Episode 22: Durant’s Coinbase Drama, MetaMask’s New Token, Robinhood Ventures & What’s Next for Crypto

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Welcome to another episode. This is JR, founder and CEO of Social Market. Hey, my name is Leon Hitchens and I’m the chief marketing officer at Social Market. Yeah, we have another episode for you at Social Ledger Report. You know, ah in this podcast, we talk about the last week’s trending  or hidden news that maybe the media didn’t cover. So we want to make sure everyone is fully aware of what’s happening on blockchain since everything usually goes really fast in this space. It’s moving a lot. We have a couple of big companies.

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here like Coinbase, which we’ll talk about more here today, doing a lot of great things. So, you know, it’s kind of what we want to do in this podcast. So to start off the stories,  first we’ll talk about Kevin Durant, who lost access to his Coinbase account where he had some Bitcoin.  I think it’s a fun story that we can cover. Metamask is, you know, releasing another token. So that’s really cool, actually. I actually didn’t know that. So first time learning it here, here in life. Coinbase came out this weekend, pretty much locked in  and

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came up with a series of releases and announcements, including their base camp, which is kind of this PR event where they announced different things being launched. And, you know, we’ll talk more about that.  And lastly, Robinhood launches Robinhood Ventures, where just out there, lot of retail investors to invest in stocks  for the first time ever. They are now  letting people be VCs,  question mark, investors. So we’ll cover that more here in a moment, which is all pretty interesting stuff.

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But if you like what we talk about, if you want to see more of it, please subscribe to the channel. costs you nothing and it helps us produce more content. If you have any thoughts or feedback for what we should cover, that also helps. So let us know. In case this is first time tuning in, we usually cover the markets whenever we talk about the episode and we showcase Social Market, my company for giving a little bit of a digest on the the market state of the market. Well, this last week, we’ve actually released a series of updates.

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and this is all on development. we’re gonna see is pretty much,  know, what’s going to be available at the end of the month. So this is what we’re doing, you know, you might, if you compare it to last week, so even if you go right now to app.socialmarket.tech, you’re gonna see several different things. So first, you know, we’re gonna have a lot more real time token activity.  We have all these different layer twos and layer ones like Solana and Ethereum. When  you filter these out, you can kind of see

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You might have some issues here with some of these tokens. We’re still working on it, but you’re actually going to see a lot of actual tokens in real time being updated. We updated our provider. So we’re no longer with CoinMarketCat work with CoinGecko. So for instance, if you look for Pepe, you might actually get different token activity from Uniswap as the decentralized exchange with Ethereum. Quick swap here, which we’re having some issues rendering that ah Uniswap as well.

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and then we’re on the base. So you’re to get all these different token activities moving in real time between networks and decentralized exchanges, almost like deck screener, except what we’re doing is, you know, a little bit more than that, where it’s more than just the deck screener. So this is kind of like what social market is evolving into, giving you more larger coverage on token activity on chain. Aside from giving you

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the market overview, which it looks like right now is all coin season. I don’t think we’ve seen that yet in this while covering this episode. I think it’s the first time and Ethereum is like at 40. What is it at right now? It’s like 4500 roughly. Oh yeah. So Ethereum it’s sitting at 44,000, 4,400 my bet. I wish 44,000. Me too. It could happen. You never know.

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Yeah, and if Bitcoin goes up a bit more, could flip silver and other market caps too, which is fascinating that even at 115, I’m kind of surprised that it’s altcoin season when a lot of these altcoins are kind of sitting relatively flat. Dogecoin is up, I think it was 29 cents, right? Or 27 cents? working on is having leaderboards on asset performance. So whenever users…

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I don’t know, click on a button we should do something like that, like the market cap tracker, like, you know, gold, like have it flip filter where there’s gold and Microsoft and Nvidia, Apple, like all of them. I love those charts where people are like, Bitcoin just surpassed this company’s market cap, you know? Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. I like those too. They’re really cool. Yeah, something like that in here would be fun because then we could just use the interface to take screenshots and…

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post onto the channels.  There you go. So that would be the network effect that we’re that we’re trying to do.  So one more thing I’ll showcase here, and this is actually Leon’s first time watching it, is adding a wallet where you can either use your Google account to create a crypto wallet that is self custody. You can create your own or you can import your own.  So you can create one actually, if you want to go through the steps right now, Leon, we can do that.

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Or we can also import one right now. I made several just to build this. But yeah, so let’s actually build one from scratch. So the way it looks is this is kind of like the onboarding I built. We use identicons here as your profile image. If you’ve used Metamask, Rainbow Wallet, Rabbit Wallet, anything, you get your own pixelated icon that’s unique to your Ethereum address. Here’s what we’ll do. This is our wallet. You can copy it.

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And then you can say your password to encrypt your wallet,  which pretty standard. I’m just going to use a password generator. You guys will be able to access this account if you want. I don’t really care.  then  maybe give us some crypto.  Yeah, that’d be nice.  So now you can reveal your seed phrase, which you already know what it is.  If you are

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familiar with crypto, this is kind of like your private key, which you do not want to share with anyone. But for demo purposes, we’ll look at this. And then yeah, that should be it. So  you now have your wallet in social market, and then the app will refresh. You can go to wallets.  And this is what you have. You can fund with our, well, we’re still working on the on-ramp, but you’ll be able to do that. You can swap tokens, you can send or receive to  yourself or to another  wallet that you have or

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someone else. Is it if I and this is like random questions. If I like if I swap devices, it’s all it’s all still recoverable. Like you kind of like Metamask. Metamask has like a recovery phrase. What’s difference there on that? Yeah. So as soon as you create this wallet, it’s pretty much live on the blockchain, which means as soon as you know, you have your seed phrase, you have your Ethereum address because this is all in Ethereum for now.

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Um, as long as you have  your address  and let’s say you forget your password, you can just wipe the entire account here. So the entire app. So, you know, I’m going to delete this wallet, you know, you want to make sure that you actually have it like your seed phrase. So, you know, let’s say I’m starting from scratch almost. I don’t know why I did that.  Uh,  well, you’re seeing debugging in real time.  Okay.

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So let’s say you don’t have an account. And  let’s say you have a new device. Like you have this on a mobile wallet. So you can always  import it to your web wallet. And then you can create a new password.  Let’s just say we’ll use this one for now. I’m using a password manager right now. It’s how I can do this.  And I go to my wallet, and there it is. So that was a long yes.

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Leon, but I just wanted to demo it to you and to anyone. No, I like it.  I’m excited  to use it when we can dog food it ourselves. Yeah. So now in the home page, you should be able to see your balance  and you should be able to do things with it. What chain doesn’t support? For now, it’s only going to be on the Ethereum mainnet.  And hopefully if everything goes well on the polygon and the base networks.  So this will be available on launch.

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literally these up three, the first three networks listed here. So yeah, that’s kind of what we’ve been cooking over the last month. Hopefully without any issues, we should have it live by October. I like it. I’m excited. We want to jump into the news then. Yeah, that was a very long segment, but I just wanted to cover the  app.  Yeah, let’s do want to kick it away right now. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s talk about Kevin Durant. And I wanted to talk about it because  all the time you hear about these

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Like sad stories people have a ton of Bitcoin they bought it a really inexpensive cost and now it’s worth like millions of dollars obviously Kevin Durant doesn’t need to lose you know lose any money he use well off no matter what but he he said in an interview somewhere that he bought Bitcoin at Coinbase but he forgot his password and all that stuff now

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This is the benefit of a centralized exchange. know, it’s on the platform. Somebody can go reset all the stuff, get you back into it. And that’s exactly what ended up happening. Brian Armstrong tweeted out, we got this fixed account recovered complete. And I was just kind of like, man, this is a good story for Kevin Durant. It’s 650 then, depends on how much he bought. He could have $1.8 million up to much, much more very easily. It just depends how much he was actually.

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collecting. This is where he said it. was like 2014. is that you hooked him on Bitcoin very early. Is that true? You the responsible party? about Bitcoin, but I gave him little nudge, yeah. You gave him a nudge? How did you give No, he did. And he called me in like 2014, 15. We got on a call with our business manager at the time who just like shut it down and was like, you guys like stop. Hold on, on. Go backwards.

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So you, how did you learn about Bitcoin? Just scrolling on YouTube, to be honest. Same honestly. Just seeing so many videos of seminars of people like this talking about cryptocurrency and how is the future of the world. And I was always into like futuristic, you know, new technology coming, how our world can change. And I felt like that was something that could be consistent and can last.

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Here we are now, 10 years later, we’re still talking about it. I lost him some money and we bought it at that point in 2014-15.  But about a year later, right when he signed with the Warriors,  Ben Horowitz hosted a dinner for Kevin for his birthday and the whole Warriors team came.  And at the end of that night, I was like, Kevin, I just heard the word Bitcoin 25 times this evening. And the next day we started investing in Bitcoin.  And fortunately,

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We’ve yet to be able to track down his Coinbase account info, so we’ve never sold anything and his Bitcoin is just through the roof. That’s honestly  probably best outcome ever. It’s happy because you have that other dude. He’s the one who threw it in the landfill and then he just has not been able to get it back ever since. Like he lost it. a very completely different person or different. Just an average Joe, you know, who goes that.

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I feel for that guy now. No, I feel for them, but the Kevin Durant one’s good. I’m sure there’s other people out there that bought Bitcoin on Coinbase, forgot about it. Even if they bought small dollar, you know, it’s $650 and they bought half of one and they open up their Coinbase account or managed to get back in and it’s you know, doubled, tripled in price very easily. That’s crazy for anybody. So maybe there’s some hidden Coinbase accounts. I’m kind of curious.

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how many Coinbase accounts are actually active and then how many Coinbase accounts that are like dormant haven’t been signed in for more than four years and hold money.  I would love to hear that amount of money and just kind of see from there. You know, I know Coinbase is a central exchange which there’s probably some laws there  or they have some privacy concerns as to why they wouldn’t want to do that. But I mean,

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If you know what you’re doing, can always explore the Bitcoin explorer sort of on-chain explorer and you can pretty much see which wallets are active, which wallets have the most money sort of thing. You can see Satoshi’s  wallet in real time right now if you want. I don’t think it’s  in the realm of impossible, but I just  don’t think they might have a motive right now. Now, we didn’t cover this when it came out, but Robinhood wants to launch their own social interface.

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I don’t think we covered that right, Leon. No, we haven’t even talked about it at all actually, but I actually think it’s  probably pretty big news.  Yeah. So what I think is if everything goes well with Robinhood social, which I think it will because we have a whole dedicated r slash Reddit community for that, which got media coverage in 2021 with GameStop. You know, if that goes well  and maybe in the app Robinhood social, we can see people’s  net worth or balances.

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I think it’s possible for Coinbase to  integrate some similar feature, which you can see their balances, other people’s balances or net worths, if that makes sense. Yeah, that’d be interesting because I’m more like, the hard part is you can’t tell last time that, you know, that  that person signed in, like you can see the last time they bought something, but to somebody actually having Coinbase, like I’m sure there’s some compliance part, but I think it’d just be really,  really interesting to see that data of like, hey,

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There’s, you know, a couple hundred million dollars probably just sitting there that nobody has touched in years. Yeah. And if Kevin Durant bought it in 2014, that guy’s probably, depending how much he has, he probably doesn’t even have to be in the NBA anymore. That’s probably true. He could have made, you know, if he bought a couple million dollars worth then, oh, that’s crushing it. Especially. Yeah. I mean, back then, you know, he was with the Golden State Warriors where he was making a shit load of money. Probably all got taxed.

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Yeah, you’re not wrong. You’re not wrong. Yeah. So I mean, I don’t have anything else to talk about him as much as I, you know, love NBA and love Kevin Durant. um Now let’s let’s talk about MetaMask.  So  MetaMask announced their stable coin. We talked about it is now alive. It’s on their platform. Okay. So this is kind of their first foray into actually being a token and pushing that sort of  narrative for them. Yes.

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Real quick, it’s in the Linia network, so if you use Metamask and if you’re a little technical, you can change networks from whatever you have as a default, which is probably Ethereum. You go to Linia, that’s where you can get it. Ooh, that’s kind of weird that it’s on a… Well, I might be wrong, but it could also be available on the Ethereum mainnet, but Linia is better because low gas fees. Okay, that’s very fair. Yeah, I’m kind of curious because that’s just like a… It’s just a friction point for people.

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on that I feel like kind of interesting on that. the more  like important thing here is that there is a conversation that’s been happening around Metamask for a little bit  is there is a Metamask token coming soon. Like this is not just their token. Like people are talking about like the fact that they’re going to launch something, do air drops and  kind of push this and it’s supposed to help with their.

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decentralized tool set that they’re building and kind of what they’ve been pushing. like this  conversation here, think is the best explanation of have a token at some point, maybe in near future? The Metamask token is coming. It may come sooner than  you would expect right now.  And it is  significantly related  to the decentralization of certain aspects of the Metamask platform.

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It looks like that guy. Oh, he’s still living.  Yeah.  So it looks like it’s going to be something DeFi. I bet you they  use their stable coin as like on ramp. They probably use it as like something to like store money, become more bank like.  And then they do something with DeFi, just kind of like Coinbase has been pushing on.  But this is really interesting because Metamask being a wallet and  building the technology for all that.

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has pushed hard. This is kind of their first steps into it. The stable coin makes sense, but now having their own token will be really interesting. I think it’ll help them raise money too. That’s the hardest part and  including us, like crypto right now is a  hard thing to invest in. And then also it’s a hard thing to raise money on the flip side. a  lot of these companies are really pushing for…

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like revenue and oftentimes they’re getting it through the token raises, know, look at pump fund, look at, you know, what others are doing out there because it’s, it’s,  it’s a hard world to raise and keep revenue coming in. Um, even as a wallet where they have ton of transactions. We’ll see what happens.  I think I’m pretty excited whenever a big company launches their own token, because people are going to eat it up.  And that’s usually a good opportunity to make a little bit cash there, depending how much your risk factor is, how much you’re willing to buy.

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But I mean obviously not financial advice because I would never tell people hey buy this token unless you know you really want to know what I do I’ll tell you what I do  but I’m gonna buy Metamask token if that’s the case usually people make a lot of money with airdrops uh Especially in Solana like Magic Eden. It’s this NFT platform There’s a lot of launches there  and people do just a shit ton of airdrops Especially like when they were first coming out. I have a friend who made a lot of money just through airdrops like he said in the

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you know, almost four figures at one point. it’s free money. That’s crazy. The air drops when they were really happening, it quite literally was free money. Now,  they’re a little  like, they’ve been a little less lucrative. And a lot of times, if you don’t time it just right,  you get the short end the stick. So  we’ll see this could also just really help them  like  show that  there’s a market for air drops again,  as

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as it’s kind of like been quiet, altcoins could really benefit from this. know, base is pushing on it. We’ll talk in a second. Zora’s out there. There’s a ton of token type things happening, but not quite in the way that was happening in like 2018 and 2019 and then through COVID. Man, COVID time was kind of a crazy time now that I think about it. I think a lot of us were more inclined being on the computer, being more tech driven.

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Now that’s kind of faded. It’s kind of good to see airdrops coming back. I don’t know. I felt like we were more  inclined with crypto back then because of the innate need or need to be in a computer since we’re all pretty much at home. Anyways,  those were good times in my opinion. It’s good to see it coming back. Yeah, so we have a series  of different things to cover from Coinbase. In this one post on Twitter, Brian Armstrong came out and said, hey, you know, we’re actually locked in.

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and or shared a meme where the guy is like inclining into his chair, which  is to show like, hey, I’m locking in and then go figure, you know, they released a literally a  shit ton of things, which all pretty exciting. So first thing that we’ll talk about from Coinbase  is they’re doing on-chain USDC lending. This is Coinbase talking about earning competitive yields by lending your USDC. So too long didn’t read. There’s a new way to earn more from your assets.

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lend your USDC and earn even higher rewards, all without leaving your trusted and easy to use Coinbase app. Lending is entirely powered by Morpho and Stakehouse Financial OnBase. Stakehouse Financial OnBase, that’s such a cool name for crypto. I would have thought, okay, why is there a Stakehouse on fucking crypto? Well, anyways, we are rolling out this integration to Coinbase users over the coming weeks in the US, excluding New York state, Bermuda and additional countries.

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I think it’s interesting how in New York state this is not coming out because that’s kind of like one of the crypto capitals in the US.  It is, but also  that stuff  is it’s like headaches  dealing with like New York and some of these bigger states.  You often see that on crypto. like they’ll exclude certain states  to buy and sell. um New York is often one of them.  California is one of them. Illinois.

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I occasionally will see like a  Texas pop up in there too. um Texas is pretty like weird on crypto rules and then Washington like those always pop up but New York is like one of them. I think Texas, which is where we live, they are becoming more more receptive towards crypto. Before they were kind of like, you know, we’re probably just going to do whatever the SEC does and says. So, you know, literally not thinking. But now it’s kind of interesting to see their pivot into crypto. Well, anyways.

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So here Coinbase continues, how does lending on-chain work? So here it pretty much tells you, I’ll read this one more paragraph, including more earning potential with USDC. So it says, you can earn even more on your USDC, all while keeping the familiar, easy to use Coinbase experience. Like with crypto-backed loans, we’re providing an integration with on-chain lending protocol called Protocol Morpho.

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to connect lenders and borrowers on a permissionless basis, all on base. Once you deposit your USDC, a smart contract will be created by Coinbase to connect to the Morpho protocol via on-chain vaults curated by Stakehouse Financial, where the funds will be allocated across different lending markets to optimize returns and you instantly start earning yield. Your funds are accessible  and can be withdrawn at any time when liquidity permits.

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So it’s kind of like this liquidation window, you know, if you’re currently staking USDC or Ethereum, for instance, that’s every day. So in this case, you know, it be similar suit just because daily rewards are pretty common thing in the crypto space. So the last thing I’ll cover here is more earning potential with USDC. USDC provides a reliable way to hold digital money as a widely accepted and highly liquidated liquid digital asset redeemable.

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buy one with the US dollar. Stability is not the only perk though.  Coinbase gives you the chance to earn passive rewards 4.1 APY and up to 4.5 for Coinbase 1 members while you hold your DC in your account. So it’s kind of like this, you know, savings account yield that you see in some banks, which it’s actually higher, you know, I think capital one used to be the highest  saving account yield, which was closer to 4%, but now it’s like 3.65.

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or something so it’s small difference but it can make a big difference when you have more and more money. But at a later post, Brian Armstrong talks about, you know, Canadians right now checking accounts is 0 % in Canada which means you earn zero interest rate on your money. So from today all Canadians earn 4.1 on  cap rewards on your USDC Coinbase. So they’re barely releasing the lending and

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Well, the lending, I’m not sure if it’s coming on Canada yet, but it seems to be coming on the US for now. But they’re extending this interest rate that we just talked about to Canada, which is really cool.  I think the Canadian part and just like that is way more important than anything.  This is  if this extends across the world,  there’s going to be a lot  of demand for this.  There’s so many countries in the world that hold US dollars because

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they know that either their currency is very volatile  or  they just know that they’re gonna be able to do like currency arbitrage where  the dollar gets  more value compared to their currency and all of that.  Argentina is a place where the hyperinflation happened. There’s just so many countries that I think would turn around and go, wait, I can be paid in USDC  and  just.

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spend it possibly in my home country with some sort of debit card that works anywhere and no foreign transaction fee possibly  and I’ll get way better interest on it. Like I think that could be huge. I don’t know if a bunch of countries will allow this on a regulatory perspective.  This like risks  other nations currency but it is something very fascinating. I mean crypto is so disruptive in its nature you know. I mean the US had a for a while there

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in the last administration had a rough time accepting the value that this could bring to the world, which is,  if you’re from someone either in a high-inflammatory, high-inflammatory? High-inflationatory. There’s  a word for it.  Yeah. English is not my background. I’m literally ESL or English Second Language. Well, anyways, long story short, crypto enables

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Access to money, which a lot of countries don’t exactly have good access to money, you know, I could talk about this for days, but just alone crypto lets you get access to money. mean, we already talked about airdrops, so that’s one example. And then, you know, here, you know,  literally through software, you can enable yields.  So, I mean, this is why I’m in crypto. It’s good to see this coming to other parts of the world. So we’ve already spent 30 minutes and we’re about halfway done into our stories here, but

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We’re gonna have speed around it. Yeah, we’re gonna have to literally blitz it which I’m gonna I’m gonna try to do here next This is from coin Republic  and this headline talks about coinbase expands base with three huge announcements What does this mean to the coin stock which is for coinbase?  So this is part of more things they announced as far as coinbase goes Coming September 22nd literally Monday as a recording of this video tomorrow literally max 7 plus crypto equity index futures

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And the too long didn’t read is on September 22nd, Coinbase Derivatives is expanding its product suite with the launch of equity index futures, introducing Max 7 plus crypto equity index futures. The first to offer combined exposure to both traditional equities and cryptocurrency ETFs. We’re  diversifying our US  derivatives platform beyond single asset offerings for the first time.

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launching a new equity index product that provides thematic exposure to a wide range of innovation with growth assets. So yeah, I mean, they’re expanding their capabilities with their index futures.  I think it’s pretty cool. I don’t really do a lot of perpetuity, so our derivatives, I’m sorry, derivatives. Yeah, I mean, if you’re into this, you know, this is kind of huge because Coinbase is the most trusted. They did acquisition the platform who would be doing the derivatives. was, I  forgot the name, but it was like the biggest one in.

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deal was like in the billions. So it was a pretty massive deal  and through this they’re going to enable that. Now if you ask me I don’t know how that’ll work but if I were to take a guess you would probably just go to the Coinbase app  and do all that from there. So they’ll definitely  reveal more on that. They might even do a little demo for anyone interested. So that was the other thing they announced which I think it’s a pretty big deal that they’re going to release more assets that you can do index futures with.  So

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Now, this is what I think I am the most excited about.  And going back to the Coin Republic article here. So last week we had Basecamp  and it’s kind of like this little PR event where you had like people, main people on the base team kind of announcing and  releasing different events and also having like series of, I’m guessing it’s with their team. No, it’s with anyone who.

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I think it was creators, their team  and just people that are really active in the base network. Yes.  I saw creators there. I saw people  that were friendly to Coinbase.  It was just anybody that’s engaged in that platform. Exactly. So some key insights, according to the Coin Republic, go, Coin stock traders are keeping a close track on base expansion as it might help boost user involvement and potentially lift future Coinbase earnings. Then Coinbase is

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Base team  is dipping its toes into  the idea of a native token which could go up some new ways to generate revenue down the line.  then tokens from Solana are said to become bridgeable to base, giving users broader access to across ecosystems and smoothing out cross-chain interactions. So what that means is now base  is exploring the idea of releasing their own token.

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just how Metamask released its stablecoin and now possibly releasing its own native token as well, which,  with Base, I understand because it’s literally a blockchain. Base  is a layer two,  and you could use  a native token to pay for gas fees, send it itself, or as a form of value, even trade on it. There’s so many things you can do with a native token on a blockchain.

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particularly to trade NFTs, trades or swap tokens, you name it. There’s a lot you can do. So there’s a lot of utilities. So honestly, I’m kind of surprised it didn’t do it sooner, but that is pretty exciting. So as far as some highlights that happened on Basecamp, this is from Cryptoslate. Coinbase says, Base set sites on a 100 billion and 25 billion user in 2025. So.

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What this means is the network seeks to secure 100 billion in on-chain assets, onboard 25,000 developers and attract 25 million users by the end of the year. So, I mean, the base app was released like July for beta. I still don’t have my beta invite, but I know you do, Leon, so that’s pretty cool. Can you tell us something about the base app? Like I’m tripping over my words because it’s not as fun as I expected it to be. It’s kind of like Farcaster.

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You know, you’ve got the many apps, you’ve got the social feed, but the social feed is from VARcaster. So if you have the VARcaster app, in many ways, base is pretty similar. The  mini apps are great, but  it’s not something groundbreakingly new. again, VARcaster was doing this and  it’s just, there’s a lot of overlap on that part. I really think that there’s a lot of potential there. I just, I’m not seeing the full picture. uh

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on the social component. Like everyone that’s hyping up the social component, it’s just Farcaster on top of there. Now, the sending of USDC, that was a really fun thing. Like I generated the link to you, you claimed the link and you got a dollar automatically. There was nothing for you to heavily do. I think that’s super cool. I think there’s a lot of potential in the creator awards and all of that, but when you go to the app, there’s a lot going on.

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The social doesn’t feel like as a core component of anything right now. just feels like  everything kind of feels like it was added on and siloed.  Though this might just be like  my Americanism talking that I’ve never really liked any of these super apps like  Line, WeChat. I don’t really love their interfaces  over there.  Even Uber kind of is doing it with an Uber app and Uber Eats.

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It’s interesting, but I’m not sure if I love it. You know, it’s really interesting because you’re speaking from a consumer perspective, but also someone who really just likes this space. So I can see your ideas conflicting,  but I mean, at end of the day, it’s all about execution and practicality. Like if the app is not confusing or cluttered,  then I can see it  working nine out of 10 times. With super apps, it gets tricky. We don’t have a super app unless if you want to consider the base app, the

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newest super app on the US or on the West. So you mentioned that you know you could send USDC pretty easy  and you showed me this the other day and I looked at it and I thought was really impressive. So I think this is through text  and the demo shows the guy on his iPhone getting a message saying hey you claim your USDC and then it routes him to the base app which might be on the beta version.

33:45

He authenticates, says, hey, know, I’m going to accept this, authenticates, and then he receives it. Now he still needs to download the base app, which he didn’t even have, which I think is really cool. You don’t even need to have a base app in order to accept your money. Now we don’t see more than that, but I think that onboarding sort of thing was really cool. It’s like saying, hey mom, here’s $100 in USDC. Now redeem it. Kind of shows you how to redeem it, I assume.

34:14

once you download the base app, but that was very seamless. It was really cool. I liked the UI and everything in there. Yeah, I thought it was really cool. It’s kind of like Apple Pay. USDC, think it’s going to kind of become a core component of the internet faster and faster. Like if I can just go pay and it’s just sitting in a crypto wallet, like that’s amazing. I heard somebody the other day tell me this is USDC kind of feels like cash because

34:43

You might have it in a big bank, but in reality, it’s probably on your phone. It’s probably in a wallet on your browser. It’s a lot more like cash and the Metamask wallet might be uh more like a bank, but you’ve got other applications where it’s much different and it’s more like a piggy bank or your wallet that you’re holding that you have to take cash out or transfer it. So  I’m excited to see this first generation become.

35:11

more integrated, like Google adopted it.  They’re talking about  adopting these protocols, they’re using like Sui and some other uh network to kind of do it, but more and more it’s becoming like, maybe micro payments will become a thing. When I’m on Zora,  if  you like something, you actually buy it like 20 cents or 30 cents, whatever it is, and that’s your way to show support and everything.  it’s kind of the first step to a more

35:40

more of what the internet was supposed to be when it first started. Yeah, that makes sense. I haven’t used Zora enough. If I’m being honest, I use some more FireCaster than anything for my on-chain social. I mean, I should go back into it. I think Zora has a really cool UI and if they’re doing new things, I think it’d be fun to explore. Yes. So people here in the comments are either sold on it, some aren’t sold, like JustChief said, nah, only if it goes to Apple Pay or something that you get motion.

36:10

And then Bobby Thacker says, this is totally useless. The app clip is just an ad. You can send it to a real wallet if you have one and you have to download the full app to do anything else.  Haven’t even touched on ramping. I’m new on base. This is from Sumit. I’m new on base. Don’t know any features yet, but sometimes I can’t post anything. It’s some kind of error. So wizard says base this fuck. So  a bit of mixed, mixed features here, mixed feelings, but I think, you know,

36:38

A lot of what they have right now is breaking because it’s still on beta. So it’ll be a matter time until it’s released. So that’ll be cool to explore. Yeah. I like that they’re iterating in real life and  you just like that meta AI glasses demo, which just kind of failed in the end. I’d rather see real life demos than just kind of fake like produce stuff. It becomes too AI. If you saw Apple, everybody was like, yeah, like  literally the six, seven.

37:08

It just becomes so robotic. So I’d rather see like real life testing and kind of iterating. And  I think that’s more of the ethos of the internet too. And startups is just kind of like, moving fast, like things don’t always work and it’s okay.  Just like a human on stage is going to make mistakes. An application is going to get miscoded or something’s just not going to work. And it’s a fringe case that becomes a normal. Yeah. I mean, literally I actually  did like the metas, you know,

37:36

latest press and this is similar fashion of what they’re doing here on base for base camp.  I like that. I think it’s authentic. I like the old visuals that apple does just as a side note here. I really like the apples presentation visuals  and camera angles, but everyone doing the same fucking hand motion is so stupid. I think it’s so boring. So anyways, so this is from base camp actually and this is Jesse Pollock talking about an announcement where a new bridge between base and Solana.

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For a better global company to work, it needs to be interoperable and connected, not isolated and closed. And to help make this vision a reality, I’m really excited that today we’re launching a new bridge between BASE and Solana.

38:21

I’m so excited about this.  I’m so excited about this. And it’s built for developers. The goal of this bridge is to make it so you can build seamlessly across both base and Solana with Sol, with ERC20s and SPL tokens. It lets you do three things. First, you can deposit and use Sol in any base app. So if you’re a developer building an app, you’re just going be able to use Sol. You’re going able to bring over those balances and have it just work. Second, you be able to import any Solana token into your base app. So you can build on the economy that’s growing there, help creators do whatever you want seamlessly across the two ecosystems. And then third,

38:48

you can be able to take base tokens that you created and export them to Solana. So you can tap into the liquidity there. And this means for builders and creators, you can access to more users, more liquidity, more tools to build. And for users, it means it’s just going to work. The experiences that developers are going to build are going to take away the complexity and make it dead simple. This bridge is now live on Chessnet and integration is going on. We have incredible teams like Aerodrome and Zora and Virtual. We’re already starting to use this bridge today to make the best things happen between Solana and base. And we want everyone else to use it too.

39:15

So if you’re interested in building on it as a developer, can go to github.com slash base slash bridge. We’re going to be around all base camp to help you get started. And we think this is a really, really powerful tool to help connect the base and Solana ecosystem. So that was Jesse saying how, yeah, you’re to be able to do all these cool things now in Solana and base just by using their GitHub repo, which if you’re watching this on YouTube, then we’ll leave the description, the link on the description below where you can access the posts here in that same post, you should be able to see the same link to access that GitHub repo.

39:45

So it’s pretty cool how it’s available on testnet. For those of you who don’t know, testnet is kind of like the developing or staging environment for building an app or building stuff. So it’s pretty cool. All right. So we’re almost done here. I know we still have quite a bit, but this is why I think it’s exciting. So Base, and this is from Cointelegraph, Base teases the launch of a native token at Basecamp 2025. So at Basecamp, Coinbase is a layer two network.

40:13

which is Baze, said it’s waiting a token launch to boost decentralization while unveiling a Solana bridge to expand cross-chain interoperability. So it must have happened not long after that announcement on bridging, which is kind of funny.  So Baze may soon launch a native token, creator Jesse Pollack said at the Basecamp event. According to Baze, the new token could support decentralization and expand opportunities for builders and creators.

40:38

We’re in the early phases of our exploration and don’t have any specifics to share around timing, design or governance. The network said Monday, base is a layer two blockchain built on Ethereum and incubated by Coinbase. It processes transactions off chain before settling them on Ethereum. So it’s actually cool how base works. It’s actually,  I don’t think there’s any other network that does that where it validates the transactions off chain.

41:04

It launched in 2023. The network has become the most widely used Ethereum layer two blockchain with data from token terminal showing about 20.8 million monthly active addresses over the past 12 months. Base is literally becoming the most popular layer two on Ethereum, which is really interesting. I thought it would have  been, well, I think for a while it was Polygon or Arbitrum. I know their developer base is getting pushed right now. Like Arbitrum is pushing in liquidity to developers,  but you know.

41:34

It’s really cool to see base doing all these cool things and seemingly being the number one most active network on Ethereum. Cool stuff. We’ll see what happens with this token. They haven’t said any specific things about it. You can read this article. We’ll leave it in the description on YouTube as well. This is from coinfoamania.com. says Brian Armstrong fuels creator coin boom on base. So this is where another announcement was made. And this is kind of the last one for Coinbase  this week where it says Zora were

42:04

Zora is going to be integrated on base to some capacity and this is from Coinfulmania saying, Brian Armstrong fuels Creator Coin boom on base. Brian Armstrong’s Baloges token buy fuels Creator Coin momentum on base as Coinbase app integration with Zora drives adoption. So I actually  use, I haven’t used Zora as much, but I think it does this cool thing where you can mint Creator Coins and have your own Creator Coin.

42:33

Which funny enough, I think we first saw this with  D-Sell, which is short for Decentralized Social as a Layer 1 blockchain. They had this issue with the SEC like summer last year and that kind of pushed them off the grid because they’ve been dealing with the SEC now. So who knows? Let’s see how Zora integrates it into BASE. I think that’ll be really cool. Anyways, this article continues.  Brian Armstrong’s decision to buy nearly 5 million Bellagious token on BASE

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instantly shifted the spotlight onto Creator Coin projects. The purchase was only about $40,000,  but the influence of Coinbase’s CEO carries far more weight than the transaction size. By posting the screenshot publicly, he turned what could have been a quiet trade into a signal that many interpreted as institutional endorsement.  In markets like this, narrative often matters as much as capital. Which, it’s very true, I mean…

43:29

Imagine if you had A16C investing or not even investing like a million dollar checks, but like just $40,000 into someone’s credit coin.  A16C is the biggest VC firm in crypto. That’s why I make that reference. That’d be huge. Anyways, so one more thing I’ll say here is Bellagious token and Coinbase’s ecosystem push.  The Bellagious token itself is tied with Bellagious  Serenity Vossons personal brand.

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and distributed through Zora, which has been driving much of the recent growth on base. What stands  out is not just the token, but how Coinbase is leaning into the ecosystem. Jesse Pollack’s announcement that created coins from Zora can be brought directly into the Coinbase app changes accessibility. It lowers friction and makes social finance feel less like an experiment from insiders and more like a product that millions of crypto users could interact with easily. One more thing I’ll mention here is kind of like how it works.

44:28

Base’s numbers suggest this shift is real. Since July’s launch of Coinbase app, Zora has facilitated over 1.6 million Creator Coins minted, almost 3 million unique traders, and more than 470 million in trading volume. On July 16th, there were 7,557 token launches on base. The day after app integration, that number jumped to over 22,000.

44:54

That’s not a coincidence, it’s a sign of how disruptive channels directly influence adoption. The design of Zora’s system explains part of the momentum. Every post generates a token. Each creator coin has a fixed supply of 1 billion, half of which streams to creators over 5 years, while the rest floats to the market. A small fee from each trade flow back to the original creator in Zora tokens. In simple terms, the attention turns into tradable assets and engagement becomes income.

45:22

That’s a very different model from an ad driven platform where creators fight algorithms for visibility. And you can read more of it  if you like. I mean, that’s kind of like the inherent value of Creator Coins, which you and I have talked about before, with  WebC, what it once was. We were on the DSolve ecosystem. Now we’re  building something entirely different. I mean, it’d be cool to see.  I mean, I think it’s in the realm of possibility to add Creator Coins, trending Creator Coins on social market.

45:50

which is kind of like where the name came from originally, social market, where we combine creator coin or creator economy on the blockchain. Kind of a link. Yeah, I’m really interested to see it because creator coins have been a discussion from  the start of crypto. Like,  how do you pay creators? How do you compensate? Base,  I think has a system to do it. I think Zora did it  well, but also  I think there needs to be that flashpoint moment that everyone’s like, oh yeah, I can adopt it.

46:20

Twitter,  X, Elon did it with  X. He was able to get people to pay for social media.  Meta’s now rolling out verification. They’re rolling out all this stuff. Like the true creators are really adopting it. You’ve got a Facebook, you got an Instagram verification now. LinkedIn has always had that built in. There’s a huge opportunity to figure this out with Web3. It just has not been done.

46:47

And if Coinbase can get closer and closer to that, I think that there’s a huge opportunity because I think right now the big gap is how do you, how do some people get money? Like I think if everybody’s getting money, it incentivizes the people to create. But if, if like a small portion of people only get money and everybody’s just funneling money in there all the time, I don’t think on the long run, anybody’s going to be happy with that.

47:14

There needs to be a path where if your comment gets a ton of engagement, you get money too. If your profile is engaging and doing things, you can get money as part of the fund because it’s helping the community be helpful.  I think there needs to be a distribution of that to encourage people to keep adding money and keep funding this whole system. Yeah, I agree. Right now, creators on YouTube or anywhere on the internet, they rely on the platform giving them

47:42

a sizable amount of their income. But when the income isn’t there because of whatever reason, then people set up their Patreon and they rely on small dollar donations from their fans, which is usually, you know, kind of like a very popular way to thing to do. And if you’re a streamer on Twitch, you have people subscribe to you, which you don’t get ads and you kind of get other perks from the streamer. You know, it’s all very personalized. I can easily see this transitioning into crypto.

48:12

And crypto is kind of just the whole purpose of it is to make money more accessible, make it easier to use. I can see this playing out very well in the next decade or so. So I’m pretty excited. And I think Coinbase  is doing a great job so far at kind of putting a spotlight into this because people don’t know better. People are kind of like, oh, it’s crypto is the boogeyman or, oh, I just don’t understand this. And then they’ll disregard it. But when they see big players like Coinbase putting a spotlight into it,

48:41

pushing efforts then yeah I mean this is this is a lot more realistic for most people yeah so I’m pretty excited to see what happens we’ll keep you guys updated we have one more story here to talk about and it’s not as long as Coinbase but this is from Robinhood where they launched Robinhood Ventures now Robinhood has been doing a lot in the last in the last month actually where they had their like I don’t know what it was called I don’t know if you know it Leon but they had their kind of like events

49:10

In fact, a lot of companies had their event where they announced a bunch of products  and Robin Hood was one of them. Yeah, it’s like  I forgot what Robin Hood called it, but they did something like inside or something.  All of these companies are doing some sort of special event to announce new products and  updates. Yeah. So while this event of theirs happened a few weeks ago, this was released this  last week. This is from Amit.

49:39

or a mint from Twitter and he says  breaking Robin Hood announces that they have filed with the SEC to launch Robin Hood Ventures Fund RVI a concentrated portfolio of innovative private companies leading their industries. Well folks looks like Robin Hood is going to IPO a fund that allows retail to invest into the best private companies for decades. Wealthy people and institutions have invested in private companies

50:06

while retail investors have been unfairly locked out. With Robinhood Ventures, everyday people will be able to invest in opportunities once reserved for the elite,” said Robinhood Chairman and CEO Vlad Tenev. Robinhood is not stopping. Let’s fucking go. Which yeah,  I think that’s amazing.  I think the closest model we have to that for retail investors  is if you have enough capital, you might be considered an angel investor. can join an angel group  and you can

50:36

put your money with others into like a liquidity pool and then that liquidity pool gets spread out into different companies as a form of investment. I know that’s how Alamo Angels from San Antonio operates essentially. Yeah, also I think this is kind of like part of the IPO product more than anything.  This is kind of how I understood it more  than like Alamo Angels or like an angel investing pool. um

51:04

This was going to be like an IPO thing because when you go and they have those preselected IPOs, like Gemini was a preselected IPO in there, believe. ah Yes. I forget the previous one.  You have to request to allocate shares. And a lot of times Robinhood users are all requesting it. And even if you request 50 or 100 shares, you might only get one or two. Like  I’ve done a few IPOs where I’ve gotten three or four and I’ve asked for much, much more shares on them.

51:33

I think that’s part of it is to help them like stabilize that thing and then give Robinhood users early insight, early like IPO access and guarantee it because there’s so many allocated shares. And then also for them to like really capitalize on  those investments and push it. And then I also do think that there’s a component of like angel investing that they want to do it, but they’re looking as like a VC where.

51:58

Step one is get them to one point and then step two is get them to IPO so that there’s value for their platform. Because if you could IPO and there’s exclusive pricing  for one of these  stocks and only Robinhood has it, why wouldn’t you use Robinhood over anything else? I mean, I was watching this video last week about Robinhood just kind of changing the status quo as far as the financial world goes.  Before, this is just a very small example.

52:27

Essentially, Robinhood started by trading  stocks  and you could get free stocks  and before that, you would have to go to a broker and you have to pay like at least $10 or some large sum of that just to make one single purchase of  a stock, which would disincentivize people buying like five, maybe a few dollars worth of stocks just to play the waters. They would often have to put a hundred dollars or maybe even more than that.

52:56

just to make fair value of their investment. Because if they put $100, then  10 % of that goes into  the broker, which they would just make a shitload of money through that. So Robinhood comes here and says, nah, screw all that. And then they release the stock broker app.  And you can trade with as little as $1. Or I think $5 is the  minimum cap or something.  But the point is, it changed the narrative for stock brokers.

53:25

the larger firms had to follow suit because they weren’t getting any clientele. So now for Robinhood Ventures, I can see this happening all over again, especially for like the large investment pools like Alamo Angels or Angel Investors sort of thing. I don’t know how that will turn out, but I think it’ll be very interesting to see. So, you know, this is from Robinhood Ventures. This is from Newsroom.  They kind of talk about everything that we just talked about. A cool point here was

53:54

The number of publicly traded companies in the US has fallen from 7,000 in the year 2000 to about 4,000 in 2024, shrinking the number of investable opportunities for retail traders. At the same time, private companies are growing in the number and value. With the estimated value of these firms in the US now surpassing $10 trillion, Robinhood Ventures funded or fund RVI aims to expand the access to important

54:21

and often closed off part of the market. Robinhood is really cool. I would probably buy their stock more now seeing how they’re doing this. I think it’s a huge opportunity for them. They’re going to probably get a lot of money from that like from retail investors. So that’d be cool to see. I know this is not a crypto related story, but Robinhood does have crypto and I can see this also expanding into crypto to some capacity for at least crypto based companies like Gemini.

54:47

So yeah, I think if there’s opportunity to IPO, those will go forward. So I think they’re going to be more traditional like exchanges and stuff  there or companies with crypto like backing of some capacity, but not full like crypto companies at the moment until IPOs can really be flushed out as full on like companies. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m excited. Like I’m actually really excited for this. You know, people getting capital. So

55:16

like accessing these  IPO’s and up  close door  opportunities  that retail investors don’t get. So I’m pretty excited for that. Now, I think that’s pretty much everything that we had to cover here today at Social Market. I’m sorry at Social Edge report. So do you have any other thoughts Leon for today? You know, if you want to leave a review on Apple podcast, super helpful. If not, leave a comment on YouTube, subscribe, like all those good things. Yeah. Let us know what you think. If you’d like to

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If you’d like for us to cover anything new, let us know as well. We are happy to listen to your suggestions.  But yeah, this has been Social Electric Report. Thanks for watching.