Crypto Crime Season Has Begun feat Molly White (E309)
$TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins compete with $FART, $ASS and $TITS for attention in a crypto industry defined by scams, grifts and financial malfeasance. We cover the intersection of politics with crypto and dive into some of the less savory tokens on pump dot fun, a website where “degens” go to mint, pump and inevitably dump thousands of meme coins every single day. Our guest is Molly White, a journalist, researcher and critic of the crypto and tech industries.
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Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, episode 309. Crypto crime season has begun.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Fields, 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.
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's 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 screen-capped 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 memes 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.
Some more tangible things that tied these values to reality.
But meme coins are the ultimate fuck you to the idea that fundamentals matter at all.
What if there was zero fundamentals?
It was all about attention and 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%.
$846 million 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, 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.
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, yeah.
Julian's concealing his real coin that he's got thousands 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 we kind of jump into PumpFun and 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 memecoins and then the lows.
So these kind of big ass pump and dumps essentially.
Every pump and then dump is considered a cycle on a bigger scale.
So this cycle, shitcoins and memecoins 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 memecoins?
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, you know, 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 somewhat self-aware of the fact that this is degenerate gambling, essentially.
You know, 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.
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 some.
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 fleeting sentiments or interest within people's minds, even if those sentiments are inauthentic or momentary.
But you can sort of harness that momentary sentiment by capturing people's attention and their feelings.
To, you know, pump up the value of an invented asset.
It's a lot less self-serious than, like, I guess 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 degens 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 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...
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 utility 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?
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 years ago, and a lot of the people who are claiming that have since left the industry or, you know...
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 are.
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 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 the financial regulators have basically forced the crypto industry to turn into this meme
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?
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?
And the SEC and other agencies in law enforcement have been fairly slow to crack down on crypto crime, partly, I think, just due to the volume of it.
You know, if there are a thousand 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 which I think was maybe an effort by the SEC to make an example of people and send a But I think it maybe just sent the message that if you're not a celebrity, you'll get
Yeah, I mean, a high-profile example of this is the Hawk Tua 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 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 Tua, 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.
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.
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 hand.
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.
I know Iggy Azalea has one called Mother.
And that one, I believe, like the icon or like the art for it is just her butt.
So yeah, this is the world in which we live.
You know, it feels really...
Do any of these coins have any fundamentals?
Because you mentioned there's a bit of a spectrum between the meme coin and the proper.
Especially with these celebrities, is there a meaningful distinction between, in terms of what the coin does, a meaningful distinction between something like the live streaming service we're looking at with the pump and note, and then an Iggy Azalea?
Yeah, so a lot of these celebrities like to make promises about what they will eventually provide to their token holder.
And I know Iggy Azalea was going on about creating some sort of crypto gambling website or something like that.
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 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, 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 Haktoa Girls 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.
Mostly.
So Pump.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 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.
Yeah, so it makes it a lot easier for anyone to create a meme coin compared to earlier.
So, you know, there have 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.
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.
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 credible?
Or, I mean, how does that work?
You know, like, 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, 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 Mpepe was operating 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.
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 in 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 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 fuck is behind them.
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.
Yeah, a lot of moderation happening on that.
Yeah, let's jump into...
Some of 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 PumpFun and covering it because it is just genuinely...
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 a cage.
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...
400k he will lick hands and feet.
400k he will lick balls over underwear.
500k, 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...
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 a 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...
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 taped to a wall, which was purchased by a guy we'll get into a little later called Justin Sun, 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 Sun.
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, like, the puppet's family.
Behind it to show that, you know, he's at the end of his rope or it's a movie trope of like 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 like anti-black racist 4chan.
Oh, great.
I didn't even realize that.
Like term that's been, you know, total blank death.
It's been like slightly sanitized, I guess, but...
Well, if you'd like to invest in a more explicitly racist coin, may I present to you a coin called Now I Gotta Jig a 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 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 out of a girl's...
A candle shoved in a girl's, you know.
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.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
So, goes to show the sort of guy who's logging onto 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 a 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.
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, would you invest in that one?
Well, no, but...
Again, it seems like, you know, this is, I don't know, this has been a theme as long as there has been online content.
It's like the first thing you do is, you know, you get attention.
And a good way to get attention is to be outrageous or repulsive or shocking or disgusting 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.
And this one is just, you just get the attention and just, you convince people to...
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 a Miami trauma center for third-degree burns to a large portion of his body.
Live-streaming for meme-coin clout is a recent and often troubling trend.
It was weird when a mom shook her boobs for her son's token, or a dev lost a tooth while boxing.
But third-degree burns are on a different level of weird.
Perhaps a sign that degens on Pump.Fun should pump the brakes.
Hey!
Journalism.
Mikkel, the dare dev, 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 a 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, McCall's burns were revealed.
Quote, he's all burned up, brah.
One of his friends said during the livestream, while McCall 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 Mikkel 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, more hungry than ever.
McColl 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, McColl 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 a 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, 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-defined stuff for publicity.
Oh, yeah, what happened to them, Travis?
You know, they died.
Please invest into Niagara Coin.
Yes, that's it.
Barrel Coin.
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 pumped up fund trading, I think he's down like $50,000 across the board.
I was a little surprised that they picked that particular trade to focus on.
But this guy is such an active Pump.Fun 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's 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 Sun, who is, you know, I mean, he's obviously a bigger figure than the average, like, 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 AtTronDAO.
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?
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?
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 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 see.
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.
So, I mean, tell us a bit more about Justin's son, 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 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 above-board crypto exchange.
That failed because they discovered that everyone on Poloniex was only there.
Because they wanted it to not be above board.
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 if he was the ambassador.
And that's why he calls himself His Excellency Justin Sun.
That's why HE is in his Twitter handle.
Even though he has since been removed as the ambassador, he still uses that.
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, this 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...
The conspiracy world sees him as such.
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?
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...
Around $130 million of it was spent across congressional races, really aimed at installing either people who were 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 reelection 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?
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 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 black tie 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 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 larger scale stuff that wasn't necessarily in the meme coin category to buy this token.
So 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 were 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.
And 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...
You know, very terms of, like, the enthusiasts, the traders themselves that love this stuff.
So, I mean, what does this mean for the crypto industry in the next four years, 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.
Most of the crypto's lobbying efforts were focused on getting this deregulatory push, allowing crypto companies to do the types of business activities that they were 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 were 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...
What is crime season and is it good?
Well, I mean, I think it's always been crime season in the crypto industry.
But there was at least a brief period where the SEC was paying more attention.
We saw the Department of Justice going after, you know, Sam Bankman-Fried, 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 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, you know, 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.
There are other ETFs as well in some other major cryptos, and they are now filing to create meme coin ETFs.
Banks have been trying to get into crypto.
Traditional financial firms have been...
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.
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 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...
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.
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 a meme coin and then rug pulled people.
So I'm actually for that one.
I think Cuba should continue to 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 live in my head that Fidel Castro is still alive.
He's still alive and he understands the blockchain.
Okay, so that's good.
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 a huge surge as of late in American...
Culture, just 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 do you make of Polymarket and just, like, I guess the gambolification, 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 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.
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 platform.
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.
I mean, if we're entering crime season, that seems to be pretty smart, right?
Just ask for 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, you know, 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 it's certainly some of the cover that they're trying to provide for why these types of but it's certainly some of the cover that they're trying to provide for why these It's the same reasoning that they've been using for other controversial markets around some of the ongoing wars where...
Where 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.
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 Department of Transportation.
You know, it's just like, I don't know about this.
I mean, yeah, 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 for the question, you know, will Julian be punched in the face by Friday?
What?
I had no idea.
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 thinking about the face of my friend.
I didn't realize that it might create some perverse incentives.
So far.
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'm 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...
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 those links in the episode description.
Molly, do you want to pump a coin?
Is there something that you think is a good investment?
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 million, one billion market cap.
Yeah.
Liv, Travis, any final thoughts on this whole situation?
We live in hell.
It's only getting worse.
You know, I think that 13-year-old boy at the beginning of the show you talked about is going to be present 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.
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 QAA 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 uh and keep you we have auto keyed content based on your preferences like
you do That stupid dance he does.
Just stop it.
I ain't stop what you're doing because I'm about to ruin the image of me that you used to.
