The Chopping Block: Visa, Mastercard & 140 Firms Take On Circle, Saylor’s Digital Credit Reset & the DAO Reckoning

Speaker A: I kind of thought it almost more like, like the end of Apocalypto when it's like Jaguar PA and whoever, they're having their little battle on the cliff and then in the background the Spanish show up and it's like, all right, Daddy's home. And I feel like ultimately where we have this weird duopolistic semi, not really top tier competition and stablecoins in crypto. And now it's like all the big players are here and it's serious now. Not a dividend.

Speaker B: It's a tale of two Kwan.

Speaker C: Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.

Speaker A: Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless.

Speaker C: Anyways, um, I named trading firms who were very involved.

Speaker B: Alec Eth is the ult on this.

Speaker C: Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, four of us get together and give the industry insiders perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So, quick intros. First you got Tom the Defi Maven and master of memes.

Speaker B: Hello everyone.

Speaker C: Actually got to run the Giga Brain and Grand Poobah at Gauntlet, yo. Joining us today, we've got Jordy Trading Titan at Selini.

Speaker D: Hey, Jordy Trading Titan, thank you for the amazing intro. I think we've tried to schedule this many times over the years, but this is my first shopping block appearance. So I'm excited.

Speaker C: I know it's been, uh, we wanted to bring you at the moment of max pain and I'm glad we were able to make that happen. So, uh, I received that hype man of Dragonfly. We're early stage investors in crypto, but want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life Advice. Please see ShoppingBlock XYZ for more disclosures. So, speaking of Max Payne, actually, I wanted to talk about something just at the top of the show that Tarun, uh, and I were talking about off camera. Is that, um. So I had a tweet, uh, a couple days ago where I was calling out some VC for dunking on a founder. And uh, I sort of said like, hey, this guy is being very unfair to a founder who's paying himself a salary and is winding down his company. And Tarun quote, tweeted me and he said something along the lines of, this guy is like a low rent DCI VC who's hawking all these DCI shitcoins. He deserves to get pilloried. And apparently it was unclear if you were talking about me or if you were Talking about the person I was quoting.

Speaker B: I did put op.

Speaker C: You did put op. I, I ran into a couple of people here at this event at uh, this Goldman event in London who were like, what's going on between you and Tarun? Why is Tarun like, what's. Why is there a beef going on between the two of you? What happened? Do you want to explain the beef?

Speaker B: There is no beef. I was really just dunking on the guy that Haseeb was quote tuning. Because that guy during the like, very tiny.

Speaker C: We should name who that guy is. That guy is the founder of Moonra Capital. Simon, uh, Dick, I believe is his

Speaker B: name, was really shilling a lot of Ponzi DCI coins that were just like, stake your D side coin and maybe 1% of these assets will maybe go to scientists. The other 99% go to pay inflation for anyone staking. It was like real low level Ponzi stuff. And like, I don't know, it's sort of weird to me that the guy who's shilling the D side coins is like getting mad about someone getting paid. I'm like, what do you think is going to happen in science investment that you're going to make? You're always going to have a ROI that's positive. 99% of science investment goes to zero. So I think that was more my slightly inebriated schadenfreude when I wrote that tweet.

Speaker C: Oh, okay.

Speaker D: See?

Speaker C: All right, well, I'm glad to know.

Speaker A: Continues.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm glad to know that, uh, I was only collateral damage in your.

Speaker B: No, no, no. Yeah, sorry. So there is no beef. I was more pointing out that Haseeb was choosing a worthy victim.

Speaker C: Okay, good to know. My targeting algorithms are, um, TARUN approved, but okay. There's other pain going on beyond just, uh, the personal pain of Desai, which is what's happening in the markets right now. The big story is around strategy, also known as MicroStrategy. If you recall, last time on the show we talked about their preferreds, which are called stretch, were significantly impaired. They were targeting a hundred dollar price target and they fell all the way down into the 80 cent territory, which seemed to belie an enormous amount of weakness and incredulity in the strength of the capital stack that Michael Saylor has built up over the time that he's building. MicroStrategy, uh, it hit a low of $71 last week relative to the $100 that it was historically. Trading at MSTR is down about 30% in five days. Currently sitting in the, you know, low $80 range. Um, and it's minus 82% from July 2025 peak. The M nav is now well below one, meaning that it's now trading below the value of all the Bitcoin held in reserve. So it's a very, very challenged time for Microstrategy. Now, in response to all of this, Saylor came out and announced a new framework called the Digital Credit Capital Framework. And his whole thing which he's, he said many times now is that, Look, MicroStrategy, we're not a dat. That's not how he positions himself. He is a digital credit company. His job is to issue very attractive forms of digital credit and do this kind of capital transformation from risky Bitcoin into this beautiful, uh, menagerie of financial assets that are backed by Bitcoin. And so he's now announced that he's going to do a large cushion, a larger cash cushion than he currently has. 2.5 billion that he's going to be setting aside for just dividends and interest, which should give them roughly 18 months of dividend coverage. Um, that's, you know, significantly up where they are today, which is closer to, uh, 12 months. He's, uh, announced that he's increasing the dividend for Stretch. It was previously at 11.5%. It's now gone up to 12%. These usually he's hiking it like, you know, 25 basis points, 50 basis points. So, um, this is, this is, you know, think of it like the Fed. This is significant jumbo, a jumbo raise in the dividend rate for Stretch. And he's also announced that he's going to start buying back some of the original, some of the other preferreds up to a billion dollars. Stretch, uh, is going to take priority in these buybacks as well as MSTR buybacks when he feels like it's trading below par, up to another 1 billion there. And he announced that he may sell Bitcoin in order to fund this if necessary. And something on the order of about 2.5% of holdings are up for sale potentially if he needs to monetize some of the bitcoin. Now on the announcement of this bitcoin, he, uh, announced this yesterday. Bitcoin actually seemed to hold pretty well. Uh, yesterday it was roughly in the 60k neighborhood, didn't weaken too much. He apparently sold about 1.15 billion via MSTR, uh, ATM, HM sales. So selling common shares in order to recapitalize and, uh, build up his war chest. And we saw A significant recovery in Stretch. Stretch went from $75 up to $84 yesterday, an increase about 12%. Um, the yield obviously has gone up to roughly 14% on that math. And MSTR went up 12% yesterday. Now, MSTR has weakened today, but Stretch is actually looking pretty strong today. Uh, Bitcoin is back below 58, or, sorry, it's sitting around 58k. So market's weak, it's jittery, but we can see in the Stretch prices that there's some confidence in this new framework that Saylor has proposed and the fact that he's now buoyed his cash reserves, which should allow him some leeway in, in being able to hold up this capital structure and still use the, the chain of preferreds that he's put together. So, Jordy, you announced that you thought this was a masterful stroke in this whole digital credit framework. Give us your take. Uh, especially now seeing the market weaken a little bit on the MSTR side with Stretch still holding up pretty strong.

Speaker D: I mean, uh, I've never been an MSTR holder, so in terms of why people buy that instead of Bitcoin, they're kind of betting on his alchemy to, I guess, compound Bitcoin per share, these metrics that he's targeting. Obviously, the most important thing is Bitcoin doesn't go to zero because then his whole balance sheet is worthless. And then all the other products that he's kind of built up on, the balance sheet also don't matter and the stock doesn't matter. I think what he's done is sort of one, get a huge amount of cash suddenly, which, again, he's had to sell a lot of stock. And I'm not one of the stockholders, so, uh, you know, I don't. I guess that's what those guys signed up for, right? Like, sometimes he has to dump on them in order to keep. Keep the game going. So that was quite a large amount the previous month. Previous weeks, he was doing sort of 3, 400. This was over a billion. He's kind of made a statement that he's going to protect Stretch, which I think is the right decision to do, because ultimately, you know, he's put so much of the, of the kind of flywheel into this stablecoin. I never thought Stretch was a bad idea. Even though people are dunking on him for using Claude, make no mistakes. Which version of ChatGPT are you using? I think ultimately it's similar to other instruments that we've seen. In essence, it's a Long term bet that bitcoin will grow at more than 1112 percent, which I don't think is a bad bet. And as long as he's short up where he doesn't get liquidated before that binary outcome plays out or, you know, you need, you need at least a few years to kind of see that long term rate is going to hold or not. Honestly, I thought the whole thing was overblown in terms of the Luna thing because Luna was worthless and you could print infinite Luna while bitcoin, you cannot print any bitcoin. And at the end of the day, time and time again, there were always people around the world that have a lot of fiat that at certain prices will want to convert it to bitcoin. And so this loop of like death spiral I never really thought was credible. And I think with the cash shoring, people are going to forget about this in six months and no one's going to talk about it. And he's got enough cash to write it out. So I'm very confident that people's, you know, time preference will, uh, will. Will win over here.

Speaker C: Tarun, you were the. You you called mstr, uh, or Stretch, I should say Luna for suits last time. What's your, what's, what's your take? Do you, do you stand by that or do you feel like, okay, he's tamed, he's tamed the beast and he's gotten the death spiral under control.

Speaker B: Just because it's marketed to suits doesn't mean it's not. It's more the fact that he has to constantly keep selling at the money mscr, like at some point that. How long is that charade gonna last? I, I do agree with you that you can probably make this last for a while. But I, I think the other weird thing was they opened up the amount, their maximum amount of bitcoin they're willing to sell beyond just like the dividend coverage. And you know, I agree with Jordy's point as long as they still have bitcoin in the balance sheet. But if they start actually selling, it does feel like it's turtles all the way down because like how. Who's the, who's the marginal MSTR buyer at that point? It, it really is like kind of crazy to me. Although I, I guess they are in a bunch of indices, so they do have some like, support in terms of like daily adv of rebalances. But obviously if they lose their place in the index in terms of like their market cap goes down too much, they're Going to have a lot of trouble selling the. At the monies as well. So I, There is a version, I agree with you. It's not like Luna, where it's like single asset goes down, full death spiral right there. There's like multiple assets are like kind of coupled together and hopefully they. The Rube Goldberg machine continues. But there, there's something about the way Stretch is marketed that feels a lot like anchor. That's like a little hard to.

Speaker A: Not.

Speaker B: It's the marketing in particular that's like very hard to. To not the picture of that woman who says she's never going to be stressed again or whatever thanks to buying Stretch. Like, I don't know. Uh, that part is the, the part I can't really get over. You know what I'm talking about? The, the.

Speaker A: Yeah, the AI woman.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: That's. That's canonically also.

Speaker B: Also, also one of the, the stretch AI generated pictures is like a picture of the Titanic sinking and sailor riding away on a lifeboat. And it's like, that's good.

Speaker A: I'd like.

Speaker C: That was pretty bad. That was pretty bad.

Speaker B: The iconography of this is. This is like anti cult bitcoin.

Speaker C: There may have been signs, there may have been signs,

Speaker A: you know, the difference being with anchor, of course, that, uh, you know, with anchor, the rates were too high and with stretch, you know, rates are going to keep going up. So if anything, you know, isn't. Isn't it more attractive? Aren't people getting, getting paid more?

Speaker B: The rates are too damn high.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, they need to jack those up. I, um, I do feel like, uh, I mean, this feels like a good outcome. It's kind of like there's adults in the room kind of speaking the language of the market, like, you know, cash reserves. Hey, here's how we think about this going forward. I think the other unfortunate thing obviously is just like macros looking worse. And now it looks like, okay, maybe there's actually going to be a rate hike this year and then obviously it's going to trickle down into the market that strategy is trying to tap into. And so it feels like the gamble of, uh, tap into credit rates go down, buy bitcoin on cheap leverage. The market is working against you and unfortunately it's not a great trade to be in right now.

Speaker C: Yeah, that and the destruction of private credit, I think also just kind of weakens the demand for this kind of stuff because trades that looked like, oh, this is very cheap and safe and this is going to be great because Blackstone is driving. That's uh, people have less and less confidence in things that are shaped like that.

Speaker B: Well, I do think it's interesting. Sailor spends a lot of time marking himself as distinct from private credit, but it does sort of feel like it's the same buyers at the end of the day. So it's like that part. I don't really know how to.

Speaker D: I guess, like, the question is, do you guys think that you're going to be on the show talking about, uh, you know, how much stretch months there are in like, you know, in six months.

Speaker B: Has since vetoed it last week. Laura should force us to talk about stretch last week for the record.

Speaker C: Yeah, I really didn't want to talk about this, but I think we are unfortunately now in the stretch cycle that we have to talk about.

Speaker D: Does feel we are, but like, are we still going to be in the stretch cycle some months from now? Because he doesn't have to do anything now at this point. He can sit on his hands. He's got the ability to, you know, if something deep eggs and like, stretch goes to 60, he can buy that. If MSTR goes to like 0.6 MNAV, you can, you can buy a little bit, you know, here and there and keep it going and do nothing. And in six months, are people still going to be thinking about this or like, you know, to be clear, to

Speaker C: be clear, if he's buying back this stuff, then his cash reserves start to really run low and then he's got to do another ATM or he's got to do something like, uh, we're right back where we are. If, if stretch goes to 60, we're in bad shape because the dividend coverage is going to decrease as well. If he's actually buying it back.

Speaker D: No. Well, he said he'll sell up to 1.25 billion of Bitcoin, which is not that much bitcoin. I mean, in the grand, the amount of 10 billion kind of blocks we've had go through over the last 12 months, that's really not a lot of bitcoin. And he sells a billion of bitcoin and repegs stuff. It's not that scary.

Speaker C: But it is reflexive. That's the problem. I think it is genuinely reflexive. If the market knows more selling is coming because stretch is depegged, which means he's going to sell more bitcoin, which means that maybe stretch depegs a little bit more, which now MSTR goes down a little bit more. Now he's going to go buy back some MSTR all of a sudden. The liabilities are getting away from him and he's signaled he's going to defend.

Speaker D: Right. I guess the question you have to ask is, is every bitcoin buyer just trying to avoid MSTR sales or that's the problem?

Speaker C: I think the answer is yes. I think right now, um, he is so much of the market, the market is so weak right now that he is so much of the market and so many people. So, you know, today at the uh, this, this Goldman event, um, Evgeny was talking about how so much of what he sees on, on his desk is people positioning around, around microstrategy. Is that just trying to understand when are they going to buy, what are they going to sell, what are they doing? Because they're the marginal, they're the marginal flow in the bitcoin market right now.

Speaker D: Well, that's definitely like why we went back from 80 down to 60 is because the amount of people that we're trying to front run sailors buys, you know, every month. He was buying 2 billion on the 14th and you just kind of knew it was going to happen. And like all, uh, uh, including us, like everybody was just like, oh, we're getting away a week away from the dividend. Let's just pile in and then pile out. And then I think on that last time when it didn't, it was kind of clear it wasn't going to repeg and we don't have another one coming. It was kind of obvious how much money was just waiting for the next one. It had to, had to get out. And that kind of brought us back to 60. But at this point, the front runners are out. Obviously no one's front running buys anymore. And I think we're back to who wants to buy this digital gold.

Speaker C: The answer is there's not that many people. I mean, uh, that's the problem, right, is that outside of strategy, the ETF complex has seen like 5 billion of outflows, like the single largest run of outflows that we've seen so far in the ETF complex. Which tells us like, okay, well, who's left? Retail's not here. The ETFs seem not to be buying, Sailors not buying. And so we're kind of sitting around waiting of like, okay, where's the marginal firepower going to be coming from without the market regime fundamentally changing?

Speaker D: That is the bear case. And the bear case is that stocks are probably maybe going to do like a bit of a double top and we might have a pullback potentially going into midterms. That is a Little bit kind of top of mind for bitcoin buyers. Like, you know, is liquidity really going to be good? Um, right now. But it's one of those assets that when it's cool, everybody just wants to, wants to get in and then when it's not cool, everyone's like distancing and uh, it's very streaky. I think it can be like very reflective up and down. Right now, obviously we've already had a lot of reflection down. We'll have a bit of a bottoming now. Whether we go a little bit lower on the bottoming is unclear. I'm not sure who's still selling it. You're right. The ETF seems to be the main seller right now. There's like some, somebody queue upping every day, somebody really large, but hopefully that, that kind of bottoms out and then the, the really, really good time to buy is when people start worrying about the, the dollar's value again. But that's not going to be probably for at least. Uh,

Speaker C: okay. That was a very, very trainer podcast.

Speaker B: His name from game theorizing to macro theorizing after that.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, that was good. We don't usually get into these waters on the podcast because we're all completely out of our depth. But I appreciate the call. If you had to guess, where would you say you're a buyer of bitcoin? I assume that you guys are pretty non directional at Selini. Uh, but where would you say you're a buyer? Oh, you guys are directional. Okay.

Speaker D: Yeah. I mean there's different parts of the business. There's like the very non directional quoting stuff and then there's like, you know, we do venture in liquid bets in quite, you know, directional stuff. And we're definitely buying. I mean we've been buying. We bought a bunch of stretch on the announcement. I thought the announcement was good. We managed to buy a bunch under 80 and kind of holding it maybe until like high Hades. We've been buying bitcoin here. I think it's not a slam dunk, but just kind of keep buying a bit more every, every time it ticks down more.

Speaker C: Where do you think it is a slam dunk? What's the price that you're like, that's. I'm piling in there.

Speaker D: I don't think it's about price. I think it's either when like stocks have kind of puked and you're like, okay, there's no macro headwind here. Like we've kind of gone through a bit of a deleveraging that's, that's when it's a slam dunk because I think it'll, it'll uh, recover very well once the liquidity gets uh, back in.

Speaker C: Okay, fair enough. Well there's been uh, another piece of news that has gotten people quite surprised. There's a new stablecoin on the block called Open USD, abbreviated ousd. OUSD is a new consortium, but uh, this consortium is not like other consortiums we've seen. There doesn't seem to be a single company behind it but rather a true consortium of something like 140partners. The CEO of Open USD is going to be Zach Abrams, who was the co founder of Bridge, which of course was previously acquired by Stripe. But the whole idea of the open uh, standard Stablecoin is that it's a single stablecoin with no fees. The uh, Mint and Redeem is at no cost, there are no volume caps. Everybody who is a member can mint the stablecoin and they get the yield for the stablecoins that they mint. So it's in a way kind of similar to the partnership between Circle and Coinbase where each of them gets, you know some of the economics based on how much they contribute to the underlying issuance and is governed collectively by this Open Standard board of partners, no single entity. Now these 140 partners that signed up for the Open USD Standard or Open Standard USD was a huge mammoth list of some of the largest companies in the world. So we saw Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Klarna, Affirm, Ramp, Brex, Western Union, Moneygram, Remitly on the fintech side. Then on financial institutions we saw BlackRock, BNY, Mellon, Standard, Charter, DBS, US Bank, BBVA, Mizuho, ICE tech companies. We saw Google, Samsung, IBM, Shopify, MercadoLibre, DoorDash, Grab, Rakuten, and then the crypto side we saw Coinbase, tempo, Solana, Bybit, Okx, Ripple, Crypto.com, gemini, Aave, Morpho, Polygon, Aptos, Plasma, Stellar, Fireblocks, Metamask, Anchorage, Bridge, Reign, among others. I saw about six different announcements of chain saying we are official partners and uh, we're stablecoin is launching on our chain so no less than Solana, Bas, Polygon, uh, Aptos, uh Plasma. I'm sure there are others that are going to be initial Mint partners and of course notably absent from this list were Circle, USDT, PayPal, each of which have their own stablecoins. And uh, I saw Circle was down something like 7, uh, 8% on this announcement. So unsurprisingly, this being kind of a shot across the bow at hey, do we believe that we can actually challenge the duopoly that we see in the market today between Circle and Tether? So this looks like a very serious consortium right now. It's pre launch, not going to go live until later this year. They said they were kind of vague with the uh, the actual timeline, uh, but this looks like it's going to be very serious. And of course Stripe being that Zach Abrams is going to be CEO, uh, Stripe is positioning themselves as this is going to be the default stablecoin for all activity that's going to be running through Stripe. So we saw a lot of people kind of back patting and uh, handshaking each other and high fiving and saying great, this is great. Stable coins are going to take over the world with this new initiative. Uh, Jordi, I see you nodding your head. What's your thoughts on ousd?

Speaker D: You know, I thought some of us on this podcast will be inside the cabal, but clearly we're not in the cabal.

Speaker C: No, we did not get a phone call about OUSD on. Unfortunately we are, we are. This, this cabal did not include us.

Speaker D: But I, I mean the Circle thing, I completely understand. They first took the hit with um, you know this, this situation with Coinbase and Circle has always been very complex and even the hyper liquid USDC ended up being more of a Coinbase deal where they kind of ended up being the issuer into all that USDC and capturing a lot of the economics and it seems to be a continuation of their strange bed partners. But I don't know, I don't know exactly what their conversations are between. Sorry, sorry. You know, I'm not as good.

Speaker B: Uh, well, no, no, you're very DEI friendly with bed.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, that's very, very important. Thinking of you.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Bad persons. Bad persons, please.

Speaker D: Bad persons. I'd love to see how this goes. Obviously you know those of us who've been in crypto for a long time, I've seen hundreds of Stable coins take a shot and come and go. Obviously this, as you said this looks like quite a consortium but at the end of the day will they a take over perpetual uh, denomination pair that it's always kind of stay tether's playground except for you know, some of the USDC stuff. Will they get into, I mean prediction markets has been uh, USDC's. Will they break into that or this just going to be like a visa kind of background thing.

Speaker C: I'm not sure yeah, it's notable because the big stablecoin consortia in the past, Right. So obviously the original stablecoin consortium was center, which was the original thing that Circle created, of which it originally was going to have a bunch of members, and then the members ended up being just Circle and coinbase. But, um, the original idea was a consortium. That was how it was supposed to be, uh, structured. And my understanding is that that kind of changed over time and to just become this duopoly or dual issuers of Circle and coinb. And then, of course, there was Libra, which was, you know, the whole idea was that, well, you know, it's the Libra Foundation. Uh, it's not Facebook. It's, you know, you know, whatever the 30 ring of companies, which, uh, are a bunch of financial institutions that were part of the Libra foundation as well. On some level. Tempo also presented itself as being a bit of a consortium or having a bunch of partners. Now, this seems to be kind of in the real original center model, is that it really is a consortium and there is no company at the center that's supposed to be driving it. That's. That's the way it's very clearly positioned. It's not like, okay, this is the Stripe Consortium, or this is the, uh, you know, whatever. It does strike me that, like, it's really hard for consortia to succeed, uh, without there being a very muscular presence at the Center. Maybe that's what Zach Abrams is going to be playing here. But there's so many players here, and it's really not obvious who's going to do the heavy lifting. You know, with. With Libra, it was obvious, okay, Facebook, yeah, it's a consortium, but, like, it's Facebook. Facebook's doing all the work here. Who's doing all the work? Because it's not like these 140 partners are going to do that much work. So, you know, if you think about Visa, okay, Visa was a consortium. You know, the Fed was a consortium. Um, but there's always this, like, very muscular.

Speaker D: It's always like, down to the, you know, it's like the cliche thing of. It's. It's all going to be down to the incentives, like, who's actually going to be making money here. And so we had to have to kind of pull on that string. And you said that right now it's whoever mints it, keeps it. He who smelt it, dealt it. But then what if somebody like, un mints. What if I meant a billion and you meant a billion and we, You Know, we trade it and Tom has it and then he burns.

Speaker C: That's a good point.

Speaker D: So like, who, who's interested? Like, I don't know.

Speaker C: Yeah, how do you do the fungibility thing? So it's like, okay, we know who minted, but when I redeem through a different channel, do I get decredited or does the original guy get decredited? You can't track, you know, it's not UTXO based, so how do you actually track which ones are which? Is it colorful based?

Speaker D: Maybe, maybe. Agora, uh, was saying that one of your report codes, they were saying that this is kind of similar to what they're they've been trying to do. Maybe kind of like that. But I think they're just paying the apps that hold it. So it's a little bit different.

Speaker C: Right, right. It's, it's. I mean having, yeah. Paying the balances that are held by different applications. I mean that's what Circle does de facto today where it's like, okay, I'm going to share some of the revenue that I attrib to Hyper liquid by just looking at what's in the bridge. I'm not counting the mints or the okay, you minted, but then later somebody else redeemed those coins. That's obviously very hard to do in an asset that's completely fungible. Uh, Tom, what's your take on ousd?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think, I mean obviously people's kind of first, I think reaction like you said, is hey, this seems like a serious competitor to someone like Circle. But Coinbase was also down 5, 6% today and obviously their stock price right now is heavily tied to Circle because they're getting these um, interest payments um, from Circle for USDC on their platform. And so I think if anything I kind of thought it almost more like the end of Apocalypto when it's like Jaguar, PA and whoever, they're having their little battle on the cliff and then in the background the Spanish show up and it's like, all right, it's like daddy's home. And I feel like that's about this where we have this weird duopolistic, semi, not really top tier competition and stablecoins in crypto. And now it's like all the big players are here and it's serious now. Although I think to your point there is a history of consortium backed payment methods, payment payment networks. I mean even MasterCard as well was a consortium m. But in crypto it's really struggled to take off, I think of just corporate stablecoins in general, like PiusD, they've been trying to get that thing off the ground for years. I mean famously we had the bet on the show two years ago about PyUSD. I don't even think it's surpassed that peak. Even though they're obviously offering a lot of incentives for it. And you could argue, okay, well PayPal, they don't really have the user base or the distribution, but they do have the incentive. It's their own thing. They have a lot of different channels. They are the payment app in addition to every other property that they own. So it's like if they can't get it off the ground, what's the chance that these other players are getting off the ground? I don't know. It feels kind of low. Although I do think a consortium based model is the most likely winner of any sort of competitor because it is actually how you get a real network off the ground and you get everyone to cooperate versus you have a million different fragmented stablecoins that end up not being interoperable and therefore a bad experience.

Speaker D: You guys see that? Uh, Paolo from Tether tweeted saying yeah,

Speaker B: I was about to bring up. That's kind of what Tom's statement of like basically dunking on circle is like, oh, finally a player number two has shown up basically.

Speaker C: Oh wow, wow.

Speaker B: It was like I was like, wow, the, the, the, the, the vengeance between the two of them is probably has to be the highest of anything in crypto.

Speaker D: But he's also praising at the same time he's praising this new competitor. He's like, oh, this is going to be like a player too.

Speaker B: I feel like he did something like that when Libra came out too though where he's like finally a real competitor.

Speaker C: This is like a joke he keeps bringing out every couple years.

Speaker A: No, no, no one did this for wld or uh, USD1 rather this is, this is really the first time when people there's a real competitor.

Speaker C: So that's true, that's true. I guess I'll say like normally the idea of like okay, this is a, this is a true consortium where there's no rent seeker at the middle, right? It's not like, okay, Facebook is going to be the primary beneficiary of Libra. It does seem like this position is there's no rent seeker in the middle and it's almost like commoditizer compliment which is that, okay, all these people really don't want there to be a stablecoin duopoly. Right? Like if you Think about what is the incentive of all these people in the consortium that might be the single tying incentive. It's uh, like, look, maybe I'm not going to own the stablecoin, but I just don't want those guys to own the stablecoin because that's going to make it a lot more compelling for me to be able to build my business and integrate this stuff and really make a push for it. If it's Tether that owns this or if it's Circle that owns this or somebody else, that's really bad for my business long term. Whether you're Western Union or BNY Mellon or whoever. Right. I can see that being the rationale for this. That said, I feel like I am skeptical when the consortium is too big. I'm almost like more bullish if it's a consortium of like eight people or 10 people. A consortium of 140 people is basically like, you know, we all went to a concert together and like we all signed a petition.

Speaker D: It's kind uh, of.

Speaker C: That's sort of what this feels like to me a little bit.

Speaker D: It's the anti hyper liquid model. You just go from 11 people and you guys go to like everyone. We're all building together.

Speaker C: Right? I remember the story about the Libra, right? Is that like the Libra historically when people saw like the 40 partners of Libra of like, you know, check out.com and Mercado Libre and Visa and blah blah, blah. And like then later reporting about, about the, about the Libra showed that like most of these people didn't really understand what the Libra was. They hadn't cleared it with their boards. They like, they were, it was like kind of they signed a petition or like an LOI or something.

Speaker D: I mean to be fair, like we don't really know if they would have managed to find any pmf. It sort of became like a legal blocking, right? Like they didn't really manage to get, get it out. Maybe it would have been good, I don't know.

Speaker C: Right. But my point is that with the Libra, all the names that we were so excited about of like, oh my God, I can't believe Visa is behind this and you know, these banks and whatever is that. We later learned the banks actually weren't that committed to Libra. And what they've been asked to sign was pretty watery of you guys agree to make a best effort to maybe do something if we put this thing together. And like no one's going to say no to that because it's like, okay, Well, I want to make m. You know, I want to have the optionality to do something like it.

Speaker D: You guys like all interact with like all these firms and you know that they have like a crypto guy. Like each of these firms needs to have a crypto guy and that crypto guy needs to win every year. You know, you got to do. You have to show to the bosses, like, you know, uh, we did a partnership, we did something. So they, they kind of, they need to sign up. And that's kind of like how it plays out. And I don't think it's a signal or counter signal. That's just going to be like the default. You know, they're all going to sign up so they can show that they did something.

Speaker C: Right, right, right, agreed. I mean, we haven't seen any, uh, actual governance structure yet. There's, uh, this idea that there will be many groups that are a part of this governance structure. I'm presuming it's not going to be 140s, like the fucking UN or something. So there will probably be. We'll probably get more visibility into what is the actual governance structure here. Who are the real parties who are signing up to be.

Speaker B: Imagine if it was a representative democracy and the delegated to end of the company.

Speaker D: Imagine if it's a Dow and they have to go in the forum again and start.

Speaker B: There's just going to be, you know, it's going to be like the U.N. if they do have a really do 140, it's going to be like there's going to be a Security Council and it's really going to just be that multi sig. Everything else is thrown away.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's going to be Black Rock and BNY and Salana, you know, making all the calls. They'll be like, they'll be like Russia, you know, it's like, oh, no, sorry, there's a veto. So Russia doesn't like this. So we're not doing this one.

Speaker B: I don't doubt that that's the problem for all these consortiums. Right. Even with just n equals 2 for a circle, they had lots of that.

Speaker C: Right, Right. So do you, do you, Tarun, do you. Are you bullish on this? Are you bearish on this? Like, is this the number two? Is this potentially the number one? Do you see a path there?

Speaker B: I don't know. I think, yeah, a little bit. I'm a little more.

Speaker C: This why we bring you out? This is why, this is why we bring you on the podcast.

Speaker B: I'm a little in the confident like of like there's someone at every one of these companies who loves crypto more than everyone else. And maybe it's their job if they're lucky. But for a lot of them, it's like they're trying to prove that they need to keep a crypto function at all. And everyone can market stable coins, right? It's like, hey, private money. Suddenly our company is like able to earn more interest on doing nothing and like being part of the transaction flow versus like having to put up capital, having to take risk as, uh, more as much risk. I mean it's a much easier.

Speaker D: When you said that, I was like, the US government has that same guy. It's like Scott Besson, he's always talking about how stablecoins are going to save the treasury demand and whatever. Maybe, maybe Scott Besson needs to join the cons.

Speaker C: I mean, uh, that would make me

Speaker D: very bullish if like, you know, you, the US government kind of joins the consortium.

Speaker B: Patrick DeWitt, is that CBDC?

Speaker D: That's, I don't know, kind of.

Speaker C: Hey, hey, no, no, no, we don't do that anymore. We don't do that. It's illegal. No, Patrick DeWitt, who's part, uh, of the White House, uh, crypto something. Crypto executive. I should know what his title is, but he's like the guy right under David Sacks. He tweeted like, this is great. This is, you know, why we have so much positive, uh, room for innovation in America. So clearly the White House gave a nod of approval to this. So they like seeing this thing come together. I take issue with your framing, Tarun, because I think like almost all these companies have done some, you know, it's like, oh, we did a part. Google Cloud did a partnership. Some of them have done.

Speaker B: For the record, there's 140 names, right?

Speaker C: Like, yes, yes.

Speaker B: A lot of them haven't done much or have done fake stuff. There's obviously a small core that has done 90%, 95% of any real crypto thing, right?

Speaker C: Yeah. But I'd say I, I think almost every single one of these companies, almost certainly at a board or at a C suite level, take stablecoin seriously. They may not take crypto seriously, but they take stablecoin. Like every single one of these companies take stable. I mean, maybe doordash doesn't or something, I don't know. But most of these organizations, financial institutions, banks, they're thinking about stablecoins. This is not a, this is not irrelevant to how they see their 20 year plan. So, so I take it seriously that like this is not a, okay, the little corporate innovation department, like you know, just okayed something and maybe they did,

Speaker B: you know, I, I, I'm not saying it's like exactly like that. Uh, stable coins are much easier to sell. Like, like crypto, right? Like Libra is a harder sell than this because Libra promised you some stake in the fees that was nebulous. Whereas those promises you like straight up treasury yield. But attributably, right, like there is a real, there's real dollars behind this versus like a little bit more like the hope of a token type thing like appreciation. Which I, I do think like is, is a, a distinct difference between the stablecoin consortiums and like L1 plus stablecoin, which I think actually has this problem of like you're promising a lot too much that like has to make the token work or the net validator network work. Whereas here there's that kind of irrelevant, right? That's why all the different networks are on the same thing. No one cares about that at all. I just don't know again to your point about incentive, like who's incentivized to bring order flow? Like why is my top line metric aum? Like bring in a bunch of aum? Because then you get to the Geordie problem of like, well then everyone who has a billion dollar balance sheet just dumps a billion dollars, transfers it to someone else and then transfers it back and suddenly they're farming the fees the most, right? And like hey, you're having the lucky

Speaker C: consortium farming games on this, okay?

Speaker B: Of course, I mean inevitably, right? They're going to pick some revenue share agreement and someone's going to be a little smarter than the rest and just start farming everyone else. The second thing is like, okay, well maybe it's volume based and it's like who's going to generate the most real volume KYC user volume or whatever. You have to prove it. Well then obviously some of those businesses are way more adept at just like shoving all their users onto this and doing exactly what they're doing off chain but just being like oh, we're settling here now pay us all the incentives. And so I think the farming gains actually do occur when you're like are we trying to grow, be an AUM business and have assets managed here? Are we trying to be a payments volume business? Are we trying to you know, like, and that, ah, you know, even with just those two, the spectrum between those two, you're going to completely change the revenue Share agreement and like the real long term value to like each business and whatever rules you set there dictate who gets the most value out of this and inherently who will try to be on the Security Council. Uh, I think that's like the natural end state of all these. And so I don't. These revenue sharing agreements are actually the key thing of like whether this is real or not. And like I don't know what that is. So I, that's, that's. However they choose that that will determine whether there's farming incentives or people moving real demand on. And I don't know how you get 140 people to agree on that who all have enough uh, incentive to like bring their real demand onto this. There will be people who naturally do, right, who, who, who I think will have certainly much more of a reason to do that.

Speaker C: I, I sort of take an even more basic mode of analysis on this which is that my expectation is that the stablecoin market is really hard. Part of the reason why PayPal was unsuccessful and most of these other players that have launched, you know, Fiserv has their own stable coin and blah blah blah, all these guys, Western Union has their own stable coin colonize their own stablecoin. Stablecoins are really hard, they're very sticky. They have natural network effects. It's actually really difficult to get your new stablecoin into something that already exists. And the rake that tether and circle take on, mints and redeems are actually very low and the market can bear it pretty well. And so going to okay, zero mint, zero redeem fees is an advantage, but not that much of an advantage relative to just the liquidity to the acceptance, to the ubiquity and to just like the, the, the moats that it's already integrated into all these places. So my expectation is that probably what happens here is that tether continues to rule the roost when it comes to exchanges and crypto trading and a lot of these emerging markets. Places where it's just kind of everywhere, right? It's in the water supply, it's just all over the place. Circle probably continues with a lot of the integrations that they've won just through kind of sheer BD and uh, relationships as well as in Defi where it has become, you know, the, the, the sort of, it's become the unit of account within defi. Um, and it's kind of accepted.

Speaker D: I think, I think Haseeb, like the one pushback I have is that the rake is not really the mint redeem the, the rake is the, is the interest on holding. And both of those guys obviously don't pay anything out to users. No, no, no, they pay some.

Speaker C: You can't pay out to users here, you can pay to you. This is still genius compliant. They're not paying out to users.

Speaker D: No, I understand, but like, let's look at the deals they have. So there's the Binance, kind of like cuts and Tether has Histor not pay that much to Binance. I think I hear whispers of what the exact amount is. But they pay something but not that much. They keep a lion's share because they're like, well, we have negotiating power too, obviously with this hyper liquid thing, 90% of it's not going to hype buybacks or whatever. So the negotiating power was clearly kind of going on the other side. But the rake in essence is going to be. We're not going to be in a zero yield environment. It's pretty clear if anything yields are going back up, firms even like us. Uh, I'm a little bit tired of holding so many stables and not getting anything. I can see the amount of cash that these guys are. We're just making tether money by just holding this usdt. There is space for someone to come in with lower rake. It's not about the mint fees. And ultimately I agree with Tarun. This whole thing is going to depend on have they gotten the incentives right where the right people are getting enough to kind of grow. This OPEC will kind of succeed or fail if like the members are all happier with the money.

Speaker C: But notice who's missing, right? Binance is not here. Binance is not on this list. And that tells you a lot, right? Coinbase is not here. Binance is not here.

Speaker D: Uh, Coinbase is there.

Speaker B: Coinbase is there. That was the whole people fighting.

Speaker C: Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. So Coinbase, sorry, Coinbase is there. Coinbase is there. I apologize, but it's very clear, like Coinbase obviously has two masters here. They're very incentivized to continue pushing USDC because they have this big stake in USDC as well, uh, relative to just ousd. And I suspect that they're going to say yes, but they're not going to necessarily be pushing it at the margin to the extent that they can because they have this broader product suite that's oriented around usdc. So I suspect for that reason that fragmentation is good for the incumbent. If OUSD is not going to be able to cleanly bring everybody on board and basically build this rebel alliance, probably they're going to have to open new markets. And I think it's plausible that they can't open new markets, right, like interbank Settlement or, you know, this Stablecoin sandwich stuff, B2B payments. This is a very plausible place. That. And this is kind of what Tempo's story has been as well, right? Is that, look, these are totally new markets that didn't already exist. You know, DoorDash and OpenAI and anthropic and all these partners that they have, they're, uh, not using any stablecoins today. So them using this player as the way in which they're going to be onboarding stablecoins and be willing to, because they have a stake in it, and it's not just leaking economics to somebody else. They may be willing to expand the stablecoin market in this direction. But where I'm skeptical again, because there's no single muscular hand that's going to go toe to toe with circle or go toe to toe with tether and say, great, I'm going to win over Binance, I'm going to win over Defi, I'm going to win over emerging, uh, markets, and I'm going to go do all the integrations in Latam or, um, in Southeast Asia. There's so much prior work that's been done here.

Speaker B: I think one thing I will say about that is that's that to me is slightly downstream of the revenue sharing agreement in this thing, right? Like fundamentally, right. The rake, like Jordi's saying, has to get cut up, uh, based on your usage or participation or how much you're doing stuff. And like, what you choose as that revenue sharing agreement dictates whether someone who already has access and like a BD team, a growth team that knows how to just go accumulate assets or accumulate volume, we'll just go try. It's effectively going to be trying to farm the revenue share agreement. There's like no way around that, right? It's like everyone is going to like, look at what they're good at, what they can do for the least costs and maximize their potential.

Speaker C: Here, I think, is the problem with that, is that, like, look, if you look at something like Visa, right, Visa is a consortium. It was created to basically coordinate all of the banks and, you know, get all the consumers that are available by all the banks and like, it makes sense once the value is already there in the entire banking system, to coordinate in a central entity that sits on top. And I think you can do that when you're really just having to Attribute the value that's being contributed by each person. But in the stablecoin market, the stablecoin market is still pretty nascent. It's not that big, right. In absolute terms relative to a Bny Melon or a blackrock. Stablecoin market's tiny. Maybe to Circle, it's big. But Circle is a $20 billion company. These are orders of magnitude larger companies that are dealing with economics, uh, that far outscale with the current stablecoin market. So the reality is the stablecoin market needs to be expanded. And market development and expansion of the market is not where a consortium is going to shine. In order to go into uncharted territory, it takes a lot of risk. And a lot of that risk might not be internalized by you. If you're like, look, I'm going to go do market development in Indonesia and your PayPal, maybe you do that market development. Maybe you get the fees, like maybe your mint is the mint that works, but maybe somebody else's mint, maybe grab goes and takes that market share after you've done the market development. If you're circle, you don't care. You just go do the market development and you will internalize all the gains. But if you're a consortium, there's a lot of incentive to free ride and only pick up the easy money that you know you're going to be able to capture. And that's why consortia, uh, are not used to like go. You know, you don't use a consortia to go open up a new continent. You use an explorer on a ship that's, you know, venture financed. Right, like that. The, the centrality of an.

Speaker B: I don't think we're saying different things for uh, those sorts of.

Speaker C: Right. But I think it comes down to the central question of do you expect them to win over the current market or to expand the current market? And I think the theory that I'm propounding is one that this kind of system works for expanding the current market relative to the flow. They already have available B2B flows and okay, some of their banking clients and blah, blah, blah, but it doesn't really work for them to say, great, we're going to take over hyperliquid, we're going to take over, you know, uh, the stablecoin deposit navy. We're going to go take over the trading pairs on Binance. I think that's much harder for this kind of structure.

Speaker D: Let's see if they manage to snag like a robinhood or something. You know, I Haven't seen those guys on the list, and I know they're announcing a bunch of stuff, uh, this week.

Speaker B: Well, they're in a different consortium.

Speaker D: Different. Which one?

Speaker B: Usdg.

Speaker D: Oh, okay, okay. And there's. There's like, that.

Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. There's, like, also this, like, competing consortia thing, which is, like, also weird. Like, coast theorem has to apply eventually.

Speaker A: Really?

Speaker B: Like, how big? How many of these can you have?

Speaker D: Yeah, I agree.

Speaker C: Okay, switching gears. Jordy, this one's for you. There's been a comeback happening in the meme coin market, so we'll give a very. I'll give a very short, tortured version of this, because I'm certainly not a expert on what's happening in meme coins, but apparently there's been a bit of a comeback in the meme coin market around friend of the show Ansem. So, Ansem, of course, one of the biggest, perhaps the biggest, meme coin influencer in the space. Uh, he's somebody who drives a lot of volume around anything that he does says, talks about. And there's a meme coin just named Ansem, so named for him that he did not launch. Uh, he was given some of the creator fees because Pump Fund now has this creator fee concept. Uh, so those were awarded to him in sort of whatever in respect for his name. Uh, he took 65% of the supply, but is now distributing some of the fees as airdrops that he's giving to many people, you know, some of the big creators and influencers that he knows. This seems to have triggered a really significant rally in this meme coin. Um, it's now got roughly $100 million market cap on this meme coin, which we have not seen in a long, long time. Now, this is relatively small compared to the meme coins of yesteryear, which were in the billions. We'd see meme coins routinely go into hundreds of millions, but $100 million meme coin we have not seen in quite a long time. Uh, and so this seems to be putting a little bit of energy back into the trenches and giving people some excitement that, hey, maybe, maybe, maybe it's not over. Maybe meme coins aren't dead. Maybe we can have a little bit of a comeback if we just believe hard enough. Jordy, what do you say? Do you believe that, uh, this man can put the meme coin market on his back and return us to the promised land? What do you say?

Speaker D: I mean, first of all, I like that I'm the Meme coin guy. I don't think the Trenches would accept me as one of their own.

Speaker C: What is your positioning with the Trenches?

Speaker D: I mean, look, this. I've been deep enough in the Trenches to know that this is like the WWF I used to watch as a kid. You know, you got Hulk Hogan and this guy. This is like entertainment theater, and it's all, like, not as real as it looks. And, you know, people get entertained, and that's the value and that. That's fine. But, like, if. If you look historically, all these meme coins, they have a story of like, oh, this is organic. And the dev, you know, you. He didn't make any money, or this happened, and this is like a storyline generally where it's all kind of constructed. Look, probably, you know, you look at the incentives of, like, a. A pump fund to make sure that people know that they have this new creator thing, and maybe that gets people excited. Is that worth pumping some coins? Like, I. I'm not. I'm not saying that I know exactly what happened in this case, I don't. But generally, I've learned that this is. This is like one of those WWE kind of things. And Ansem has never shied away from, you know, getting in the mud. You know, he's got the cat coin and this one, and he's on stream, and everyone's buying it. And, you know, like, I like Ansom. He's. He kind of, like, doesn't act like he's, um, more serious than he is. He's a cool guy, and he just has fun with it, you know, I'm happy. You know, I got some Meteora bags that hopefully now they're getting some volume. Maybe that'll do. Well, I don't know, but, um, yeah, sorry, I don't have exact insight as to what the future lies for. Ansem Coin.

Speaker C: All right, Tarun Ansem coin. Do you have a take?

Speaker B: I didn't know about it other than because I had muted. There was, like, some time where people are getting angry at Anselm, and it somehow took over my whole timeline. And I muted Anthem and I forgot to unmute it. Sorry, Ant was. Yeah, you were just. You were causing too much controversy. It must be at least six months ago, three months ago. And then I just kept seeing. All these tweets are like, it's not great when your favorite influencer launches a coin. And I was like, who is this talking about? And, uh, I think I only learned it was Ansem, like, yesterday. So I. I'm. I'm the boomer who knows absolutely nothing about this.

Speaker C: Tom, you got to take.

Speaker A: I have no takes. I was. I was hoping for a little more from our. Our meme coin wizard, but, you know, he's not Trench native.

Speaker C: Okay. I think this. We maybe shouldn't have, uh, listed this topic because I think none of us have interesting things to say. I kind of felt like, okay, maybe

Speaker B: there's possible for there to be an interesting thing to say.

Speaker C: Like, actually, that's more maybe on a different show.

Speaker B: Question of whether it's even possible to say something interesting. I think the answer is no.

Speaker C: Ourselves a little bit. Yeah. No, we've become cringey.

Speaker D: The most interesting thing is that, like, whenever a certain amount of time goes by, people do kind of like the. The demand gets pent up for some stupid coin to speculate on, and then it just. They get it and it kind of has this wave and then it just goes under. You know, it's like the Mordor again. It has to kind of. The evil has to grow again below the surface and then kind of. So that's cool that it's always there. It's all, you know, the speculative fervor is.

Speaker C: That's so cool. I love that it's within all of us.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: No, how hardening to think about that. Um, I mean, I guess, like, the close analogy to this I remember was white whale. I don't know if you guys remember that, but there's like this. I don't even know how to describe him. Like, this pseudonymous guy who makes AI videos of himself as a talking whale. And he, uh, like, basically ctoed a meme coin and then eventually let go of it. But it was like kind of one of the only meme coins that was doing well for a while. And so it does seem like these meme coins now, the only ones that survive, they sort of metastasize around some main character. I mean, there's also Binance Life that also seems to be the other meme coin that, uh, has gotten a lot of energy, which I actually really appreciate Binance Life because it's the only thing that you'll see on page one that has any Chinese characters in it. But he's kind of like, okay, we're still an international community. There's still meme coins for people, uh, who are not terminally, um, online and American. Okay. Last story that I wanted to run through was we talked a little bit about Daos and Consortium. You have a story now about ENS and, uh, kind of throwing a little bit of shade on the DAO structure. Tom, you said you wanted to chat about this one, so I'll try to run through it a little bit, but I didn't follow it very closely.

Speaker A: I just suggested it.

Speaker B: Haseeb has made being the host of Consortium right now and he's outsourcing the job to each of us to like to try.

Speaker C: If I was outsourcing the job of host, I, this, this show would be going a lot worse. Okay, so, so Dao. Okay, so just very briefly, what happened was that the uh, ENS DAO is going to be doing a restructuring that is going to be delegating day to day control of the treasury to a foundation and they're going to hand off uh, the control of all the ENS tokens, uh, the, the eth, all the other, all the, the stables, all the money that's sitting in there, uh, going into this, this foundation. And basically there's like one dude, Nick Eth, who, I don't know exactly who it is.

Speaker B: Famous Ethereum developer.

Speaker C: How do you, uh, Nick. What was the last name?

Speaker A: Nick Johnson.

Speaker C: Right, Nick Johnson. Okay, okay, so like a, yeah, core, Core ETH community member guy. He voted against without having said anything in the governance forums or the kind of, you know, pre, the pre. Vote. He took all of his tokens, which is roughly 50% of the supply, is that right? Yeah, roughly 50% of the supply and blocked the vote or 50% of the supply that voted, I should say, uh, he blocked the vote, uh, with just his single vote and basically said look, no, the Security Council must exist as a backstop against compromise and violations of the Constitution. And so therefore we need to kind of continue our overseeing of these assets. This caused a lot of people, nor has been a consternation of oh, daos are fake and look, one guy can control the whole thing and what's the point of daos and blah, blah, blah. There's a lot of hand wringing about. Is this another example of daos totally failing in their, uh, stated purpose of having some kind of decentralized control and ownership? Tom, what is your take on this story that you have limited interest in?

Speaker A: Uh, I still have an open request. I want to see, um, Louis Theroux style documentary and you're visiting these daos of yesteryear and seeing what they're up to and where the funds are going. And I felt like that when I was kind of reading the story where I was like, wow, I've not thought about this in many years, but I'm curious to know all the actors involved and what they're doing, I feel like

Speaker B: this is more like one of those videos where you find a tiny part of civilization that's disconnected from the rest of the m. World, and. And you're like, oh, wow, look at what happened. If you got stuck in the 1950s, and you never really learned anything about new technology and how. How you could live as someone living in the Stone Age, I. I think

Speaker C: it'd be more like you stumble on, like, a random YouTube video of, like, some city council in some tiny town you've never heard of, where they're, like, people are yelling and they're super angry, and it's just like, oh, I guess they're.

Speaker B: I mean. I mean, hey, hey, if it. If it's any consolation for crypto people, at least AI Is dealing with Daos, because the data center approval thing is almost exactly like dao.

Speaker C: Fair. Fair enough.

Speaker D: Fair enough.

Speaker C: Um, let's take the core of the argument. Let's kind of take it seriously for a second. Of, like, do you guys think that this indictment of daos. I feel like this is more and more of the thing people are saying is that, look, this proves that daos failed. Daos are not the right governance structure. We've seen, for example, Makerdao, you know, Rune famously kind of came in and eviscerated a bunch of the Dao. Kind of like, you know, Ulysses coming home to, uh.

Speaker A: Cast out the suitors.

Speaker C: Yeah, cast out the suitors, exactly. Uh, we've seen Stani kind of do some of the same thing with the AAVE Dao. It kind of feels like there's a vibe shift in. Hey, Daos are overly complicated, overly bureaucratic. This was a little bit of decentralization theater maybe we were doing under a previous administration, but we can cast that away and focus on efficiency. That seems to be the vibe. Do you guys embrace that vibe? Do you think it's gone too far? Do you think it's not gone far enough? Jordy, why don't you take that?

Speaker D: I mean, the. You know, we. We've gone from daos to consortiums now, so we're evolving.

Speaker B: Yes. Daos with stock tickers for the members instead of ENS entries.

Speaker C: Okay. Yeah, I mean, I. That does seem. That does seem worse. I. I think that's the. I don't know if that's the point you're making, but I think consortiums seem worse than Daos. There's probably no process and more bylaws fallacy right there. Okay. Do you. Do you think. Do you think consortia are better or worse than Dao Darun?

Speaker B: They're just different. Same thing, different clothing, just okay, so no difference.

Speaker C: Tom, what do you, what would you say? Consortia or daos, which are better?

Speaker A: I think, um, I think it depends on the structure. I think this open dollar sound, it sounds more like a federation, you know, it's like they all do their own thing and, and to benefits and there's some sort of loose idea of something tying them together, but it's very thin. It's more of a, uh, Articles of Confederation kind of. And this is more of like a. I would say, if anything it's more libertarian minded, right? In that you wanted a type of governance where if someone has a certain amount of tokens and they are kind of that certain amount of votes, and that's what it's doing, that's what it says on the tin, and there's no other weird backstory. I think people have this idea in mind because they're used to an experience of democracy that's more head weighted, that like, oh, uh, we should have this sort of voice of the people kind of moment. And it's like, no, no, no, no, that's not what we're doing here. We explicitly said we're doing token governance and that's what this looks like. And I think that's obviously going to be concentrated in people who own a lot of the token and are maybe tied to the project. And so I think that's kind of what people are experiencing is like they thought it would be one or the other and actually the other ends up looking a lot like the other one.

Speaker D: The one optimistic take is that AI is going to, in the next couple of years, probably make it a lot easier for representative democracy systems to work more than they have historically. Because historically the issue is like, you know, no one really has time to express their preferences. Like, I don't vote ever, because the amount of time for me to spend a day sitting in line is not worth the like, small infinitesimal chance that I can influence an outcome. But if I have an AI doing kind of representing me in daos or in structures that you, uh, know, I can hold tokens and, and just tell the AI to take care of voting for me and what my preferences are, that might make these things more viable.

Speaker B: The original Dfinity pitch. No, I'm kidding. But actually not untrue because it actually is the original.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually this. I'm, I'm like getting flashbacks to 2017. This is great. Damn okay. All right. I like, I like the DOW bullet, but this is a, this is an argument for daos. Yeah, Jordy.

Speaker D: Okay, AI is going to save. AI is going to save the Dow.

Speaker C: AI is going to save crypto once again. Okay, beautiful. I like that. I like that. Cool. All right, we're up on time.

Speaker B: Believe that the most are Jordy and Tina Zen.

Speaker C: That is true. That is true. Well, hey, I believe I, I believe it too. I believe it too. I'm with you, Jordy. Jordy, where can people find you Twitter these days.

Speaker D: Game theorizing. And you know, once a while I'll pop up in the podcast as well.

Speaker C: Okay, lovely. Well, I'm glad we were finally able to get you on the show. Thank you, everybody. And we'll be back next time.

Speaker D: All right, thanks for having me, guys.