Nick Navis
speaker
139 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Nick Navis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Now, regardless of which kind of meme coin creator we're talking about, the goal on pump.fun is generally the same. Whether you are a 13-year-old boy or a C-list celebrity or a crypto insider, what you want is for your meme coin to blast off. You can think of the site as a kind of massive launchpad, like a giant Cape Canaveral.
But a lot of it is filled with the skeletal remains of meme coins that have failed to launch.
Which means they basically have zero buyers.
But if a coin creator can get enough key opinion leaders on board, they might get some initial price liftoff. Because this whole horde of key opinion followers might hop on the rocket in hopes that they can hop off before the price collapses.
The hope for the truest meme coin believers is that their coin will somehow manage to reach escape velocity and make it all the way to the financial moon, maybe even Mars, to join the doges and pepe coins of yore.
So just like as in a casino, on Pump.Fun, the house also always wins? Yeah. But if you are somehow coming away from all of this with the impression that meme coin millionaires are being minted all the time, Zeke says that is exactly the fear of missing out that fuels this whole market.
And keep in mind, meme coin trading is a zero-sum game. Every dollar someone makes on a meme coin mathematically has to come at the expense of someone else buying it, which means that this tiny minority of winners, that 3% of traders, is making their fortunes off the vast majority of meme coin investors.
In your mind, is this all just a giant casino? Like, is this just like an ancient practice of sometimes irrational gambling, like just updated and put onto the blockchain?
In a way, a lot of what's going on here feels like a new twist on the classic pump and dump scheme.
Has anyone made a greater fool coin?
And in fact, when we checked the pump.fun registry, there turned out to be no less than 12 competing greater fool meme coins. Half of them with the ticker sign fool.
Just a quick warning, this episode includes a kid cursing.
A few months ago, I came across this livestream video clip that had started going viral online that I think captures something essential about the absurdity of the current financial moment we're living through. Here's the backstory. On the night of November 19th, 2024, this baby-faced kid, he looks around 13 years old, used a new online platform to launch a brand new cryptocurrency into the world.
We're not using his name because he did all this anonymously. The cryptocurrency he created is what's known as a meme coin, which is a kind of joke currency, something that doesn't hold any inherent value besides what other people on the internet are willing to pay for it. The kid named his coin Gen Z Quant. He spent a few hundred dollars to buy up about 5% of the total supply of his new coin.
And then he also started live streaming on the platform. Somebody else recorded the live stream, which is why in the video you can hear the kid and a couple other voices.
In the video, you can both see the kid's face and a chart showing the coin's price. Within seconds, the list of people buying the coin starts to stream in, and the little green price line on the chart starts shooting upward, like a rocket ship trying to reach escape velocity on its way to the moon. At first, the kid seems surprised. Wait, what? Wait, I'm so confused.
But then he gets this kind of devious grin on his face. His cheeks start to get a little flushed. He moves his cursor over to a sell button on the website. And with one click, he cashes out the entirety of his holdings in Gen Z Quan. Some 51 million tokens for a cool $20,000 or so. There's a murmur of surprise from other people watching the live stream.
In the chat, a little burst of fire emojis starts popping off. And the price of Gen Z Quant then immediately collapses. The green line on the price chart turns red and takes a nosedive. And for a moment, the kid again seems shocked at what he's been able to do. Holy fuck! Holy fuck! And then the kid makes it clear. He is not, in fact, so confused. He seems to know exactly what's happening.
He extends both of his middle fingers to the camera and utters a line that's become kind of infamous in the crypto world. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks for the 20 bandos. Thanks, in other words, for the $20,000 or so that this group of total strangers on the internet had just transferred right into his account.
The kid then stands up, starts tugging at his hair, and just takes a moment to revel in what he's pulled off. And I think maybe the most absurd part of all this is that the kid then goes on to pull this exact same move two more times with two other meme coins he created that very same evening, betting over $50,000 in total.
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