AI ROLLUP #8: $500B AI Boost | Trump’s $70B Memecoin Frenzy | 400K Onboarded | Agent Framework Wars

Welcome, Bankless Nation, to the AI Roll Up where we stay up to speed with the emerging trends and developments in the AI crypto space. I'm David Hoffman here with my co-host Ejaz. Ejaz, how you doing, my man? How was your week?

Uh y not much. Uh President of the United States launched a meme coin that went to seventy billion dollars,

Casual.

decided to launch another one the next day.

What

Did he do that?

Oh yeah, and then he announced five hundred billion dollars worth of investment in AI in the US, which yeah, it's pretty just simple weekends. Casual standard stuff. Yeah. No, Matthew.

were expecting

Yeah, yeah, I mean, just an all right crazy weekend. And I feel like we can't start this pod, this particular episode, without even addressing it. So I want to pull up this tweet that I put out, which kind of summarizes my thoughts around all of this. And I just want to kind of start off with saying I think this is incredibly bullish for crypto AI. And it might sound like a stretch for some, but like let's just kind of like take this. You're embodying the meme

of this like thing that happened? And now you've like you're the the Charlie Day

from Philadelphia.

Phil Delphia is like, here's why this is bullish about crypto AI.

I know why. Completely unrelated things. Yeah, no. Okay. So for context for people who, you know, were most certainly living under a rock and had no idea what was going on. Um, the current president of the United States decided to launch an official meme coin called Trump. Trump official. Trump official. Yes. Thank you, David, for that correction. Because there are many. No, it was official. Yeah, in case you didn't know. And it just surged to $70 billion in under, I think, 30 hours, which firmly placed it as one of the top 15 blockchains or cryptocurrencies in the world. That is the quickest raise or rise of a crypto coin ever, which was just broke into the top 20 crypto.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely insane. And so, you know, what has this got to do with AI coins? Well, I had a few thoughts about this, David. All right. And let me know if you disagree. Well, number one, um, this coin was launched on Solana. So, in my opinion, Solana AI coins are about to get a huge influx of capital. And the reason why I say this is most people kind of like knew about Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana prior to all of this. But I don't think how many people, uh, I don't know how many people actually interacted with Solana, right? You know, they had to get like a Phantom wallet or their limited coins listed on Sex's uh centralized exchanges. And so they were wondering, hmm, what is this thing? Well, now when Trump launched their meme coin, they were like, well, how do I get access to this thing? And so there was this massive flurry of capital to buy this coin. And so what they're doing now is they're looking at their app on their phone and they're up massively, and they're thinking, well, what should I get now? And and you know, I think they start kind of like digging into the narrative behind Solana, what's kind of like the hottest kind of trends, and they'll see crypto AI. And I think that a lot of, you know, tokens and teams and protocols that we've spoken about will start getting a lot of attention and will see that flow from meme coins into these things. So that's like number one.

Okay. I totally agree with you. You tweeted this out at 8 45 a.m. on Sunday. And I was also thinking this, especially the influx into specifically Solana. So the wealth effect of Solana, Solana prior to the launch of the meme coin, was coming in at like $200 with the launch of the Solana of the Trump meme coin came in at $280 for a soul token for a soul, a single soul. Massive capital increase, a capital influx. And so just on the soul appreciation alone, everyone on Solana just got holding Solana.

30 billion dollars of value.

Yeah, so it's mocking. 30%. Yeah, exactly. $30 to $40 billion. So adding that to the capital of the wealth effect of Solana in of itself. Yeah. But you also, again, like you said, uh, like I said, you tweeted this on Sunday morning right before Melania launched, which really just sucked out the momentum and the optimism. Like people, I think, were like, oh, this okay, yes, Trump is doing this to make money. This is a business endeavor, but it's incentive compatible with crypto. And we could all kind of just, you know, look like shove the fact that he's gonna sell a bunch of money and get a bunch of money. We could shove that under the rug because it's incentive aligned. But then when Smelania launched, a lot of that got unraveled. Uh, and the Trump, the value of Trump went down, the Solana, the value of Solana went down, but you know, it's still at 230, 240, it's still pretty okay. So I'm gonna I'm gonna tamper the amount of wealth effect that Solana has gotten, even though it is still real, it's still large, it's still in the tens of billions of

Yeah. Well well let me let me counter that. I agree with you, but let me counter it just slightly. Um and and just look at it this way. A bunch of people saw a brand new coin, specifically a meme coin, go to a $70 billion valuation.

In under 30 hours,

they're gonna now start thinking, probably, wow, there's probably a bunch of other things that could do something similar. Why can't it be my meme coin? My meme coin's funny. I laughed at it. I bought a bunch of it. Maybe it could happen as well. And like I started thinking myself, like, wow, like if this could happen to this, like maybe it could happen to some other types of stuff. I still think it's it's kind of interesting to look at. Um, point two that I make in this tweet is if we just kind of zoom out for a second, it's just completely nuts that we have an acting president of the one of the biggest countries in the world launch something like this. And I think that this might end up being net, net good for the industry. Remember, the biggest challenge that was faced in crypto to date has been unfriendly regulations. And now we have a president that's launching stuff like this. And I think this kind of signals that the game is kind of different now.

Mmmm.

Gary Gensler is out. Crypto voters now hold a huge significant influence over current and future US elections, governments, et cetera. And Trump knows this and will probably play to it. And we also have the most pro-crypto cabinet ever, right? You know, we have um some kingpins from the tech world that are in place to guide policy around AI and crypto. And I think that's quite good. What do you think, David? Do you think that's uh a bit of a stretch or you think that has some legs to stand?

I think that is all correct. I think that's all correct. Like Trump is just blowing the doors open on the Overton window on what can be done and what could be done with uh crypto. I even Mark Cuban, in response to the Trump meme coin, was his response was like, Well, I can I'll launch a meme coin. Uh David Portnoy chimed in on this, is like, well, you know, everyone's just launching meme coins. Uh so I I totally agree with that.

Yeah, but David, let's not forget this was also a massive onboarding event. Moonshot, which is one of the new crypto wallet startups um, which make it super easy to buy tokens on chain, I think using Apple Pay and stuff, onboarded or like showed that almost 400,000 people were onboarded onto Solana just through this single event, which is just completely.

This is something I worried about because like I don't know. I when somebody launches meme coin, I don't know if it's just like the DGEN just goes gambling on this new you know casino game that they were just be given. And then people talk a big game about it, like adoption. Like, is it really adoption if uh Iggy Azalea has a bunch of DGens buying her token? I don't know. Uh so that this is actually data. I didn't know this. I this is actually data that Moonshot is saying 400,000 new people

have made up made moonshot accounts to buy the Trump token in the last 24 hours.

Yeah, I mean, think about it, right? People who already knew about this entire crypto world would have been able to access it through wallets or were trading from deck screeners and stuff like that. This is people downloading this app,

uh connecting their card of bank accounts and just aping via Apple Pay, which is just like just nuts to see in general, right?

It's cool to if you go to the get get trump memes.com, the meme coin page, you can hit buy now with debit debit card, and that takes you to moonshot.money slash trump.

There you go. Yeah.

Which is where P Moonshot is getting all these accounts and where they're getting their data from.

Yep, yep, yep. Um, but also if we look at like fees on the actual base chain, David, if you pull up this tweet, Solana's daily revenue just hit an all-time high, uh almost $60 million, which was more than double of their previous all-time high set back in November. I mean, just look at that chart. That chart is vertical.

I just see I just see so much MEV happening here in this chart. That's all I can see.

Yeah. It's it's it's just insane. And

To this point, right, you know, with we've spoken about Solana, this meme coin is on Solana, people were onboarded onto Solana. It sucked all the air out of the room for all other coins. So if you held a portfolio of crypto tokens on Solana, um, cuff, cough, you know, my AI tokens, um, like a lot of value was taken out of it because people were trying to just ape this coin. And I think you mentioned, David, that, you know, you were one of those people that you woke up and you were like, well, let's do this.

I I woke up one one day too late. I woke up and I dumped every single meme coin that I have in my Solana wallet, which is all of them, uh, into the Trump token. And then I round tripped it. So I'm about to I I've I no longer hold any Trump token, but I was once upon a time almost 3x up. Uh and now I uh came out basically out of wash.

Yeah, yeah. And and and so kind of like bringing it back to AI and like, you know, we want to put our thinking caps on a bit. I did think, well, you know, what does all of this mean for crypto AI? And, you know, where do we go from here? If you pull up this tweet from uh Elon Money, um, I think he makes a really prescient point, which is, you know.

Crypto is still a narrative game and it's very much around mind share. And he kind of evaluated where the top mind share was after this Trump thing had happened, right? What were people talking about aside from Trump? And this is kind of like the ranked list of things, David. Of course, you have our Lord and Savior Fartcoin right at the top, fundamentals galore. Um, then you have things like Gryffane, which is like the the DeFi AI, um, kind of like one of the leading protocols there, AI 16Z arc. So the point is like, you know, a ton of these coins are still very much focused around crypto AI. And this is kind of like a generalized pool of data, right? So it's it's just really interesting to see that.

Oh, this is a pull of data of all possible tokens. Yes, yes, and the and the alpha here is that it's Fartcoin number one, Gryphane number two, AI 16Z number three, ARC, which we talked about last week. And those so the top four are AI tokens.

Yeah.

Yes, correct.

Okay. Correct. All right.

And so then I start

So what you're saying is the meta continues to be AI agents.

Okay, so the argument I keep hearing and why I'm making this point is

um crypto AI, uh crypto AI agents specifically is going to be a very transitory matter. It's not gonna be around for long. It's gonna, you know, rise and die. And I see where that's coming from. We have got a lot of PTSD from you know a ton of other subsectors. I feel like

I I'm I'm cautious.

Yes. Yes. I'm also very cautious as well. And do you know what, David? I remember feeling the same way around a lot of the DeFi stuff because there was a lot of stuff that got created that ended up dying out. But I knew at its core that this was fundamental infrastructure that was needed by society, right? And when I look at agents, I just feel the same way. When I look at like the kinds of things that they're going to enable, you know, much easier UX and interaction with blockchains, they're going to become the leading creators and consumers of blockchains. It just makes sense to me that they're going to stick around and stay. Now, are the protocols and teams that we talk about?

Day in, day out, gonna be the ones that make it. I I think it's fair to say that neither of us know. I certainly do not, right? But I think figuring out where that goes and focusing where mind share is is very important. And the fact of the matter is, for the last, I'm gonna say year and a half to two years, David, crypto AI has been one of the top things in mind share, certainly for the last six months, right? Yes, last episode we were saying it was at 65% uh mind share, which is just like nuts. So I do think we have like, you know, more fuel in the tank uh for for this to kind of go. But I started thinking, you know, does all of this kind of money flow into Solana

AI coin specifically? And if you look at this post, it kind of shows both sides, right? So um

You know, this is a post from uh uh Diamond Hans Dig. And it says, you know, what Donald Trump was fundamentally changed the rules of for this bull market, in his opinion, thinks second order effects are kind of gonna flow to Moonshot. It's going to flow um to tier one exchanges, and it's gonna focus on quite a few things on base potentially, right? So he calls out AIXPT being a strategically positioned um uh coin, which is like very popular. Obviously, it's got like over 400,000 followers. Um, and then he talks about like how this might be one of the main focuses, right? And he argues that like it can still be a base ecosystem and he calls out virtual here where you know a lot of money eventually flows back. Um, and I see that point of view, to be honest, David. I I don't think this necessarily king makes all of the Solana AI coins, but it did just onboard a ton of people who probably won't want to bridge or move their capital anywhere else.

I think what it's really going to help secure my uh belief that this crypto AI revolution uh bubble, whatever you want to call it, is going to be the defining meta of 2025. Is there there we need to hit some inflection point about both crypto and AI, mainly focused on tokens because that's what a bull market is, that really captures the interest of the otherwise uninterested people because that's what brought them into NFTs in 2021. You know, retail investors. We have to strike the curiosity of retail investors. And that takes both we we need uh both like crypto to do well and AI to also itself, you know, I'm not talking about crypto AI, but like Silicon Valley AI to grow in capability and power and investment in the space.

Yeah, yeah. Well speaking of Silicon Valley AI, David, um Trump yesterday announced five hundred billion dollars will be spent

Within the US on AI-specific infrastructure sites, data sites, and just in AI in general. Now, this is a coordinated effort from the likes of OpenAI, Masayoshi-san, who leads the softbank fund.

And it's just crazy. So 100 billion is being focused on being allocated this year alone. And this kind of like made in America theme, which we've seen being propagated over the last couple of weeks, you know, uh if the blockchains and crypto coins are made in America, like Solana and XRP, this is so nonsensical.

Well but

But nonetheless and

USA branded got like a twenty

twenty five.

percent valuation bump left.