry, it's a veto.
So Russia doesn't like this.
So we're not doing this one.
I don't doubt that that's the problem for all these consortiums, right?
Even with just N equals 2 for a circle, they had lots of that.
Right, right.
So do you, do you, do, do you, are you bullish on this?
Are you bearish on this?
Like, is this the #2?
Is this potentially the #1?
Do you see a path there?
I don't know.
I think, yeah, a little bit.
I'm a little more this is why we bring you on.
This is why, this is why we bring you on the podcast.
I'm a little in the confident of like, of like.
There's someone at every one of these companies who loves crypto more than everyone else.
And maybe it's their job, if they're lucky, but for a lot of them, it's like they're trying to prove that they need to keep a crypto function at all.
And Everyone can market stablecoins, right?
It's like, hey, private money, suddenly our company is like able to earn more interest on doing nothing and like being part of the transaction flow versus like having to put up capital, having to take risk as more as much risk.
I mean, it's funny to say when you said that I was like, the US government has that same guy.
It's like Scott Besson.
He's always talking about how stablecoins are going to save the Treasury demand and whatever.
Maybe, maybe Scott Besson needs to join the construction.
I mean, that would make me very bullish if like.
You know, you, the US government kind of joins the consortium.
Patrick Dewitt is that CBDC that I don't know, kind of.
Hey, hey, no, no, no, we don't do that anymore.
We don't do that anymore.
It's illegal.
No, Patrick Dewitt, who's a part of the White House, uh, crypto, something crypto executive, I should know. what his title is, but he's like the guy right under David Sachs.
He tweeted, like, this is great.
This is, you know, why we have so so much positive room for innovation in America.
So clearly, the White House gave a nod of approval to this.
So they like seeing this thing come together.
I, I take issue with your framing Tyro, because I think like, almost all these companies have done some, You know, it's like, oh, we did a partner Google Cloud did a partnership with some of them have done or whatever for the record, there's 140 names, right?
Like, yes, yes, a lot of them haven't done much or have done fake stuff.
There's obviously a small core that has done 90%, 95% of any real crypto thing, right?
Yeah, but I'd say I, I think almost every single one of these companies, almost certainly at a board or at a C-suite level, takes stablecoin seriously.
They may not take crypto seriously, but they take stablecoin, like every single one of these companies takes stable.
I mean, maybe DoorDash doesn't or something.
I don't know.
But most of these organizations, financial institutions, banks, they're thinking about stablecoins.
This is not a, this is not irrelevant to how they see their 20 year plan.
So, so I take it seriously that like, this is not a, OK, the little corporate innovation department, like, you know, just OKed something and maybe they did, you know, I, I, I, I'm not saying it's like exactly like that stablecoins are much easier to sell like crypto, right?
Like Libra is a harder sell than this, because Libra promised you some stake in the fees that was nebulous, whereas those promises you like straight up treasury yields, split attributably, right?
Like, there is a real, there's real dollars behind this versus like, A little bit more like the hope of a token type thing, like, appreciation, which I, I do think like, is, is a a distinct difference between the stable queen consortiums and like, L1 plus stablecoin, which I think actually has this problem of like, you're promising a lot too much that like has to make the token work, or the net validator network work, whereas here there's that's kind of irrelevant, right?
That's why all the different networks are on the same thing, no one cares about that at all.
I just don't know, again, to your point about incentive, like, who's incentivized to bring order flow?
Like, why is my top line metric AUM like bring in a bunch of AUM because then you get to the Jordie problem of like, well, then everyone who has a billion dollars balance sheet just dumps a billion dollars, transfers it to someone else, and then transfers it back.
And suddenly they're farming the fees the most.
Right.
And like, hey, you're having the lucky consortium farming games on this, OK, of course, I mean, I, I inevitably, right, they're going to pick some revenue share agreement and someone's going to be a little smarter than the rest and just start farming everyone else.
The second thing is, It's like OK, well, maybe it's volume based, and it's like who's gonna generate the most real volume, KYC user volume or whatever, like you have to prove it.
Well then, obviously some of those businesses are way more.
Adept at just like shoving all their users onto this and doing exactly what they're doing off chain, but just being like, oh, we're settling here, now pay us all the incentives.
And so I think that farming games actually do occur when you're like, are we trying to grow, be an AUM business and have assets managed here?
Are we trying to be a payments volume business?
Are we trying to, you know, like, and that.
You know, even with just those two, the spectrum between those two, you're gonna completely change the revenue share agreement and like the real long term value to like each business.
And whatever rules you set there dictate who gets the most value out of this and inherently who will try to be on the Security Council.
I, I think that's like the natural end state of all these.
And so I don't, these revenue sharing agreements are actually the key thing of like whether this is real or not, and like, I don't know what that is.
So I, that's, that's however they choose that, that will determine whether there's farming incentives or people moving real demand on.
And I don't know how you get 140 people to agree on that, who all have enough incentive to like bring their real demand onto this.
There will be people who naturally do, right, who, who, who I think will have certainly much more of a reason to do that.
I, I sort of take an even more basic mode of analysis on this, which is that my expectation is that the stablecoin market is really hard.
Part of the reason why PayPal was unsuccessful and most of these other players that have launched, you know, Pfizer has their own stablecoin and blah, blah, blah.
All these guys, Western Union has their own stablecoin, Klorin has their own stablecoin.
Stablecoins are really hard.
They're very sticky, they have natural network effects.
It's actually really difficult to get your new stablecoin into something that already exists.
And the rake that Tether and Circle take on mints and redeems are actually very low, and the market can bear it pretty well.
And so going to, OK, 0 mint, zero redeem fees is an advantage, but not that much of an advantage relative to just the liquidity, to the acceptance, to the ubiquity, and to just like the, the, the modes that it's already integrated into all these places.
So, my expectation is that probably what happens here is that Tether continues to rule the roost when it comes to exchanges and like crypto trading and a lot of these like emerging markets, places where it's just, it's just kind of everywhere, right?
It's like in it's in the water supply, it's just all over the place.
Circle probably continues with a lot of the integrations that they've won just through kind of sheer BD and and er relationships as well as in DeFi, where it has become, you know, the, the the the sort of it's become the unit of account within DeFi.
Um, and it's kind of accepted.
I think Hassib, like the one pushback I have is that the rake is not really the mint redeem.
The, the rake is the is the interest on holding, and both of those guys obviously don't pay anything out to users.
No, no, they, they pay some to that can't pay out to users here.
You can't pay.
This is still genius compliant.
They're not paying out to users.
No, I understand.
But like, let's look at the deals they have.
So there's the Binance.
It's kind of like cuts.
And Heather has historically been able to not pay that much to Binance.
I think, you know, I hear whispers of what the exact amount is, but they pay something, but not that much.
They keep, they keep a lion's share because they're like, well, you know, we have negotiating power to.
Obviously, with this hyper liquid thing, 90% of it's not going to like, hype buybacks or whatever.
So like the negotiating power was.
Clearly kind of going on the other side.
But the rake in essence is going to be, we're not going to be in like a zero yield environment.
It's pretty clear, like if anything, yields are going back up.
Firms, even like us, you know, I'm a little bit tired of like, holding so many stables and not getting anything.
Like I can see like the amount of cash that these guys are, you know, we're just making tether money by just holding, holding this USDT.
There is space for someone to come in with a lower rate.
It's not about the mint fees.
And ultimately, like, I agree with Tarun, like this whole thing is going to depend on.
Have they got the incentives right where the right people are getting enough to kind of grow this OPEC.
Will kind of succeed or fail if like the the the members are all happier the way with the with the money, right, but notice who's missing, right?
Binance is not here.
Binance is not on this list.
And that that tells you a lot, right?
Coinbase is not here.
Binance is not here.
Um, Coinbase Coinbase is there.
That was the whole people fighting.
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, Coinbase Coinbase is there.
Sorry, Coinbase, Coinbase is there.
Coinbase is there.
I apologize.
But it's very clear like Coinbase obviously has two masters here.
They're very incentivized to continue pushing USDC because they, you know, they have this big stake in in USDC as well, uh, relative to just OU USD. and I suspect that like they're going to say yes, but they're not going to necessarily be pushing it at the margin to the extent that they can because they have this broader product suite that's oriented around the USDC.
So, I suspect for that reason that like fragmentation is good for the incumbent.
If OUSD is not going to be able to cleanly bring everybody on board and like basically build this rebel alliance, probably they're gonna have to open new markets.
And I think it's plausible that they can't open new markets, right, like interbank settlement or, you know, this stablecoin sandwich stuff, B2B payments.
This is a very plausible place that and this is kind of what Tempo story has been as well, right?
Is that look, these are, these are totally new markets that didn't already exist, you know, DoorDash and OpenAI and Anthropic and all these partners that they have, uh, they're not using any stablecoins today.
So, them using this player as the way in which they're going to be onboarding stablecoins and be willing to because they have a stake in it.
And it's not just leaking economics to somebody else, they may be willing to to expand the stablecoin market in this direction.
But where I'm skeptical, again, because there's no single muscular hand that's going to go toe to toe with Circle or go toe to toe with Tether and say, great, I'm going to win over Binance.
I'm going to win over DeFi.
I'm going to win over uh emerging markets, and I'm going to go do all the integrations within. or in, in, um, you know, in Southeast Asia, there's so much prior work that's been done here I think, I think one thing I will say is that that to me is slightly downstream of the revenue sharing agreement in this thing, right?
Like, fundamentally, right, the rake.
Like Jordy saying, has to get caught up based on your usage or participation or how much you're doing stuff.
And like, what you choose as that revenue sharing agreement dictates whether someone who already has access, and like a BD team, a growth team that knows how to just go.
Accumulate assets or accumulate volume, we'll just go try.
It's effectively going to be trying to farm the revenue share agreement.
There's like no way around that, right?
It's like everyone is going to like, look at what they're good at, what they can do for the least cost and maximize their potential.
But here's here I think is the problem with that is that like, Look, if you look at something like Visa, right, Visa is a consortium.
It was created to basically coordinate all of the banks and, you know, get get all the consumers that are available to buy all of the banks, and like it makes sense.
Once the value is already there in the entire banking system to coordinate in a central entity that sits on top.
And I think you can do that when you're really just having to attribute the value that's being contributed by each person.
But in the stablecoin market, the stablecoin market is still pretty nascent.
It's not that big, right?
In absolute terms, relative to a BNY Mellon or a BlackRock, like stablecoin market's tiny.
Maybe to, you know, to Circle, it's big, but Circle is a $20 billion company, right?
These are, these are orders of magnitude larger companies that are dealing with economics that that far outscale the current stablecoin market.
So, the reality is the stablecoin market needs to be expanded.
And market development and expansion of the market is not where a consortium is going to shine.
In order to go into uncharted territory, it takes a lot of risk and a lot of that risk might not be internalized by you.
If you're like, look, I'm gonna go do market development in Indonesia, OK, and your PayPal, maybe you do the market development, maybe you get the fees.
Like maybe your mint is the mint that works, but maybe somebody else's mint.
Maybe Grab goes and takes that market share after you've done the market development.
If you're circle, you don't care.
You just go do the market development and you will internalize all the gains.
But if you're a consortium, there's a lot of incentive to free ride and only pick up the easy money that you know you're going to be able to capture.
And that's why consortia.
Are not used to like go, you know, you don't use a consortia to go open up a new continent.
You use an explorer on a ship that's, you know, venture financed, right?
Like that, the, the centrality of an actor I think we're saying different things for.
Right, but I think it, it, it, it comes down to the central question of do you expect them to win over the current market or to expand the current market?
And I think the, the theory that I'm propounding is one that this kind of system works for expanding the current market relative to the flow they already have available.
You know, B2B flows and, you know, OK, some of the banking clients and, you know, blah, blah, blah.
But it doesn't really work for them to say, great, we're going to take over hyperliquid.
We're going to take over, you know, the stablecoin deposit in Ave, we're going to go take over the trading pairs on Binance.
I think that's much harder for this kind of structure.
Let's see if they managed to snag like a Robinhood or something, you know, I haven't seen those guys on the list.
And I know they're announcing a bunch of stuff, uh, this week.
Well, they're in a different consortium.
Different, which one?
USDG.
Oh, OK, OK.
And there's, there's a like that, that's what I'm saying.
There's like also this like competing consortia thing, which is like also weird like cos theorem has to apply eventually, like, how big, how many of these can you have?
Yeah, I agree.
OK, switching gears, uh, Jordy, this one's for you.
There's been a comeback happening in the meme coin market.
So, we'll give a very, I'll, I'll give a very short tortured version of this cause I, I'm certainly not an expert on what's happening in meme coins, but apparently there's been a bit of a comeback in the meme coin market around friend of the show, Ansome.
So Ansome, of course, one of the biggest, perhaps the biggest meme coin influencer in the space, uh, he's somebody who drives a lot of volume around anything that he does, says, talks about, and there's a a meme coin just named Ansom.
So named for him that he did not launch, uh, he was given some of the creator fees because Pumped out.
Fun now has this creator fee concept.
Uh, so those were, those were, uh, uh, awarded to him in sort of whatever in in respect for his name.
Uh, he took 65% of the supply, but is now distributing some of the fees as airdrops that he's giving to many people, you know, some of the big, Creators and influencers that he knows.
This seems to have triggered a really significant rally in this meme coin.
Um, it's now got roughly $100 million market cap on this meme coin, which we have not seen in a long, long time.
Now, this is relatively small compared to the meme coins of yesteryear, which were in the billions, we'd see meme coins routinely going to hundreds of millions.
But $100 million meme coin, we have not seen in quite a long time.
Uh, and so this seems to be putting a little bit of energy back into the trenches and giving people some excitement that, hey, maybe, maybe, maybe it's not over.
Maybe meme coins aren't dead.
Maybe we can have a little bit of a comeback if we just believe hard enough.
Uh, Jordi, what do you say?
Do you believe that, uh, this man can put the meme coin market on his back and return us to the promised land?
What do you say?
I mean, first of all, I like that I'm the meme coin guy.
I don't think the trenches would accept me as one of their own.
So like, what, what is your positioning with the, with the trenches?
I mean, look, this, I've been deep enough in the trenches to know that this is like the WWF I used to watch as a kid, you know, you got Hulk Hogan and this guy.
This is like entertainment theater, and it's all like not as real as it looks.
And, you know, people get entertained and that's the value and that that's fine.
But like, if, if you look historically, all these meme coins, they have a story of like, oh, this is organic and the dev, you know, he didn't make any money or this happened and, This is like a storyline generally where.
It's all kind of constructed.
Look, probably, you know, you look at the incentives of like a pump fund to make sure that people know that they have this new creator thing and maybe that gets people excited.
Is that worth?
Pumping some coins, like I'm not, I'm not saying that I know exactly what happened in this case, I don't.
But generally, I've learned that this is, this is like one of those WWE kind of things.
And, Handsome has never shied away from, you know, getting in the mud, you know, he's got the cat coin and this one and he's on stream and everyone's buying it.
And, you know, like, I like handsome.
He's, he kind of like, doesn't act like he's more serious than he is.
He's a cool guy and he just has fun with it.
You know, I'm happy, you know, I got some meteora bags that hopefully now they're getting some volume, maybe that'll do well.
I don't know.
But um, yeah, sorry, I don't have exact insight as to what the future lies for Antsome coin.
All right, Tarun, Antsome coin, do you have a take?
I didn't know about it other than because I had muted.
There was like some time where people are getting angry at Anthem, and it somehow took over my whole timeline, and I muted Anthem and I forgot to unmute it.
Sorry, and I was, you know, you were just, you were causing too much controversy.
It must be at least 6 months ago, 3 months ago.
And then I just kept seeing all these tweets are like, it's not great when your favorite influencer launches a coin, and I was like, who's this talking about?
And I think I only learned it was Anthem like yesterday, so I.
I'm, I'm the boomer who knows absolutely nothing about this.
Tom, you got a take?
I've no takes.
I was, I was hoping for a little more from our, our meme coin wizard, but, you know, uh, he's not trench native.
OK, I think this, we maybe shouldn't have, uh, listed to this topic because I think none of us have interesting things to say.
I kind of thought like, OK, there's it possible for there to be an interesting thing to say?
Like, actually, that's more maybe on a different show the softball question of whether it's even possible to say something interesting.
I think the answer is no ourselves a little bit.
Yeah, no, we've we've become the cringy the most interesting thing is that like, whenever a certain amount of time goes by, people do kind of like the the demand gets pent up for some.
Stupid coin to speculate on.
And then it just, they get it and it kind of has this wave and then it just goes under, you know, it's like the mordor again, it has the kind of the evil has to grow again, below the surface.
And then we kind of, so that's cool that it's always there.
And so, you know, the speculative fervor is so cool.
I love that.
It's all of us.
Yeah, no, how heartening to think about that.
Um, I mean, I guess, like, the close analogy to this I remember was white whale.
I don't know if you guys remember that, but there's like this, I don't even know how to describe him, like, this pseudonymous guy who makes AI videos of himself as a talking whale, and uh he, like, basically CTOed a meme coin, and then eventually let go of it, but it was, like, kind of one of the only meme coins that was doing well for a while.
And so it does seem like these meme coins now, the only ones that survive.
They sort of metastasize around some main character.
I mean, there's also Binance life that also seems to be the other main point that has gotten a lot of energy, which I actually really appreciate Binance life because it's the only thing that you'll see on page one that has any Chinese characters in it.
It's like, OK, you know, we're still, we're still an international community.
There's still meme coins for people who are not terminally online in American.
So, OK, last story that I wanted to run through was, you know, we talked a little bit about Doos and consortia.
We have a story now about ENS and kind of throwing a little bit of shade on the Dow structure.
Tom, you said you wanted to chat about this one.
So I'll try to run through it a little bit, but I, I didn't follow it very closely.
I just suggested it.
I see Hasi Hassib has made being the host a consortium right now, and he's outsourcing the job.
Up to each of us to like, to try if I was outsourcing the job of host, uh, this, this show would be going a lot worse.
OK, so, yeah, so Dow, OK, so just very briefly, what happened was that, uh, the ENS Dow is going to be doing a restructuring that is going to be delegating day to day control of the Treasury to a foundation.
And they're going to hand off uh the control of all the ENS tokens, uh, the, the E, all the other, all of the stables, all the money that's sitting in there, uh, going into this, this foundation.
And basically there's like one dude, Nick.
E, who I don't know exactly who it is, um, but this guy famous Ethereum developer.
Nick, uh, Nick, what was his last name?
Mick Johnson, right?
Nick Johnson.
OK, OK.
So like a, yeah, core, core community member guy, he voted against, without having said anything in the governance forums or the kind of, you know, pre, the pre-vote.
He took all of his tokens, which is roughly 50% of the supply.
Is, is that right?
Yeah, roughly 50% of the supply and blocked the vote, or 50% of the supply that voted, I should say, he blocked the vote with just his single vote and basically said, look, no, the Security Council must exist as a backstop against compromise and violation of the Constitution.
And so therefore, we need to, you know, kind of continue our overseeing of these assets.
This caused a lot of people, no's been a consternation of, oh, Dows are fake.
And, you know, look, one guy can control the whole thing.
And you know, what's the point of Dows and blah, blah, blah.
There's a lot of hand wringing about, you know, is this another example of Dow's totally failing in their stated purpose of having some kind of decentralized control and ownership.
Tom, What is your take on this story that you have limited interest in?
I, uh, I still have an open request.
I want to see like a, um, Louis Thoreau style documentary and, you know, visiting these, these Dows of yesteryear, and seeing what they're up to and where the funds are going.
And I, I felt like that when I was kind of reading the story where I was like, wow, I've, Not thought about this in many years, but I'm curious to know all the actors involved and and and what they're doing.
I mean, I feel, I feel like this is more like one of those videos where you, you find a part, a tiny part of civilization that's like disconnected from the rest of the world.
And, and you're like, Oh wow, look at what happened if you got stuck in the 1950s and you never really learned anything about new technology and how, how you could live as someone living in the Stone Age.
I, I think it was more like you stumble on like a random YouTube video of like some city council in some tiny town you've never heard of where they're like people are yelling and they're super angry.
And it's just like, oh, I guess they're, I mean, I mean, hey, hey, if it's if it's any consolation for crypto people.
At least AI is dealing with Dows because the data center approval thing is almost exactly like Doova.
Fair, fair enough, fair enough.
Um, let's take the core of the argument and let's kind of take it seriously for a second of like, do you guys think that this indictment of Taos, I feel like this is more and more of the thing people are saying is that, look, this proves that Dow's failed.
Dows are not the right governance structure.
We've seen, for example, Maker Doo, you know, Roon famously kind of came in and eviscerated a bunch of the Dow, kind of like, you know, Ulysses coming home to uh to, To to to cast out the suitors.
Yeah, cast out the suitors.
Exactly.
We've seen Stani kind of do some of the same thing with the Ave Tao.
It kind of feels like there's a vibe shift in, hey, Doos are overly complicated, overly bureaucratic.
This was a limited decentralization theater, maybe we were doing under a previous administration, but we can, we can cast that away and focus on efficiency.
That seems to be the vibe.
Do you guys embrace that vibe?
Do you think it's gone too far?
Do you think it's not gone far enough?
Jordy, why don't you take that?
I mean, the, you know, we've gone from Dows to consortiums now, so we're evolving.
Yes, Dows with stock tickers for the members instead of ENS entries.
OK.
Yeah, I mean, I, I, that does seem, that does seem worse.
I, I think that's the, I don't know if that's the point you're making, but I think consortiums seem worse than Daws.
There's probably more process and more bylaws and more lawsuits and fallacy right there.
OK.
Do you, do you think, do you think consortia are better or worse than Dallas Troon?
They're just different.
Same thing, different clothing, just no.
Tom, what do you, what would you say, Consortia or Dows, which are better?
I think um.
I think it depends on the structure.
I think this open dollar sounds, it sounds more like a federation, you know, it's like they all do their own thing and, and they reap the benefits, and there's some sort of loose, you know, idea of something tying them together, but it's very thin.
It's, it's more of a, you know, uh, like, like it's like like the Articles of Confederation kind of.
And, you know, this is more of like a, I, I would say if anything, it's, it's more like libertarian minded, right?
And that like you wanted a type of governance where if someone Has a certain amount of tokens and they're kind of that certain amount of of votes and like, that's what it's doing.
That's what it says on, on the tin and there's no other weird backstory.
I think people have an idea in mind because they're used to the experience of democracy that that's more head weighted that like, oh, we should have this sort of voice of the people kind of moment and it's like, no, no, no, no, that's not what we're doing here.
We explicitly said we're doing token governance, and that's what this looks like.
And I, I think, you know, that's obviously going to be concentrated in people who own a lot of the tokens. or maybe it tied to the project.
And so I think that's kind of what people are experiencing is like, they thought it would be, you know, one or the other.
And actually, the other ends up looking a lot like the other one.
The one optimistic take is that AI is going to, in the next couple of years, probably make it a lot easier for, Representative democracy systems to work more than they have historically, because historically, the issue is like, you know, no one really has time to express their preferences.
Like, I don't vote ever because the amount of time for me to spend a day sitting in line is not worth the like small, infinitesimal chance that I can influence an outcome.
But if I have an AI doing kind of representing me in Taos or in structures that, You know, I can hold tokens and just tell the AI to take care of voting for me and what my preferences are.
That might make these things more viable.
The original definity pitch.
No, I'm kidding, but actually not untrue, because it actually is the original.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, actually, this, I'm, I'm like, getting flashbacks to 2017.
This is great.
Damn, OK.
All right.
I like, I like the Dow bullet, but this is a, this is an argument for Dows, yeah, Jordy?
That AI.
AI is gonna save AI is gonna save the Dow.
AI is gonna save crypto once again.
OK, beautiful.
I like that.
I like that.
Cool.
All right, we're up on time.
Believe that the most are Jordi and Tina Zen.
That that that is true, that is true.
Well, hey, I I I believe it too.
I believe it too.
I'm with you, Jordy.
Jordy, where can people find you?
Twitter these days, game theorizing and, you know, once in a while I'll pop up in the podcast as well.
OK.
Lovely.
Well, I'm glad we're finally able to get you on the show.
Thank you, everybody, and we'll be back next time.
All right.
Thanks for having me guys.
