Don’t Midcurve Circle and PumpFun | Weekly Roundup
6 Jun 2025 · 68 min
Circle is launching live trading and preparing for an IPO with valuations compared to Robinhood and Coinbase. The hosts break down the Pumped Up Fund token sale metrics and revenue model, then warn about emerging crypto scams and discuss distribution strategy across on-chain and off-chain platforms.
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Who of these three names— Circle, Robinhood, and Coinbase— which one grows faster next year? Which one has more defensible margins? Which one would you buy if you— gun to your head, you can only buy one. Or the second question is, you can buy a portfolio. How do you allocate like $100?
This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe. You'll hear more about them later in the episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the Roundup. Santi, how we doing?
Doing great.
We've got 3 updates for you guys. 1, Suze's follower count is ripping. 2, France just blocked Pornhub. And 3, permissionless tickets. Go get your tickets. So I think we checked all the boxes that we checked.
All the boxes. Oh, and the scams, right? We got to point that out.
Yeah, actually, this is— I called this out last week, but if you didn't listen last week, there are more Empire scammers than ever. So we have one producer. We just added the producer's handle to the Empire Telegram— excuse me, Empire Twitter handle. So if you go to the Empire Twitter bio, you'll see Jarrett. He's the producer. That is the only producer. So if you get hit up by someone else or people— yeah, with these like 7 other profiles right now saying they're an Empire producer, fake news, fake news. So Santi and I run the guests with Jarrett. We're the only people who will ever reach out. No one else will reach out.
Might I add? Yeah, super, super important. Like, it happens all the time. And just be careful when people reach out. It also happens with journalists and VC runs. If anyone asks you to like jump on their own Zoom or whatever and just making you download stuff, stop everything you're doing. Just don't.
Yeah, yeah. Um, I do need to call out Permissionless because we are— so recording this June 5th, Permissionless is June 24th. We are 19 days out. Uh, because there are so many conferences in the industry, people like to wait until the last minute to get their tickets, and they always buy at the top and they buy super expensive tickets. And then people complain to me that they're buying $1,000 tickets. Don't let that be you. I'm not giving you a discount at the end. Go buy your tickets. There is a code, EMPIRE10. I will say I was just talking to our head of event programming at the very last minute for DAS. We got several huge speakers, including obviously Trump was one of them, but many, many others. I think we will see the same thing for Permissionless. I can't share any names right now, but big names are coming. So go check out the Permissionless site, go look at the speakers. I think the Founders and CEOs of every single big protocol, L1, L2, CeFi company are speaking there. So yeah, go, go get your ticket.
Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to say it again. So we last week, you had the audacity to say that Suze is not going to get to 10K, right? Okay. She had— she was kidding.
I didn't say that. I said Suze will get to 10K.
No, you're backtracking now. She had like, she had like 800 followers. She's up 2x now, ladies and gentlemen.
887, she has 1,620. 1,620. Pretty.
Suze is leaking all the—
follower count.
I'm worried Suze is going to come for my account too. Why is that?
Why is she ripping?
She's tweeting good stuff. So she tweeted that we were hiring 2 investment associates, like private equity.
Oh, that's why she's ripping. She's targeting the easy— the investment bankers who take their job and are just scrolling Twitter all day.
To be fair, her game on LinkedIn is like much stronger than on X. Like she posted this on LinkedIn, we've gotten like over 50 inbounds and it hasn't been— it's only been like 12 hours.
Oh, LinkedIn is crazy right now.
You're a LinkedIn— you do this all the time, right?
LinkedIn is better than Twitter for, at least for, I mean, for like virality and likes and dopamine hits. But actually, but actually for jobs, jobs is, we've got a couple open jobs right now. We have Yeah, like research analysts. Let's see how many we've had. We posted this job the other day. We got 304 candidates. Wow. Like a week. Crazy. Data research data analyst, 703. I'm looking at Ashby right now. We have 11 applicants in the process, 14 active, 703 that we've denied.
Is Ashby your ATS?
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah, it's crazy.
We're looking at it.
That's good. What'd you guys, what'd you guys use?
I think Gem initially.
Oh, I don't know Gem.
Yeah.
Ashby's good.
Yeah. Nice.
When you level up.
To be fair, like, yeah, I've been spending way more time, like I have always have the LinkedIn tab open. That, ladies and gentlemen, was not the case.
LinkedIn's great. This is when, this is when people should truly stop listening to Empire is when we say LinkedIn is great.
All right. Enough of the plugs about our companies and we're hiring. Guess what else?
We're hiring.
Let's, uh, let's plug another one.
Circle.
S-C-R-C-L-E. SC— no, no, CRCL. CRCL. You're making me record this thing at 7:30. I'm tired. It's early. So if I make a few mistakes in this episode, I need another cup of coffee, ladies and gentlemen. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Big, big shout out to Circle. So Circle there— I didn't realize this— their technical name, it is Circle Internet Group. Circle Internet Group, the issuer. I'm just going to read a CNBC clip here. The issuer of one of the world's biggest stablecoins, priced its IPO at $31 a share. That is above the expected range of $27 and gives the company a total market cap of $6.8 billion. They— so they ended up raising— I'll give the TL;DR. They ended up raising a billion. They offered 34 million shares, raised about a billion, I think a little over a billion. CNBC said, quote, enormous demand for the company.
They ended up increasing 20 times oversubscribed. The book was.
Yeah, I saw late last— I was with some people last night who were decently close to the deal and I was like, look, is this, is this real? Like 20 times? Like, do people just like to leak these headlines and the bankers are leaking things to Bloomberg to get— they're like, no, it's actually about 25 times oversubscribed. They're like, everybody close to this deal is partying right now. Everybody is very, very happy. So and if you remember, they originally sought to raise I think it was $500 or $600 mil. I think it was like $625 million. They were going to sell 24 million shares at like $25 a share, bring in $625 million. So they increased it from 24 million shares originally to 34 million shares. Uh, and yeah, raised over a billion. So big, big shout out to Jeremy and Circle and the whole team. Uh, hopefully they are celebrating a much deserved win.
Look, I'll give them credit. I remember Circle in the early days, uh, through the Breyers because they were one of the larger investors. Like, this company went from being like OTC trading to like full metamorphosis, kind of pivot into stablecoins. And, you know, honestly, I mean, it was pretty remarkable because very few companies actually are able to do that. And in large part, I mean, Jeremy's a very seasoned entrepreneur. And, you know, he— it's one of those that like, I remember in the early days looking at Jeremy, it's like, okay, a guy that has clearly been very successful in Web2 coming into Web3. And he is probably in my mind one of those that has always been an anchor in the industry as, as like really evangelizing and, um, and just a testament of like smart people appreciate like executives that really understand how the world works and their industries work appreciate crypto. And I think Jeremy's one of the first ones to kind of get behind that train. And now of course you start to see more and more of that, but like, you know, Larry Finks of the world. But, um, can we comment a little bit on the valuation? I know we kind of towards the end of the last segment, we were just talking about like Circle valuation, how it would price. Best case, it trades at like long stablecoin thesis. And look, 25 times oversubscribed is quite interesting. I don't want to read that much into it, but, um, what is it? I'm trying to look at like EBITDA. So '24—
here, I'll read 2024 financials. $1.7 billion in revenue, $285 million in EBITDA, $155 in, uh, $155 in net income.
So this thing's trading at, call it, what, 28 28 times 2024 EBITDA.
Um, I mean, I think it reached like $24, 24 times, uh, $8 billion, or you're going to $7 billion?
I was doing $6.8 billion. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's 24 times, uh, LT— like 2024 EBITDA. What's the guidance on this year's, like, expected— I mean, analysts, the way this works is the IPO will happen, then research cover research analysts, probably from the guys that did the, uh, IPO, that was JP Morgan, a few others will likely come out with their first equity research reports, but that's going to take some time. But what's like the guidance on 2025, like EBITDA? How much does that 284 number grow? Any sense?
I don't know. That's a good question.
Yeah. But like hypothetically, I mean, say it grows, uh, in line with like stablecoin growth, like maybe that's like, I don't know, 300, 330. So I'm just saying like, look, it's— this thing's trading at like forward times EBITDA, call it 20 times, maybe sub-20. Let's compare that to maybe a couple other names like, uh, Robinhood and Coinbase, right? I always like to use those two as examples. So from a pure market cap perspective, uh, Coinbase, uh, I'm pulling up financials in real time. Coinbase has a $51 billion market cap. Um, it is— bear with me one second here. Oh no, no, I'm looking at a different company. I'm looking at American Mobile. You can understand why. Uh, Coin, help me out here.
What are you looking for?
I'm looking at like Coin and Hood Financials. I used to pull this up in an episode with, um—
oh dude, just use Perplexity now. Yeah, it's so— I've stopped using Google for all of the search stuff.
Yeah, no, I was using TradingView. Show me— I was actually using Perplexity for Circle.
Perplexity Pro, if people haven't used the, like, the— since the recent update, it is so good for financials.
Show me Circle, HOOD, and Coin EV to EBITDA and key financials. Yeah, I use Perplexity and, um, ChatGPT, like, deep research, but Perplexity Pro is really good. They have like a —now to— all right, it's gathering the stuff. But anyways, any other commentary on this?
I have a lot of thoughts on this, actually. So people, I think this one of the takeaways is that this shows the disconnect from crypto Twitter and reality and, you know, reality being like public capital markets, people who aren't spending 8 hours a day on crypto Twitter. If you ask anyone who spends a lot of time on crypto Twitter, hey, what do you, what do you think of Circle? Very bearish. You know, their interest rate cut Here's, here's what they say. Interest, interest rate cut risk is real. It's imminent. If the Fed cuts rates, Circle is going to turn unprofitable. They would say they're completely constrained by Coinbase, right? 50% revenue split, bloat. They would say bloated operational expenses. And you remember that period in time when they, when they published the S-1, the whole— it felt like the whole timeline was very bearish Circle. Oh my God, the headcount's crazy. They're paying execs so much. Really bloated operational expenses. Wow, they're so tied to Coinbase. Coinbase owns them. So that would be that— like, that was like 95% of the industry, the quote unquote industry's take on Twitter. In reality, that ended up being the mid-curve take. In reality, being bearish on Circle ended up being the mid-curve take. What actually happened is there's all these capital markets, institutional investors, capital markets investors who said, Oh my God, stablecoins are this incredible use case. How do I invest in the success of stablecoins? Crap, I don't know. I have no idea how to do it. Oh wait, here's a public offering, you know, stablecoins on a platter. And that's what it ended up being. So yeah, long stablecoins ended up being the left curve and the right curve take. Being bearish circle ended up being the mid curve take. And I think, yeah, crypto Twitter, maybe mid curve this one.
Yeah, we called this last week. Okay, so We, we got the results back. So I'm going to spit out a couple of metrics here.
Um, we got the results back. It's like a doctor coming in. We got the results back.
Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen. We're looking at Circle, Robinhood, and CoinMarketCap. Circle, uh, okay, this is terribly wrong.
Um, is this correct? We did not get the results back. We did not.
Like, Circle is like not correct. But Robinhood, Robinhood is a, Robinhood is a $58 billion It's had a huge run-up this year. Um, enterprise value— LTM revenue is $2.9 billion, LTM EBITDA $1.3 billion. Robinhood is trading at 43 times EBITDA to LTM. Coinbase, on the other hand, is more fairly priced. Uh, similar market cap, $65 billion. Revenue is 2 times larger than Hood. EBITDA similarly, so the margin profile is kind of the same. And then Coinbase is trading at 18 times, um, and Circle, we just established, is trading at like 20 times, 25, 25 times LTM. So it's trading a little bit higher than Coin on an LTM basis. Um, the question is, what is the forward guidance and what is the forward growth? Like, who, who of the— maybe this is a better question— who of these three names, uh, Circle, Robinhood, and Coinbase, which one is has, uh, grows faster next year? Which one has more defensible margins? Which one would you buy if you— gun to your head, you can only buy one? Or the second question is, you can buy a portfolio, how do you allocate like $100? I mean, I'm, I'm biased.
I'm biased. He's bull and starry-eyed. I'm giga Long Hood at this point. I'm like, I mean, I just bought some today too.
No, not financial.
It is, uh, when they bought Bitstamp, it was like, I think it was basically a year ago to the day. It was like June, like a week or so. They closed like, yes, 2 days ago or something. But like, um, when they announced the acquisition of Bitstamp, I, I mean, I think I said on the podcast, I was like, I'm going to be extremely biased, uh, pro Robinhood moving forward. Yeah. When the day they bought Bitstamp, I made it my, I went into the account, made it my largest public Public Equity Holding and it is now— what is this? What is HUD doing right now? Yeah, that was at like $20. It's at $72. It's $72.
I feel like it's in— my trader told me this is in overbought territory. Alert, alert, do not buy. Yeah, alert.
Okay. I'm like gigalong HUD at this point.
But like, let's do the— what I like to do is I'm from scratch, from like you always, I think, periodically need to do this exercise of like, how would you construct your portfolio from scratch?
This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe. Powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics, Geodnet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force. By delivering real-time, centimeter-level accuracy, accuracy, Geodnet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Solana holders with the best staking rates on Solana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance a staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Solana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Solana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Solana staking with Marinade's best-in-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards. And optimize delegation via Marinade's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.
If I was starting fresh, right, I'd buy 80% HOOD, 20% COIN, and I wouldn't be buying Circle. Why? Because I probably fall into the crypto Twitter camp where I do think that they're like— I think why people are buying Coinbase right now is like you've got just mass— it's stablecoin season. And like, so actually, Circle aside, like I went to this event called StableCon and it felt like a local top in stablecoin, like a Ascent. We have stablecoins. You and I both believe we're going to 10x from here, right? The Fed is calling for like— the Treasury is calling for $2 trillion in stablecoin market cap over the next 3 years. Like, we're like $300 billion today. So obviously stablecoins are going to grow, but sentiment-wise, it couldn't be better for stablecoins. Like, I think we're nearing like a local top in sentiment for stablecoins. So I think Circle just hit this IPO perfectly and I'm just— yeah. Yeah, I think they're a great business. I think so. I like, I like HUD and Coinmore.
I was having this discussion with Omar from Dragonfly yesterday, and he's been of the similar camp. Like, he's been tweeting a lot of really good alpha on public companies, reading a lot of the disclosures. And like, you know, he's picking up on MercadoLibre and Robinhood and a couple other companies that are talking about, you know, crypto in, in their earnings, like Payoneer's up for sale, you know, stuff like that. Right. I'll tell you what I look at, like LTM revenue growth is very different for these 3 guys. Coinbase has grown 75%. Why? Because, you know, crypto prices have gone up and it's tightly— it was very volatile, right? That earnings growth is kind of very tied to crypto asset prices. Robinhood has grown not too dissimilar, 60%. So Coinbase 75%, Robinhood 60%. Circle, 15%. And I think, uh, so point number one, Robinhood is growing very fast. Um, it is coming up from a lower base, both of revenue and profitability. Um, and, and as I think about it, yeah, it's super, you know, it's priced really aggressively, 42 times. Like, it's, it's vastly more expensive than, uh, Coinbase at 20 and Circle at 25 on an LTM basis, but it's growing, you know, pretty fast. And more importantly, I think the issue I have with Coinbase is it's pure crypto. And from a customer acquisition standpoint, let me ask you a question. Who attracts customers and can acquire them cheaper and retain them? Robinhood or Coinbase? Robinhood. Yeah. Because the audience is massive, right? The people that want to buy stock, the flow is such that, and this is, it's like The audience that wants to buy stocks, massive, everyone in the US, right? And then they're going international. And then from there, the upsell to crypto is a very natural extension. The upsell, their debit card, all these different products. Circle as a, just like a Coinbase as a pure crypto play struggles with that because as soon as like Bitcoin's down to $20,000, $50,000, no one, it's like crickets. Their profitability, the trading revenue goes down. And honestly, I mean, their product suite hasn't really been really well integrated. And, and I think like you talk about the alcohol business has not been in it. Yeah, it's, it's sort of like all stitched together. I have very close to Omar.
You mentioned Omar from Dragonfly. I sat next to Omar at a dinner last night.
Talk about a guy. The Don one?
The Don one. Yeah, the Don. Were you—
and Suze was on the other side? Suze was there.
Yes, yes, I see you.
I see you. I was not there.
Across the Atlantic, I got eyes everywhere. The Saruman eyes. Just like Yeah, I never, I never actually spent much time with Omar. Talk about a dude who's gig along Robinhood. He is. He loves Robinhood. But, oh man, I was saying I was long Robinhood. His eyes lit up. He's like, oh my God. But he was showing me. So he got the Robinhood card, the gold card or whatever. Yeah. And he's saying like the, when you get points, so they have 3x points on everything when you get points. You can just slide this, but this like slider, and it's really nice UX and it just auto converts it into the stock of your choice.
Oh wow. That's great.
And it's like this, it's so, you know, compared to Coinbase, which, you know, like Coinbase, I think most people in the industry have used Coinbase at some point or another. You go to all these different products and like the design ends up changing. The URL kind of gets funky. Like you, you get logged in and logged out and Yeah, they definitely haven't, you know, they've, they've done a great job acquiring all these companies, the Togomis of the world, right? Zappos. But the integration has been a little, little rocky, I feel like, from a UI/UX perspective.
Yeah, definitely. So yeah, that's my point. Like, I feel that I would rather go along companies that are starting to leverage crypto rails and like Vlad is in my mind the second to Larry but more importantly, like, Vlad is going to be one of those CEOs like the Collison brothers that like really shows the world how their business can be materially like leveraged and really tapping into crypto on a variety of things like tokenized stocks and, and really acquiring that user base and like just doing many, many things with crypto and crypto rails. And he's been very public about it. So, um, I sort of seem to agree with you. Like, I would, um, I think HODL, you know, as a business is far more defensible and has much more sticking brand and weathers kind of the volatility of crypto. And you're getting a pretty high growth, uh, name that is going to continue to do more in crypto. So it's, uh, I think you get the best of both worlds, right? Yeah. So that, that's my— I think Circle, yeah, I, I could see Circle run up just from a, like, it's starting from a little bit too.
Look, it's got 25x demand. All those people can't get in. Yeah.
And it's like, again, it's, it's the— Kobe once said this to me, I think way back in the day. He was like, you you sort of like the market, like, likes to go like the catch-up trade. So if you miss Coinbase, you miss Robinhood, you're, you're going to be in the— you missed Alana, people are buying Hyperloop.
Yeah, that's the Hyperloop.
So you're going to— so, so you're going to want a long Circle. And you know, it doesn't take much for that. Like, I could see Circle go to like 40 times, uh, so like double in price here. And I got— yeah, I could see that.
I could see it. Um, okay, last take on Circle, and then we can move on to Pump.fun. Is have spoken with 3 different CEOs this week who were very, very, very closely watching the Circle IPO process the last couple of months. And what this has done, which I think nobody is— I haven't really seen many people talking about, is actually I posted this thing here. Let me pull up this tweet from January of 2024. I'll pull this up. I said, This is January 2024. Circle had just filed for an IPO. I said, I can't overstate the importance of Circle's IPO. There are 6 to 10 companies waiting to see how Circle does. If they're successful, everyone else will push to IPO. Having several public crypto companies other than just Coinbase and the miners would be a huge unlock. And sure enough, I will pull this up. I said, more true than ever, speaking with founders this week, the demand for Circle just pulled forward the IPO timeline. For several other companies. So I haven't seen people talking about this and can't mention the companies, but there are some bigger later-stage crypto companies that I didn't think I would— if you, if I was, you know, if you said you got to place a bet on this, are they going to IPO in '25 or '26? I would have said '26, maybe even 2027. And all three of these CEOs/founders are IPOing in 2025. They're looking to get out in July, August, not August because that's dead. Dead time, but September, October, November. So yeah, I think we will see several more crypto IPOs this year. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think that's very, very important thing that Circle's success did is it pulled forward the— 100%.
This episode is brought to you by Geodnet, the world's largest decentralized RTK network, delivering real-time, centimeter-accurate positioning around the globe, powering technologies that enable precise navigation for drones, autonomous vehicles, first responders, farmers, and robotics. Geodnet shows that blockchain can be a truly transformative force. By delivering real-time centimeter-level accuracy, Geodnet enhances emergency response, boosts construction precision, and enables advanced navigation for drones and surveyors far beyond the limits of standard GPS. To find out more, Click the link in the show notes or follow them on X. I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Marinade, the platform connecting Solana holders with the best staking rates on Solana. Marinade unlocks a high-performance staking delegation platform that brings billions in liquidity and security to the Solana market with solutions for both individual traders and global institutions from both DeFi and traditional finance. Use Marinade to earn rewards on your Solana treasuries and holdings. Optimize your Solana staking with Marinade's best-in-market features, including user downside protection through protected staking rewards and optimized delegation via Marinade's automated auction marketplace. To learn more about Marinade, visit marinade.finance or click the link in the show notes. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply.
Okay, let's move on to Pumped Up Fund. Yes. All right. So Blockworks broke this news that Pumped Up Fund is planning to raise $1 billion through a token sale with a valuation of $4 billion. The— we try to summarize the sentiment and the feeling on crypto Twitter and I want to hear what your take is on the sentiment. So let me pull up some of the tweets. I'll pull up some of the tweets and I'll read these. So one person's got— Jack Halderson says, maximum extraction, pumped up, you know, quote, maximum extraction. Pumped Up Fund has been getting a lot of hate lately for their $1 billion raise on a $4 billion valuation. Honestly, he said, so they're doing $1 billion in revenue. $600 million in profits. And hold on, that was not the hate. I'm supposed to pull up the anti. All right. So this was actually the hate. The hate said every influencer that supports Pump.fund has sold out. No respect. They truly don't give, you know, I told them, I'm told I'm not supposed to swear anymore on this because it hurts our, hurts our distribution, the algorithm. But they don't give a, you know, an F about this space. And then Altcoin Gordon said, wondering why Pump.fund are trying to raise $1 billion in what seems like a last attempt to cash out. Check their revenue. So a lot of these people basically came on the timeline and they were like, who, who would ever do this? Like, why, why would, why would you ever buy Pump's token? Like, Pump.fund, this is clearly a cash grab. They're selling out. What is your take on Pump? You want to give your— I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Pump.fund situation.
Listen, I've been an investor since the early days. And I've gotten to know Noah and the team. I can tell you, they are as sharp as it gets. Like, he— I've been just amazed by his— he's just one of those founders that is like super strong, super steadfast on a mission and executes like crazy, like the speed of execution, the momentum. And it is like on unparalleled. And I remember interacting with him like when they launched video and they had to peel that back and that they just quickly hired a bunch of people. Like, it's the vision that Noah's had, and I've seen him publicly talk about this in a couple of conferences, is, has always been the same. It's just like the grand vision is like there's this Pump— what Pump has done very well, and mind you, I'm saying all this as an investor, so my bias is there, but like I'm trying to be objective as possible. They have captured a ton of attention, better than probably any other company in crypto for a long time. And, um, whether you like it or not, that's like— I'm not going to get into that, like, if you like meme coins or not, like, we've had this discussion, but like, objectively, they've gotten captured a ton of attention and they've gotten a lot of revenue as a result of that. And, and so what is the opportunity for them? They— I think that, and I'm Noah, if you want to come to the pod, feel free here. But my view is they see a huge opportunity to continue to extend in that. It's like, how do you continue to capture more attention for people? And it starts with memes, but you think the intersection of social, something like TikTok and pump and connecting those two and the financialization of that, like attaching value to that and layering that into more social elements. And I think you start to see elements of that with a video component. I think they're going to really double down on that and they have an opportunity. They have a very engaged audience. And someone might say, wait a minute, like, look at the volumes, look at the You know, it's, it's come down a bit, but it's like, make no mistake. I mean, they have a very engaged audience. They've been able to capture that. And if you don't think that they're going to press on that opportunity, I think you're like delusional. They very much see that opportunity. And I think that's part of the race. Like they want to raise that amount of capital to go for the jugular. Like they do. I think Noah would probably say like, I'm not going for like Binance's business. Like it goes like larger. I know. I know. There's just certain founders that you meet that are not are not afraid to like say it as a grand vision. Like a lot of times founders like, like, oh, you know, I just want to grow into that. Like Noah's like, no, I want to become like the largest social media financial like combination behemoth. And you know, they're at, for their age, I mean, I can't, it's one of the fastest growing, most profitable companies ever. And these guys like in their early 20s, like I don't care what you think, but like if you're not gonna give them credit for that, then like like objectively, like it's pretty impressive what they've been able to accomplish.
So, um, so we've got a lot of Pumped Up Fund data on the, on our research and data platform. So Pumped Up Fund earns revenue in 3, 3 ways, right? AMM fees, 0.05, you know, 5 bps of all trading volume on PumpSwap, which is Pumped Up Fund's own AMM. They've got bonding curve fees, right? 1% fee on all trading volume on Pumped Up Fund's bonding curve. And then graduation fee, which they make 6 SOL from every graduated token that migrates to, to Radium and that, that, that part's no longer active. That used to be— I think that stopped in February or March. So if you look at their monthly revenue, January, you see how much they made in January? One, they made $144 million in January in revenue. That's in one month. New, new company. Yeah. December, $97 million. November, $114 million. And they're going to—
and people say it's like they don't need the money. I guess the question is who are they raising it from? And they just want to do hypergrowth.
This is what gets into my thing. Is, okay, March of this year, $39 million in revenue, April $48 million in revenue, May $50 million in revenue. So I'm on the timeline, I'm seeing all these takes like, this is why crypto Twitter is so dumb. Crypto Twitter's take right now is, look at how much money they're making. Why, why, why do they ever need to raise money? Are you kidding me? What a— how is that even a take? That exists on crypto Twitter. Like, how is that even a take that anyone could genuinely have? It's like you're making money, so therefore you should never raise capital. It's like, imagine this wasn't a crypto business. Like, imagine, I don't know, imagine it was like Bezos and Amazon or something. That's a bad example. But like, imagine any tech company in the world is like making money. So then they go to the investors and they're like, hey, we're so successful, can we go raise a round? Investors like, yeah, obviously you think the users are going to be pissed that they're raising another round. It just makes— it makes absolutely no sense. I know this is crazy.
This is a disconnect that you talk about crypto Twitter, right? There's always like, you know, there's this idea of like vocal minorities that always express their views, but that's not representative of it. It's like, yeah, the end of the day, like I would say these guys are just very laser-focused on the grand vision.
Yeah, it's so— I think they have like $600 million in the treasury right now or something roughly that. That's what I saw. I don't actually— I saw that on Twitter somewhere.
Do you know where they're raising from and is it closed?
I do know who they're raising from. It's not public yet.
Is it like a big crypto investor or like non-crypto?
I think some of their early crypto funds that have supported them along the way are doubling down on this round and then And then a new— I think a new big, new big fund, I think, is coming in.
Crypto native? Decently.
Nice. Yeah. I think they're— I think they're going for the streaming. I'm an idiot. I passed on Noah. I met Noah and was like, this guy talks too fast. It was like a $50 million valuation. Like, screw me. But I passed on Pumped Up Fund. But have gotten to know a lot of— have gotten to know them and their investors quite well. And you obviously know the team and stuff like that. But I think they're going for something outside of just meme coin trading. Yeah, 100%. And I will say Blockworks gets so many pitches to bring our content places like, you know, Zora is like, bring our— hey, Blockworks, bring your content to Zora. Like, we didn't, we didn't do that. Like, you know, Lens is like, hey, bring your content to Lens. We didn't do that. Farcasters, like bring your content to Farcaster. We didn't do that. Abstract. Abstract. Bring your content, your video streaming over to Abstract. We didn't do that. Pumped Up Fun is the first one that we're seriously considering bringing it over because what does Blockwork— you have to look at the incentives of the company. The incentives of our company is we want more distribution and attention because it draws a lot of our companies downstream of that. So Pump.fun has the attention. It's, it's the exact same reason it's like we would go create a TikTok account is because they have the distribution and they have the users there. And Pump.fun actually has the users there, right?
The name of the game is like always distribution and user, user base. Right, right, right. The user base that— let's compare Farcaster with Pump.fun. Okay. One tried to like, you know, compete against Twitter. They are capturing only a subset of the crypto user base. And so here, and this is the chart. Yeah, it's really hard to like compete against X, right? Because it's so embedded. Um, I would say if you're a company like far— like Pump gives you access to a user base, like they've just expanded the pie for the crypto universe where they've attracted normies into the fold. And if you're a company out there, like of course you're going to get interested in that. Of course it's a super valuable company because they, they've sort of permeated it's a company this cycle that has permeated into mainstream perhaps more than anyone else.
This is the chart right there that matters is total traders, in my opinion. Yeah. So, so maybe volume's gone down, revenue's gone down, whatever. But the total number of traders is up, is actually an all-time high at 13 million. Total traders have traded in May, traded on Pumped Up Fund, 12.9 million traders. So as Blockworks, I'm saying that's 12.9 million people We'll probably get like 15 million podcast downloads this year. If we could add 10% of Pumped Up Funds, 13 million, boom, that's another 1.3 million. Great. All day.
Yeah. I mean, let's look at— I always like to, when I evaluate teams, is like the capital efficiency. How much have you raised and what have you produced? Forecaster has raised $180 million to date. That's not chump change. I think they raised at a billion-dollar valuation last Series A round. Which was $150 million. Pump has not raised that much. Of course, they're raising $1 billion now, but— What have they raised so far?
Let me see how much has—
You know what?
We should really make it on the Pump.fund dashboard. You can see how much they've raised. That would be better. Yeah, that'd be good.
Yeah. Like, look at the efficiency, like revenues and profitability versus the amount that has been raised. Give me a sec. It's including the billion, but I want to strip that out. Pump. But I, I, I'm gonna go as far as saying like I think it's vastly less than Forecaster.
Yeah, I don't know.
Um, yeah, cool.
Anyways, Yeah, I guess if you're thinking about like, I thought this chart was interesting. Zerex Sharples. How do I— there, share this tab. There are some takes that I guess I could share. One is from Zerex Sharples, who is a Blockworks on the Blockworks data team. If you look at the— so launchpad businesses are obviously booming right now. And I think many, many, many more people— not I think, I know many more people are launching launchpads. Some of the big brands in the industry launching launchpads. Pumped Up Fun is actually back to 80%. So they got down to 50% market share about a month ago. They're back to 85% market share. So if you look at the top 4 launchpads based on token origination volume, it's Pumped Up Fun has 85%, 4Meme, which I've literally never heard of, has 8%, Believe, which was like hot for a second, has 3%, and Bonk has 2%. So the origination, I would also say that I thought this was Joe Biden had, had some bull— had like this would be like maybe the bull case for the Pump token. So because I think there's a lot of people saying, look, you know, $4 billion is a high FDV. This was Joe Biden's take is, A, if the team cares at all about public sentiment and the token price, A, they'll likely initiate a buyback, which are very— you know, the buyback narrative is very popular right now. B, the token will almost certainly launch on PumpFun or PumpSwap. TGE day is typically the peak in trading volume, which would mean record revenues for Pump. So people start posting all those annualized revenue based on that sell. There's a high chance that both teams and investor allocations will be vested for a year. So for those who bought during the sale, it'll be hard to sell off unless the price spikes immediately after launch. And he said the key point will be how much airdrop sell pressure is released on day one, and will there be new buying demand comes from after a $1 billion token sale.
So it's, uh, 20— I mean, they're selling, what, 25% of all tokens? Yeah, yeah. Which will be mostly locked for at least a year, uh, if it's anything like, uh, you know, pretty much the standard, uh, the airdrop might come But yeah, I think that's a healthy amount of the supply that's been sold. So it'll be interesting to see the tokenomics, which I haven't seen. But anyway, this guy had a good take.
Austin, what's that?
Any sense of timeline, by the way, of when they launch?
No, I don't think so. Yeah, let's see. Shout out Jack. Jack Kubanek for this story. No, no timeline, I don't think. And then, yeah, this last one was Austin Maraza at Dragonfly said, I thought this was a good take too, which maybe explains why there's like, like anger on the timeline. He said Hyperliquid really screwed up everyone's expectations. Pump is just acting like a normal company. Why would they raise $1 billion instead of giving it away for free? Because they can. Why do they charge fees and make a lot of money? Because they can and it lets them scale. They built an amazing product, amazing brand. People are angry at them for monetizing their success because crypto has trained everyone to expect free money from projects that don't even make any money at all. Spot on. Quote, quote, tweet that, you know, crypto has trained people to expect money from projects that don't even make any money at all. Said Hyperliquid was a generational miracle. They gave away a big chunk of the protocol. They created an up-only chart at launch. They built a valuable business and pointed it all at the token. But it's not realistic for everyone to recreate this kind of pristine, radical benevolence. Hyperliquid also owned the chain, the exchange, and the market making. Every variable, at least at launch, was in their control. The vast majority of other airdrops are tokens that are not real businesses. They're giving away governance rights and future utility, not actual cash flows. If Pump allocates future revenue to the token, that cannot be compared to almost anything else in this industry. So spot on. That summarizes how I feel.
Do me a favor. Go up. Top right. Hit the smash follow. I love, I love when you, I love when you like reference folks and it's like follow back, you know.
Follow. All right, I'll follow Austin Marazzi.
There we go, ladies and gentlemen.
Got the public, you got the public.
Austin got you another follower. Thank you very much. Um, uh, no, that was a good take. Honestly, that's a good way to end this segment on Pump. Yeah.
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Maybe in smaller, smaller news, I mean, there's a bunch of news actually this week. So Trump, TrumpWallet.com launched. This was kind of funny. So TrumpWallet.com launched as this like new crypto wallet website. Tied to the Trump meme coin appeared. And actually Magic Eden started kind of like tweeting saying that they were involved. And then within a day, the— what's Trump? Trump, Trump Jr., DJ Jr. comes out, or maybe it was Eric Trump. I forget who it was, was like, we're not involved in this at all. This is not true. And I guess they were threatening to sue Magic Eden. So Yeah, it was like Magic Eden was saying were involved. They're saying they had partnered with them, but then they were saying they hadn't. And then, you know, Trump's kids were saying that they're going to— they're actually going to launch a token, but it's— or they're actually going to launch a wallet, but it's going to be with World Liberty. So who knows? That was— that was that news. I feel like people are getting pretty sick of like—
yeah, the question here is Look, the administration is a 180 from, um, you know, what we've had in the last 4 years. Um, has there— has it been pushed too far where the Trump coin, Melania, like the, the Trump family involvement in crypto— what is your general perception? Is it positive? Is it hurting us?
I think it's bad. I think it's been— I think it's gone way too far, actually. And I, yeah, I'm pretty— I think Trump folks need to step back from crypto. I think it's gone. I think it's, I think it's net bad for the US presidency and how it's viewed. I think it's net bad for crypto as an industry. Yeah, I think it's bad. I think it's bad for both. Yeah, what do you think?
Yeah, look, I, I think there is— I agree with you. I think there should be more distance, uh, in the same way that David Sachs did it. David Sachs assumed office as a crypto czar and sold all of his stake in crypto. And I think there was something very— that has always been kind of the precedent in, in any person holding public office. For the most part, it's like if you're going to be involved in, like, you should remove yourself from business dealings and activities. Or create a more robust layer of that, right? And I think in this case there's just too much meddling, too much going on. And I think it would be wise for them to just look, offload it to someone else, be long crypto in other ways. But like, it feels too much Nancy Pelosi style, if you know what I mean. It should be a bit more distance, I believe.
Yeah, I guess that's right. You can't, you can't hate on Nancy Pelosi for clearly doing it. I mean, Nancy Pelosi is clearly out here insider trading, like, you know, best trader in the history of the world, but you can't hate on that and then turn around and do this.
So you like, you can't have it. Yeah. Yeah. Look, there should just be— it creates confusion in the market and it's like, look, maybe there's nothing, maybe this whole chart, maybe there is like a clear initiative policy best practices that they have internally, which is if the family is going to buy Bitcoin, if it's going to do stuff, then there's degrees of separation and fiduciaries and how the decision-making happens. But if there is, I think it'd be wise to be public about it because right now there's just so much confusion going on. It's like, is Melania the real coin or not? Is it backed or not? What is World Liberty? And there's all these projects claiming to be like, you know, in in with the president. It's like you've never had that, you know, in prior administrations. I think there's something really powerful about just being like, you know, um, you know what I mean? Like, you've never had this idea of like, we're a company that like the president endorses. Like, well, no, like you're just, you know, operating in the United States and, you know, it's a great system and capital markets and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah.
So that's what I think. All right. We should have shared this during the stablecoin part about, about Circle. But I loved the quote of the week was definitely from the president of Western Union who said, there it is, Omar. Oh, dang. This is becoming the little dragonfly pod over here. Yeah. Omar. So this Kenneth Zukowski research analyst said said, I mean, because I think there's talk of stablecoins potentially disrupting cross-border providers. I mean, I guess, are you guys thinking about this as, quote, hey, we're actually going to end up using stablecoins to lower our cost? And this guy, Devin, the Western Union president, says, who gets paid?
Like, I looked at his compensation because lo and behold, you know that I looked at this company to do exactly that. He gets paid a pretty penny.
Today we use a highly inefficient legacy system called SWIFT. Anything that could make that faster, easier, cheaper is better for my business. If somebody figured out how to move money with turbo pigeons, I'm happy with turbo pigeons. My alternative is the SWIFT banking system. And if stablecoins can do it, awesome. But right now we haven't found that. It's more complex and more expensive, but it does solve some market inefficiencies for us in a few places in the world where there's no good alternative. But wherever there is a good alternative, it's not met yet the threshold for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. But when it does, we're happy to do— to every day long do it that way. I promise you, this man has never sent a stablecoin in his life. I promise you. Why not?
I mean, that's just like all this complacency in organizations. These guys get paid like, you know, tens of millions of dollars just to like do nothing and keep their jobs. And then they hire cronies in the board so that they never lose their job. Um, there is some point around like the remittance business. I've looked at it as like what Western Union has is like this vast network of like agents in local countries that like you can, if you, Jano, are sending money, you deposit in one and then whoever, like their agent, their network of agents like source liquidity for them in real time. And, and, you know, they pay a big commission to their agents to do that. There are some core, I think what he's saying here is that there are some written corridors that are like really competitive, really efficient, like Mexico-US and, you know, Mexico-Europe and like US to India, like the larger remittance corridors. There are corridors where liquidity is not really there. The fees are really high. And so maybe I think That's what he's pointing to. I think we should bring on someone like Simon Taylor from Fintech Brain Food or Guy to talk about this, because I would say that, like, to give Mr. Devin some credit, I think a lot of people in crypto say stablecoins are going to solve everything, and it comes from a place where I don't think they fully appreciate how the, like, payments and, like, the money movement flow happens. There's a great blog post actually that we will probably link in this episode and it's Matt Brown's notes. And I will just send this to you just now because maybe we can just reference it very quickly here. And what my point I'm trying to make is people that don't maybe have a fine appreciation for how the money actually moves, just would say stablecoins are going to solve everything. And he has some pretty good visuals there that just kind of explain Western Union and that, like, remittance money operators. Like, it's worth, like, reading his blogs about stablecoins and Western Union to give you a better appreciation, because Simon also has a great pod that I'll link here.
We'll link to this Matt Brown Substack. This is a good— this is a good piece. Stablecoins. That—
and he has another one, but, uh, Simon Taylor— I'm trying to look his blog here. Um, what is it? Fintech Brain Food. Here we go. He has one post. This is probably my favorite. That's called Stablecoins Are a New Platform.
Oh, the one he published, uh, this week, right?
Yeah, I saw. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So go read that because I do think that there's— he is one of the sharpest guys that will tell you stablecoin— it's not so much as stablecoins are going to replace, it's like what they enhance. Um, and very simplistically, you might say, oh, you know, Western Union and all these remittance operators are charging an arm and a leg, so their business is going to go away. And you're like, no, like someone still needs to source liquidity in real time, and that's a big challenge. And, you know, certainly what Bridge and Stripe are doing, like, facilitates a lot of that, but it's like kind of like an unfair comparison, you know what I mean? And it's— you hear a lot of blanket statements from like less sophisticated people that don't know much about fintech that like Stablecoin is going to like totally, totally disrupt these businesses. And part of it is true, but there's a lot of nuance. And Matt and Simon are really sharp thinkers on this.
This. Yeah, check this out. Jeremy just posted this. Wait, it's a pretty cool image. Nice. Epic. Um, little, little video of a Circle banner going up at the, uh, New York Stock Exchange. Um, all right, this was, uh, this was— didn't get much coverage, but, um, MoonPay got a BitLicense, got a BitLicense approval in New York. And this is less about— so big shout out to MoonPay. Very impressive. I'm sure they've been working on this for many years. This is interesting news because there are the Bit— so the BitLicense is this super archaic license that says if you're a crypto company, basically, can you operate in New York? Not operate, but like, I think it's can you make it so that your customers in New York can buy and sell crypto on your platform? Something like that. They've only given out— I think it's like 21 in the history. In history. So here's a— if you look at this, they tend to give out— so look at this, 20— boom, I'll change this. So 2019, they gave out 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. So this was to Fidelity, ZeroHash, Bitstamp, Robinhood, NYDIG. 2020, they only gave out one of these things. 2021, they only gave out 3. 22, they only gave out 3. 23, they only gave out 2.
These are like massive companies. You're talking about PayPal, eToro.
I mean, last year they only gave out 5. It was to Anchorage, Fireblocks, Cumberland, PayPal, and WisdomTree. Last year they only gave out 2, eToro and Coin Cafe. I don't know what kind of underbelly dealings were going on to get Coin Cafe a license, but you know, anyways, that's an outlier. So far this year, Dibs Trust Company is the only one. Again, never heard of them, but that's okay. So this, I think, is interesting because there's a bigger thing going on, which is Eric Adams is now in real— is trying to get reelected. So he's going to try to get money from crypto people. I'll put that aside. So what's interesting, what's coming next is Cuomo is probably going to be the next mayor of New York. Cuomo basically created the BitLicense. It was created by this guy, Ben Losky, but Cuomo kind of oversaw it. So It'll be very interesting to see if the— I think the second order impact of this, so of this MoonPay announcement, big— a first big shout out to MoonPay and Ivan and Keith and the whole team over there for getting this super, super hard to secure. So big shout out to them. But second, I wonder if this means that the BitLicense— BitLicenses are going to be given out a little bit more, maybe, maybe not, but maybe combination of like seeing this combined with Cuomo most likely being the next mayor of New York makes me think hopefully the super archaic BitLicense is either going to get removed or given out more. So yeah, shout out to MoonPay. Yeah, let's get rid of the BitLicense.
It must cost, I mean, millions of dollars to get, right? Yeah, I would guess. I mean, it's like, yeah, okay.
I mean, MoonPay just set up a New York office. Yeah. So I think one of the things that they want to see is, are you, are you long New York as a company?
Are you hiring New Yorkers?
Yeah, I had a— there was this tweet from this guy Mikey Tulip King. Um, I wanted you to—
this is an Anon episode. All these Anon—
I'm just pulling up other— I don't have enough, uh, interesting takes myself this week. This is what happens when you make me record early, so I just use other people's takes.
Always blaming it on me, you know. That's what—
yeah, always, always, always. He said He said growing returns in crypto without trading, size as needed. This will beat most of crypto Twitter. I want to get your take on this. I know I'm asking you, you know, kind of math in real time and, you know, real-time math, public math is never, never easy. But so he said deposit 1 BTC on AAVE, borrow half a BTC in USDC, swap for BTC and deposit 1.5 BTC, liquidation ends up being around $43K BTC at these prices. Pay 5% on the borrow, which ends up being about $2,500. Do nothing for 5 years while Bitcoin runs to $300K to $1 million. At $300K, you make an extra $137K or half a Bitcoin. At $1 million, you make an extra $487K or half a Bitcoin. Re-up leverage at key price levels for higher gains. The trick is that you can size heavily, Read entire net worth into this trade and literally ignore the rest of the market. Go focus on your career, focus on your family, etc., etc., etc. Leverage can make you rich. The problem is most people would rather blow themselves up on 20x leverage instead of 1.5x leverage. Agree or disagree with this take?
Yeah, there is a protocol that allows you to automatically rebalance. I'm blanking on it. It's There's a couple of things immediately. Uh, the BTC on Aave is not pure BTC, so I could see some criticism around that. It's some sort of flavor synthetic, right? Wrapped BTC. Wrapped BTC. So, so like you have to, you know, make sure that, you know, you feel comfortable doing that. But, um, take a native asset, could be ETH or it could be, you know, something else. And you could do this, right? You could do this in Solana too, and whatever, Kamino or whatnot. Um, I think that, so the important thing here is the health score, right? You have 50% LTV, which is, you know, fairly decent margin. You get liquidated, um, you know, when BTC basically falls by 50%, give or take, right? Because BTC as collateral in AAVE gets, depends on the wrapper, but it gets pretty high. Like, you know, basically like at what point will you get liquidated? And the riskier the collateral, the, like, the, the more buffer that AAVE as a protocol imposes to make sure that they can liquidate that collateral and sell it. So there is no bad debt on the protocol. BTC being the most pristine collateral, and ETH, you get what, uh, you know, 80% or so, 90% before you get liquidated, right? Um, trying to do this on real time, but, um, but anyways, it works. I mean, I think it's a good strategy. Yeah, the question— the, the key here is I don't buy this walk away entirely. Like, you have to— there's smart contract risk, but you know, obviously it has Lindy. There is— you got to still monitor that. You got to monitor that position. There is a, there's a project where I did this that automatically rebalances it and like goes along, like it maintains the same leverage. So as, as the price continues to run up, like, it will, it will do this recursive over and over and over and over. Um, and also like do the unwind for you in real time. Of course, the key there is historically when there's been a lot of network congestion, like in very high liquidation days, prices, gas prices go up a lot. And so you do risk paying a lot in gas or not, not getting block inclusion, getting liquidated. Like that has been the risk, like on like Black, what is it, Thursday or whatever. Thursday. Yeah. Yeah. Good luck. Like, or like everything was not working. You would've gotten liquidated, but BTC, the volume of BTC is less. It's a good strategy. Like, if you're— you just need to monitor the position. Yeah. I really want to plug this project because I found it to be quite— quite—
we can drop it, send it to me, drop it in the— yeah, yeah, yeah. Either in the show, people should like look at the contracts, talk to the team.
I used it to do this with ETH and it was— I mean, I was very—
you know, speaking of the Empire Telegram, we have 971 people in it right now. We're Almost 1,000. Let's go. Almost at 1,000. You know what's, you know, it's just a sign of the times is that the Blockworks Poker Telegram group hit 1,000 people before Empire Chat did. So that tells you anything about this industry. All right, I think that's it. I think that's a good pod. Go buy your permissionless ticket. Empire 10. The side events page did just go live. The agenda went live. Santi and I are doing a lot, actually a few live Empire recordings. So that'll be good.
I got it, ladies and gentlemen. You got it. DeFi Saver. DeFi Saver. Yeah. Look, go look at— I haven't used it in a while, but if you want to do the strat, like start with—
It's got a pretty janky UI, no?
I mean, it has all the different protocols. It like, You know, you could do a simulation, you could do a, the one I'm talking about here is LoanShifter. You can do not LoanShifter. You can do like go on Aave and yeah, you can, you can set this up. Go play around with it. Again, not an endorsement. I've used it. The team has historically been responsive. Play around with it, deposit a fraction of a dollar and play around with it. Maybe not because of gas, but you know, deposit like $100 and play around with it.
Huh. DeFi Saver. All right.
DeFi Saver has had, used to have a functionality that it would automatically do this for you and you could toggle and it would like, the smart contract would like do this for you. You rebalance, unwind up, uh, and then flex up as prices. Oh, interesting. Yeah.
This is a real, this is a real company. Okay. No, dude, it's been around for like a ton.
And as a result of like the high, like gas days during liquidation, they've introduced like some pretty interesting nuances there to like mitigate that.
Interesting. Yeah. Yesterday a user opened a massive— I'm just reading some random guy's tweet. Oh, this guy works at DeFi Saver. Yesterday a user opened a massive ETH long in AAVE v3 using DeFi Saver. Right now their position is $29 million in collateral, $20 million in USDC debt, $9 million balance. Why'd they choose DeFi Saver to create this? One, leveraging in one transaction available for 10 protocols. Two, meta aggregation for the best swap rates. 3, using SAFE as the smart wallet means you can access this position in any frontend. Yeah.
Look at the screenshot there. Go up, go up. Click on that. Yeah, there it is. So, so what this is— yeah, exactly. There's automation. Yeah, there's automations. It's the functionality that I'm talking about is this boosted component. So increases leverage by borrowing swapping in a single transaction. it will also, like, automatically run the strat for you.
Uh, yeah.
Again, in this particular case, the user has gone up to, like, you know, borrowing, like, two-thirds of the collateral.
So, like, you know, yeah, a little risky over there, Chief. Risky and risky.
We do not endorse leverage in this podcast, but, uh, If you're going to do it, make sure you have a healthy margin because these assets are very volatile and can go down 50% on any given day.
I got content of the week. Do you? Non-crypto. I'm trying to get— I— non-crypto content of the week. Steve Ballmer episode on Acquired. Did I say that last week? No, I did not. Steve Ballmer episode on Acquired. Wow.
The guy gets $1 billion in Microsoft stock dividends a year. $1 billion in Microsoft.
He's giving away $1 billion a year. And I always thought, is he giving away a billion?
He's giving away all the dividends that he gets in charity.
And he's like, I can't, I can't give away enough money right now. I can't keep up. And they were like, oh, you're, you're making, so you're selling off Microsoft stock. He's like, selling Microsoft? He's like, no way. He's like, I get it. He's like, I get $1 billion a year in dividends. Dividends.
Legend. Crazy. He's not a founder. He joined early on and then just got a great deal. And like, he has more ownership of Microsoft than Bill Gates.
Yeah, Bill Gates sold.
That's awesome, man. Um, no content for me. Just keep reading 10-Ks and management presentations and grinding out here, grinding in the— buried deep in Excel. Uh, I will say it again, I'm looking for two top-tier investment banking or private equity analysts. If you feel that's you, come join the cause, brothers.
Looking for two really mediocre, cracked— no, cracked Excel junkies. If you live in Excel, If you've touched a mouse in your day job, I don't want you. I don't want—
I want, if you, you gotta have the, you gotta have a couple, I wanna see your keyboard without the, like I would remove, remove it.
Yeah.
100%. Yeah. No mouse. The, the interview is like, well, you used to do some crazy interviews at JP Morgan. Like which? But what would you, I'll just say funny. So we would be training for private equity. Interviews, it's like typically you get like a case in 45 minutes, you have to, or like an hour, you have to do an LBO model with like a, you know, financials that they give you. We would, as young investment banking bucks, would go out on Thursday or Friday night for a drink, come back to the office and like see like who would do like a 3-statement model a little bit tipsy. And if you could do it, like it's one of those things that you could do it like drunk. It's like mimics the interview process. Like you're going to be nervous.
You're so cool. You're so cool. You're going to be nervous.
I know this is me flexing.
It's You're the man.
And it's like, so if you're, if you're like, if you're tipsy and you can do this, it's like you definitely know how to model out.
I found the picture. If your keyboard doesn't look like this, I do not want you. F1.
If you have F1 on your keyboard, ladies and gentlemen, do not bother applying.
Do not apply. Do not apply. You should actually make that a screener question, which is you should give someone like 5 seconds to respond. Which key on the keyboard would you remove?
Oh my God.
And then if they don't get it within 5 seconds, they don't get to apply for the job.
Can you send me that pic? I'm going to tweet about it. It's like, if your keyboard looks like this, apply now. That's awesome. Hey, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. Another great week in crypto. A lot of stuff cooking. Interesting. Circle goes trading live today. We're recording Thursday, so it will be—
Yeah, well, yeah, unfortunately we're recording this before it's live. This is 8:40 in the morning on a Thursday, so Um, well, yeah, good. Uh, shout out Jeremy, shout out Circle team, big congrats to everyone there.
Of course. Thanks everyone for listening. Have a great weekend. We'll be back next week.
See you, folks.
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