After getting junked on a lot for being an unk from the last episode, I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way.
Not a dividend.
It's a tale of two coins.
Now your losses are on someone else's balance sheet.
Generally speaking, airdrops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed trading firms who are very involved is the ultimate DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem.
Hello everybody. Welcome to The Chopping Block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros: first you got Tom, the DeFi maven and master of memes.
You got Tarun, the gigabrain and grand poobah at Gauntlet.
Joining us today, we've got special guest Paul, Prince of Pumps at FOMO. Welcome, Paul.
Not sure what I think about that title, but great to be here.
I am Haseeb, the head man at Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see choppingblock.xyz for more disclosures. So, Paul, we brought you on the show. You're one of the co-founders of FOMO. And on the last show, we were pretty roundly criticized for being dinosaurs and having an extremely, call it antiquated, take on what's going on in the memecoin sphere. Now, obviously, FOMO has been at the center of what's happening in the memecoin space, and you told us you had seen some of the clips of us talking in the last show rolling around in social media. What was your impression hearing what what we had to say at our last show?
Yeah, I said this joke before. I was like, we're going to recreate Jurassic Park. We're bringing you guys back to the modern age. But I was actually traveling this weekend, so I wasn't too deep on Twitter. So we can rehash some of the conversation here, but yeah, I think listen, when you're building a product, I think everyone has their own take, especially one that's a consumer product. Everyone has their own take as a user of what this product is. And I think FOMO, our next part of our journey is to do a lot of deeper discourse around what our brand ethos and future vision is, because I don't think it comes across otherwise. And happy to go through it on the show here. I think FOMO is a lot larger than it is now. I think onchain trading is—onchain is the largest revolution in the financial industry since trading was computerized for the first time in the 1970s. And everyone's trying to build these skeuomorphic applications, like let's build Twitter onchain, but the real main use cases are global distribution. This is why all these apps are building tokenized equities, so you can globally distribute. Second, it's the largest social network ever created. It's fully transparent and everyone has access to every single transaction that's ever been created in the system, but it's just obfuscated by these alphanumeric strings and these clunky block explorers. Right? So if we can create an experience that's super easy to onboard that anyone can use, that you can create an identity through natural language around, whether it's Tarun, Tom, or some pseudonym—you could be fully anonymous, but I get full transparency to what you're doing—then hopefully eventually as we have stocks, prediction markets, and all these other asset classes, we become the social graph of all of finance. And I just think on Twitter, it's really hard to see that, especially when pump.fun and all these memecoins are launching. And I think it's really important to position yourself. For example, Robinhood became huge on options and then kind of pivoted over to these other asset classes as well. And I'm not going to make a normative judgment on these asset classes. Like, I think people should be able to trade whatever they want. I actually think it's really fun and really cool concepts, but the overall vision of the platform is a lot larger than you might see in some of the public discourse on Twitter.
So Paul, okay. Are you yourself a trencher? Were you a trencher when you started FOMO?
Yeah. So, I was a wannabe trencher, and my co-founder, who everyone knows has a much larger presence than me on X—so we were talking about that before the show, but yeah, he was early to every single crypto protocol. And we met in college, actually, at a summer internship in TradFi. He went to Yale and I went to NYU, and we were both there. He was early to every protocol, and one of my friends was working at dYdX and kind of took the—I'm a builder at heart. I've always been a super geek for consumer products, and I wanted to work for a product. So I joined the first opportunity I had, which was at dYdX. He kind of came over there, and we built out the institutional book of business there. But the whole time we were there, he was trading all these crypto protocols and trying to get me involved. And I mean, you need to take three days to onboard from fiat, and you have this EOA wallet in a separate exchange, and you need to have slippage settings and make sure you don't get sandwiched, and just a terrible experience. And I've always had this deep empathy for a normal user and what type of product experience would resonate with them. And I think there's this push-pull in every single decision we make, where we can build a product that is the best for the best traders—we pay our routers not to take positive slippage from our users, we just have the best execution, it's the first truly cross-chain gasless trading application—but then it's something that you could onboard in seconds. You have this accessibility layer not only in terms of use, but also in terms of discovery: I'm seeing what the best are trading all the time, and it's easy for anyone to onboard, and then you can build the experience for both user groups. Though it's funny, because the camps are like, he's the trencher, I'm like the person who wants to trench but doesn't know how. And then you kind of have this push-pull in every decision you make.
So I will say, after getting dunked on a lot for being an unk from the last episode, I spent my holiday weekend trenching and probably learned some very expensive lessons along the way. Actually, you know what's amazing is my dear fellow Delawarian Hunter Biden really made my P&L go from negative to positive quite dramatically. Because I feel like the game is really understanding the news—news I'm using broadly speaking, not like, 'Hey, this is the news that's happening,' but what social thing is hyped enough for someone to be making copycat coins or making something that fits a moment. And so I did end up positive. Not some crazy 10,000% positive, but a respectable 10% positive. But I really enjoyed the experience, even when I lost money.
Like I had kind of always heard this thing, right? It's like you lose money, but the social game, the PvP aspect of it... I think you, Haseeb, have the casino view of this, like casino gambling. It's like the same thing, but there's actually the social dynamic of trying to be the first one to figure out some new trend, or the feeling that you were there first, which is expressed not in you buying the asset, but in you creating the new asset or being very early to some new asset.
Did you create assets as well?
I indulged in some of the memecoin forks, but this I didn't do via FOMO, this I did via direct—just wanted to get the full Robinhood chain experience. But the beauty of FOMO is I deposited, my deposits were available in three seconds. I don't think I've ever used a crypto app that's been comparable to the speed of that. I didn't think about what chain I was using at all. In fact, about 50% of the time I was buying copycat Hunter Biden coins, I thought I was buying them on Robinhood chain, I was buying from Solana. I didn't even know what chain I was using. Something I think I've said on the show before is it's kind of interesting that the millennial trading apps have survived so long. They obviously have a liquidity advantage, a network advantage—Coinbase, Robinhood, things like that, right? If you look at them versus stockbrokers 10 years before them, they had this whole UX difference, they changed the fee model, blah blah blah. But somehow the experience hasn't changed in 10 years plus for Robinhood, Coinbase, etc. And I think after using FOMO and really seeing the users write their thesis and doxxing when they bought and sold, the social aspect is a really very different thing. And I know everyone's like, 'Oh, it's been tried 20 times. How could it work this time?' But it was like playing a video game. It was more like playing a video game than trading. And I don't know, anyway, sorry, that was my long-winded experience of three days in FOMO.
I think it's this fundamental misconception that it's been tried before. We did a deep dive on every single social trading app. You look at eToro and Webull, and they're all riddled with confirmation bias. You don't have full transparency to what people are doing. And the game theoretically optimal thing if you have a private mode is to be private and everyone else to be public, right? So then everyone goes private. And if you don't have full transparency to everything that's happening, two things happen: one is it builds mistrust because people are only talking about their wins and not their losses, and then you have no clue if this is actually what the person's holding or what they are actually holding on the side if they're just posting that trade. And then the second thing is it's an opt-in system, right? And you see this on some of these social trading apps today where it's not embedded as the glue to the overall app, but you're just making a post about the thing. But on FOMO, if you just trade, you don't have to write a thesis, don't have to build a following on purpose; everything automatically follows, right? If you're trading well, it goes to your feed, people follow you, it goes to your notifications, and that's how you bootstrap this spiral social graph. And it's very similar to what happened on TikTok, where it used to be the only people that got distribution were the people who already were famous and had a big audience. But now on TikTok, anyone in the algorithm could become famous by going viral, right? And a similar thing is happening on FOMO where we have these localized leaderboards. There's 24-hour leaderboards which are a shorter timeframe than all-time, and we want to do more categories of leaderboards. You can see the 24-hour one is less inspirational than obviously the all-time one, but it's more aspirational and you're seeing new people come there every day. People are hitting amazing trades, they're getting famous there, and then they're getting hundreds of thousands of followers on FOMO. They're then building an X account, having 50 to 100,000 followers there. And now we launched Creator Rewards, which I think will be the most important thing we ever built, which now if you have these things, you get a boost, and if you trade, we attribute it to you, and people are trading after you—we already did $2.5 million there. So now you can imagine when you have a robust equities product, right, not only can you trade this from anywhere in the world, but why would I trade Tesla stock on another brokerage when I could come to FOMO, do it, build an audience, and then get paid for building that audience?
I was going to ask: do you think there's something unique about memecoins that fits this particular format? Because to your point, everything that's been tried before is mostly equities, but memecoins obviously are inherently this social contagion kind of thing, which makes a really good fit for a social contagion kind of app.
Yeah, absolutely. There's two things here: one is cultural, and then one is the architecture. The underlying architecture of the blockchain is the best architecture ever created for a social graph because it's just there and all you have to do is just create something around it, right? It's not like I have to create a separate bank account for every single user and then expose that through APIs. I literally have a distributed ledger. I have a social layer on top. You create an identity around it. The social layer is proprietary, all the information is there, and we generate you an embedded wallet. The second thing is cultural. People were used to trading in crypto, and it used to be that you just marked a wallet and there's no actual visibility of whether that person actually claimed that wallet, etc. But now people are claiming wallets, and I think culturally it's a really important foothold. You guys talked about these millennial apps, and I think you're exactly right. There's talk of this major generational wealth transfer, but I think a lot of people that trade on Robinhood would have never been trading on a Charles Schwab otherwise. It opened up this new investor class. And I still think your mom and sister are not going to Robinhood because they're like, 'I want to buy AI. Sure, I could buy it on Robinhood, but what do I buy? I don't know what the memory stocks are.' There's no accessibility in terms of discovery, and that's exactly what the social graph allows for. Because now I could come to this platform really easily, but then I get to discover things in real time, right? See what the top people who are talking about earnings reports on these AI businesses, etc., what their theses are, interact with them, earn, and then also trade. And I think that's kind of the key here. But yeah, I think the unique thing of the blockchain and the culture there is a really key part of it.
One other thing I think that stands out about this is that if you look at Robinhood chain pre all the pairing of memecoins with stocks, but also pre FOMO moving there, there was quite low usage, right? And so there's actually an interesting distributional difference of going through the app versus the chain. I think crypto two years ago was sort of bottoms up, right? The chain brought the wallet. And here it's going the other way. I don't know exactly the stats, but it was something like 70% plus of Robinhood users came from FOMO. I mean, that's kind of incredible if you think about it, because Robinhood themselves owns this huge app with a ton of distribution. So I'm curious how you think about that and how you think about the graph in the sense that you now know a lot about people's preferences in multiple environments. Whereas the previous social trading in crypto was really about boxing you into one—you know, like the friend.tech type thing. I'm not saying that's social trading exactly, but it was all about making a closed enclave versus moving in different places and driving people to different venues. How do you guys think about that in the long run?
Yeah, that's exactly right. And you had this experience where it abstracted the chain. We love all these chain teams, but I think FOMO kind of leveled the playing field because you don't know what chain you're on anymore, right? And I do think that the infrastructure was all built for one chain, but now you could do that on any chain. And I do think it's an amazing distribution channel. You're right. If you think about active wallets today on FOMO, I'm pulling it up on Robinhood chain: FOMO had 94,000 active wallets on Robinhood chain. The second largest app had 30,000, right? So we have three times more than the second largest application there. And I think it's amazing because you're creating great distribution for these new blockchains, and the leaders of these blockchains are starting to realize that as well. Historically, everyone has always thought about interoperability only at the infrastructure level, but I think it's starting to get built at the application level, and that's something that no one really noticed or predicted was going to happen.
Well, one of the interesting consequences of that, if it is true that more and more of the buyers are concentrating from FOMO rather than from some kind of unique distribution, is that FOMO kind of will start doing an implicit load balancing across different chains. So right now, one of the things that we've seen that's pretty incredible is the growth of Robinhood chain. Despite being live for about 70 days, they've made about 42 million in chain revenue—an enormous amount of fees, 600k a day, 90% of that going to Robinhood. And that kind of revenue is meaningful even at a company level for Robinhood. That kind of revenue is really coming from congestion, effectively. That's why the fees are so high, because there's so much demand and only so much block space. So if most of the users are ultimately coming through FOMO in the first place, then almost the market itself can start to load balance the different coins launching across different chains: let's move some to Base, let's move some to Solana, let's move some to Ethereum, let's move some over here. And that should result in some level of the capture to chains going down and more of the capture going to applications, and of course going to folks like FOMO or pump.fun or whoever.
I think it's a bit idealistic because people just want to trade the same coins on the same days, and it's whatever the narrative is running. So for example, Robinhood is known as a stock trading app very publicly in public discourse to millennials, etc. So something where you're pairing an attention-based asset with an RWA, it makes sense narrative-wise for that to be on Robinhood chain, right? And I think these different chains have their own narrative.
If most buyers are on FOMO, they're going to launch it on Robinhood chain anyway, even if most of the buyers are on FOMO.
I think that's right. And the goal of the chain is to move all trading there, and we want to be more of this agnostic layer where users can trade whatever they want on any chain. And it's our obligation and job to create a smooth experience no matter what that is. And that's a very difficult job, as you can imagine, because cross-chain trading is a very new thing. This thing didn't even exist six months to a year ago, right? And I think that this is something we're building in real time: making sure there's great liquidity across chains, how do you actually create improvements to the solver routing, etc. And that's something that we're working through right now. We have some really innovative things in the pipeline where I think this will become a solved problem, and I think it'll actually be a competitive advantage for FOMO very soon. But yeah, I mean, load balancing would be amazing. I think it's just a big idea with stickies; people just follow narratives.
Right. Right. Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean, I'm going to tell you that I learned that when trading Laptop on SOL and Laptop on Robinhood chain, and 300 fake Laptops.
We do label them. If you go to the top of the coin page, we do label them. But yeah, the goal is to abstract it away, obviously, because no one understands what a blockchain is, right? I guess there's this group in crypto Twitter that does, and maybe someone who's somewhat informed about crypto, but any of the group outside has no clue, right? And they're just going to get scared away if they see that.
Yeah. So it's interesting, because I think after the last show's conversation, it seems Tarun has recanted his ways. I think between us, I might be the unrepentant one.
I think it was fun.
You just don't like the fun aspect of it. You're like, 'Ah, they're losing money, they must hate it.' I'm like, 'Actually, it's like playing a video game. Like, yeah, I went to the arcade and I put money in the machine, and then I never got it back.'
Well, if you talk about modern mobile games, I think there are maybe some analogous dark patterns in modern mobile games. But the point that I want to make is that I actually don't have a problem with most memecoin trading. Most memecoin trading is people just buying and selling Doge or Trumpcoin or whatever. I think the phenomenon that I find to be most deleterious, generally speaking, is the memecoin production function. I think that's where most of the value gets shredded, and I think that's where it's most harmful to people. And of course, that's where a lot of FOMO lives de facto, as a lot of what people are doing in FOMO is doing the new launches and the new stock coin pairings or whatnot. That's where I think you see all these middlemen, this whole memecoin supply chain stuff that we've learned so much about the internals of, and that people reliably lose money when they're doing this. People don't reliably lose money buying Doge. Doge goes up, Doge goes down; it's a memecoin, it's just kind of harmless when you buy it. And using an app that makes your experience better, that's all great. And look, if you're sophisticated and you're buying memecoins and you've got your system and you're crushing it, good for you. That's awesome. You are the 5%, right? The other 95% of people who are buying memecoins are losing money.
And so all that is to say a tool like Axiom or what you guys are building with FOMO is great. It obviously helps people; whatever it is they're doing, they're going to be better at doing it using a tool like FOMO or Axiom or whatever. What I object to more is the dynamic. So what we were talking about last time of these stock tokens getting paired to memecoins: everybody buying these was losing money because they were just obviously a horrible design, and they were almost comically designed to lose money. What really incensed me last time on the show is that I kind of feel like it's important to say that out loud and to not treat all forms of gambling as the same. I'm okay with most forms of gambling. You go and spin a roulette wheel, I have no problem with that. I don't necessarily recommend my kids do it, but if you want to do it, fine, you're an adult, you can do whatever you want. But I think there are forms of gambling that should genuinely be discouraged. Like, I don't think people should be buying lottery tickets. I think lotteries are just absolutely destroying people who buy—they lose so much money per dollar that you put into a lottery ticket compared to playing roulette. I think lotteries are much more extractive than roulette wheels.
There are differences between forms of gambling. And the thing we were talking about last week—I don't even know if people are still doing that at this point; I'm sure they're learning quickly what does and doesn't work—different forms of this are more and less damaging to retail. And I think it's important to be clear-eyed about that and not to just point and laugh.
You actually just hit the nail on the head, and I actually think our views are much more similar than you might have thought before this call, because I actually think you're spot on. And I think that's the entire point of FOMO: it gives you a surface level to learn. We talk about this all the time: we hate the idea of copy trading, and we've never built that, because the whole point of FOMO is that you get full information and then you can learn by doing. You could follow people, you could take an educated guess, and then you could figure out maybe how to become better at predicting trends. Everything built on FOMO is built to hold longer. Think of the concept of a thesis—it's like a long-term thesis, right? Even the idea of FOMO, fear of missing out, it's like, 'I don't want to miss out, I want to hold this token longer.' We reward people for having Creator Rewards on the platform, which rewards people for holding longer, for putting theses, etc. We have average hold time as a stat. Whereas if you're tied to a launchpad, right, your incentive is to create coins as fast as possible because that's how you earn money. So I actually think FOMO is coming in and trying to revive the trenches and sweep up the dust a little bit.
Because before we had the launchpad game, my co-founder was trying to convince me to buy Harambe coin. It was sitting at 200 million. He's like, 'I'm going to hold this thing for four years,' right? Because that thing could sit at a few hundred million, go to a billion market cap, right? Because there were so few memecoins. You needed deployer teams, you were talking about Doge, etc. And I think this is why I'm so confident in the translation of this thing to longer-hold social graphs, such as equities and these other types of products, whether it's perpetuals and you're trading either short or long on maybe a real-world asset. I'm very confident on this because everything built on FOMO is made to incentivize people to actually have real theses and hold longer and really signal out signal from noise. So 100%, I think that's the reason we're building this product. As the creator of a technology, technology is usually neutral and people are going to misuse and use the technology, right? As a steward of the technology, our obligation is to steer that technology in as positive a direction as we can. The goal is for the brand ethos to be very positive, to be a beacon of light, to be a joyful experience.
I think that you go to a prediction market protocol, you feel a little bit of shame using that thing. And I think a large part of it is because you're doing it in solitude, right? But when you're doing something in solidarity with others, it brings this more joyful experience. It's much more joyful trading or betting on a sports game at the sports game with your friends than it is doing it on your couch and creating these bad behaviors, right? So the whole goal of FOMO and the ethos that we're trying to project is to be more healthy and to really create this global financial social graph, and to really create something that's more withstanding than this really short-term memecoin game. Of course people are going to trade those assets, and we are an onchain application—if you don't have access to those assets, then you're just in a really bad place, right? Because people should be able to trade whatever they want. But I don't think you should encourage those behaviors, and you should encourage educational experiences through all the content we create, through the product decisions we make in the app, etc.
I really like that take. I think that's a very good take because one of the things that anybody who runs one of these kinds of businesses knows is that customer churn is the most important metric to keep an eye on. And if you are just allowing your customers to just incinerate themselves by making bad decisions, your business is going to flame out very quickly. You're just not going to be able to replace people fast enough into your funnel. And so one of the important things to do, whether it's a mobile game, a casino, or a social trading app, you have to make sure that your customers are going to survive, that they're going to stick around, and they're going to keep having good experiences. We talked about this concept of financial entertainment before. If you consider FOMO to be financial entertainment, fair enough. Make sure people are spending an appropriate amount of money on their financial entertainment and not just going bust with their entire bankroll and becoming a CoinFessions post in the first week. If that's what's happening on your app, your half-life is not going to be very long. And that really resonates with me as the right way to approach creating the subtle nudges in an application to get people to do memecoin trading the right way.
Because I do very much agree that memecoins are not going away. They may not be the final form; there may be other forms of social trading that are going to follow that are more like people just buying regular tokens or even people buying stocks, people buying productive assets, people buying who knows what the future iterations of this are going to be. But the social aspect of trading is very deeply ingrained. And once upon a time, that social graph was on Twitter or it was in group chats. Now it's clearly extending into FOMO and some of these other places where people are starting to pull it into that feels sticky and almost intrinsic to the behavior to me.
Exactly. Yeah, the incentives are aligned, and I think you hinted upon this. But think about other financial media: Michael Burry didn't become famous right after The Big Short; he became famous after The Big Short movie. It's the same as Warren Buffett—he was famous for his investor letters and for his live streams and podcasts, etc. There's never been a platform for these people, right? People created their own media networks, either through feature films, etc. But imagine a platform where traders could actually become famous. We really believe traders are the next celebrities. We think also in the world of AI, where it's really easy to have an opinion and that's commoditized because you just talk to an LLM, what you're holding is what your actual belief is. And we really believe that this is much larger than even the largest financial consumer app that ever existed because it's global, people could earn, etc. But I also think this is the next-generation social media app: people are going to become the next celebrities. You've seen this happening, and everyone's kind of known this thing's going to be true, but you need all of these different aspects to be perfect. You need a really robust engineering team, it needs to be on a new type of architecture like the blockchain, you need someone to have empathy for a user so a normal person could use it. And the goal here is to hopefully be this media platform where a new type of media is created, a new type of celebrity is created, and then people can kind of trade and have access to anything, share opinions, and hold things in solidarity.
Yeah. I mean, one other thing that's interesting is I love the shaming aspect where you'll see someone who's like, 'Here's why I bought this 300K market cap coin, and here's my thesis,' and then three seconds later you get another notification that they sold everything, they don't believe their thesis. I really enjoyed learning which influencers—because before this, I never really paid attention to memecoin influencers if I'm going to be honest, and I kind of am like, which ones are full of shit and which ones are real.
And I'm not saying it's a science, right? There's even onchain sleuths. People are like, 'Why don't people just buy on side wallets?' Well, listen, there's tons of sleuths on crypto Twitter, and then you see someone on FOMO buying, and then you see someone selling immediately repeatedly on a side wallet that's maybe not on FOMO, but it's all on chain. People have tried to argue that transparency is bad because people are buying on side wallets, but that's transparent, just not tied to your FOMO identity. There are people that are calling out those people. There have been people shamed off our platform, literally deleted their accounts because of this social confluence and burning their social identity. When we launched our clans product, which right now is just a superposition of P&Ls—eventually hopefully you could trade together more deeply—the only criticism I saw is like, 'Oh, now we could see the groups of people dumping on us.' I'm like, 'Well, these people are going to dump on you anyway. Now you could actually see it, right?' Transparency is just generally a good thing. And I think we're just offering more information to the users, and you do with that what you can, but I think it's a very healthy evolution overall.
So the other dynamic that's been at the heart of this boom in memecoin trading is these launchpad wars. Once upon a time, it was basically just pump.fun, and I have to imagine if you rewind six months ago, probably most of your volume was pump.fun tokens. Today, we have this real all-against-all battle, and now it's basically three: there's Pawns, there's Stomp.fun which is on Solana, and then there's Pump which of course has always been on Solana. Pawns is the Robinhood-specific one. It's rallied crazy this month, huge amount of growth in volume. As of yesterday, they were the number one launchpad by revenue, Stomp.fun was number two by revenue, and then Pump was number three, which is surprising given that Pump historically has been the king. How do you think about FOMO's relationship with these launchpads? Obviously you guys are agnostic; anything on any launchpad is fair game to trade on FOMO. But strategically, as one of the co-founders, how do you think about—do you want a world with more launchpads? Is that good for FOMO, or do you not care? How do you think about it?
Yeah, I think it depends, right? Because this new stock pairing is a completely different thing. If you were talking about pure memes, like remember when those people got caught in 4K cheating at the Coldplay concert, there's a token for that, right? So that's like a canonical event that could be memes, and imagine if you had some AI launchpad that could predict these things. But the problem is like no one really wants a fair launch, because the whole point is that you're buying and having this chance to get in early and see this tremendous upside, right? So if you're thinking of the game from that perspective, then there's always going to be this new meta that people are trading, and I think it's very healthy to have new launchpads. Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it for me: we're pretty agnostic to this, and it's cool to see new entrants and new metas being created. Every time you see a meta, whether it was the whole stuff about OpenClaw and the AI meta, you're like, 'Okay, what can possibly come next?' And well, now there's stock token pairing. You always think that this is the last one, and there's always people creating new things, and there will always be new things created. So I think that's kind of exciting. I think that there is this world where
these things kind of transfer to more real world events. You saw the SEC recently put out this thing where it's like you can give out, I think it's equity in a business through a token launch if it's up to $5 million, and I think you can even do there's some situations where you can go even higher. Well, imagine if you had a Kickstarter project, right? And instead of people funding the Kickstarter project and coming in and then just getting one of the projects, what if you could launch a token and you actually could have a launchpad team that helps them build alongside this? And FOMO has this new product, I don't know if you guys have seen it, but it's called team tags. And a lot of this is like developers who launch a token will come and hold the supply and give messages. But we've seen pawns, we've seen Solana, we've seen LayerZero, we've seen Monad—tons of teams are now holding treasury supply on FOMO. And the teams are able to give updates in the thesis as a notification to everyone who's holding their tokens. So think about this. It's the highest intent distribution channel that's ever existed for a financial product cuz you have a direct line of communication with the exact people that's holding your financial asset, right? And obviously this is a huge stretch, but imagine in the future you have public company CEOs coming into the platform being able to, instead of just in earnings reports, but you could just in real time communicate with all your stockholders, right? That's never existed as a form of distribution. So we're really excited about what that looks like. And I guess I'm kind of digressing from the initial point, which is just like we're pretty agnostic to launchpads, but I do think there's going to be new things constantly created and this is not always cats and dogs, right? I think there will be utility tokens and new real world events that will be created from these onchain assets.
Okay. Interesting. Well, speaking of real world events, we've alluded a little bit to the launch of this laptop token. So, for those of you who don't know, Hunter Biden, yes, that Hunter Biden, the Hunter Biden that is the son of former President Joe Biden, who was part of, you know, obviously the laptop scandal and Burisma and blah blah blah, all this stuff was never really in the public eye. You should find the audience because Hunter Biden had many scandals.
He did have many scandals. There was the what was it? The poop painting scandal. There was a bunch of—
That was Burisma. That's Burisma, was it not?
Anyway, so kind of a scandal-ridden fellow. He also used to be a crack addict, which that's not a slur. That is actually true. He has acknowledged that and was in rehab. And of course, he was indicted for tax evasion, I believe it was, and his firearm.
Anyway, he is back in the public eye, has started becoming very vociferous in politics, and he has announced that he's launching a memecoin called LAPTOP. Of course, this is a reference to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. So, he's launching this memecoin called LAPTOP on September 9th on Base. He has teased the LAPTOP token saying that he is going to airdrop some of the LAPTOP token to people who lost money on Trump token, as well as to some subscribers to his Substack and some other random people, as well as keeping some of the proceeds for himself, as one does. So this is kind of the left Trump token.
I feel like you glossed over. I have to say, I'm not really a memecoin fan, but this was one of the more thoughtful or clever memecoin proposals out there. He has this whole sort of burn mechanism thing of like, "Oh, if these predictions come true, I'll commit to burning some percentage of the supply, like if Dems win midterms or Bitcoin hits 100K." And I think the other thing that was interesting, and this was sort of a whole scandal, was he's kind of become more popular recently because he did this interview with Andrew, what's his name from Channel 5. You probably saw those clips. And so Channel 5 subscribers also were supposed to get an airdrop, and apparently he just used Channel 5's subscriber list, got their emails, and then Channel 5 put out statements like, "I don't know how they got our email list. We don't endorse this memecoin." And I guess this is something I want to ask Paul about, which is how do you square—whenever I hear people talking about memecoins in kind of mainstream media or non-trenchers, there's just universal disdain and groaning. And I think when this Hunter Biden thing came out, it was the exact same reaction. Maybe part of it is political, but part of it is like there's just such negative sentiment around memecoins. And then I look at the FOMO numbers and user numbers are growing and look quite healthy. And so how do you think about memecoins in sort of culture more broadly?
Well, celeb tokens in particular, I should say, get a very particular treatment almost every time.
Listen, we'll do everything we can to protect our users. If we don't know teams well, we're not going to ever condone a token. Even the verification symbol on FOMO is just meant as a representation that this is the canonical one that you are thinking of. It's not that this token is any—it's never like financial advice or anything like that. It's just another form of protection for the user in the sense of just knowing the one that people are talking about. But listen, as the founder of this project that has much larger ambitions, I think FOMO is a lot larger than this, you know? And I think we want to be an open platform where if you want to launch a token, it's going to be on-chain and you want distribution. Like it's your job to do everything on the go-to-market and all the side there. We're not going to do anything there. We'll be an open platform where you could trade these tokens when they're on-chain. But I'm focused on a much larger vision than any of these celebrities or politicians launching tokens on the platform. I just think it's honestly noise, to be honest.
Yeah, I would say we've been pretty critical in the past of—there were ones called social tokens, now I think they're just celebcoins. I think we have a pretty good track record of calling all of them bad ideas. Whether it was Trump, Melania, or Iggy Azalea's coin, or a number of other ones that we've talked about on the show.
They do seem uniquely bad. Oh, of course. Kanye, that's right. I forgot about Kanye. They do seem uniquely bad among all kind of the menagerie of memecoins. It's like at the bottom is celebcoins.
Look, I think the interesting thing to me about the stockcoin thing, even though I would say I certainly mainly lost money in the stockcoin world over the weekend, obviously.
No, no, no. That's actually the fun part, right? It's like what news exists for the stockcoin stuff? But I think an interesting aspect of some of the stockcoins is some of the memecoins, like some of the LAPTOP clones, were pairing with short US bond ETFs. So you buy LAPTOP and you get airdropped LP fees in short US bond token. And I thought that was actually just kind of amazing because it's like I'm buying this memecoin, but I'm getting airdropped LP fees in the stock token basis. And it's like, okay, everyone in crypto knows that this sounds boring, right? It's like, okay, I rebased a staking coin and gave you the LP fees of trading the underlying versus the LST. It's the same thing, but there's something crazier about the fact that it's the real asset, right? Somehow I'm getting some short 30-year Treasury bonds out of this, and I don't even really totally understand why. And so there's something very more relatable I think about the stock versions of the crypto stuff we've already known that I didn't even think I would feel like, I mean, I've been doing this forever.
How long do you think this meta is going to last?
Stock token pairing meta. I've seen some people try to make some constructive versions of it where the memecoin is a reward token for your stock, where basically there was this whole thing about how the Hims CEO started following the boner—
