Zeke Faux
speaker
126 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Zeke Faux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
network like ethereum or solana where it's like a place where people are creating other crypto things and when you buy one of those coins you're kind of buying into the network and you get a share of its profits so that's almost like buying into like a crypto bank kind of right like it's like it's like investing in a stock for a bit or an exchange or a bank essentially
Yeah, some of them are a lot like that. Like Sam Bankman Freed had one that was called FTT. That was basically just stock in his crooked exchange FTX. But at the silliest end, we have, and which is one of the most popular things in crypto right now, are meme coins. And the first one of these was called Dogecoin. And it's also like...
more than 10 years old, it was created as kind of a parody of Bitcoin. And it was saying, we're going to copy Bitcoin, we're going to change the name, we're going to put a picture of a dog on it. And It turned out that, I don't know if you think this is a funny joke, but it turned out enough people did think this was kind of interesting that they started to buy it.
Unlike a stock or unlike one of these ones where you're buying into a network that generates fees with Dogecoin or other meme coins, there's no way for it to ever generate any money. You're purely buying it on the idea that somebody else might buy it. also for no reason, driving the price up higher. It's kind of like a new form of gambling game. And in the last couple of years,
Thousands of these meme coins, maybe even hundreds of thousands of these meme coins have been created. People are just pumping them out. And there are all these traders that are kind of have they've made it a game to chase like the new meme coin. And if you get in early, the goal is to get in before the masses and then profit when the price spikes and sell it before it inevitably collapses.
Well, true. I think the kind of twist is that In your classic pump and dump, like Jordan Belfort, more of the people that Belfort... When he was calling people, he was saying, hey, this stock is hot. They just discovered gold in Bolivia. It's going to go up. And so there was this element of lying about the prospects of this company. So people were being defrauded that way.
In this case, you've got people like... Dave Portnoy from Barstool Sports being like, hey, I just created this dumb coin. It does not do anything. It'll probably collapse eventually. Do you want to buy some? And people have sort of organized themselves into this kind of pack of degenerate gamblers who move from meme coin to meme coin and try to make money on it.
Yes. So it's kind of funny, but The cryptocurrencies that have actually found the most widespread use are ones that are backed by dollars. And this is because in my book, Number Go Up, I was really focused on this one called Tether. It's the biggest stable coin. It's gotten so large that... There's something like $130 billion worth of it outstanding.
And the pitch is that a tether will always be worth a dollar because it's backed by real dollars that tether the company keeps in the bank somewhere.
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly one popular reason. Criminals all around the world are figuring out that this is very handy because you can keep Tether in like an anonymous wallet and you could zap an unlimited amount to somebody other side of the world into their anonymous wallet. And unless law enforcement is able to figure out what your secret wallet address is, they would have no idea.
Compare it to like a bank or a credit card company that's going to ask a lot of questions about your transfers. You've got like Russia using it to evade sanctions. Chinese gangsters in Cambodia are using it to run this massive fraud and human trafficking operation. And also just crypto traders use it.
Basically, whether you're a criminal or you're selling sneakers, you don't want your currency to go up or down 10% in a day. So the stable coin is more attractive.
So it's three days before inauguration. He writes on Truth Social that My new official Trump meme is here. It's time to celebrate. And honestly, a lot of people in this meme coin world were waiting for this moment because they knew if Trump ever did launch a meme coin, there'd be a lot of interest and it would go up a lot. And that becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So Trump coin shot up as high as $72. On paper, Trump had $57 billion worth of Trump coin at that price. It's since...
crashed it's down to uh i think like 17 bucks now now it's a bit complicated but the best estimates are that trump by selling this meme coin made about a hundred million dollars because his holdings on paper would be hard to turn into real money without like totally crashing the price but he did make a hundred million dollars of totally real money that's the estimate of selling this meme coin so it really beats like you know a new trump hotel or like
Trump steaks, Trump vodka. This is like the best way to monetize your celebrity.
I believe that actually Witkoff was the business partner on Trump's first cryptocurrency, not the Trump coin.
Now, I mean, if he didn't get in on Trump coin too, I'm sure he would be mad because that was like a great money making opportunity right there. But Trump had an earlier cryptocurrency deal. called World Liberty, where Witkoff and his son had a big role.
One interesting part of that was this guy, Alexander Vinik, appeared to be just like a crypto criminal who ran an exchange that some people say was even set up to launder the proceeds of hacks. It's not immediately obvious to me why Russia would want him back or what he had done for Russia. So I was intrigued that he was their side of that trade.
So he runs a blockchain called Tron. He's been around for a while. And the SEC's case against him is that when he launched Tron and sold its new cryptocurrency, he engaged in manipulative trading and fraud activities. to make the price look like it was going up to help sell it to the public. Now, he denies this, but it's a serious case.
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