Episode 13: Bitcoin Hits $118K, Coinbase Wallet Reinvented, & Robinhood’s OpenAI Tokens Controversy

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Hey everyone, welcome to another episode. This is JR, founder and CEO of Social Market. And my name is Leon Hitchens. I’m the chief marketing officer at Social Market. And this is the social ledger report.  You you’ve got a beautiful background, man. Like…  I’m in the middle of  the AGNC  in Peros Island.  I got engaged, so  came here to… Congrats. So, thank you.  We came here to celebrate a little bit  and yeah,  I’m feeling like I’ve been reborn a little.

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just getting a break from work and everything, but couldn’t miss another episode of Social Ledger Report because while I’ve been on vacation, I do admit I’ve been a little bit bored for what’s been happening on the internet. When  we occasionally looked on Twitter,  it looked like we have a lot of news to cover today  and I’m of excited for that. Well, one,  the internet’s a little spotty. I guess no Starlink  there in Greece. We  need have a little checkbox in Airbnb. Starlink enabled.

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That’d be amazing because that’s the same problem. Like you didn’t notice.  I’m going to sling broke my collarbone. It mostly looks like fracture may be set improperly, but we’ll find out. But the internet up in Michigan, especially just kind of around fire lake area, it’s just, it’s not great. Starlink would solve a lot.  Hopefully we’ll, we’ll get better, but the market’s flying right now. Like even as we speak,  like I’m looking at my little, a little chart on

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on the side of my screen here and man, the market looks just amazing. Bitcoin hit an all time high.  Ethereum  actually passed  3K yesterday, it’s a little below and then Ripple XRP was flying. Let’s pull up social market app. Amazing work JR here. I know some stuff isn’t working just fully but  like  you’re in the middle of ocean.  We’ll forgive it little bit longer but.

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The most important part of this is  actually getting the data from Bitcoin and getting the data from each of these. Like  I said, this is an all time high. Yeah. And all of this time, all of this data is in real time.  if you want to find a really good way to look at the markets in real time, look at socialmarket.tech  or more specific app.socialmarket.tech. You might notice right now some this recording some differences by the time you check it out on your own on app.socialmarket.tech you should see.

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more up-to-date data. For instance, recent transactions, those are all in real time. You can see where the whales and where people are moving their money. I think one time we were able to pull out someone selling close to two million in Bitcoin. So that was very interesting. Dude, yeah, that’s a lot Yeah, so the all-time high was $118,667. Like, it’s insane. Crazy. And right now we’re sitting at $117. The rumors are that

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we’re going to see 130 here soon. But even outside of Bitcoin, I know we’re at right now, Bitcoin is the talk of the town, but really, you know, like the other ones are showing solid growth. Ethereum finally passed 3000 the other day. Timehime was 4700 back in the day. And then we hit, we hit about 3000 yesterday. So it’s the first time the flippening could be happening. Like

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I don’t know totally. And then the other one that  I’ve been super interested in since Consensus  is XRP.  They were looking at bank charters, they were looking at ETFs,  like  really strong growth across the board. Like all time high was $3.40. We’re still not there, but we’re on the road to recovery, which is I think the important part. Let’s look at six months.

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Yeah, February time. March.  This is where  the last time it was all-time high. you know, we’re looking pretty,  pretty good  on a recovery road.  I realize now that it wasn’t that long ago when several things hit a new all-time high.  Now, the Nasdaq and Dow Jones,  last time we recorded the episode, did go  into a new record, the S &P 500 too. Then Bitcoin  this week.

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Ethereum has been falling behind so much. It’s kind of crazy. You know, if you’re looking at NFTs on OpenSea, it’s probably your time now to buy or to consider. It’s showing solid growth, but the problem is Ethereum has just always been weaker. Part of this too is like Bitcoin’s dominance and net negative for Web3 because Bitcoin is just like a digital gold. Ethereum has so many more tech advantages over Bitcoin, but Bitcoin has that first mover status.

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And then like you’ve got XRP, which was, you know, embroiled in all of the SEC problems. And now that they’re out of it, it’s looking like a safe haven for investors. So there’s a lot of stuff happening. XRP is the underdog in all of this. Everyone’s not really doing it, but I think we’re starting to witness a 2021 style alt season.

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Just because like right now it is a  Bitcoin season  and it’s very strong Bitcoin season. Yeah, it’s very strong. I’m excited.  I love Bitcoin. I was reading the other day the American  Kingpin, the book they recommended a while ago, Leon,  on  Russell Brooks’ story with Socrates. Yeah, I kind of baffle at how  they go a little bit into that book talking about, you know,

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I think this was originally announced in May if I recall.

06:09

There we’re going to offer a new wallet essentially kind of rebuilding it from the ground up It’s finally hit early beta for a lot of people and then also they’re talking about launching a whole new name So  the TBA is just this this whole new app and  for  for it It’s leaning on all the changes on base But the most important part about this app and end is that  it’s kind of rethinking what the off the wall is it’s gonna have it

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You know much better design. I think crypto design is always kind of lagged behind. It’s super complicated. The UX is always a little clunky  and it’s hard for a normal user to do anything.  But the most important part is it’s going to have DeFi, NFT, Dapps,  all of that  is going to make it  much more powerful. So it’s going to be like a centralized wallet, but it’s not going to like destroy crypto’s core values of self sovereignty and all of that.  And then those  mini apps.

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really you’re going to kill it because now you’re going be able to like do a bunch of stuff in there. It’s kind of like, um, when you’re on Farcast or you’ve got all those D apps and those mini apps in there that are super cool. Uh, but  I think it’s just a huge like  push in the right direction right now. I agree a little bit about the D apps or DAPs, however you call them. We didn’t see them be as relevant as they are now. I think around the  first bull market or the first, well,

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I mean, we’ve had several markets, but  the first time  crypto  probably became as mainstream as it is now was like 20, 20, 20, 21, 20, 22 period.  We  heard that word more for developers  and people on more  niche backgrounds with tech  tech backgrounds.  And  the reason is, is because  building them is.

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was a lot harder back then than it is now. Now you have all these different frameworks. I’m speaking from a developer perspective with my background, but  back then you had to use very elementary,  very  low level coding where  it wasn’t as easy to boilerplate and well it required more boilerplating.  Now you can just connect to Coinbase  developer platform or any other  new developer platform I don’t even know about that can…

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simplified the development of apps. For reference, know, social market was once known as WebC and we were building a online social app on the decentralized social blockchain. But because our focus has shifted a little bit, so has the business. But the point being with that is the WebC based platform was the app and it was so much easier to build. I built it back in 2023, 2024, so much, much easier to build.

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now than it is back then. So I’m excited. I wonder what kind of apps people are going to build. I’m excited to see the use cases we would see  on Coinbase wallet and maybe beyond it. Yeah, the one, the one thing that I’m like a little interested in is like,  are these mini apps inside wallets going to kill  those standalone D app movement? Most D apps have been like standalone in their own thing, but as they move into like these wallets or even like in Farcaster, I feel like

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making them so much more accessible, it’s going to be there.  Also,  this feels like everything apps, know, lot China has all of those with like WeChat and Line and all that.  But  this is kind of cementing like an everything app in the United States in  a way that I don’t think anybody  really is realizing. agree. I think the hardest part when creating an everything app is the payment system,  but anything else is relatively easy to build, especially with, well, social media in of itself is another.

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But  what made it  really easy for us with WebC was that DeSoul  made a lot of that simple.  Farcaster also enables that.  I’m not entirely familiar with  Farcaster as I am with DeSoul, but  Farcaster at least enabled people to  create a on-chain or online  crypto-based  authentication system, which is powerful. You’re taking the power of almost permanent ledger  and

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making it into an authentication system.  I think that’s incredible  and it makes  UIUX a lot simpler. I’ve seen a few  behind the scenes  on what the  Coinbase team is building for the Coinbase wallet. It looks really enticing. They’re using a lot of very  nice UIUX details, simplifying  using crypto. Metamask right now is probably the hardest wallet to use today, which is amazing because it means that  crypto is shifting to a more simple  UIUX  and

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Hopefully, we’ll see 1 billion people using crypto  sooner than  we think. Yeah, I do think  what Coinbase is doing is really what Metamask should have done a long time ago. It’ll be interesting to see as they launch this wallet what’s going to happen. then,  man, crypto is just going super up. We’ll see what’s in there.  Now,  we’ve got another story.  This one’s a little less feel good. I think you told me this.

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JR the other day is it reminds you of a bit cloud a little bit but  Robinhood is offering what they’re kind of talking about like is tokenized stock portions of private companies  So  the one that they have right now is Robinhood is listing open AI token Despite there being like unclear IP rights There’s also like regulatory issues  and then beyond that like open AI has come out and just said

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Point blank that this is not equity. So  these open AI tokens  are not open AI equity So when you buy an open AI token through Robinhood, you’re not getting equity in open AI it’s some weird system where you go and and Buy into a company that owns some equity, but you don’t get any of rewards You don’t get any of the voting. You don’t get any of the  the dividends like you you can’t buy into a private company like you can

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And they’re saying like very clearly that they did not partner on this or not involved in it. They don’t endorse it  and  Like if you do want to buy equity like they requires their approval and they didn’t  approve anything  either  and then you know comes and says, know, your equity is fake So like point-blank, it’s not  it’s not equity in the end. Yeah,  I I just find that I’m laughing because I just read his comment. Your equity is fake. Oh man, it’s

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It’s kind fun to see  beef drama unfold in real time because  for those of you who don’t remember that Elon actually invested, believe, half a billion dollars in OpenAI back in 2018 or something. Yeah. And, you know, they’ve  long since got their own ways, but I just find it so funny. And it’s been interesting because  OpenAI is a nonprofit business, but it’s also a for-profit. I think this tweet  here really kind of encapsulates it.

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So Robin had made a fake crypto token  of open AI equity, which is also a fake token representing a share of future profits for a nonprofit organization. Oh gosh, trying to convert to a for-profit organization. So it’s just like  out of all the tokens they could have made, it was like one of the messiest  they picked. forget, honestly,  I even forget the other token that they offered  out of the gate because I was so enamored with all of this drama happening on Twitter. Dude, it’s so funny.  And pardon the background noise. There’s like,

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five trucks just  coming through  on my end.  But  I think it’s so funny because the situation yells to me, Big Cloud.  Back then, you know, people were creating their own token and drug-pulling other people.  I mean, that was one of the issues, but the main issue with Big Cloud was that people couldn’t withdraw their own money.  These  on-chain-based stocks,  I think they’re amazing. I think the problem we’ve seen with

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stock markets right now  is if you want to buy a stock at any given time  outside of market hours, you got to wait for that order to fulfill. I’m not sure how that works on the New York Stock Exchange or  Robinhood or something, but usually the price will change and it’s not very efficient for the avid  day trader. The trading experience is  lackluster for lack of better word.

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On-chain means  it’s running 24-7, there is no downtime. The availability, it makes it incredibly affordable or very cheap. know, transaction fees by nature on on-chain are low.  If you’re a platform, you can add your own transaction fees on it, but  it’s relatively cheaper than traditional finance. I definitely see the value with on-chain stocks. I know Kraken did something similar. They’re still working on it. I don’t  even know if these Robinhood tokens are available yet.

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haven’t looked at it yet. I think they should be available correct since they somehow released the open AI ones but it’s interesting times we live in. No I’m not entirely sure I’ve been following the story but I haven’t actually checked my Robinhood account. don’t even know where  they it. Like I’m kind of curious where they listed it. Let me see if I can find it real quick. I don’t see it I don’t even know how to buy it.  I don’t know where you buy or what you do. I think in the end though I’m kind of surprised the SEC hasn’t stepped in in any capacity.

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Like I understand  they’re way more crypto friendly, but  this seems like a spot where  if I was any  buddy in the SEC, I’ve been like, wait, they’re offering private stocks to  regular people  via  some weird shell company that doesn’t actually give them there that they’re investing in.  Like  I would have been like, Hey, that’s definitely an investigation path. Like out of all the things you could have done,  I feel like that’s there, but

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It really feels like they’re asleep at the wheel at the moment. Do you watch Coffeezilla? Have you seen any his latest videos?  I haven’t seen any of latest, but I know when he was going after Logan Paul.  Oh yeah, that was very interesting to watch. Also with SBF,  Sam Beckman Free. But he has been following the scam that the president of Argentina pulled with his people, the  Libra,  the token where he effectively ruck pulled the entire country.

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He’s been following that scam and people associated with it. As it turns out, those are the same people who are associated with the Trump and Melania coin. But the reason why I bring it up is because we’re seeing all this crime happening. Is there any sort of follow up from the law enforcement? Well, definitely not from the Trump meme coin, if we’re being honest. But with the Libra or now with this, he made a tweet and all of that saying, crime is li-

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during Trump’s presidency, which  I have my own opinions on that, but all I can say is, you know, I really think he is speaking from a matter of accountability where what we saw last presidency was a  day night difference. What we’re seeing right now where  the SEC is no longer persecuting anything crypto  or rather crypto  based lawsuits are kind of just dismissed. Rightfully so when it came to  going against Coinbase,  you know, Kraken and

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several other Uniswap,  those were just  the SEC being a predatory agency against  innovation that crypto was enabling back then and even today. We’re seeing all these amazing things coming out because the SEC is saying, hey, go ahead and innovate.  But there needs to be a point where  you need to  follow the  standing laws. You can’t simply create tokens  on behalf of companies. The same way you saw

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Well, the founder of BigCloud that is known today as DSO, you know, he got sued by the SEC for enabling the platform where people could create all these tokens on behalf of people without their consent. So there needs to be at least accountability saying, Hey, you don’t create something on my behalf without my permission. It may not be the law, but at least that would be fraud and fraud is a crime. So we’ll see what happens. There’s a lot of like questions. What is allowed? What is in.

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This feels like the wild wild west moment of crypto kind of  Hintering regular financial markets, but also like  what is right? What is wrong? What is legal? What’s not  so a lot of questions to be had there  We have one last story  We’re talking AI and we’re talking crypto, which is  something that  is becoming  more and more common  Are they so

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We’ve seen AI kind of transform everything since it had its  what I call iPhone moments with Chachi BT back in 2022.  Just because, you know, I studied AI back in college and even did research for it too.  But back then AI wasn’t as prevalent or as well known today. So it is very much, it very much had its iPhone moments.  And now we’re seeing that cross with crypto. Yeah. So  we’ve got  Coinbase entering phase two with Proprexity.

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It’s giving  retail traders AI driven altcoin insights, automated trading strategies,  predictive analytics.  I think that’s a lot like what Polymarket did with Grok. Give you some context, but this one’s a little bit more advanced.  I wonder if we’ll see kind of like a wealth front  for  crypto through Coinbase at some point where they do all the investing for you.  You know, all these AI tokens is fueling the bull market.

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Grok 4 enters the chain. It’s going to have the ability to learn directly from blockchain activities on Ethereum and Solana.  And it’s pushing DApps towards real-time smart contract optimization.  And then Public Company makes AI crypto treasury play. The Interactive Strength,  Inc. invests $500 million  in Fetch.ai tokens.  It’s one of the biggest moves, and really the first moves in a public firm, adopting AI-focused crypto  as treasury assets.

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Most companies that are adopting treasury assets right now with crypto or  you’re talking Bitcoin, maybe Ethereum, some Ripple possibly. Solana’s popping up in there,  but there’s a lot  just kind of happening all that.  So  in terms of the perplexity part, Brian Armstrong  went and tweeted all of this. said this is the first stage is going live and there’s a lot more to come.  So it’s gonna ingest all the market data, including Coin 50, which is just…

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all the top 50 coins in the  market. They’ll be able to like look at all the information, make better trade decisions.  And then phase two’s coming. It’s gonna be able to get  Coinbase’s market data and be used in perplexity in response to user queries. So traders are gonna have ability to monitor market activity  and then ask perplexity what trades they can make, analyze like token specific moves,  all with AI. This is really changing

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the crypto space like  I could see day traders going from,  you know, even Forex like which is currency, you know, trading from Forex to even just regular day trading stocks to day trading crypto  and being able to  do a lot of cool stuff with AI. If you’re really smart and know what to do. One thing I saw from this tweet was that he says quote unquote, and today this new access to reliable real time data via increasingly intelligent LLMs.

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will help lots of people make smart informed decisions about crypto. think this is something that crypto really needed for a while because  you know day traders and not just for crypto, now that I realize, but day traders  they need to find different sources to find reliable information. know a lot of times they use  things that are paywall like Wall Street Journal or  New York Times  and also you know  tweets from different people or  just anything they can find on Google.

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A lot of the times  it’s  so decentralized, all these resources that it is hard to keep  track.  But  when you create  a tool like AI  and give it the data that  Coinbase is giving it, it’s going to make it so much easier to just  open the Perplexity app and then  make a prompt,  hey, give me this week’s  biggest  market moves or something on the crypto space.  Boom.

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all this data is from Coinbase, know, this is what’s top,  blah, blah. It gives you everything in one spot. And that’s incredible.  I was looking at it  at the perplexity API  and  I was playing with the app.  I was using it  and it was able to, you know, pull me some of the data  on, the crypto markets. And I compared it to Coinbase  and it  was pretty much on the same level. So  that’s awesome. I feel like

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If someone creates an app that kind of gives you everything you need to know as far as any particular asset and is powered by an LLM and we can verify that the LLM is not full of shit, then that’s an incredible tool that we can use. Yeah, it’s going to change crypto trading. It’s going to help people enter this and then it’s going help people make better decisions, which I think in the end will help crypto across the board where you have everyone kind of.

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trading in a manner. I’m kind of curious how accurate Proplexity will be but every all of these AIs are getting plugged in with like real-time data and I love that they’re Plugging into crypto is one of the first ones. So we’ll see kind of what happens any other thoughts on any of the topics this week Yeah, so one more thing I wanted to say is you mentioned crock how it’s actually now going to be on chain so that’s exciting you’ve already seen that on polymarket and

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I think it’s really cool because  Polymarket gives you almost the same kind of  capabilities that Coinbase is with giving you its data. You know, can go to Grok right now and can say, hey, give me some of the trending Polymarket  traits or whatever. And it will. You remember the Mecha Hitler or whatever  comments that were saying,  like Grok was saying so?  Yeah, Grok went a little insane  and had data from like  4chan and was saying like people were Hitler and everything.

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It just hallucinated to no end. So that was another thing that happened this week, which I thought was very interesting. It was funny as well. I was just on the beach reading it and I’m like, dude, what is happening with Twitter? Well, it reminds me of when Gemini was white or like re washing history and like George Washington could only be black and and all of us went a little too far and like generating images and like the Hey, generate me an image. And it was like

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Everybody was Indian. It was just like too much. Like this is not the same thing, but Grok was just like full on like white supremacy and racism to a T and everyone’s just kind of like, whoa, where did this data come from? you know, there’s Seth, Seth pools in the internet that just people will say anything and 4chan is one of them. So like it’s a careful line of like feed at the right data, but also what data is it getting?

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Humans are quite  vile creatures, like just each of us has some pretty dark and nasty thoughts  from day to day and some people put them out on the internet. Yeah, one more thing I’ll say is  apparently the GROK 4 model, I think it’s a new one,  it’s supposed to be as smart as a physics PhD student. So  that’s really incredible. The fact that it knows,  I don’t know the current capabilities and other LLMs,  but the fact that it’s supposed to do better or

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perform better on a PhD test than a physics student on relevant topics like I don’t know, I don’t have a PhD background on physics but anything physics related I guess. Yeah it’s a really interesting thing as you kind of like look and think about what’s happening because they’re getting smarter than us, they’re getting better than us and I know GROCK4 like beat even like Claude, it beat like the 03, it Gemini.

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But there’s a really great chart out there and I’ll put in the show notes  that it just like  the last pie everybody else and it’s more efficient and  everything  Yeah Check out more of the more the comments for any links any stories that we talked about  I’ve got a question for everybody So  I I want to know like, you know just for every listener that went through this like, you know, which side are you on? Are you a Bitcoin maximalist an eith optimist or?

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Just a AI crypto degen, you know, I love if you dropped in the comments,  you know, your hottest take and your opinion on everything. And beyond that,  subscribe to the Boost network on YouTube. You can find the social ledger report on  Apple podcast and every podcast player that you listen on. So  check out app.socialmarket.tech to stay up to date on the weekly moves on crypto. All in one place. You can keep track of the inflation, whether it’s  bull market, but

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Yeah, check out the app and let us know what you think on the comments. Sounds good. Bye. Take care.