ROLLUP: Milei’s Memecoin Scandal | KAITO Airdrop | The Fed’s QT Pivot? | Ethereum’s Pectra Upgrade

Bankless Nation, welcome to the weekly roll-up where we cover the weekly news, drama, and developments in the crypto space. This is the third week of February today on the show. I have the pleasure of being joined by Kane Warwick. Kane, how you doing, my man?

Yeah, I'm good. I'm good. Just got off a flight from Hong Kong, so

this will be fun.

It was a messy week. Are you sure you are ready to go through the messy ass week of news that I have for you?

Always ready. Always ready.

Okay, uh, Kane, where were you when Javier Malay

dropped the Libra meme coin?

Uh it was just before I headed uh off to Hong Kong. Um, so

Did you?

I

I didn't buy it. You know, it's funny, like I I had that whole thread about Trump and just being like

washed on the trenches and not not having like enough energy to to deal with it. And I saw it and I was just like, uh

too tired. I can't handle this.

Too many loops down the roller coaster. Okay, so I'm gonna go through.

There is a ton of things that happened as a result of the fallout of Javier Malay. I have like 20 links in front of me to go through it all. Uh and so can maybe just like sit back and relax while I like run through some of the facts, and then we'll kind of debrief about all of it at the very end. So on Valentine's Day at 5 01 p.m. Eastern time, Javier Malay tweets out this tweet saying, uh, Argentina grows. Uh, this project uh will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy by funding small Argentine businesses and startups, drops a Solana contract address. The name of this project, in quotes, is called uh VivaLibreDadad Project.com, uh Ticker Libra, and uh and then a Solana contract address. Uh and so if you bought this on Valentine's Day, uh congratulations, you are a true crypto bro. The Libra token immediately launched at something like a two and a half billion dollar valuation, and then it jumped up to five billion dollars within 30 minutes, and then about from 90 minutes from launch, it was down to 30 million dollars. So inside of 90 minutes from launch, it went up to five and a half billion dollars and then down to less than half a billion dollars.

Already people's uh just like warning signs were triggered uh with with this Libra launch. 82% of the Libra token were held in one cluster of wallets that all spawned the Libra token. Also, no tokenomics were shared. Unlike the Trump token, no tokenomics were shared, just the president of Argentina tweeting out this Solana contract address. And so people's people's like warning signs were all ready uh firing. But then I guess it doesn't really matter because the thing had already dumped inside of 90 minutes.

Um

there was uh another tweet from Javier Malay saying a few hours I put a go, I posted a tweet, like I have so many countless times, supporting a supposed private projects, which I obviously have no connection to. Uh he has since deleted the tweet and finishes the suite with to the filthy wrath of the political castle.

Who wants to take advantage of this situation to do harm? I want to say that every day they confirm how lowly politicians are, they increase our conviction to kick them out in the arse.

This is just day one.

There is this individual that arises on this scene named Hayden Davis from something called Kelsier Ventures, who I don't think anyone had ever heard of before. Kane, before this, have you heard of Kelsier Ventures?

No, uh it it's weird. Like I I um I'm in a lot of chats and uh and you know uh there's different cabals that uh have been mentioned, but these guys never came up to the best of my knowledge.

Yeah. Yeah. And this individual Hayden Adam uh not Hayden Adams, very strictly known as Hayden Adams.

I was about to say, you you're you're using its full name. How much did Hayden Adams pay you

to make

his

own?

Second Hayden that I've ever come across in crypto. First one, uh Hayden Adams of Uniswap, great guy. Hayden Davies, uh, who is a supposedly behind this Trump meme coin along with Kelsey or Ventures, puts out this statement about trying to explain what just happened. And it's kind of a mess of an explanation. He puts a lot of blame upon snipers.

A sniper bots that were going to come and snipe this supply. And then later, also Hayden went on a CoffeeZilla interview. If you do not know who CoffeeZilla is, he is this YouTuber who kind of just exposes scams across the world and very frequently comes into the crypto space because we tend to produce a lot of scams. And so we invoked CoffeeZilla. CoffeeZilla posted an hour and a half long interview with this Hayden individu individual where Hayden admitted that he sniped, Kelsey or Ventures sniped the Libra supply

ahead of to get to front run actual snipers.

Maybe maybe not the best tactical decision uh in in this whole uh mess to go on copy Zilla.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe maybe maybe not

as well thought out as uh as you know this criminal mastermind uh

uh we thought he was, but here we are.

It does seem very much like an SBF post FTX list like publicity tour

Mel

where the the man just does not comprehend at all that he just might be in at least a little bit of legal trouble.

Yeah.

He thinks he's good.

Just crashing out, completely crashing out. Yeah.

Completely crashing out. Yeah. It doesn't stop with Hayden, though, who somehow we will reveal shortly here, got the uh got Javier Malay to tweet out this tweet. So we'll we'll talk about how he actually got that to happen. But there's also something that's worth talking about in this whole complex is uh Jupiter and Meteora. Um the Meow, who is the founder of uh Jupiter, it's not his actual name, uh, had to put out the statement saying, hey, uh there uh early employees of Jupiter were seen trading the uh Libra token, but Jupiter had nothing to do uh with uh the launch of this token. Uh we had no employees that had any insider information. So he had to put out the statement.

That Jupiter and nobody in the Jupyter uh orbit really had any sort of inf insider knowledge. Uh Miao, again, founder of Jupiter, had founded this thing called Meteora, which is kind of like a more sophisticated AMM with a bunch of levers and gadgets and dials to really kind of be able to tweak a Dexon Solana. And Meteora does not have the same level of deniability. So there's Ben Chow from Meteora, who has since stepped down, who also tried to distance himself from this Libra launch. But as it turns out, there is this association between Meteora and uh Hayden Davies, Davis, uh, that has been ongoing. So not just the Libra token, uh, but also the M3M3 token, which I think stands for meme, which is related to the Meteora token. It is the meme coin that was launched on Meteora, as well as

as we find out, uh, the Melania token. So the Melania token, Hayden admits to, once again, on the um

On the Coffeezilla interview, that he was also a part of the Melania token launch. Uh, and so we have this one individual who is finding ways to reach out to people of influence and convince them that it's a great idea to launch a token.

And then they get referred to Meteora as kind of this technical service provider.

There's the idea out there that it's actually Meteora who's trying to snipe the supply.

Ahead of Hayden Davies. And so it's actually Ben Chow or somebody in the Meteor orbit who's actually doing the sniping. Uh, and it's actually uh Hayden Davies and Meteor that's going head to head to try and snipe the supply of this meme coin that is being tweeted out by Javier Malay. Now, it's worth noting how uh this uh individual, Hayden Davies, who is a United States citizen, lives in LA, got uh access to Javier Malay.

Uh, and it's reported that uh Hayden Davies found a way to reach out to Javier Malay's sister and wrote messages that have been turned into screenshots on Twitter that say that to the to the effect that he sends her money and that he that she is in her total control. And through Javier's sister, he is able to gain access to Javier, uh, which is how a tweet coming out of the president of Argentina had a Solana contract address in it. This, I think, uh, Kane, I have a take for you.

This is not nearly as bad as FTX, but this is the worst thing in the crypto industry since FTX. How do you how do you like that take?

It's it's the worst thing this year so far,

I would say. Um

February, bro.

I know, right? I know. It's uh dark times. Uh so I think the interesting thing about this is this is not a uh singular event or or news story, right? Like this is this is something like FTX that was bubbling under the surface for a long time, right? Maybe not as long as FTX, but um but I think the thing about FTX was

it really undermined your view of reality, right? Like

I had conversations with SPF where I was like, where's, you know, on Twitter, like, where like, where are you pulling this yield farming money from? And it was like, oh, it's alamed. And so, you know, all of a sudden you had to question your perception of like all the things that had happened. Right. Um, and I think this is one of those things where a lot of people in the space have been like, okay, it's a, you know, there's there's obviously these different cabals doing crimes and, you know, they're they're manipulating launches and they're bribing people to do uh, you know, token launches. But the idea that there was, you know, one puppet master in the background controlling this whole thing that no one had ever heard of is like so wild.

Mm hmm.

It's it's really, you know, and then all of a sudden you go, okay, well, who, if they're able to compromise this person, who else did they compromise? And and so there's this kind of unwinding of a lot of stuff that's happened, and now you've got a singular thread that runs through it all. And and I think that's been kind of the the wildest part of the story is that there's just this

crackhead guy running around, you know, bribing and manipulating people and taking advantage of of different platforms and teams. And, you know, uh it's it's insane that someone was able to get that much uh control and influence um without anyone really knowing that this was going on.

Yeah, I would be curious to know, and I think we're gonna find out because I'm gonna go ahead and guess that there's already active investigations going on to be the man is a is it lives in he resides in LA. He resides in Los Angeles. He's he's on shore. Uh and people lost a lot of money with this. Um Dave Portnoy was paid tokens ahead of launch, was paid tokens, Libra tokens by Hayden Davis uh to promote uh the Libra, uh the Libra coin when it came out. Uh Dave Portnoy returned those tokens, uh, saying that he, because Hayden requested Dave to not tell anyone that he was going to promote the Libra coin. Uh and so Dave returned those six million coins, which I don't know what the total value was, but millions of dollars. Um but Dave had insider information, and so therefore he bought the token.