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- [00:00]
A
Heads up everyone. We've got exciting news Bits and Bips Our Macro Meets Crypto show is officially spinning off into its own podcast feed, YouTube channel and X account. If you've been enjoying the deep dives into interest rates, monetary policy and how they intersect with the crypto markets, make sure to follow Bits and Bits wherever you get your podcasts on YouTube and on X. You'll find the links to YouTube X and other podcast platforms in the Show Notes. We'll be posting here for a few more weeks, but starting in September, Bits and Bits will launch on its own feed. For now, we will publish longer clips from the show on those accounts. Remember, go to the Show Notes now and subscribe to Bits and Bips. That's Bits plus sign Bips spelled B I P S on YouTube X. And wherever you get your podcasts, you.
- [00:49]
B
Have 10 minutes to invest. If you miss this initial 10 minutes, you going to invest into the peak and you're just going to be Exit Liquidity for the snipers who got in in the first second.
- [01:01]
A
Mantle is pioneering Blockchain for banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of TradFi and Web3. Follow Mantle underscore official to learn more. Earning yield on stablecoins just got smarter with Re protocol. Get up to 16% APR plus points through regulated insurance backing and ETH basis strategies with no lockups required. Deposit USDC, USDT or DAI to start earning stable yield and points today at Re XYZ.
- [01:35]
C
Re XYZ hey everyone, I'm here with Nick Viman, CEO and co founder of Bubble Maps. Welcome Nick.
- [01:42]
B
Thank you for having me, Laura. Pleasure to be on Bubble Maps has.
- [01:46]
C
Had some great investigations into recent shenanigans in the crypto space involving people like Hayden Davis, Sahil Arora, and others. But let's start with Hayden Davis. He's a character that's appeared in a number of these incidents and he was involved in what you called the presidential coins because there were a few of those. So tell us about your investigation into those.
- [02:11]
B
Absolutely. And it has certainly been an interesting year for crypto with those presidential coins. I think nobody expected this tokenization era to go that far because last year we already have all the celebrities launching tokens. I think you had Iggy Azayla on your show at some point, but only a few people were expecting this to go that far, that even the President of the United States would endorse and would launch his own meme coin. And it was. I remember this vividly. It was at the beginning of the year on a Saturday morning, I live in Europe, and we woke up to this madness of the President Trump launching his own meme coin. And I remember everybody was wondering at the time, is this real? Because it was not the first time that Trump was allegedly linked to a token. If you remember, before There was Donald Jr. Trump DJIT or DGT, but it ended up being associated with Martin Shkreli. So another story. And for this one, although he posted both on Twitter, on his own Twitter account and through social, a lot of people were skeptical. Did he get hacked? Is this really his own initiative or not? And so the first thing that we did this morning was we checked the bubble map of Trump and we wanted to see if that was matching with the tokenomics that he shared on his website. And that was actually the case. Surprisingly, the token of Trump was done in a very transparent way, although there was one holder with 80%. But I'll get to this in a second. But at least the actual tokenomics was matching with the on chain distribution. So there was evidence backing the claim he made on his website. And as we started to dive into this Trump token, we were surprised in a good way, that it was done pretty properly. The website, his Meme coin website, was set up weeks before and it seemed like a plan gone pretty, pretty well. And then two days later, the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump, launched her own meme coin on January 19th. And when it launched, we didn't have the same impression at all. The token first thing, the bubble map, meaning the on chain distribution of the token, was not matching with the tokenomics on her website. And also her website was done in a rush. It was set up maybe one or two days before the launch. So it all felt like an opportunity when they saw that Trump was such an incredible success. And also, I think the whole crypto community was praising this launch and they were super happy to have such a notorious figure endorsing crypto for the first time. Because before this, we've had a lot of, I would say, pushback, especially from regulators and the US Government towards crypto. So Trump was very much welcomed. But then when it was Melania Trump, all of a sudden, it didn't feel as sincere as a genuine approach towards the crypto community. And so what we did is we started to look on chain. We were curious to know and to understand, is this the same team who launched Trump, Donald Trump and the one who launched Melania? And pretty quickly we saw that it was not the same team, which, when you think about this, is super, super surprising. I mean, husband and wife, shouldn't they be advised or at least have the same studio behind hunting both their tokens? That was not the case. And as we follow the trail of transactions from the deployer of Melania, we actually found that it was Kelsier Avengers who launched Melania Truga. And at the time, nobody knew who was Kelsier or Hayden Davis. They only became very public thicker after Libra from Javier Miller. But at the time, nobody knew. And I told my team, all right, I think there's a thin line connecting Melania Trump to this guy, Hayden Davis, whoever that is. But the worst thing was, at the time, we knew that Hayden Davis sniped Millennial because we found his other extra wallets in which he sniped the token and made very decent amount of profits with this. And at the time, we were even hesitant to share this online, given the gravity of such a finding. Because imagine this, if we were wrong, we would throw someone under the bus and under a huge bus of the first lady of the United States. So we were very hesitant about our findings at the time. You know, there's always a layer of Or a degree of uncertainty with this on chain connection. But then on February 14, I remember that was Valentine's Day launched. Launched a Libra. So another. Another presidential token.
- [07:07]
C
It was a Valentine's Day gift to the crypto community.
- [07:10]
B
Yeah, he's very romantic. And so at the time, it became very quickly known that it was Kelsier Ventures and Hayden Davis who was behind it. I think he publicly said online, look, I'm the one behind it. Remember this video that made 10 million views where he was sitting in his weird costume from another dimension?
- [07:32]
C
So many memes from that. That was the funniest.
- [07:35]
B
That was insane. That was insane. Why this piece of clothes? I don't know, but it was certainly for our memories and because we knew, or we had this initial finding that he was connected to Melania. When he said publicly, I'm the one who launched Libra, for us, it was very obvious then that our initial finding was correct. And so what we did at the time is we posted a tweet saying not only he's the one behind Libra, but he sniped Libra with extra wallets, but he's also the one behind Melania Trump. And that post really was the beginning of a huge turn, I would say, turnaround from the crypto community towards these presidential coins, because all of a sudden, they appear not as crypto savior anymore, but actually as detrimental to the space, because so Many money was flowing in this presidential token, and the losses were so huge that it was deterring people from investing into crypto at all. So this is what happened. And. And yeah, all of a sudden, Hayden Davis was propelled from a completely unknown individual to kind of one of the key figure in this presidential coins.
- [08:49]
C
Yeah. So for that incident, like when you say sniped, like, for you, it was just. This is like basically insider trading. So if you were to reveal that, then you're. I mean, I know every, every jurisdiction has laws on as to, like, whether or not something can be called insider trading. So I understand that might not be like, the legal way you would describe what happened there, but, you know, the crypto equivalent, whether or not there's a law, is basically what he was doing. So, you know, later, there were a few other instances where you realized that he was involved in other things. These were not as widely known, but there were some meme coins. I don't know if you want to talk about either of those.
- [09:42]
B
Absolutely. You know, when we trailed all his wallets, we were surprised to find that he, not only he launched those presidential coins, but he seemed to be involved in other, smaller, unknown tokens. One of them was Fries, for example. Another one was Hood. And those were some meme coins that reached significant reach at some point. Not to the extent of a presidential coin, of course, but maybe 20 million, 30 million FTV, which is significant. And at the time you were wondering, why is this guy, who's already so busy and he's on an Interpol notice at that point, he's literally on a red Interpol notice. Why is he launching meme coins on the site? Is this a passion that he has? And the answer is that I think at the time he was in a very precarious predicament and potentially to make a few bucks on the side that were unknown because all his wallets were tracked, at least all of them related to the Libra case where he made 100 million, that potentially he wanted to make some. Some money on the side. That's my educated guess. But to this date, I'm not entirely sure about his motives. That. That's a bit unclear.
- [10:53]
C
And just to be clear, for those particular ones, did he use literally the same exact wallets, or is it just that you tracked the movement of funds to. To other wallets that launched those other.
- [11:03]
B
Meme coins that was other wallets, but connected in a way that was pretty. With a good. With a very good degree of certainty. We could say that those are his wallets. And Also, I want to make one point clear. When I say Hayden, it's usually Hayden Davis or Kelsier Avengers.
- [11:19]
C
Right, right.
- [11:19]
B
There's now the on chain data is very clear, but the off chain association to someone is not. So it can be him, it can be Kelsier, it can be some of his friends. Sometimes it's not entirely certain.
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C
Got it. So that brings us to the present day because he made an appearance again recently.
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B
Yeah.
- [11:41]
C
So this is around the Yeezy token. There are some details that really blew my mind for this one. But tell me how you connected him to this token launch.
- [11:51]
B
Earlier you said, you asked me, is this insider trading? And I agree with you. We have to be very cautious with these words because all of a sudden we walk into legal territories that I'm not entirely sure I master. But one thing he's certain is that he has access to privileged information. At least that was the case for Melania and Libra because he was launching the token. So when you launch a token, of course you have some privileged information about the contract address, about when the launch is going to happen, about who is in board, about when the tweets are going to come out. You know, all this information that are critical when you launch a meme coin. And so one thing is for sure is that he used this, he used this information that he had to snipe tokens, to snipe the token with his other side wallets. And I'm very confident saying this on an interview because he admitted it during the interview with Coffeezilla. You know, there's actually a funny thing, this interview with Coffeezilla that he did a one hour interview. I listened to this, I, I listen to this interview every month because, because so rarely you have someone admitting or from the other side of the table admitting what is happening behind the scenes of these big launches. All the other insiders, people who are inside the tokens, I mean, are not admitting anything. They want to stay under the radar, they want to keep the operation secret. So very rarely in the history of crypto you have someone sitting and just saying everything out loud, everything that is happening behind the scenes. And I'm going to give it to him. I find this guy very smart, very articulate. It's no random that he ended up here convincing president to launch tokens. If we sit down for a second, the guy is 25, something like that. Below 30.
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C
Yeah. In his 20s.
- [13:46]
B
It's no accident that you manage to convince so many people to follow you and to trust you. There is an element of charisma that he has in the way he speaks. So I listened to him because I want to keep as an on chain data company, I want to understand, I try at least to understand every argument from every side of the table. Now going back to your question about this latest incident which was around easy. So Kanye west launched a token. Actually this is one of the case where we knew that he was going to launch a token from February. I'm not sure if you heard back then, but I think it was Coindesk and Sam who made an article about how the easy token is going to drop and the tokenomics even leaked at the time. And I think because it leaked so much, the team behind the Kenny was token was thinking look let's not launch right now because it's going to get heavy snipes which is a topic that we're going to talk about later on. So I think this is why they postpone and the token was launched two weeks ago or something like that. And we were actually very surprised because we found wallets associated with Hayden Davis Kelsier Ventures who sniped the token as well and they made around 12 million profit from this launch. So I don't know exactly the connection between Hayden Davis and Kenny West. I tried to contact the team behind the K West token. Nobody know who's the team. I've heard rumors and I have some information but I, I was never able to confirm them on who's the team who run the show. I think they're trying very hard to avoid us to be completely honest because I've tried my best to get in touch and they certainly don't want this to be advertised. But yeah, I'm not sure exactly how Hayden Davis managed to managed to connect with the KNE west team. I have no idea.
- [15:45]
C
Something that I found interesting was that the Yeezy token, when they deployed it, they initially deployed 25 contract addresses and then they selected one at random for the official Yeezy token and they said that that would dissuade snipers by making it 1/25 chance that they would pick the right contract address. But somehow Hayden Davis picked the right one.
- [16:19]
B
Yeah. Is he Kenny West? I don't know. But.
- [16:22]
C
Oh, oh, and actually one other thing too. The blockchain data even showed that they actually did 50 addresses. Not. Yeah, so that's the other interesting tidbit. So it was really 1 50th of a chance.
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B
But anyway, you're right and I find this idea to be very smart actually because what happens usually when you launch a token is that you have the insiders and they know the contract address. They even know the one who's going to be selected potentially by the person who launched the corner, who announced the token to the world. But then you have the other kind of snipers who are the one who listens on chain. And there is a very select few who are able to be that precise with how they and in the way they read the blockchain. And they managed to find this nugget of intelligence amongst an ocean of hundreds of millions of tokens that are created and they managed somehow to find the right one. At first I couldn't believe that was true, really. I thought those snipers, they must be insiders, they must have insider information. But actually moving forward along the way, I found some more conclusive evidence that some of the snipers indeed are just super advanced sophisticated players and they find the information on chain. It's hard to believe that this is the case. So for those second kind of snipers, the one who just sniff on chain, I think deploying 50 tokens with exactly the same parameters, exactly the same holders, exactly, exactly the same bubble map, exactly the same vesting in cliff Service is very smart because if you have now 10 millions to spend to snipe a coin, well, you're only going to spend 200k per token because now there's 50. And if you make 10x on one, you've only made 2 million as opposed to potentially 100 million, which is what happened on Trump. So I think in theory this is a very smart way to approach this. But if you're an actual insider, probably you know which one is going to be selected by Kanye west anyway and.
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C
Wait, but I'm sorry, you said that there are some people that through sniffing on chain, they can detect which one has been chosen for the actual contract address.
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B
Sorry if I wasn't clear, there is no way you can detect which one is going to be selected by Kanye west, because I suppose only him has the information. But you can. At least in the case of Trump, for example, there was. How to say this. At first we were convinced it was pure insider trading. The guy who ended up finding the Trump token, Nassim, can say his name out loud, but there was some other evidence that pointed out to another direction, which is that he actually found the token on chain, but there was only one token. That's the thing with this set of parameters, with this bubble map, with this festing program, with this connection, there was only one Trump token that fit all this criteria at the time, had Trump followed the same process of creating 50 tokens and just selecting one of them at random, this sniff sniper, they would have been torn by the choice of having to select one amongst 50.
- [19:30]
C
Got it. Okay. Yeah. This is so interesting just because. Oh gosh, this was in my book and I don't remember all the details, but for the DAO they did something very similar. But I think what they did was they asked different community members to deploy because they didn't want any of them. They wanted it to be decentralized. But then what ended up happening is after I forget there were like eight or something that had been deployed then, then ultimately actually they did have to pick like the M.O. they picked the most anonymous basically. Like how were they deployed? Like via Shapeshift or you know, there, there were just certain considerations. But anyway, all right, so in a moment we're going to talk a little bit more about what happened with the UC token, but first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors, make this show possible Mantle leads the.
- [20:27]
A
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- [21:04]
C
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- [21:06]
A
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- [22:12]
C
XYZ Back to my conversation with Nick so you know one other piece about the Hayden Davis thing Was the timing of the easy launch related to his case? Can you talk about that?
- [22:27]
B
Sure. So what happened was, remember the Libra case that we talked about just before? The thing is, this one in particular was a disaster because what ended up happening was a cluster of connected addresses. A cluster of connected addresses holding, I think that was 80% of the supply was unlocked. So there was no vesting in Cliff. And when this token was out, the first thing we say is, look, hold on first, there is no tokenomics shared, so we have no idea how this token is going to be used for. Why is someone holding that much? That was the case for Trump. Trump was very clear on what the token use case is going to be. We can debate on whether this is useful for society, of course, but at least that was disclosed. In the case of Libra, there was no information whatsoever about what the token was going to be used for. And on top of this, the supply was completely unlocked. So this is exactly what we said. And one or two hours later this cluster of connected addresses started to sell through one sided lp. What this means when you sell to one sided LP is instead of just dumping your tokens on a traditional lmm, sorry AMM Automatic market maker, you just set some tokens, some Libra tokens on a one sided liquidity on Meteora Dll. And what it does is when someone buys the token, it buys from this one sided lp, meaning that you're not technically creating any selling pressure on the chart. What you're doing instead is you're absorbing all the buy pressure. The reason I'm saying all of this is because this is very smart. Because the people checking for the sell order on Deck Screener, for example, or on Eddie analytics, they don't see any sale happening. So from their perspective, the team is not dumping the chart. What they don't see though is that all the buying pressure is now getting transformed into actual green candle because it's all absorbed, absorbed by this one sided lp.
- [24:38]
C
Wow.
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B
And, and the time that people realize what's happening, meaning that they're actually selling, because that's the same result, they're actually selling all the supply that they own. Well, they have, they had the time to sell for 100 million worth of Libra tokens and all of this money ended up in Kelsey Adventures slash Hayden Davis pocket. And he even admitted it again. I listened to the interview with Hayden Davis just before the, just before your show just to make sure I had everything in my head. But yeah, he had all the money. He was the custodian of these funds. And he was at the time saying, I'm going to re inject all this money in the chart. I want to make it fair. I want to make it fair for the traders, or maybe I'm going to redistribute them based on the P and L of who lost the most amount of money. Of course, it never happened. None of this happened. And the crypto community moved on because then there's this other drama, this other new token launch, and we move on. And so Hayden Davis, while on an Interpol notice, had this $100 million sitting around in his wallets that everybody forgot about. It got to the point where, I'm not exactly sure about the temporality here, but a judge decided to froze out of this 100 million, 57 million related to the Libra case. They were frozen by circle. And then I think that was the day before the Kanye west token. The judge, based on the elements they had and based on the actual law, decided to unfreeze these funds. And when you unfreeze these funds, it means that technically the funds are his and he can use this fund at his discretion. And the reason why they enforce these funds are because one, I think the legality of what he did is unclear. Is this legal? Is this illegal? You mentioned first that it depends on the jurisdiction. And this is crypto. Crypto is an international. It would be based on an international cooperation between countries to have something that is actually reliable and scalable. But that's not the case. And they decided that based on the elements they had was not sufficient enough to freeze those funds. And they deem that because the other person involved was from Meteora, Benchau and Hayden Davis were not threats and they were not threatening at all. So they decided to unfreeze the funds and he got his 57 million back. So when you think about this, when you take a step back, that's actually a very lucrative business because if you manage to onboard a president, you're going to make 100 million. And it's not a crime. So yeah, why not? And this is why. Now there is this saying in the space that crime is legal is because despite the fact that from a consensual standpoint, you know that what Hayden Davis did is bad, is detrimental for the space, and it even nearly got to the point where Javier Milei was impeached as president of Argentina. So certainly there's something wrong here. But despite that fact, the law is not strong enough to condain this kind of behavior. So we just let it go and the next day, Kanye west was launched and he sniped and he made 12 million.
- [28:05]
C
Yeah, I'm sure people might want to connect some dots there. We probably can't, but it seems perhaps there are dots to be connected. Maybe there will be more information that comes out about this. So the numbers, when you analyze who participated in the Yeezy token launch, are frankly, so depressing. You guys had a great tweet about that. Can you talk a little bit about. And this is why everybody's been saying the meme coin trenches are down so bad. But I feel like this almost takes the cake for tokens like that. Just talk a little bit about how many people participated and kind of how well they did.
- [28:51]
B
Yeah. No, in the case of. Of Yeezy. No, it's not how you say this. Yz. Yz. Yeah, I think it's how you pronounce that in the case of the K. West token. So in the case of the Kenny west token. Yeah, you're right. Not a lot of people profited from this token. But the larger point is, the larger point is that the window opportunity to make money on this token is so short now, it's literally if you don't invest within the first 10 minutes of the token, you're down only.
- [29:24]
C
Wow.
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B
And I think the reason is because now there are millions of tokens are created every month. I think the last time I checked, it might be slightly outdated, but the range is good. It was 5 million tokens per month on pump fund. And because the attention span is so short now because you just jump to the shiny thing as soon as the token is launched, you have this initial burst of attention because it's attached to a new figure, whether this is a president or a celebrity. And then the thing is, those meme coins, because they're purely based on attention, and you know that the peak of attention is going to be when the token is launched. There is no reason to hold token anymore after this initial burst. So you're constantly chasing the attention peak, which is going to be the new launch. So the trenches are down so bad because people are just chasing new launches. And there is no reason to stick around for any of these tokens, at least any of the celebrity tokens. And even Kanye west is suffering the same fate, despite the fact that he's one of the most popular singer in the world. Even him, he couldn't create loyalty towards his own meme coin. That's not the case for utility token.
- [30:37]
C
Yeah, I would say. I would say he's turned from popular into controversial. So that could have been another factor. But anyway, keep going.
- [30:46]
B
But even for a popular celebrity, even that one that is unanimously praised, I think that they would suffer the same fate. Because once you've given this initial endorsement to a token, what left is there to give? Are you going to give another endorsement? You've already done this. And no celebrity is ready to really attach this to their fame. I don't think he's ever, maybe I might be wrong, but I don't think Kenny west is going to sell his concert tickets with YZ tokens or his clothes with YZ tokens. I don't think he's going to go that far. And no celebrity in the past, whether this is Jason DrBullo or Mayweather or Little Pump, they never give these tokens further utility than the initial attention they gave it. And because of this, once you've given this initial attention, the token is going to be down only because what else can you provide that's not the case for utility token because utility token, there's always more you can do. You can attach it to your product, you can give yield to this to your holders. This is exactly what Pompom or Hyper Liquid are doing. And you can always incrementally improve the utility of your token. But tokens that are purely attention based are not working. Especially now that there is so much tokens. And I think this is why in the case of Easy it was such a bloodbath is because of this very fact. And now you have 10 minutes to invest. If you miss this initial 10 minutes, you're going to invest into the peak and you're just going to be exit liquidity for the snipers who got in in the first second.
- [32:19]
C
Yeah, basically when you add up a kind of like everybody who participated, it's something like out of the 70,000 total traders, it's close to like 60,000 that lost money.
- [32:33]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [32:36]
C
I mean it's not that different from all the studies that show what happened on Pump Fund. You mentioned one of the, you know, people in this sniper crew, Nassim. Tell us, tell us about him and what his trajectory has been in these meme coins.
- [32:54]
B
So this is, this is a super interesting story and it's something that we're digging into more because those snipers in my opinion are plaguing the industry. They're very sophisticated, they're very smart. They acquire the this information sometimes purely on chain. As I said before, they sniff on chain, they listen and they have certainly some very smart algorithm that are at least giving Them reducing the amount of tokens they have to check. Because if they have to check 5 million tokens per month, this is simply unbearable. So certainly they have some pre filtering algo. And then based on, based on this and based on some insider information, because some of those alpha groups, they are willing to pay insiders to have the ca in advance. Let's say you're the nephew of a president who wants to launch a token and you've heard during the dinner from the uncle that maybe he's going to launch a token at some point and maybe you have some other information because you're related. I say nephew, but you can be a friend, you can be an employee, you can be anyone around a president. There's hundreds of people just gravitating gravity around the president. And maybe some of, some of these guys, they, they have access to this information, but they have no clue how to participate, how to leverage this information they have. And what ends up happening is that sometimes they contact this alpha groups or this snipers group and they say, I have an information that might be of interest, But I want 50% of the amount you make on these snipes. And so these alpha groups, as I said, sometimes they sniff around, but most of the time they pay. They have this network of people that are well implemented and they receive privileged information, they pay for this privileged information that allow this to snipe even more. What's crazy about the sniping group as well is that sometimes they don't compete, but they coordinate. Meaning that instead of sniping for a million, you will do way more damage if you snipe with 10 million. But maybe you don't have 10 million of your own. So what you do is you get in touch with other snipers because you're convinced that the information you have is incredible and rare and that it's going to be the hit of the century. So you pool funds in one address and then you snipe with this address that just gathered $10 million and then you redistribute the funds to all the, all the snipers. The issue with this is that in any market a monopoly is considered bad because then there is no competition and that allows the company that's alone to abuse the system. That's exactly what is happening with the snipers. Instead of competing, which would create, I guess, something fair, or at least more fair, they collect the funds and they snap together all at once. They snipe together all at once and they completely destroy charts. And in the case of Nassim, the first time we met, we never met him. The first time we encountered him on chain was in the case of Trump, where he made 100 million out of a $1 million investment.
- [36:10]
C
Wow.
- [36:10]
B
And he was so certain that it was the right Trump token that he bribed the chain for 70k. Bribe the chain for the audience that is listening means that you're literally throwing money out the window. You're giving it to the chain.
- [36:25]
C
You mean like in transaction fees?
- [36:28]
B
In transaction fees, absolutely. You're paying this to the miner because in the event that your transaction would collide with somebody else, you would be first. And then it's a betting war, meaning that based on everybody who's bribing the chain, the one that is bribing the more the most is going to be first, and the one who's bribing a bit less is going to be second, third, fourth, et cetera. And they were so convinced it was a banger trade, rightfully so, because they made 100 million that they paid the chain 70,000. Throw it out the window. I don't need this. Take it. I want to be first. And this is what happens on so many of these meme coins. They have the contract and they are ready to pay the chain. And this is why in so many of these cases, we know there's some degree of insiders information. They're not waiting for the tweets to be live with the. With a contract address to be publicly shared. Because otherwise you have no time to bribe the chain. Then you're just playing with everybody else, with the newbies like us, the rest of the world. No, you have the information and you're really to. You're willing to pay something just to have this certainty that you're going to outsmart and outpace everybody else.
- [37:40]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that, like, he definitely must have known for sure, because you're right. Everybody else, like, if I think about the people who were at the ball that night and they were like, is this real? Like they're trying to figure it out, you know, but he, you know, without needing any extra confirmation, knew. So one other figure that is kind of in this world that also made an appearance recently is Sahil Arora. You know, we've mentioned this on the show before. This involves Bass and Jesse Pollock and Jacob Horne of Zora and. And also perhaps a boxer, or at least the boxer's name, Tyson Fury. So, yeah, tell us about, about him and what you've noticed about his activities.
- [38:30]
B
Sahil is known to be the crypto villain. He's, he's proudly, he's actually proud of this name that he got from the crypto community and he's proudly representing the crypto villain. He's certainly an interesting character. So it's an Indian man who's based in Dubai and who's notoriously known for onboarding celebrities into crypto. What he does is that he on Instagram most of the time, he DM some of these well known celebrities with very attractive offer. And this offer can be I will pay you $300,000 for a tweet. And for some of the celebrities, even though they're certainly very well off, an offer like this for such little effort is ending. So they end up accepting and I'm going to stretch my brain and be very charitable and assume that most of them don't even know what they're tweeting. So because Sahil, they share with them a contract address, it's not clear what it is. For someone who's completely obligious to crypto, who doesn't know crypto, sharing a contract address on Twitter, it can be anything. It can be an affiliate code for a crypto website or for a casino. It can be anything. Not necessarily a contract address. But this is his traditional process. He pays them a huge amount of money, he creates a token and he shared the contract address with the celebrities to tweets. And then the celebrity tweet about the token. And because he's of course, because he created token, he bought 60, 70% of the supply and he then just dumps the supply on the community of the celebrity that tweeted it. So he's using the community of the celebrity as exceed liquidity for the token he created in their name. So that's been how he got very well known. I'm sure you've heard about Jason Derulo's story. It was actually super interesting how he tricked him and then Jason Derulo, he tried to get the supply back from him and then it turned to this huge mess of a story where Jason Derulo, I don't know, he tried to clean his name, but it was a mess. Really, it didn't end up well. And yes, Sahil, he's a very interesting character. I don't know how he manages to convince them one after the other. That's always the question. Despite the fact that everybody's talking about him, at least in the crypto community, he keeps scoring new names every single time and new trophies. How is he doing this? I don't know.
- [41:17]
C
Yeah, I mean, it could even be something as simple as he says. I've worked with so and so and so and so and so and so. And that alone makes people trust him. Who knows? Yeah, I mean, it might also just be like they're so used to doing different kinds of deals that they don't realize they should scrutinize this a little bit more. Bubble Maps tweeted, something that I think a lot of people are probably feeling. Despite our collective efforts as investigators, builders and communities, the same names keep running the same scams. The playbook is simple. Infiltrate big launches, get in early and extract millions. It's happening in plain sight and no one is stopping it. So then of course you mentioned what we just discussed, Hayden Adams, the YZY Token, Naseem, Sahil Rohra, and you mentioned these all happen within a few days, which, like, that's another mind blowing fact. And you concluded all of these cases show a systemic failure in law enforcement and user protection. So do you have ideas on how the industry can handle these kinds of things or just generally, you know, what, what it is that they should do about these types of situations?
- [42:29]
B
That's a very good question. The thing is, as an analytical firm, there's only so much we can do. Our contribution is very limited to the fact that we can only help set up a diagnostic. So when we say, when we see all these launches happening, when we see these repeated patterns of Sahil onboarding celebrities, Hayden Davis being involved in these presidential tokens, snipers plaguing the game and racking up millions, we can only sit and see. We can only see and observe and desperately trying to spread the words on what's happening in the space. The thing is, I've become very convinced on the fact that governments and law enforcement is not going to help because they're too slow. This industry is just going so fast and mechanically because governments are in the way they're built. It takes time to create new laws and to sit down and vote them. The crypto industry is just going too fast for this to work. Not talking about the fact that it needs some international cooperation for this to even be remotely considered. Because if you're a scammer and you're based in Dubai, you don't really care about the laws that is going to be voted in the US government by the US government. You don't care you're sitting in Dubai or any other country that is more permissive with this kind of crypto stuff. So I've become very convinced that if there is a solution to this mess. We need to fix it as a crypto community. And this is why I ended up this tweet by saying no one is coming to save us. I know it sounds a bit daunting as a conclusion or maybe a bit pessimistic, but I really think that's the case. And so for me, the way that we want to help the space, our modest contribution to this is that we want to make sure that when there is an incident on chain or just a crypto incident, we want to make sure that the information is shared very quickly, not only by us, but by any sleuth out there that has an eye on what's happening on chain. The zakyxbt is of this world, but you don't need to be that seasoned. ZakxBT is obviously number one, but there is an army of people who are scouting things like the snipers, but for, for like white hat snipers, we can call it that way, who are just looking at transactions and sharing, sharing tweets and alerting everyone on, on some of the danger of the space. I think this is where we can help. And what we need to do and what we will do with Bubble Maps is that we will, we're creating a platform right now that collects all these tweets and as soon as there are on chain incident there is this, there's going to be this resonance, this platform where you can quickly, at a glance see what's happening with a particular incident. This is how we want to help, this is how we want to contribute to this large scale issue that is ramping in this space.
- [45:25]
C
Huh? And then wait, so like basically people can kind of flag some kind of, you know, like, you know, check this out. I think there's something shady happening. And then what? Then there's like a warning to the.
- [45:41]
B
Community or like so they, they don't need to go out of their way and, and write. On this platform it's called the intel desk, they just need to tweet. But the thing that's a bit bothering about the tweets is that very quickly they just disappear into the oblivion of the feed and you forget about them. And because crypto has such a short memory, you even forget that three months ago a president just rocked the token. You just forget it and you move on. That's exactly what we talked about, about Hayden Davis having 100 million sitting in a wallet. So I think where we can help is just making sure that crypto now has a memory and we stop with just this non existent accountability where you can Just commit the worst, the worst thing in the space. I'm not going to call them crime because technically they're not. Crime is legal but, but you can just commit stuff and then everybody moves on and there is no accountability whatsoever. So the idea with this platform is that it's going to be, you can think about it as a Wikipedia of on chain incident where every case is going to be directly organized and you're going to see exactly what happened and who contributed to the case and we hope to bring memory back to crypto at least.
- [46:56]
C
Okay, all right, so we're going to switch topics because there is another incident that not incident. There is another event or development today that you found some interesting tidbits about. So obviously everybody knows that today World Liberty Financials token got listed on exchanges. The Trump family's wealth in crypto went up by five and a half billion. But bubble maps tweeted thing about somebody else who's not a Trump, who benefited financially, who's Justin Sun? So tell us what it is that bubble mass found there.
- [47:32]
B
We're not blaming Justin sun at all for that matter. He's a brilliant investor and he invested 75 million on the, on the World Liberty Financial pre sale. Anybody could have invested back then. It was, it wasn't in public, it was a public pre sale. He invested once 30 million at 1.5 billion FDV and the second time 45 million at 5 billion FDV. And because the current FDV of World Liberty Financial is 20, how much is this 25 billion if I'm not mistaken? I think on average he made a 10x. Yeah, I think it's 25 billion right now.
- [48:11]
C
Okay.
- [48:12]
B
He made a 10x on a 75 million investment, so that's $750 million. One thing that I want to know here is the fact that he, I think he, he got, if I'm not mistaken, 20% of the total pre sale. So he invested a significant amount of money. He took a huge risk, I'm going to give him that. To his credit he took a risk and he got 20% of this total amount of unlocked on day one. Because that's the thing with this pre sale, you got 20% but then the rest, the 80% hasn't been decided. What's the vesting in the cliff? That's the funny thing about this World Liberty Finance token. You don't know what's the vesting in cliff for the lock tokens. It hasn't been voted yet, which is surprising for a token that's already launched. Usually before the token is launched, you set the parameters for the token, whether this is the vesting, the cliff, and the distribution. But in this case, it hasn't been done. So there's a degree of uncertainty on whether Justin sun is going to get the token within six months or a year or two years or more.
- [49:20]
C
Yeah. Something interesting about Justin sun is. So our executive editor Steve Ehrlich wrote Forbes cover story on Justin sun, and in it, he talked about how Justin sun actually was a huge fan of the Apprentice when he lived in China and actually kind of like, says that he learned English from watching the Apprentice. So. Yeah, so it's kind of interesting that he kind of got into, like, American culture through watching Donald Trump as, you know, a reality TV Persona. So, yeah, so it's interesting now that, you know, I think, like, it's, you know, Trump is somebody that he must admire a lot or just feel some kind of affinity toward, you know, following him through that whole period.
- [50:07]
B
I agree, because he also, I think at some point he was the number one holder of Trump coin, if I'm not mistaken, to participate in the dinner. So you're right. I think he's a big fan.
- [50:17]
C
Yeah. All right, well, before we go, I would also like to hear your story. Tell us how you got into crypto and how you came to found bubble maps.
- [50:26]
B
I got into crypto in 2017. It was at the peak of the bull run back then, but I think it's a kind of a common denominator for everyone. When you join crypto for the first time, it's at the peak of a bull run because it's when the social pressure of getting into crypto is too strong and you cannot resist the urge anymore, and so you start to invest a little bit. And then I got completely wrecked by my first investment. But the passion that I got at the time stayed, which is. Which is for me, a net positive.
- [50:53]
C
Can I ask what that first investment was?
- [50:56]
B
Yeah, of course. I think it was couple of random tokens that went to zero and ripple. Yeah, I didn't know what I was doing, to be completely honest. I was completely blind and I did some random thing. But, yeah, it's what I did. And at the time, it was my first job. I was working for a consulting firm one year in, just after engineering school, and I was like, all right, this space is for me. This is exactly like my old video games that I was playing, but on a larger scale. And I like this culture. I like it a lot. So I decided to launch A company at the time called Crypto Navia, who was an on chain, not. Not on chain, was an analytical tool for crypto that was gathering a lot of news outlets and information about what's happening on social media. Kind of a Bloomberg for crypto. But that didn't work out, to be completely honest. And at some point we spent two years on this and we decided to pivot for on chain data instead, at some point, because we realized that on chain data was actually what matters most, or that was something that was exciting us way more than traditional information or Web2 information. And this is how at some point we decided to launch bubblemaps. And it worked very well, actually, very quickly when we launched this, we realized that we needed this very quick way to understand on chain data because traditional on chain analytics are very intimidating and overwhelming. And Bubble Maps is accessible and user friendly and playful. And it resonated with the crypto community very quickly. And one of the evidence of this is, is the fact that now Bubble Maps is integrated everywhere in the space. It is on Coingecko, it is on DexCreener, it is on Axiom, on every popular crypto website. And personally, as a founder, I'm very flattered because people say, let's check the bubble map of a token, like a common word, like a concept, not a brand. As if you would say, let's check the chart of a token. So managing to become part of the culture, part of the crypto culture as a word, is the best compliment that you could say to a founder. Actually.
- [53:17]
C
Yeah, I would agree. And so actually something that I realized I don't know about these data firms is do you have to run nodes on all the chains or is it literally just connecting to different block explorers through APIs or what does it look like?
- [53:34]
B
It depends. Sometimes you can be dependent on nodes. But for us, the way that we decided to do this is we don't want to redo something that's already been done very well by company that raised sometimes hundreds of millions to gather all the nodes from all the chains. We don't want to go through this. So instead we're building a layer on top of these providers. We're usually using the data from various providers and building this intuitive, sexy bubble map on top of the data they provide. Of course, we have some redundancy in case some of this provider would go out of business, which is something that can happen in crypto. So we are pretty robust in the ways that we handle those data providers. But no, we, we don't want to Run our own rpc. I think this is, this would have been a nightmare for us to do.
- [54:21]
C
Okay. And so, you know, because there are a number of these different blockchain data firms, like how does Bubble maps, you know, position itself or distinguish itself from some of the others?
- [54:36]
B
So the one that comes to mind who are in the same category as we are are I would say Nansen, arcam, Jun Analytics, Block Explorers. And the way we differentiate is one where probably the most intuitive and user friendly. You know, when you connect on babs you have this colorful bubbles, those colorful clusters. It is very approachable, it's not intimidating. And it's a mission that we've had from the very beginning because crypto was built on the premise of transparency and the fact that everything that happens in crypto is written on a ledger. But because you have 5 million tokens that are created per month and hundreds of millions of transactions potentially per day, who's just going to look through them at all? So with babmat's remission has always been to simplify things as much as we can. So this is, I think in terms of the mission, how we differentiate from these other providers. And then again, similar to what I said before, we were never selfish with bubble maps. We were not saying, hey, go to bubblemaps IO to use bubble maps. We say we're just going to work with everyone, we're going to go where the users are. And this is why we are on Coingecko and pumpfun and all the other website. We want to be where the users are, we want to walk them, we want to work with them on their journey towards crypto. And also that's a very effective go to market. One of the other point, and this will be my last one, is the fact that we have a token. Not every analytical tool has a token. Arcam, they have a token. Nansen, Dune and Block Explorers don't. And our token is called Babel Maps Token. It is listed on every major exchange, including Binance. And the point of this token is to decentralize the investigative process. Process, meaning that we don't want to be the only one deciding on what we should investigate. And this is the point of the intel desk that I mentioned earlier. We want this idea of investigating tokens or anything for that matter, crypto related, to be a community pro, to be a community related process, a collaborative effort. And so we're building this on chain intelligence layer where everybody's going to contribute to this larger scheme that is on chain investigations through the intel desk and through bmt.
- [56:50]
C
Oh, okay. Okay. So earlier when you talked about the intel desk, that's what the tokens for. Yes, I see. Yeah, I was going to ask. That was my next question to ask you what the token was for. So. Okay. Well, it's been super fun chatting with you. Is there anything else that I didn't ask you about that you would want people to know?
- [57:12]
B
That was a very well rounded interview. That was a pleasure to be with you, Laura. No further question on my side, but maybe a little final word. Before investing into a token, always check the bubble map. We have a saying, we say just bubble it meaning that you should always open the bubble of the token. And if you see any shady cluster, any cluster that is above 20% of the supply, you should definitely start wonder why are these connections there is somebody trying to hide from me is the token bundled? And one of the advice that I keep giving is share the bubble map inside the telegram group of the token. And based on the answer, you have your, you know, if you want to invest or not. If they ban you from the telegram groups, you have your answer. You know they're trying to hide something from you.
- [57:58]
C
Yeah, that's, that's a super smart tip. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on Unchained.
- [58:05]
B
Thank you, Laura. Pleasure was mine.
- [58:07]
A
Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Aranovich, Margaret.
- [58:12]
C
Curia and Pam Majumdar. Thanks for listening.