Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
If you're hearing this, well done. You've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 309, Crypto Crime Season Has Begun. As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field, Liv Aker, and Travis View.
A 13 year old boy raises both his middle fingers to his webcam, sticking out his tongue and yelling in his high pitched voice. "No way. Holy fuck. Holy fuck. Holy fuck."
Thanks for the 20 bandos. The Child is live streaming on a website called Pump.fun, which was designed to launch and trade crypto meme coins. The source of his defiant glee is the fact that he just rug pulled the other people who invested in his coin, which he named Gen Z Quant. This means that he sold a large amount of the digital currency in one go, cratering its value and cashing out in the process.
In a single click, he made nearly $30,000. In the same evening, he's back at it again, this time creating and rug-pulling a coin called "I'm sorry" and another called "My dog Lucy." By the time he goes to bed, he's made $50,000. The meme coin buyers he ripped off quickly find his personal information online and start calling his house and messaging his mother on Instagram.
The image of the child flipping off the camera has since become a meme, and it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to memecoin livestreams with questionable ethics on Pumpfun.
I've seen things you normies wouldn't believe. Caged men in BDSM dog outfits. Women taped to walls. People firing guns out of their windows. Teenagers shaving their eyebrows while sitting in their underwear on the toilet. Cockfights. Puppets gobbling prescription pills. A man covered in birthday cake lighting a candle held between a woman's butt cheeks. Another setting himself on fire. All those moments will be screencapped and turned into memes on the blockchain. Time to buy.
To be clear, this creates value for the coin? Is that the point? That's the purpose? Yes, yes. Well, I will let Molly explain. But yes, essentially, these are people live streaming outrageous things with the hope that more people will buy the coin and pump it up.
for fun. Pump fun. It's right in the name. So this week, we will be diving into pump.fun, meme coins, how the president is now involved, and what lies ahead for the perfectly sane American crypto industry. And for that purpose, we're bringing in the big guns, specifically Molly White, a journalist, researcher, and critic,
of the crypto and tech industries. Welcome, Molly. Thank you for having me. Molly, before we jump into some of the madness on, you know, PumpFun, could you help our audience understand what a meme coin even is? Yeah, so a meme coin is basically a cryptocurrency token that has even less of a purpose behind it than most cryptocurrency tokens. They are themed around
often. So, for example, Dogecoin was an early meme coin that was themed around the Doge meme. But they don't even really have to be memes in the traditional sense. It can be just any sort of idea or
theme, really, and they have no purpose other than to trade based on the amount of attention people can gather and therefore the amount of money they can make off of the token interest. Yeah. So, I mean, this is very interesting to me because as a longstanding critic of capitalism itself,
You know, it seems that value is kind of made up, but there was always this tension on the stock market between people who, you know, were essentially betting on sentiment. So just people buying based on their sentiment and the price going up and what they called fundamentals, which was the underlying profits the company was able to make, like some more tangible things that tied these values to reality. But meme coins are the ultimate thing.
fuck you to the idea that fundamentals matter at all? What if there was zero fundamentals? It was all about attention and humanism.
human emotion. And a perfect example of that is currently one of the most traded coins is a coin called Fartcoin, which has a market cap. It used to be over a billion. It's currently down 20 percent. So it's eight hundred and forty six million dollars market cap. Currently, I've seen obviously there are coins that I can't even use the name of, which we'll be discussing later. And it's
You know, how many of these do you think are minted every day? I mean, are these just a kind of endless supply of different tokens being created? Yeah, I mean, thousands of them are created every day. There's really no barrier to entry when it comes to creating a meme coin. And so people are doing it constantly based on whatever they think they can generate interest around. Yeah, for a little while, there was a battle between a coin called
tits and a coin called ass. And that was a big one. Who won? Ass. Okay. Oh, no, wait. No, I think it was tits. I'm sorry. I didn't pay enough attention to answer that question is the truth. You know, because I'm all about, I would have invested into face coin or personality coin. Personality coin. Jillian's concealing his real coin that he's got a thousand of dollars into, which is, of course, feet coin.
He's a big investor. That's false. That's false. People saying that I've invested thousands of dollars into toes are just dead wrong. So, I mean, you know, before, yeah, before we kind of jump into Pump Fun and like its role in this cycle, which is what crypto enthusiasts call
the kind of period of time between which the high is hit on Bitcoin and then all of these different like altcoins and even meme coins and then the lows. So these kind of big ass pump and dumps, essentially every pump and then dump is considered low.
a cycle on a bigger scale. So this cycle, shit coins and meme coins are huge, huge. They've never been this big and this present, and there are more of them than ever before. But before we jump into that, what do you think attracts people, the vast majority of which seem to be young men, to meme coins? And why do they call themselves degens? Well,
I think it's really the gambling that attracts people. And that's partly where the name comes from. Degen as in degenerate gambler. The thing around meme coins is there is this perception that if you just pick the right meme coin and you get in early enough, you could be the one who buys it at a couple of cents before it goes to tens or hundreds of dollars. And therefore you could make these obscene profits if you just pick the right token.
And so there's this gambling mentality around it where people are constantly trying to get in early on new tokens and find the ones they think are going to pump in price so that they can be the ones to profit. In reality, it's very challenging to be the person who profits. The odds are very much stacked against you and oftentimes the casino is rigged.
But it is that sort of get rich quick gambling mentality that tends to attract people to the meme coin space. And, you know, they're they're somewhat self-aware of the fact that this is degenerate gambling, essentially. You know, they are they are making these enormously risky financial decisions because they think that, you know, the
Small odds might pay off for them. Yeah, it seems like it's kind of linked to the fact that there is so little upward mobility and there is a tiny chance that if you do strike it rich on a meme coin, you could essentially transform. You could hop classes. You could suddenly be a multimillionaire from someone who couldn't pay their rent.
Right. Yeah. I mean, that's actually what I attribute a lot of the crypto boom to is this economic fragility that a lot of people are dealing with, where it's really challenging to get out of your economic circumstances just by, you know, working a nine to five or,
even two nine-to-fives, you know, people feel like they have limited ability to get out of poverty or pay off their debts or be able to afford a house or anything like that. And so to some extent, there is this sort of nihilistic feeling that, well, I guess I might as well just take it to the casino and see if I can...
make some returns on this, especially when the news likes to highlight people who, you know, are success stories in that way. And sometimes they don't very well reflect the odds of someone actually being that person versus the person who loses all of their money in order to make that other person a multimillionaire.
I will say that the whole concept of mean coins, I mean, I kind of like it because it leans into this idea that the value of an asset just lies totally inside the, you know, the fleeting sentiments or interest within people's minds, even if they're, you know, those sentiments are like, you know, inauthentic or momentary, but you can sort of like harness that momentary sentiment by, you know, capturing people's attention and their feelings to, you know, pump up the value of a, you know, invented asset. It's a lot less self-serious than like, I guess, the
the Bitcoin maximalists, the people who are very dour and prophetic about like how important this technology is and stuff. But yeah, it's fun. The thing that amazes me is how self-aware a lot of the participants are. Like you said, you know, they call themselves DGens kind of jokingly. But I've, you know, watching a bunch of streams and paying attention to a bunch of influencers, you'll hear people be like, oh, this coin is fucking worthless and I hate the people behind it. But I think this is a great investment right now.
Yeah, you'll even see that taken a step further where people will say, I know this is a scam. I know this token is going to rug pull. But if I can get in early enough, I can still make money off of it before everyone is totally ripped off. I mean, there is this degree of like self-awareness that is not present in some parts of the crypto world. So is this a little bit like if, you know, there's like a con man in
And if you're among his first few marks, you kind of become con man yourself. And the bet is essentially I will be one of the first few in the tent that will then, you know, kind of a pyramid scheme, essentially. I mean, I hear so many people talking about it that way. They just say this is a good Ponzi.
Yeah, I mean, you do sort of have to be in on the scam to some extent, because if you are one of those people who does make money off a meme coin, by definition, in order to cash out, you are selling your tokens to somebody else. And eventually someone is left holding the bag. There is somebody at the end of that train who does not make money and who is the one who loses all their money. So yeah, I mean, it is very Ponzi-like in
many ways because, you know, there is no value behind these tokens. There is no good or service being generated. It's just plain speculation. This seems like a big shift as well in the crypto industry where at first people were arguing about, you know, decentralized finance and you
in these different coins. And that seems to have really kind of blown to the wayside. So do you think that the industry in general, or at least the traders, the participants, are more cynical now than they were a few years ago? Or what do you make of it? Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of the
big promises from a couple of years ago really failed to pay off. We're not all using blockchains every day in our internet lives or in our financial lives. You know, blockchains have yet to revolutionize a lot of the things that people claimed they would be revolutionizing a couple of years ago. And a lot of the people who are claiming that have since left the industry or, you know, started a different company outside of the crypto world.
So I think a lot of the shine is worn off on that particular story. There certainly are still people making those types of claims, but the primary focus, I think, of a lot of people in the crypto world right now is just the speculative aspect of it, where there's not much in terms of fundamentals, as you say. It's just, you know, is this token going to go to the moon? Can I get in early enough? The reasons for that, I think, would probably vary depending on who you asked.
Some, like myself, would say that, you know, they just could not fulfill those promises. And so they have moved on to something that always attracts people, which is get rich quick schemes. But, you know, people in the crypto world like to say that the the
Securities and Exchange Commission, the financial regulators have basically forced the crypto industry to turn into this meme coin frenzy because the SEC does not crack down on meme coins as much as they do other parts of the industry. And if you don't promise a return
on your investment, the SEC is less likely to see it as the sale of an unregistered security and come after you. So, you know, that's been a narrative I've seen a lot lately. I don't put a ton of stake in it, but there is this effort to sort of blame outside forces for causing this shift.
Is it illegal to rug pull people? And I mean, it seems like these are extremely common things that happen constantly in this industry, specifically with meme coins, but also with some larger kind of profile stuff. Is it illegal? Are people going to jail for this? So it is. I try to emphasize this a lot, but crime does not become legal just because you do it on the blockchain.
It is still illegal to steal from people, still illegal to manipulate markets. You know, all of these like blatant crimes are still crimes. The question is just to what extent are those laws being enforced? And the SEC and other agencies in law enforcement have been fairly slow to crack down on crimes.
crypto crime, partly, I think, just due to the volume of it. You know, if there are 1000 pump and dump scams every day, they just don't have the capacity to go after that. So we have seen some crackdowns on sort of meme coin adjacent projects, and often celebrities who have gotten involved in pumping tokens and sort of touting behavior, which I think was maybe an effort by the SEC to
make an example of people and send a message by doing high profile enforcement cases. But I think it maybe just sent the message that if you're not a celebrity, you'll get away with it. Yeah. I mean, a high profile example of this is the Hawk to a girl, Hayley Welsh, who kind of went viral for a video in which against her will, by the way, this video was posted afterwards. I found out later, but, you know, she's drunkenly in the street, gives a street interview about a giving head.
And then this was posted. She tried to take it down. It didn't happen. She went viral. And then she had a show briefly called Talk To, which was a big podcast for a moment and then, you know, launched a coin. And that was rug pulled brutally. I mean, she seems to have
somewhat disappeared. It seems like a murky area, but is this what you mean? It's just like they'll aim for like high profile stuff that does make the news? Yeah. So, I mean, the SEC has not made any statements about that particular project. There was a class action suit, but nothing from the regulators. But that is the type of thing that you might see a regulator go after.
Other good examples are there were SEC enforcement actions against Kim Kardashian, for example, who had advertised a crypto project, which in fairness was not a meme coin. But, you know, there's some question as to what the fundamentals actually were behind that project. And she was essentially pumping the token price by promoting this token to her many, many Instagram followers. And because she was not following the
rules around how you have to disclose specifically when you are promoting a security. There are sort of additional disclosure requirements if you are promoting a security and not like a handbag. They went after her for that. And there have been other similar lawsuits against various celebrities, mostly of the sort of B-list or D-list variety, but people who got caught up in promoting these tokens. I know Andrew Tate has a token called Daddy. Yeah.
I know Iggy Azalea has one called Mother. And that one, I believe like the icon for like or like the art for it is just her butt. So, yeah, these this is the world in which we live. You know, it feels really good. Do any of these coins have any fundamentals? Because you mentioned there's a bit of like a spectrum between the meme coin and the proper.
like especially with these celebrities like like is is there a meaningful distinction between like in terms of like what the the coin does meaningful distinction between something like the live streaming service we're looking at with the pump and note and then like an iggy azalea yeah so a lot of these celebrities like to make promises about what they will eventually provide to their token holders and i know iggy azalea was going on about like creating some sort of crypt
crypto gambling website or something like that. Like she had these big business dreams at one point, although I'm not sure if those have continued to be expressed. I thought there was going to be conservation for koalas. Probably. That's what I remember reading about that. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, it's very much like an offshoot of a couple of years ago, all the celebrities were doing NFTs. And the idea was like, well, if you buy my NFT, then you'll get to meet
me and you'll be in this Discord channel with me and, you know, I'm a basketball player and I'll give you tickets to my games or I'll give you a jersey or whatever. And so there was this attempt to provide some sort of reward for people who held the token. That's a little bit less common in the meme coin world, partly because if you make promises and then you don't keep them, you can be, you know, in the...
regulators can come after you for that. But you do see it. Yeah. And a lot of the celebrities who launch these meme coins like to say that, oh, this isn't a cash grab. You know, this is me engaging with my community. That was the Hak Tua girl's statement was that this is how I'm engaging with my community of fans. And it's like, okay.
by taking their money? I think that's fair. I think it's time for the fans to suck her off. So, you know, let's talk a little bit about Pump.Fun. So a lot of the coins launched there are on the Solana blockchain, right? And as far as I can tell, it goes kind of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana, which are like the three big names that have
continued throughout the different cycles. And Solana seems to be a newcomer where it's even easier to create a meme coin token on that blockchain. Is that about right? Mostly. So Pumped Up Fun is specifically a Solana platform. And
is largely responsible for why it is so easy to create a meme coin there. It's also a little bit easier because Solana's fees are lower. And so, you know, if you wanted to create an Ethereum meme coin, for example, you might be paying hundreds of dollars in fees just to set it up, whereas Solana transaction fees are very low. But yeah, generally speaking, those are three of the largest blockchains. There are probably some competitors you could quibble over, but Solana has seen quite the
resurgence in popularity recently thanks to this meme coin craze. Pump.fun was launched in January of 2024 by three guys in their early 20s who were once meme coin traders themselves. And they've made a big effort to stay kind of anonymous, which, hey, I mean, coming from us, respect, that's fine. But, you know, slowly they've been dragged out into the light because they are running a huge meme
multi-million dollar business. So what is so unique about Pump Fund and what effect has it had on just meme coins and this kind of milieu in general? Yeah, so it makes it a lot easier for anyone to create a meme coin compared to earlier. So there've always been meme coins on...
Ethereum or Solana, you know, Dogecoin was basically just taking another blockchain and copying that and, you know, adding the meme branding to it. So it's always been possible, but it's been challenging. It's, you know, required some investment of funds and some degree of technical capability. And Pumped Up Fund basically tried to remove that barrier so that anyone could just go and create a token with very little effort required.
acquired and it has really, I think, opened the floodgates for the meme coin craze. They claim that they did it so there would be less rug pulls. Is that is that credible? Or I mean, how does that work? What is a bonding curve? You know, like what is what's the deal here? Yeah, I mean, they say a lot of things.
The creators of Pumped Up Fun also regularly post semi-jokingly about rug pulling people. So it's not clear to me that that is really one of their primary goals. They certainly have not made any particular effort to crack down on the practice on Pumped Up Fun. Julian, you mentioned you were involved in a rug pull in some respect before. I did not mention that.
And I have not, of course. I was never someone who found a website for a coin called Mpepe. Right.
which is a play on Mbappe, one of my favorite soccer players, and the frog, the cartoon frog. And that website did not, in fact, take my money and then never launch a coin and then disappear. So I won't have you disparaging my name. Yeah, no. I mean, what's incredible with that story is that the way Mbappe was operating was
was that they had a website that had a kind of like facsimile of, you know, we're raising this much money and then the launch will happen after this. Like, you know, the kind of progress bar scam, you know, where you're like, we're filling this progress bar by showing interest. And they were paying for placed ads on legitimate crypto news websites. And this to me kind of speaks to the fact that these crypto news websites are like 100% pay to play. You can just
write an article yourself and kind of it doesn't even have to be properly labeled sometimes as like just a press release from someone behind not even a coin, a pre-coin sale. I mean, do you sometimes get frustrated being one of the few, you know, I guess people who cover crypto that aren't also in on it? Yeah, it is really frustrating that there are these conflicts of interest throughout the
crypto worlds and the sort of crypto journalism such as it is. There are some really good journalists who work in this space and who work for crypto media outlets, but a lot of those outlets are funded by the crypto industry and very much controlled by crypto industry interests. In fact, there was just some controversy where Coindesk, which is probably the most prominent crypto media outlet, took down an article that was critical of a very wealthy
the crypto executive because of basically pressure from that executive on the editorial board. And they completely caved to pressure and then fired a bunch of people who tried to push back on it. So, you know, that's just sort of common throughout the crypto world. And I think the disclosures that are being made on these websites are usually very lacking if they exist at all. And, you know, certainly these paid placements are a particular issue as well. Yeah, I think so, too. You guys owe me money, whoever the
fuckers behind the fuckers assholes. Okay. So yeah, since their launch, Pump.Fun, they integrated and then I guess later took down a streaming component, which allowed users to attach a live stream to a meme coin. So people would be interacting with someone streaming live and investing money and watching the level go up and down or the price go up and down. I have to assume they had a very rigorous terms of service for the- Yeah, a lot of moderation happened.
Yeah, let's let's jump into some of the, you know, these amazing coins that got launched. I've collected some screen caps here for everybody's pleasure. This is kind of what got me interested in Pump Fun and covering it because it is just genuinely amazing.
Well, let's get into it. First up, we've got a coin called Locked in Dog Cage until 25M. The ticker for that is Dog Cage. And here you can see a screen cap of a man in his underwear and a black balaclava. He has a dog collar on and he is in
Above him, there's a whiteboard that says milestones. When we reach 100K, he will bark like a dog 100 times. 200K, he will eat dog food. 300K, he will lick hands and feet. 400K, he will lick balls over underwear.
500K, he will have my... I will have my master whip me for being a bag dog. 1 million, he will piss in the cage. 5 million, shit in the cage. 10 million, face reveal. And 25 million, break out of cage. I don't believe some of these million milestones were reached, thank God. He may still be in the cage for all we know. We do not know what has happened to this man. I mean, this...
Kind of is, I mean, it gets worse from here on out. But yeah, Travis, what's your... My thoughts is that, I don't know, I feel like this is, I don't know, historically very common thing. People have long been willing to pay money to see something grotesque and unusual.
But usually, in order to see something grotesque and unusual, you had to wait until the circus came to town, you know, and then you went to the freak show. You saw the acrobats. You saw the lion tamer. It was a whole package. Now, the grotesque and unusual can come straight to you, streaming live. And you know what? Now the people who do this kind of thing, they're entrepreneurs. They're taking charge of what they're doing instead of being beholden to whoever owns the circus.
Okay, so I guess you also support the following coin. GTW, Girl Tape Wall, which is just a girl dressed as a banana taped to a wall with a lot of duct tape. She is smiling, which I don't know. I mean, this could be under duress. It says, a tribute to the great banana tape event for the history for the culture.
And I believe this is there was a banana tape wall coin. And also there was a piece of art that was a banana tape to a wall, which was purchased by a guy we'll get into a little later called Justin's son, who ate the banana. So spent a lot of money to kind of be like, fuck you and make, you know, get some attention. He's the one who didn't want the article on the Coindesk website, by the way. Oh,
Good, good. I was going to ask, but yes, of course it's Justin's son. He may be the highest profile person who should be in jail that I've seen in the industry and we will definitely cover him. So Travis, did you invest in this, the girl tape wall, because you thought it was such a cool... No, no, no. I missed out on this one, unfortunately.
How about Puppet, which is, as far as I can tell, a live stream of a puppet gobbling pills, committing suicide, I guess. And there's a broken frame of the puppet's family behind it to show that he's at the end of his rope. It's a movie trope of the broken frame of the family, broken life. And then it just says in red on the wall, total puppet death.
Which, as far as I remember, is like a vague reference to an old anti-black racist 4chan. Oh, great. I didn't even realize that. It's been total blank death. It's been slightly sanitized, I guess. Well, if you'd like to invest in a more explicitly racist coin, may I present to you a coin called Now I Gotta Jigga Ape. So aping into a coin is when you're just like...
essentially doing a market buy, which means that you buy, you know, the kind of, you just buy without setting a price for your buy. You just buy a certain amount at whatever is currently being offered. Now, if you didn't notice, that acronym breaks down to N-I-G-G-A, so the soft A. N-word, and this is a live stream of a young man with a Trump poster behind him or a Trump flag. He is covered in what looks like feces or
Or mud. Obviously, you know, questionable like blackface reference here. He is missing one of his front teeth. And then if you scroll down a little further, you will see the same person covered in goo that now has turned slightly white. And he is lighting what appears to be a candle that is being held between a girl's butt cheeks. I think he might be smoking drugs. Yeah. He might be smoking. Right. Yes, he is. He's holding a spoon. He is freebasing drugs.
Out of a girl's... A candle shoved in a girl's... Yeah. So, any investors? Any interest? No. Lib? The disturbing thing is I think that one was the highest market cap of the screenshots we've seen. It had $900,000. Yeah. So, goes to show that sort of guy...
Who's logging on to this website? Next up, we've got CFC Chicken Fight Club, which is a man in a Pepe mask live streaming actual cockfights, which are, of course, illegal. And that's why I'm assuming he's wearing a big mask. And then the next one is just a young man holding a gun with it.
Very extended clip. And the story behind this one is that the ticker is PERC, P-E-R-C. So a reference to Percocet, I'm assuming. And then he was firing his gun out of his window blindly after each milestone was reached. Oh, my God. So.
on livestream. I did not include the many, many livestreams that involved sexual themes like people stripping or people touching themselves. There was a young man who had convinced his mother to participate sexually. Livestreaming it, Travis? And he's...
Would you invest in that one or? Well, no, but again, it seems like, seems like, you know, this is, this is a, I don't know. It just, this has been a theme as long as there has been a online content is that it's like the first thing you do is to, you know, you get attention and a good way to get attention is to be outrageous or repulsive or shocking or disgusting or,
in a way that people find very, very compelling. And then, you know, the second step is you're supposed to find a way to leverage that attention to, like, sell something else. But this one is just, you just get the attention and just, you convince people to buy something that is essentially worthless outside of you actively promoting it on the stream. Molly, they shut it down, but is anyone going to get in trouble for running this live streaming website?
I guess that remains to be seen. Certainly there are regulators and law enforcement potentially who could come in on something like this. But given the recent changes in the administration, I would be surprised to see much of a crackdown on anything crypto related in the next four years.
Yeah. A reminder, Trump launched a coin on the Solana blockchain. So he literally launched a meme coin in the same vein as everything we've covered so far, which, yeah, we'll get into that in a bit. But I do want to cover the more extreme side if you didn't think this was extreme enough. So, Travis, could you read from this article by Ryan Gladwin on Decrypt, which is a crypto themed website?
Six days after creating the Truth or Dare token under the ticker DARE, on Pump.fun, a Solana dev doused himself in isopropyl alcohol. It had fireworks shot at him. He's now being treated in the Miami Trauma Center for third-degree burns to a large portion of his body.
Hey!
Journalism. Mikol, the daredev, quickly went up in flames after being hit by a few fireworks. His friends, who were live streaming it on Twitter, ran up to him to attempt to put the flames out. Unfortunately, they weren't prepared with an extinguisher or fire blanket. Only a couple gallons of water. They thought it was like Looney Tunes rules? Mm-hmm, pretty much. After 15 seconds of panic, Mikol's burns were revealed. Quote, he's all burned up, brah.
One of his friends said during the live stream, while Mikol flailed on the floor and more water was poured on him, it didn't take long for them to run out of water. Stop recording and start helping, another friend said to a person behind the camera. I've included some images of Mikol during and after this event. So Liv, could you describe what you're seeing here? The first one seems to be like he's leaned over on fire.
And then he's in extreme, another one of him in extreme pain and in a hospital. And his face seems pretty badly burned. It does not look good. Although Mikol has since quit the project at the time he vowed to continue, even live streaming from his hospital bed. So here's from a further decrypt.
article. We are alive. We have not given up on you, the dev says from his ICU bed, visibly burnt after being pelted with fireworks. I'll probably be here for another three days, but right after that, you're going to see me right back in Miami. You're going to see me right back and better, more motivated, and more hungry than ever.
Mikol confirmed in a voice note sent to Decrypt that he suffered second and third degree burns across a large portion of his body, with his left hand and shoulders being the worst affected. Since being in the hospital, Mikol said that he has been pumped with oxycodone, morphine, codeine, and fentanyl to help deal with the pain. He must constantly stretch to prevent his skin from healing too tightly, and is beginning physical therapy soon. He told Decrypt that this is the least he's been in pain since the incident.
This hospital bill is going to rack the fuck up, he said in the voice note. They're trying to keep me here for a week and a half. So, yeah, this is, you know, when things get to a point where you're like, okay, this isn't, I mean, are we still having fun, Travis? Are you still entertained? Well...
No, well, I guess I'm reminded of people who tried to, like, you know, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel or other, you know, death-defying stuff for publicity. Oh, yeah, what happened to them, Travis? You know, they died. Please invest into NiagaraCoin. Yes, that's it. BarrelCoin.
Barrel coin. There has been a lawsuit aimed at Pump.Fun, but it has nothing to do with these live streams. So, Molly, can you explain what happened there? Because I know that you looked into this and found that the guy who was suing them was still using the website to trade while he was suing. Yeah, so...
There is a class action lawsuit that was filed. They found as the sort of lead plaintiff, a guy who had lost a little bit of money on a token called Peanut, which was named after the squirrel that briefly became a MAGA celebrity around the time of the election. He only lost like $200 or something like
that, which compared to most of his pump.fund trading, I think he's down like $50,000 across the board. So I was a little surprised that they picked that particular trade to focus on. But this guy is such an active pump.fund trader that he
kept on trading even after the lawsuit was filed claiming that Pump.Fun was an unregistered securities exchange, that it was taking advantage of its users, and that it was relying on these shock stunts to try to pump the token prices on the platform. Now, I've talked a little bit about my issues with addiction on this podcast, and I will say that those include gambling. I love to live at the casino and play poker for days on end.
And I have been this guy where I'm like, this should be illegal. I'm never coming back. And then the next day I'm sitting back in my seat hoping for that flush or that full house. So that's all I'll say about that. So now that we've covered what they call the trenches, which is, you know, if a guy is getting burned from head to toe, that kind of makes the trenches a little more literal. But, you know, mostly these are guys hanging out in telegram groups, pumping coins, launching coins and stuff like that. I do want to talk a little bit about Justin's son, who is...
You know, I mean, he's obviously a bigger figure than the average meme coin trader. He's someone who's launched several coins in the past. And he also is the author of this recent tweet. USDT 2.0 is about to launch with a 20% APY, fully subsidized by AtTrondow. All interest will be sent in advance to a transparent address. There's no other reason. It's simply because we have plenty of money. So stop asking me questions like, where does the yield come from? Yeah.
Molly, what the fuck is he talking about here? Well, it's simple. He's promising you 20% APY on a risk-free investment. What is there not to understand? Right.
So, I mean, I've had a savings account. For some reason, my APY is nowhere near that. So how does this work? Well, there is an interesting parallel in that the last stablecoin-based project to promise a 20% APY where don't worry about where the money is coming from collapsed pretty spectacularly. And the
The creator of it was just finally extradited to the United States to face fraud charges. So that's how the last one went, I guess we could say. Okay. So where does the yield come from? Yeah. I mean, has he answered yet or we don't know? There's a joke throughout the crypto worlds and probably it should be throughout the financial world, which is that if you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield. Hmm.
So, I mean, tell us a bit more about Justin Sun, because he is, as far as I can tell, having spent some time in these circles, one of the most hated people in the crypto industry. And yet there are tons of coins that he's launched that have like been kind of robust or like existed through multiple cycles. How is this man not in jail? And what's his history? Yeah. So Justin Sun goes way back.
He launched an ICO, which was initial coin offering in China very shortly after China made such a thing illegal and then fled the country not long after, I mean, days afterwards. He's been involved in probably too many crypto projects to count, but he often sort of downplays his involvement by pretending he's just an advisor when he actually owns the platform.
He purchased the Poloniex cryptocurrency exchange, which used to be this totally no rules, you know, everything is allowed. You don't have to tell us who you are. You can do whatever you want on this platform type of crypto exchange that was bought by Circle, which is a US-based crypto business who decided they were going to try to make it an aboveboard crypto exchange. That failed because they discovered that everyone on Poloniex was only there because they wanted it to not be aboveboard.
And so Justin Sun bought it and decided he was going to return it to what he called its YOLO polo roots. So basically bringing it back to being a totally, you know, criminal enterprise, pretty much. In doing so, he tried to steal several hundred million dollars of bitcoins that belonged to
Poloniex users, but had sort of accumulated in various wallets. I mean, the list goes on. He has passports in several different countries. He became the ambassador to the World Trade Organization for Granada because it seems like he thought that he could get diplomatic immunity for everything he did. Yeah.
If he was the ambassador, and that's why he calls himself His Excellency Justin Sun. That's why H-E is in his Twitter handle. Even though he has since been removed as the ambassador, he still uses that title. Is he American? I mean, what's his nationality? He's Chinese originally. He has, like I said, passports in several countries. I think like Granada, Malta, maybe.
You know, the sort of usual suspects for people who are trying to accumulate passports. And I guess most recently he has been cozying up to Donald Trump. He made a $30 million purchase of World Liberty financial tokens, which are tokens that are launched...
by Trump associates and to whom 75% of their revenues are given. So he sort of made this indirect contribution to Donald Trump. He is a shady character through and through, and even the cryptocurrency world sees him as such.
So yeah, speaking of contributions, the crypto industry has been very active in politics in the last few years. Can you tell us a little bit how that manifests and how that's been going? Yeah, so this past election cycle, the crypto industry emerged as this huge force in
the political sphere. They created a number of super PACs that were supposed to be dedicated towards supporting cryptocurrency interests, and they contributed around $200 million to fund those PACs. Around $130 million of it was spent across congressional races, really aimed at installing either people who are friendly to the cryptocurrency industry or
ousting those who were seen as opponents to the industry. And it was really almost as much as anything a show of force from the crypto world to try to convince politicians that they cannot stand up to the cryptocurrency industry because they will be removed from office in the upcoming re-election cycles if they do so.
They supported quite a few candidates, some of whom probably would have won anyway. And so I think the strategy was really just to claim victory across a very broad number of races. But they did make a meaningful difference in some congressional races that were tightly contested.
and where, you know, cryptocurrency sort of had suddenly become this topic of interest. Yeah, I'm thinking of Cynthia Loomis, who is behind this idea that the United States should have a Bitcoin, like, federal reserve. She is among them. She's been a crypto fan earlier.
than many. She had laser eyes in her Twitter profile picture years ago, but she has been promoting the crypto industry plan to create a Bitcoin strategic reserve, which has been a popular talking point lately. She was not a major recipient of crypto funding this last cycle, although she was supported by the crypto industry, but I think she was not in particular a
threat of losing her seat. But there were some meaningful races like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, who was the senator who had previously served as the Senate Banking Committee. He was ousted and replaced by Bernie Marino, who is a former car salesman who also ran a cryptocurrency
company and was quite fond of everything the cryptocurrency industry wants to be doing. How partisan is this effort? Is it like they're influencing both parties or is it more targeting Republicans? Yeah, so they did heavily target Republicans. And I think the spending was about two to one Republican to Democrat in the end. But they did make a very concerted effort to both portray their
lobbying as bipartisan and to get Democrats on board because crypto has been so split across party lines, with some exceptions, that I think they understood that in order to really get their agenda moving forward and not getting stalled up in Congress as it has in the past, they needed to get Democrats on board. So there were some very significant Democrats that were supported by the industry as well. Trump recently launched a
Trump and Melania meme coins. So could you walk us through what happened there? Yeah. So Friday night before the inauguration, Trump suddenly and without any warning launched the Trump meme coin. It was very unexpected both to me, but also to people in the cryptocurrency industry, many of whom were at a crypto sponsored event.
event in Washington at the time and were sort of taken by surprise by this meme coin launch that happened during their party. The token sort of immediately took off. There was a substantial amount of trading early on. And then only a day or two later, Melania announced her own meme coin. My theory is that whoever was behind that thought that they could just do the same thing and get the same results. It did not quite go as planned. The
Melania token ended up crashing the price of the Trump token, as people might have expected if they had thought about it for more than a couple seconds. Because, you know, if you suddenly introduce basically more tokens that are linked to the same project, people see that as sort of an increase in supply. And so the price goes down on those tokens. Certainly some people sold their Trump tokens so they could go buy Melania tokens. So that was a bit of a gaffe. And then both of those tokens have followed the traditional meme coin pattern.
of, you know, reaching high valuations very early on and then sort of petering out over time as people lose interest. That's certainly been the trend, at least thus far. Yeah, I mean, I know the Trump coin created a kind of what they call a liquidity suck where people were selling their other meme coins and even some of some larger scale stuff that wasn't necessarily in the meme coin category to buy this token. So these...
These things have impacts, you know, far beyond just their own markets, right? I mean, they will affect how people trade other coins. Yeah. So it wasn't, you know, exclusively people who are putting new dollars into the crypto ecosystem to buy Trump tokens. There were a lot of people who were selling off other crypto holdings so they could buy the Trump tokens. Then it was more of a sort of moving of money versus an influx of new money.
Although there certainly were people who were brought into the crypto world because of the president's meme coin launch. He did everything he could to make it very easy for people to buy in, even if they didn't have crypto wallets. You know, he partnered with a company that allows you to buy
the Trump meme coin using a debit card. So there was that aspect of it as well. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people in the crypto world were a little peeved that he was maybe sucking the liquidity out of more deserving projects, I guess, by... Like fart coin. Yes, like fart coin, by taking it for himself. Yeah. So this is completely unprecedented, right? I mean, this is probably the highest profile, highest visibility human being on earth, launching a Solana...
shitcoin by the very terms of like the enthusiasts, the traders themselves that love this stuff. So, I mean, what what does this what does this mean for the crypto industry in the next four years for for Trump's relationship to it? What do you make of this whole stunt? It was very strange to observe. I think everyone inside the crypto industry and who
watches it from the outside sort of knew that going forward, we're going to be seeing a very big change in crypto law enforcement and the regulatory attitude towards the industry. You know, most of the crypto's lobbying efforts were focused on getting this deregulatory push, you know, allowing crypto companies to do the types of business activities that they were previously either prohibited from doing or were afraid to do because they did not want to
you know, wind up in the crosshairs of the financial regulators who were in charge of overseeing these markets. So we sort of knew that they were going to be calling off the dogs when it comes to the crypto industry. But with Trump launching a meme coin, that sends a much stronger signal that basically anything goes. And I think that was actually not entirely welcome news for some of the crypto industry who was, you know, they were a little bit horrified to see that because I think
They understand that, you know, a total Wild West where crime is allowed is actually not the best business environment to be operating in. And so people were sort of reacting negatively towards the Trump token, even if they had previously been supporters of crypto deregulation and of Trump personally. Yeah, it seems like people who wanted to see Trump, you know, kind of make things respectable by, you know, supporting Bitcoin.
We're kind of shocked that he would go for possibly the most degenerate, most pump and dump, you know, and that's within an industry that's so full of this stuff. But yeah, this doesn't bode well, I don't think. And people in crypto, I've seen many people refer to what's coming as crime season. What does this, what is crime season and is it good? Well, I mean, I think it's always been crime season in the crypto industry. Yeah.
But there was at least a brief period where the SEC was paying more attention. We saw the Department of Justice going after Sam Bankman Freed, for example, or the Terra co-founder who, again, crashed that stablecoin that previously promised 20% APY. And so there was...
some degree of accountability beginning to enter into the crypto markets that now I think people are wondering, you know, are we going to see anything? There was there was this thought, I think, among Trump supporters in the crypto world that he would just pay attention or he would just instruct the regulators to pay attention to the frauds and to the outright scams. But
anything that was supposedly above board would get the OK and they would have, you know, this very legitimizing regulatory framework that they would be able to operate under. And now I think a lot of those people are questioning whether or not that's the case because, you know, Trump has just launched this token that would probably be
disallowed by any responsible regulatory framework. And, you know, I think that this isn't, you know, all Trump's fault. It does seem like traditional markets, banks, you know, investment firms have been taking a liking to crypto and Bitcoin in particular over the last few years. I mean, I speak for myself only, I guess. But I think a lot of people had this impression that like once, you know, Bitcoin hit
an all time high and then crashed dramatically. Everybody was like, well, that's it. That's crypto. That was the fad. And then now it's higher than it's ever been. So, yeah, like are we seeing a kind of move towards embracing crypto by more traditional financial players? Yeah. So I think if, you know, the meme coins were one hallmark of this crypto cycle, the institutional adoption is perhaps another where,
The SEC approved a handful of Bitcoin ETFs last year, allowing institutional access to Bitcoin that was not previously available. There are other ETFs as well in some other major cryptos, and they are now filing to create meme coin ETFs. You know, banks have been trying to get into crypto. Traditional financial firms have been trying.
very interested in crypto. I mean, some of those Bitcoin ETFs are offered by Fidelity and BlackRock and some of the biggest names in traditional finance. So there has been this sort of institutional interest in crypto that maybe did not exist previously, which the crypto world has been very excited about because they see it as the legitimization of Bitcoin. You know, if BlackRock is offering a Bitcoin ETF, how bad could it be is sort of the idea. But you know, one thing I said a
back when crypto fell apart in 2022 is that we see these boom and bust cycles over and over and over again in the crypto world. And without some external force, it seems to me that they will more or less persist
perpetually continue and they get more extreme every time where the price goes higher than the last time and then it crashes more dramatically than the time before that. And every time it happens, more people get totally wiped out. The consequences are way worse. And, you know, without some sort of external force, I think this is just something that will happen again and again in the crypto world.
And, you know, there was briefly a question of whether that external force might be applied via the strengthening of the regulatory apparatus in the United States. You know, there was a brief moment when Congress people were issuing statements about how horrified they were by the FTX collapse and we need to do something and we need to prevent this from ever happening again.
And then they sort of quickly forgot about that and have now been embracing the crypto industry and saying that not only should we not regulate the industry more thoroughly than we have, we should actually roll back regulations. So I think we're in for a rough time pretty soon.
Yeah. I mean, it's also notable that countries are some of the biggest holders of Bitcoin. I know El Salvador, Andrew Bukele has been very, you know, positive about it. Well, Bukele has. I would not say that El Salvador, in terms of its people, have been particularly fond of Bitcoin. Right. And I think my favorite recent story is Cuba launched Bitcoin.
a meme coin and then rug pulled people. So I'm actually for that one. I think Cuba should continue to rug, rug pull American investors and get some of that cash. I'm pretty sure it was just a Twitter hack, wasn't it? Well, you know, I'm going to I'm going to live in my head. I'll let you know. Still alive. He's still alive and he understands the block chain.
OK, so that's good that that seems really good to tie in our broader economy to something that has been going through really dramatic boom and bust cycles. I can't see anything bad on the horizon. I think that betting, though, in general and just gambling has seen huge a huge surge as of late, like in American markets.
culture, just, you know, betting being integrated to sports. And then also the rise of Polymarket, which to me is fascinating because it's a website that, you know, was betting on the election, or at least it's a website through which you can bet on any outcome of almost anything. So, you know, people bet on the outcome of the election. And
You recently, in one of your articles, you posted a screen cap of one bet. Will Palisades wildfire spread to Santa Monica by Sunday? 13% chance, down 37%. So, yeah, what...
What do you make of polymarket and just like, I guess, the gamble-ification, the degenification of everything, just outcomes in life? Yeah, I mean, I think crypto really has to be seen in this broader context where, you know, meme stocks are a thing. People are being encouraged to become day traders on Robinhood. Sports betting has been
you know, legitimized throughout the United States. And now it's hard to watch a sports game without getting, you know, shown the odds on the on the outcome or invited to a sports betting app. So, you know, crypto is really just one of the many ways in which gambling is being encouraged, I think, in American society these days. Polymer
Polymarket is an interesting case because, for one, it's really not supposed to be available to American bettors. It's not allowed in the United States, even though Polymarket is an American company. They actually, yeah, they're headquartered in New York, but they paid a big fine a couple of years ago and had to...
restrict all Americans from accessing the platform, which they do by basically just checking your IP address so you can circumvent it trivially. There is no identity verification happening. And so, of course, people are openly using Polymarket within the United States, which I think the CFTC was reportedly looking into. But whether or not that investigation continues remains to be seen. But there are all sorts of bets on Polymarket, and they range from, I think, the relatively harmless to
ones that are actually somewhat concerning, like the Palisades wildfire market, where, you know, if you were to take a position that, you know, against the odds, you think that the wildfire will spread to Santa Monica by Sunday, you're somewhat incentivized to go light a fire in Santa Monica so that the bet that you just made comes true and you make a huge profit on it. This is why we don't usually allow people to make bets on like
will a celebrity be dead by Friday? You know, assassination markets are like a known quantity, but Polymarket is just sort of learning these lessons themselves, apparently, without doing much in the way of moderation in terms of what people are allowed to bet on on the platforms.
It does feel like a lot of these platforms are kind of willfully, oh, yeah, we hadn't learned that, you know, as if they didn't know exactly what was going to happen, but wanted the kind of influx of funds and cash. And then to be told, you know, I mean, basically act as if you're doing nothing wrong until you get caught and then go, whoa, we hadn't even thought of that. I mean, if we're entering crime season, that seems to be pretty smart, right? Just ask for information.
forgiveness, not permission? Yeah, I mean, that is the tactic throughout the industry is to sort of pretend that you could not possibly have foreseen the very predictable outcomes of the incentives you have introduced. I mean, we've seen that throughout the crypto world.
Polymarket is also taking the sort of Muskian approach to their platform by suggesting that these bets are actually a way to do citizen journalism and that they are gathering information for people and that it is providing a service that, you know, these betting markets are basically telling people in sort of a journalism way.
the odds that they're going to have to flee their house because the wildfires are headed in their direction, which seems to me to be a very flimsy excuse, but is certainly some of the cover that they're trying to provide for why these types of markets are on the platform. It's the same reasoning that they've been using for other controversial markets around some of the ongoing wars, where
You know, people were allowed to bet on whether there would be an airstrike in a specific location. For example, a lot of people found that to be less than appropriate, let's just say. But Polymarket said, you know, this is a newsworthy event and we are providing information to people on the ground. Yeah, this is kind of like calling horse races the Department of Transportation. Yeah.
you know it's just like i don't i don't know about this i mean yeah i mean i'm really interested in seeing you know the ways people might deliberately use these markets to manipulate reality you know you can say listen when i set up a market uh for the question you know will julian be punched in the face by friday what i had no idea that would incentivize someone who takes a position on this to stand outside julian's house and then punch him in the face i was nobody was thinking about the
face of my friend. I didn't realize that I would... Nobody's better than this. Might create some perverse incentives. So far. Yeah. I don't like where this is going. I think this episode is coming towards an end, and I don't appreciate that, Travis, and Liv, so far. Fuck.
All right. Molly, yeah, before we wrap up here, where can people follow you and find your work? So I write the Citation Needed newsletter. It's citationneeded.news. And then I'm also on most social networks. I am molly.wiki on Blue Sky and everything else is pretty much linked.
everywhere. Are you also involved? I saw there was like a website that kind of tracks political contributions of the crypto industry. Where can people find more information about that? Yeah, so I also run the website followthecrypto.org, which was tracking political spending by the cryptocurrency industry in the previous election cycle. I am working on updating it going forward because they are
actively fundraising for the midterms. But at the moment, it is still reflecting the 2024 elections. Wow. Great stuff. We'll have all of those links in the episode description. Molly, do you want to pump a coin? Is there something that you think is a good investment or 20% of the PY? Yeah. So the Molly coin should be hitting a million dollar market cap any minute now, at which point I will...
I don't know what I'll do on stream, but something. Molly takes Molly when Molly reaches one billion market cap. Yeah. Liv, Travis, any final thoughts on this whole situation? We live in hell. It's only getting worse. Yeah.
You know, I think that 13-year-old boy at the beginning of the show you talked about is going to be president one day because he is only 13. He's grifting at 12th grade level. He's got the skills that are going to be necessary to be successful in the coming generations. So good for him. Yeah, his dad was actually impressed. I was reading an article and the dad was like, this is pretty entrepreneurial, pretty cool stuff. Yeah.
I'm surprised he hasn't been named to the cabinet yet. Yeah, the dad was like, this doesn't seem so different than gambling at a casino. And I'm like, so you're okay with your 13-year-old son gambling at a casino? He makes a big bucks. That's cool. Only if he wins, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Do not come home if you're down. All right. Well, Molly, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you, listener, for tuning in to another episode of the QA podcast.
you can hit patreon.com slash QAA and subscribe for five bucks a month. You'll get a whole second episode for every regular one, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes. We've also got a website, QAAPodcast.com. And I guess like look out for the QAA coin. That's going to go to the moon. Listener, until next week, may the deep dish invest in you and pump you and keep you.
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