Episode 21: Why Gemini’s IPO and Polymarket’s Rise Are Game-Changers for Crypto

00:00

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode. This is JR, founder and CEO of Social Market. Hey, my name’s Leon Hitchens. I’m the chief marketing officer of Social Market. This is Social Ledger Report where we talk about the weekly news, trends, and  just trending things on the crypto space. But before we kick off, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel. It costs you nothing. That motivates us and pushes us to keep creating content for you. So if you really like what you see,  or if you don’t like it, be sure to like and dislike or whatever you like. But yeah.

00:28

onto the uh

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kind of this mixed market signal, but it’s really more leading towards altcoin season. And then fear and greed index is right in the middle, a little bit more inclined to greed and inflation is actually closer to 3 % right now, which I know this is a yearly view on the index. We’re actually trying to update it to be monthly to keep it more up to date. But for as of last month, the USD inflation was right at 2.9. So almost at that 3 % mark, which is still relatively high, but

01:26

It’s  staying where it’s  pretty level headed. Also, gold reached 3,600 as  of last week. Also, NASDAQ is, these are DTFs that you’re seeing in market overview. They’re all  relatively high levels of price. know S &P 500 is actually trending in the markets. It’s supposed to go even higher. We studied, you know, weak  overall, like you had, you know, some IPOs and some stuff that we’re gonna talk about, but.

01:54

Bitcoin held on I think it’s 115 right now 116 aetherium is at like 4600 40 I think it’s like 4600 Yeah, so 115 6 almost 116 eats, you know holding strong at 4600 and I think the eat all-time high is 49 46 so that’s really good XRP even with all the news and the pushes from them as the company as a There’s a word for it as a protocol

02:23

They really haven’t increased their value too much. It’s sat around the $3 mark, which is a good sign in many ways, but they could become like a banking protocol. And I’m just kind of shocked that they’re staying pretty stable. Same thing happens with Chainlink. Even though they’re getting a ton of news around them, there’s really not a lot of movement around them. I’m trying to search for Chainlink on the chains and tokens, but it’s not letting me. there?

02:50

Is it based on? Yeah. So right now we’ve been having some issues a little bit on the backend of what we were doing at social market. We’re actually in the middle of converting this into a coverage based wallet with market analysis. changed providers on our data broker. So that is still updating. You will be able to view Chainlink, but that’s probably the reason why you can’t see Chainlink right now because it wasn’t available before for some reason. Oh, really weird. Let me go look.

03:17

There’s Department of Commerce news, like $24. Let’s see. It’s kind of high from the start of the year, the of year was like 15, 18. Right now it’s sitting at 25-ish. High was like 26 within the last three months. All-time high was, wow, I didn’t realize Chainley could hit that high at one time, 52.70. Oh, that wasn’t 20.21, right?

03:44

Yeah, it’s 2021. I’m still just like kind of shocked. But again, like they’re talking about Swift. They’re talking about DTCC, the, you know, AI Oracle stuff over there. Like there’s all of this financial institutions adopting XRP and Chainlink and they’re really not moving up in price that heavily. I know that there’s like a circulating supply and all of that, but I would just expect them to kind of

04:12

scale up as this news really hits every time. think it’s a matter of time right now there’s a little bit of fear in the markets with tariffs. That is kind of like a back and forth sort of deal, especially with certain countries like China. Although I think once that settles and you know people aren’t afraid with like the job markets because there’s also the fear that AI is going to take our jobs or most jobs that also

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signals people, you maybe I should hoard my money instead of spending it, which is kind of counterintuitive with the crypto markets, but that’s usually how goes. mean, that’s fair. Job reports were really slow, but we’ll see kind of what happens. Market’s staying strong. No crypto winners, no real slowdowns, no bear markets. So we’re seeing the right signals head in the right direction. Now it’s just how much can they stabilize? Yeah, absolutely. So as of our stories today, we’ll talk about Gemini’s IPO.

05:09

It actually hit an IPO this week. And then we’ll talk about Polymarket venture capital value reaches 10 billion, which  kind of tells everyone who doubted Polymarket that, you know, maybe, you should not be so quick to judge. then World Liberty Finance launched two weeks ago, but there were some more stories that developed from that  and including Eric Trump. And lastly,

05:36

This is more on the business venture side, but Jesse Pollack was the head of base and part of the executive team of Coinbase. He went to Y Combinator, which is this renowned startup accelerator in San Francisco. And  there could be a more push and incentive to crypto based startups coming up. So overall, several compelling stories for us to talk about.  And with that being said, leave a like in the video if you like it, subscribe to the channel if you like it or dislike if you dislike it, you name it.

06:05

all the shameless plugs but now on to our first story so Jim and I’s IPO. So big big moment for the Winklevoss twins. ah I saw all of them, you know, just  all over Twitter talking about it.  Ten years in the making,  kind of  getting shafted at the Facebook world. Who knows what the actual truth is there. But, you know, they hit the public markets and  they  were also not only beyond that, they were also just

06:33

showing up on a lot  of why this is such a bad screenshot  yeah i guess the seo or word search yeah mixed yeah uh but i don’t know this is a terrible screenshot but gemini was topping charts  on apple’s app store  okay yeah it uh

06:53

I think a large part of it was the Bitcoin credit card, the XRP credit card, and then the fact that they IPO’d, everybody was looking at them. The outcome and the goal for them was to raise $425 million in its IPO, which  I think they did. They popped about 30, 40 % from open. And then that puts them at $3.3 billion out there. And then I love that their ticker was actually  essentially Gemini,  but that was a  good ticker overall for them.

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Out of all the crypto exchanges  for a long time, they kind of looked at like the mediocre second, third tier one, but more and more they’re popping up. They don’t have a lot of dev tools like Coinbase or anything. They’re way more just like  exchange focused. Yeah. And then with their new credit card that came out. So  a few weeks ago we talked about the Bitcoin credit card and then we talked about the XRP credit card, but it really is just one. But they were  pushing for this  public relations move where

07:53

you could get a limited edition credit card with the Bitcoin design or their latest XRP design. But really what I think it’s really cool is you don’t need to have a treasury or a large holdings like Coinbase’s credit card to get the most rewards. And as a result, I use it a lot. I use it literally for everything. And I have an electric car. So whenever I charge, I just get 4 % back from whenever I travel.

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It’s amazing. I like it. So I’ve seen myself gravitating more towards Gemini, like organically over the last year. And I tend and I grew to enjoy it, enjoy it more and more. It makes sense. You know, just on their business perspective, though, they lost money in 2024. They lost money in 2025. Sooner or later, the market’s going to look at them and see if they actually make sense. You know, again, really strong brand presence. It’s a coin based.

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crypto.com and Gemini that really get talked about. Kraken has been doing really big marketing pushes.  Yeah, so like there’s a bunch of stiff competition. You have Binance, which is really an international one. You have Binance US, but  the Binance US is a different company, different thing. They also have a ton of debt that could really drag them down at some point. They got to stop these losses, figure it out. You know, they’ve got a custody business. They’ve got compliance infrastructure. I think that’s going to be really  interesting to institutional investors.

09:18

But it just shows that crypto markets are getting more regulatory clarity. It lowers the risk for these crypto related IPOs and lets them go raise public money and  raise a large sum of it without having to either go  raise another round or even just take on some sort of further debt that could put them in a really bad spot.  If  crypto at some time has a bear market and  just pushes all their exchange  volume down.

09:48

I agree. also think it’s like a really good signal for IPOs. Like, and I talked about it before,  more of these cryptos companies, IPOing means more of them  just hitting the markets and having the confidence to go do that. And then investors having that confidence to put more money into these crypto quality companies  and just, you know, kind of keep pushing it. I would be interested to see, you know, what  Gemini does with this money. You know, maybe they do some sort of partnerships with stable coins. Maybe they build out  more infrastructure, dev tools.

10:18

It’s kind of unclear, but I think if they stick to being an exchange, like the custody, the compliance and all of those large institutions would probably flock to them as a place to buy crypto reserves. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, we’ll see what happens. I think it’s interesting how despite being at a loss for the last two years, you said 23, right? 23 and 24? 24 and 25. I’m sure they were losing money before that too.

10:45

Yeah, especially since 2023 was kind of the bear market between 22 and 23. was kind of like people were bad at encrypt their left and right. But now it’s really interesting to see them. And apologies if I sound like death almost out of the house to put it. I’ve been recovered from my sickness. I just hear myself and I’m disgusted. Anyways, so I can feel it too. I’ve got all the allergies hitting me. Yeah, you know, so it’s probably that season.

11:12

bull market season is right around the corner, think, especially since, or I think it happened already, but I think it’s interesting to my original point that Gemini still managed to IPO despite being at a loss. I think that was really interesting. So I really don’t understand how some of these  business sort of things work. I feel like the more I work with a startup, the more I understand business, but  it always surprises me how business can work. A lot of it is just based on vibes and just having the right people with you.

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and maybe they just had both, you know, let them to the IPO. Oh yeah, 100%. Anything else on  Gemini? If not, let’s go to Polymarket. Okay, let’s  do it. So, solid tweet. Sorry, just wanted to say that I really love Polymarket. I think they’re trying to position themselves as this news media place,  which I think it’s interesting. There are times where I feel like I learn

12:08

about what’s happening around the world when I go on Polymarket because the bets that they make, but I feel like there’s still ways to go to make it a reliable new site. Yeah, that’s the hard part for them, like making it reliable. So  this is the tweet that I saw, a crypto prediction platform, Polymarket valued up to 10 billion in VC investment offers.  Really big, which  makes sense considering  they’re  turning to  like…

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Into a new site. this is Oh, now it’s 99 % Let’s see what it was like a week ago. The odds that we were gonna hit it was 50 % Yeah, I hear it. It’s cut out Someone said F you MrBeast down here But so a lot of people who bet that we weren’t gonna hit it are Dosting the site. So Just just the summary of it is MrBeast this guy with 400 million YouTube subscribers

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is checking Polymarket to see  if  like bets on him raising the money for that make water the water  nonprofit that he was doing was actually going to raise the amount that they said. uh Really fascinating to kind of see that out there to see that he just you know a pretty well known YouTuber also knows about Polymarket knows that this is the thing and like wants to kind of engage with it and

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show people out there. That’s another fascinating part. It’s just like permeating into pop culture and into the rest of the world. Kind of like regular betting has. Like sports betting has always been a staple of everything. Everyone talks about bookies and all that. I’m sure, you know, so one day you’re to have a bookie on which president wins and it’s going to be Polymarket. Yeah, I agree. I think Caoshi is the second largest prediction market in the US. And at one point was the most favored, most used because

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Polymarket wasn’t available yet in the US until, what was it earlier this month? They finally got clearance with CFTC. So they’re finally in the US. You can go to polymarket.com  and start betting with, without using a VPN. So. Yes. It was really cool. Now  there’s big shifts here. So  the fact that Polymarket’s breaking news, like Nepal, and if you don’t know about what happened in Nepal, oh the high level gist of it is they.

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passed some laws about restricting social media, more or less kind of banning it in some ways by companies just not wanting to follow  those rules in that specific country,  which led to  a revolt, revolution, however you want to phrase it in the country. They  stormed the Capitol, the prime minister, people were leaving, uh officials in the helicopters, in own ropes.  And then they turned around and  Gen Z went and did a discord vote and  essentially overthrew the government.

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through social media and kind of pushing on all of that.  And Polymarket was  one of the first places that I saw break it, break the news, and then on top of that kind of dig in and provide more information on it. Yeah, that’s really interesting.  we’re starting to see Polymarket become more than just a betting marketplace. I mean, not only can you do sports, but then you could do political events, you could do YouTuber, social influencer kind of events, including

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now people betting on, can they bet on Gen Z, so we’re throwing the government? Was that a market that they were able to bet on? you know? I’m not entirely sure like that part, but I know there was bets on how long the military would hold the government, uh when a new prime minister would be voted on.  There was a lot of information  on that.  And I think one of the bets was like, when is the new prime minister going to take over? And that’s how you got that news, essentially, polymarket.

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you know, was following it super closely. That makes sense. Also, I don’t think you have a, uh, like a post about it or a tweet if you still want to call it a tweet, but Robinhood, had their state of the summit. What was it last week? They’re doubling down on prediction markets and they’re planning to release their own prediction market on Robinhood. So they’re going to replace pot.

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Cauchy is like integration, also like Cauchy was non crypto based. This is very crypto based. You know, they’re using blockchain to validate it and all that, but  it’s just, it’s a shift for them. And it makes a lot of sense considering what they’re doing. Like there is a whole channel on Twitter that I discovered that’s essentially powered by polymarket. It’s like a go-to news source.  Um, and it’s all like out there. It’s kind of like unusual wells in a, in a way.

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But they’re just like posting about news and putting everything out there. That’s happening I believe they’re one of the first to like touch on Charlie Kirk and like validated  they might have the most up-to-date news generally because Those prediction markets people are watching them and they’re looking for outcomes  and when those outcomes are validated from sources that are you either video or you know actual people on the ground that are reputable  they turn around and

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you know, immediately start talking and saying, this is just what’s happening. And it’s sticky when real events are kind of tied to something online and people want to pay attention. That makes sense. I think it’s awesome. The guy who built Polymarket essentially was inspired by this original predictions market that kind of existed in the early Ethereum days. And then by 2020, he was actually building it from, there’s this famous post that he made that where he talks about having

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his little office set up in a restroom and he was just coding there, build it with React,  JavaScript, it was really interesting.  And seeing how far they’ve come, I think it’s very inspiring.  you know, I’ll talk more about that once we get into the Jesse Pollack story with Y Combinator. But yeah, I mean, I’m very excited to see what’s going to come with Polymarket now that they don’t have any handcuffs or anything holding them back from building and creating new things for the product. Yeah, it’s a cultural moment for them.

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It’s  helping in their valuation and also just pushing people to like not just, you know, hold tokens, actually use it. I would call it a social finance platform in a way. Like it’s, the closest to it. it kind of is. They do have like chat rooms and blog and forum rooms  on, their betting markets. So I can see it being more of a social finance platform. Yep. Yeah.

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Well, that’s all I got on that one. Do you want to go to, think we’re to talk the  WLFI. That’s right. So World Liberty Finance  came out recently. It’s been a bit of a developing story. So for those of you who don’t remember, we covered the launch  on September 1st when they first launched and the token kind of went parabolic for a moment and then it kind of just died down by like 50%. So it launched like at

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Or maybe it was valued like right under 50 cents and then it went to 24 cents. Well, found this story on Twitter and it’s from CryptoWorld and it goes, then, NASDAQ rules force Eric Trump off the board of World Liberty Treasury firm, ALT 5 Sigma, Forbes report. World Liberty Finance reacting red to the news. further, the token went further down. It’s now sitting right about 19 cents as of this screenshot and I don’t know if you can.

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pulled out the price right now, Leon, but I think it’s sitting probably around that same price considering how it happened just a few days ago this last week. And there’s another story that I’ll cover here in a moment. World Liberty Coin right now sitting at 21.54. So call it 22 cents if you round up. Their all-time high was 33 cents. So an all-time low was 16 cents. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So what’s the other?

20:05

I don’t know what network you’re looking at on because it’s the Ethereum one, the ether scan. Yeah. You think it was the  Solana  one where it went almost 50 cents, which is kind of interesting and clear because I was talking to a friend the other day and he said that just Solana has more volume right now than Ethereum.

20:26

Which I think it’s interesting because I thought when they run across these networks, I don’t understand how they’re different, but the Solana one is pretty much pegged at the same cost 2148. And right now Ethereum is 2154 and all time high on, sorry, I’m in the Gecko terminal and I never remember where they put Its UI can be a little finicky. Wow. I don’t know where to find the all time high in this interface. That’s where social market comes in.

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build the more easy to use UI UX and also give you the relevant information.  It definitely is. I cannot tell you and  I’m probably the dumb one  here, but I cannot tell you the high. see the pool,  the holders, the sole scanner. You can go to deck screen or deck screen. will give you a better  view on it. Let’s go do it real quick. Yeah. So your own deck screener. So

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It tells you the price. Now this is War Liberty Finance. It’s on Solana. It says WL. I don’t know if that’s the right ticker. It should be WLFI. Because if you go on the top left. So there it is. It’s any of those. Solana one. Okay. So you can see the price. It’s sitting at 21 cents and then should tell you more in the details. I believe if you scroll down a little bit. Now, Dex Greener gives you all the data from

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all the different decentralized exchanges like Radium in this case. Radium is a popular swapping tool for tokens  on Solana. It tells you a lot there, but I’m not seeing an all time high, which I think it’s interesting. No, I don’t know where they keep that. I’ve given up on finding. Well anyways, it’s sitting at 21 cents right now. So this is from Alpha Hamster and the, think it’s a funny name, Alpha Hamster. Anyways.

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The this is a thread which I think it was really interesting that kind of goes more into detail here what happens so it goes ALT 5 Sigma hold 72.8 billion tokens. Eric Trump on the board there were some blacklisted scandal and This guy kind of just goes over it here on the thread So I’ll just paraphrase here real quick World Liberty Finance holdings have grown to roughly 7.28 billion tokens worth about 1.31 billion at the

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price of 18 cents. Serena is probably worth a little bit more. This comes after raising 1.5 billion to purchase the token  as  a strategic move for their crypto treasury.  earlier, ALT 5 raised 1.5 billion through the sale of 200 million shares of World Liberty Finance. Eric Trump joined the board of directors and  his brother Donald Jr. joined as an observer.

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Zach Witkoff became a chairman. This amplifies the political hype drawing attention to World Liberty Finance as Trump coin, which I think is interesting because we already have  a Trump meme coin, but this is just being associated to now the Trump coin. And then the founder of the NFT project, RMRK, accused World Liberty Finance of marketing his address as high risk and blocking tokens, calling it quote unquote theft.

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Polygon Devrel also complains about the freeze. World Liberty Finest responded by saying, we only intervene to protect, but the community is shocked by the new era of censorship. it looks like people who were blacklisted and you know, I didn’t know until reading this, this was the founder of RMRK for the NFT project. And then this person was blacklisted and I guess this is where the scandal kind of broke through. Now it follows, actually 272 wallets were frozen.

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by World Liberty Finance, which was confirmed by them. Over the past few days, have blocked 272 addresses, of which roughly 215 are associated with phishing  and 150 are compromised. This is a small portion of all holders to prevent damage. But critics ask if they did this to  San 595 million World Liberty Finance. I don’t know who that is. Looks like some individual.  Who’s next? know, if  he was already hit. Questions rose about compliance.

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which yeah, I guess one thing I did see on my own was that people were protesting like this is not really a decentralized network or token as far as the tokenomics go. I can see where the risk comes from. Like if you’re holding WalletBirdieFinders longterm, if you truly believe in it, you know, there’s always the risk of getting your wallet frozen somehow remotely, which  I don’t know if you have a wallet on Coinbase or something, they could freeze your funds somehow. That would be interesting to see it happen. So this is a chart.

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that’s shown from Dex Greener actually. And it says the price and kind of like the market movement that same day when it happened. The last thread here in the, thread I guess, it just, you know, it kind of glances over what could happen in the future. Trump was removed as a direct, what was it? A board member involved and he became one of the observer with Donald J. Trump or Donald Jr. I mean. Things enveloped, things evolved overall.

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seems to be more skepticism over WLFI. People are suddenly becoming more concerned whether they should continue to hold that token in the meantime, because they IPO’d NASDAQ actually per NASDAQ, they had to step down Eric Trump because, you know, his family ties with the president. So that’s kind of like how the story develops. Do you have any thoughts on that?

25:57

No, I just think that there’s a lot of uncertainty. It’s concentrated holdings. There’s political ties.  No matter which way it was, anything  when there’s political person in office that also has stake in the company, it just gets a little murky.  People are like worried if  Trump doesn’t win the next election or Republicans don’t, I could see uh Democrats going after, you know,  the world liberty finance. There’s always a little bit of that.

26:24

ah If they do win, you know, how much longer can they keep going until somebody like flips and says that there’s a problem? Whether there’s not or there is  those concentrated holdings are big and then There’s a big possibility. This is classified as the security like it more and more looks like a security to me than an actual like token  I’m not sure. I just I don’t like that. It’s very centralized ah Concentrated holdings like that’s my biggest thing

26:52

If it wasn’t like that, it would look way more appealing, especially with the fact that crypto is taking off at the moment and just being truthful. like the current administration is very crypto friendly. The fact that it’s controlled by them too, I would think that they would be able to offset a lot of that in the end. But let’s see if they build out real utility payments, governance or something.

27:19

Or if it’s just like an identity asset, like slash mostly hype,  I’m kind of like up in  the air on what happens there. Yeah. So I think one thing you’ll start to notice is IPOs and stock  initial offers or initial public offers. We’re going to start to see that more with tokens in the form of crypto or formerly known as ICOs. Just because they’re cryptos, it doesn’t mean that they’re all going to be with the purpose of having a

27:48

publicly available token that it’s decentralized and everyone can trade and make money together or something. In  this case, I can see your concerns with it being labeled as a security, which I don’t know what would happen. I would prefer if it wasn’t labeled as a security, but the way they’re treating the token, I can see  concerns uprising as being a security. So only time will tell.  This was the latest developments as far as world Liberty finance, but  we’ll keep you guys updated as the weeks go.

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And on to our last story. So this is with Jesse Pollack, who’s  in the executive board with  Coinbase. He was also the, I guess, founder of Base within Coinbase. This is the layer two blockchain where… Okay, so he was the guy who  really started Base, right? Yeah, he was. That was kind of his whole, like, I don’t want to say claim to fame, but that was like his  doing. It really was.

28:46

And then it started as a small project and then  I’m not too sure I remember the details, but  it started as a project and then Brian Armstrong said, Hey, well, if you can make this network faster and then you can, I don’t know, just make it a more compelling layer two than what’s currently available with like Uniswap,  Arbitrum, Optimist, you name it, several Ethereum based layer twos. In fact, that was just a year ago when it was created. then, you know, up until now.

29:14

Base became this very popular network. You can use Farcaster on it. As far as their new base app, can use, you know, Coinbase is the latest decentralized exchange. you no longer need to use Coinbase itself as a centralized exchange. You can use, you know, it’s decentralized exchange to swap tokens and self custody. So that’s really cool. So recently Jesse Pollack, who became this very influential person in the crypto space as a result.

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over the success of bass, he went to Y Combinator, is this very renowned, those of you who don’t know, think of it like the Harvard. They live under a rock if they don’t know. What do mean? They live under a rock if they don’t know. Oh yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean, I’m sorry, but you live under a rock, but honestly, like, I don’t blame you. Business, startups, it’s always, it’s a fast world and a lot of people just can’t keep up with it. But with Y Combinator, it’s this very,

30:13

The biggest companies in the world right now, most of them have come out from Y Combinator, companies like Reddit, Coinbase, Instacart,  Airbnb, you name it. Those big companies, they’ve come out from Y Combinator.  And I think it was between 2021 and 22 when they were backing crypto based companies, primarily in 2021. And  until now, when we have applied with social market, you see a lot of AI based tools and B2B. uh

30:43

tools as well. This is kind of like where we are with AI and crypto. Crypto is no longer this very appetizing thing. They’ve backed companies in crypto in this year. Most of them have been like stable coin issuers, stable coin sort of developer tools, which is where they believe more right now. They believe more on stable coins, the functionality of stable coins. And they’ve only, I think, funded like three companies this year.

31:09

Yeah, we were talking about it a little bit too. I wonder, I don’t know if it’s like, that it’s not as appetizing  or if it’s more of just like a, the companies that they’re looking for now are more mature. So they’re, they’re trying to figure out like which one to actually make the best bet. Cause okay, that makes sense. Like I guess AI kind of had that moment of like what startups to actually go after because most were just like chat GPT like gooey, you know, like you were just building another  interface on top of chat GPT.

31:39

plugging into your app, whereas now a bunch of companies have kind of figured out like, oh, we can do a lot of really cool stuff. And there, I wonder the same thing here, like crypto first wave, it was like, you know, what, what is it? You know, a bunch of people were making tokens and coins and now people are like, oh no, Hey, it’s, it’s actually a financial system. And they’re trying to figure out like which companies are going to have impact. Yep. So it’s all a betting game almost, which I think that’s why.

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Polymarket kind of exploded because betting happens everywhere all the time including in the business world So anyways,  the story here is that Jesse Pollack who became this renowned person  on the crypto space went to Y Combinator and said he spent a day there and he said they are open for business for crypto So we’re probably gonna start to see  in the request for startups or RFS or maybe other outlets  in other socials of theirs

32:36

Starting to say hey if you have if you’re building a crypto startup come join us. I left a reply Saying hey, I would love to see their RFS to which Jesse says interesting So I’m kind of wondering if he knows what our faces or requests for startups  Previsions are hard. I didn’t even realize that until Okay, yeah, and who we were talking with on the  chat was like, oh hey request for for startups and I was like, okay, okay, but

33:05

I had never really seen it just abbreviated.  And I was like, man, I’m getting old or I’m just dumb. You know, in the business world, this is probably where the most abbreviations exist over anything else. Even some dumb ones like our face makes sense. But I don’t know. You go to some HR training or something and then they say follow fear or something. And fear stands for this and that for, I don’t know, some bullshit.  I hate abbreviations. I hate jargon.

33:35

Yeah, me too. It’s bad.  Sorry. I agree. So in this case, uh he just said interesting, which I thought it was funny. And then later  that same day, Brian Armstrong reposts his tweet and he says, time to 10x the number of YC crypto companies.  you know, I saw, I saw somewhere on Twitter that said, you know, Brian Armstrong is the kind of person when he speaks, things happen in the, in the markets,  in the crypto industry. So.

34:05

Who knows? I think this would be good. It would be good to see more crypto companies. If you’re building a startup, this is probably your time. You know, if you are building on base, this is probably your time. I wouldn’t be surprised if Coinbase and the base team are going to be advocating for base developers, which if you’re building a base as a network, you know, this could be your time. This could be your signal. You know, a lot can happen before the end of the year. I think Y Combinator’s last batch is in winter 2025. So…

34:33

If we don’t see it by winter 2025 requests for startups, which has not gone up yet, then I mean, or even if requests for startups doesn’t have anything that says they’re looking for startups, maybe they’re just going to be more receptive and not dismissive for crypto companies. I was just reading through a bunch of those. As you were talking, a bunch of threads and stuff inside of that. Yep. The reoccurring thing. Yeah. Like

35:01

Besides all the junk, if you get into it, the reoccurring thing is monetization models are a problem for crypto companies, which is true. And, you know, it kind of goes to the maturity of companies is which companies are actually able to make money. know, layer two competitions intense, like there’s a lot of L2s, roll-ups, decentralization trade-offs that are tricky. But Web3 blockchains struggle to make revenue based on gas beyond gas fees and

35:31

A wall and an L2 combo might help, but it’s still a big thing. then ecosystem stickiness is a big problem, like convincing users, developers and everything to kind of get together. Base is doing the best one. I think it’s partially because Coinbase is just behind it. Coinbase is a giant, know, cryptography. It reduced some of the friction, but honestly, now that I’m in the beta of Base…

35:58

I like it, but it’s not as smooth as I thought it was going to be. thought it was going to be like a leap forward and it’s like, really. Also it’s like how much influence are like blockchains  built by exchange backed entities are going to really have out there because  if you’re an exchange, you want to centralize control, but also there’s like a big tension between that and decentralization. Like all of that, I think  as these first cohorts of like this new type of,  of.

36:28

crypto startup comes out, think it’s going to be in signal to investors what criteria would have looked for in founders, what sort of infrastructure and consumer apps are out there. I think it’s going to be a big, a big push out there once that starts happening because they’ll, they’ll set the first steps and say, Hey, this is the criteria of people. This is the criteria of companies.  And then everybody will invest around that. Honestly, uh, we’ll see what happens. I think it’s fun to speculate, which is what we do with your best vibes.

36:57

Only time will tell because  I think we’ve seen time after time companies say something kind of out there.  And  for one, if you’re into that narrative, it’s really easy to support it, but only time will tell because  even if you have like one of the brightest entrepreneurs building one of the most innovative tools, like say Steve Jobs who built the iPhone or who was responsible for the iPhone,  it only really depends the impact that’ll bring in the value it’ll bring to users because

37:25

Going back to the iPhone moment real quick, people  and news outlets were skeptic  on the success of the iPhone, but yet people used it.  People would say one thing, but on the other hand, you would see people actually gravitating more to an iPhone.  And now iPhone is everywhere and the design of the iPhone is evolved into every other smartphone. So it’s just like hacker news and everyone.

37:52

You know, shitting on Dropbox back in the day. That’s my favorite kind of reference point of like, you could do this with a NAS. You like, who wants cloud storage, blah, blah, blah. And  they’re  billion dollar company now, like struggling to some degree, you know, out there, but they knew where they were heading and that’s an important part too. So  let’s, let’s see. Like I, I’m really curious. I know somebody is going to figure it out. It’s just, I think  Brian Armstrong has to push it along to

38:22

Yeah. How far was that? I think if you’re putting money in something, you’re bound to see more, more  set thing evolve and grow and could bring value. I’ll finish it off with this though. This is from  a tweet that I read earlier from Nicole De Tomaso. I don’t know how to pronounce her name,  but Nicole De Tomaso said, if your startup sounds obvious, you’re too late.  If it sounds crazy, you might be early enough. So looking back at the Dropbox story,

38:52

It was too early where people were being so skeptical. if you’re on the startup world building something for crypto, you know, just keep going. If people tell you it sounds crazy, then that could be a good sign because they don’t see it yet. And when they see it, it becomes too late. So keep on building. Yep. All right. I believe in that. Yeah. Do you have anything else to talk about? I think we’re good overall. No, I think that’s it. The normal pitch, uh you know, subscribe like to the

39:19

to channel. you’ve made it this far, leaving a review on Apple Podcasts super helpful. Maybe mention what crypto coin or blockchain that you’re most interested in and they will respond or talk about it on the show. that’s going to be the most impactful thing you could do. Yeah. If you want us to cover anything specific at any time, reach out to us and we’ll get back to you.