加密VC为何选Solana而非以太坊

Banklist Nation. I'm joined by Mike Dudis from Sixman Ventures. Mike, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Great to be here. I appreciate it.

Mike, we've never had you on the podcast before, but we have been around each other since like the very beginning of crypto. It's good to have you on.

Yeah. No, I'm delighted. Uh I've, you know, read tons of what you've written. Yeah. We interact on Twitter and real life and obviously listen to a ton on your podcast. So, really appreciate it. So, um, I want to the current event of the day is once again memecoins and the trenches and that's just been a seemingly an inevitable component of the crypto industry and and it never seems to be like resolved as a topic of conversation and you have a particular uh perspective I think that I want to I want to get it here on on the episode today.

Maybe we can kind of go back to the era of Bonk because that is what I remember like your first actual involvement in like the memecoin trench era and then I and then we can talk about like what's going on with like Robin Hood chain and like the Anom memecoin and like what that industry and like the the debate around base and everything. But I want to I want to kind of get your perspective around like the role that Bonk, the memecoin on Salana, played for Salana back when it was launched and kind of like what your thoughts or like strategy or just overall like perspective was around like memecoins on Salana back before memecoins were really as big as the thing as they are today.

Yeah, absolutely. So you know meme coins today I think people look at them and think of them as this like big uh you know professional industrial complex and to some extent you know that's quite true. The um at the same time you know the meme coins that have the most significant amount of value uh tend to be outliers and don't really fit that mold of kind of like the cynical short-term you know pump and and eventually you know go down rapidly type thing.

So, you know, there's different types of memecoins just like there's different types of you know, VC backed tokens. Um, but anyway, the history of memecoins is you they're one of the earliest primitives in crypto and you know, Dogecoin is like I believe more than a decade old and you know, she enu and so you've had you know Dogecoin is its own chain. Um, you Shibbeinu's and Ethereum memecoin and these are still you today worth billions of dollars. uh memecoins and this idea of you know call it IP community uh you know however you want to describe these um but people sort of having fun around something that doesn't have really tangible value uh is something that has lasting you know interest to humans and and clearly lasting value.

Um so then fast forwarding to your question on bonk uh you know at the sort of depths of the Salana bare market so post FTX you post all the other things that went wrong in all of crypto end of 2022 um you know the the mood the market participants you know in the Salana ecosystem. So the mood was low, the number of market participants had dropped dramatically and frankly the number of creators so so developers I mean there was a meme at the time a joke that there were something like 75 developers left in Salana and you know a group of folks who cared a lot about a Salana who had participated who had built things you know not just you know finance people or VCs or um you know enthusiasts or collectors but developers and you know other people who were pretty deep in the Salana ecosystem said hey what's a what's a really good Okay.

Um, at a time of like low morale and activity to get people get the chain reinvigorated, get activity back on the chain. Um, hey, why don't we reward um, you know, the folks who have been using the chain, building on it, and doing things, you know, for the past four or five years. Again, this was late 2022, I guess, not four or five years, but who had been doing things for the past three years. So, uh, you know, group of 20 folks launched a memecoin called Bonk, uh, you know, a dog coin.

Again, this is before the meme industrial complex erupted. And the idea was if we airdrop, you know, half of the supply to folks who have built on the chain, used the chain, um, collected NFTTS and other things on the chain, uh, one, we're going to have, you know, a bit of a stimulus activity. hopefully you get some excitement, attention and uh you know get people interested in you know building again again this is the stone cold bottom I think soul was you know at that point like close to 10 bucks and you know lo and behold uh it worked so basically air dropped you know 50% of supply within I think like a month or six weeks the token was trading over 400 million uh and so you a couple hundred million in value had been aird dropped at a time when that just wasn't a thing for memecoins out to uh the Salana community and developers, you know, some of them got like I think $10,000 plus at a time when, you know, their products were struggling and you know, many people were grateful and it just led to a lot of goodwill.

Uh over the next six months, Bunk sort of trended down you know into the summer and then uh but at a time when you sent it was really low, it was something really exciting uh for the community and then you know it was authentic. So we, you know, a group of folks continued to work on it. Um, and it turned into not a pure memecoin. So released, you know, products around it, a thing called Bonk Swap, a Bonk NFT sets, eventually a Bonk memecoin launchpad.

Uh, and so, you know, the team still to this day, um, there's a core team of folks who are working on it, um, who give grants, who invest in and support Salana projects. So like to me it still to this day many years later almost four years later represents you know the best of memes and community and I think shows that these things can be good um you know regardless of the value which has fluctuated quite a bit over the years.

Uh in addition it caught the attention of Salana Foundation and Salana mobile. They ended up uh you know airdropping or loading you know it ended up being more than $1,000 worth of bonk onto the phone. So, you know, you bought the phone, it was essentially free if you if you sold your um bonk. And so, that was exciting. It was great marketing. I think it showed the promise of these things when done with, you know, great care.

Um, and frankly, I it laid a um I think a template that others have done incredibly well. You know, not perfectly analogous, but you've seen Wrecked uh have a brand coin. You've seen Pudgy, Penguins, Pangu have have sort of a brand coin. Um and so folks have done that really well. So anyway, you these things done properly include many many more people than for example NFTTS because you know millions of people you can hold a tiniest tiniest fraction a dollar worth or less um you or you can hold a tremendous amount.

Um so you know like anything in crypto uh the really really really positive ones the the bons you tend to be the outlier and we have you know these permissionless blockchains where uh you know anyone can launch anything. Um, and so, you know, over time, uh, the memecoin landscape has changed over the last few years.

The reason why I asked, and I appreciate the story, and the story is like a good one, and as you say, that's like kind of an outlier in the memecoin world, like the the I think the default version of a memecoin like goes up to a very low market cap, $50,000, $100,000, and then goes to zero because

scalpers are just moving on. And that there's like a million of those, but no one remembers those. and and like at the end of the day actually kind of people only remember the good ones because the good ones are the ones that last. I I kind of have like a complicated position on meme coins and I think that's true for the industry as a whole where like at the end of the day it's 2026 and I'm like no longer interested in standing in front