Welcome to Stocks and Translation Broadcasting from the New York Stock Exchange. I’m Jared Blickery, your host, and with me is the People’s Voice, Sidney Freed. First, please like, subscribe, and comment on Stocks and Translation on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, or YouTube. Today we have back Zach Guzman, who is the host and founder of Web 3 Media Company.Coinage. You might remember him from us uh Yahoo Finance anchor back in the day. Zach, it’s great to see you here today. Today we’re gonna be talking about crypto, your wheelhouse, and our word of the day ties right into it. Meme coin Left for dead in 2022. They’re back, and it’s not just Dogecoin. Trump’s got one. Millennial’s got one. Zach’s got one.And this episode is brought to you by the number 1, just 1 US. That’s right, because it’s a conversion ratio of stablecoins to the dollar in theory. Zach here just got back from El Salvador where he interviewed the tether CEO. So Zach, just first kind of break things down where we are in the market. It’s been a crazy year, and, uh, crypto kind of went above 100,000, then it’s come back down, not at a million yet. Yeah.So where are we?
Well, I think, you know, first of all, thank you for having me back, chair. It’s good to see you. Good to see you again, uh, since the last time. Um, it’s been an evolution, you know, in terms of we got the ETFs last year. That was a big celebratory moment for crypto. We’ve had this election. We’ve had kind of a rerouting of kind of the way that the government looks at crypto this year with all the changes at the SEC Commissioner Hester Purse leading a crypto task force that is changing all of this in real time.And so it’s a steady as she goes environment right now, I think we’ve come down a little bit from the highs, but the excitement, speaking as someone who’s in the crypto space now since I left Yahoo, it’s, it’s, it’s really mounting in terms of institutions, regulators, everyone getting on board and understanding what this technology can do for America, here in America.
And this ties into our word of the day, which is meme coin, and there have been just some almost jaw-dropping regulatory developments, and I’ll, I’ll give that to you in a second, but first, let’s define it and then we can talk.About it, meme coin is a cryptocurrency based on internet memes driven by hype and speculation rather than fundamental value. And back in the day you arguably had to register these meme coins as securities if you wanted to sell them, but now the SEC has reversed course and they’re basically saying, right, since it’s a joke, uh, you can just do what you want with it. That’s my understanding. Yeah, I
mean, it’s been, uh, obviously there’s been a lot of confusion, so it couldn’t have gotten any more confusing than it already was with being coins and the idea of crypto, but now the SEC has come out and.Full throat and said look, these are not securities, and they should be interpreted as something aside from what the SEC regulates and that doesn’t necessarily mean you can do whatever you want because we’ve seen obviously crypto founders get into trouble. You can’t get fraud. Please don’t do fraud anymore and I certainly don’t want to do fraud. And so like when you’re operating with these, it’s really about being clear, being transparent, and the idea of meme coins we saw Trump launch his, we saw the president of Argentina launch his like these are evolving, and I think the cool thing, Jared, is that.They’re really just tokenizing community in a way that, you know, you can have bad versions of that just like you can have bad versions of stocks, you can have bad things on the market, but it’s exciting because now we’re entering the arena with our own meme coin play button which we tokenize the YouTube Creator Award which we can get into. But there are a lot of experiments and it’s exciting to see, you know, early learnings being applied and regulators waking up to.If there are good actors in the space, how can you build with your community in a goodway?
I want to hear about your meme coin, but my general question is why buy meme coins if they’re not really like there’s no real value there? Yeah,
I think it’s been interesting. If you think about the evolution of what’s happening in crypto. Web 2, you had this idea of the only thing that mattered was money. In Web 3 as the internet’s come around, I think we’re seeing this with influencers too and companies working with influencers. It’s not just money anymore, it’s attention.And so how do you tokenize things in that era of the internet, the attention economy? You have attention and money as your kind of two capital drivers. And so yes, it is kind of dumb to think about cartoon tokens that trade as meme coins, but think about Peanut the squirrel. That thing went from like 300 million to like $2 billion and of course it’s come back down. But there is a cycle here, and it’s not as crazy as it might look from the outside, is how can you tokenize attention and something together? What we’re doing though is trying to break down a wall between a creator andaudience, which is something we’ve talked about before, but, but that is powerful in the idea of, you know, Web 2, social media giants, Facebook, all those companies grew by letting a creator bring in followers. But now with Web 3 you can actually tokenize things together and break down the wall and let those followers co-own something, and that’s really what we’re trying to build at my company.
And Zach, you’re, and let’s get into what you’re exactly doing because you’re bringing up this this concept of community, which I think is very important.And talk about it as somebody who might be seeing it from the outside, because a lot of times it does seem crazy from the outside, but if you’re in it and you’re in this group of like-minded individuals, and you, what are you trying to accomplish there and what do these meme coins help you leverage? Yeah,
so I’llgive you a very simple example because I think, you know, a lot of people in crypto talk about things from a high level, but what we’ve tried to launch with Coinage being the first kind of community owned show which is registered here in the US as a cooperative, lets people actually co-own us and we just paid out our first.Distribution to NFT holders, which was a regulatory breakthrough in the US, I think, not a
dividend, but just a
well, we can pay patronage dividends, but yes, this one was not. This was just a distribution. It’s kind of like REI as a co op. Those can pay distribution uh distributions to members, right? You shop at REI, you get a dividend at the end of the year. That’s kind of how it works, and we’re building the same thing for media, but with this mean coin.What we launched is a lot of creators earn YouTube awards when they cross 100,000 subscribers. You can’t buy those things, right? But we got one and we’re like, hey, what can we do with this as a meme coin? Can we tokenize it and let people co-own it with us? And like things like that are kind of interesting to think about what are the value of these things. And all meme coins are doing are let people buy and sell if they want to. Again, this is the main shift that’s happening.Is the SEC is saying, look, do this if you want, but we’re not going to take the approach anymore that a regulator should tell you what to do with your money. But if you do it, you should be aware that to your point, Sid, there may not be kind of any recourse. It’s, it’s buyer beware and
you want to. I mean, in 4 years there could be a completely different administration with a different view on this stuff, and we could easily flop, whereas we flip this time.Are NFTs coming back?
That is a good question too, and I think this kind of gets to the heart of our experiment, right? We launched it was you can buy an NFT and become a co-owner. And to your point, Jared, we didn’t want to get in a position where like, OK, a new administration could come in and flip all of this on its head. And so we went the cooperative route because that is an established legal course for businesses in the US. And so all we did is tie an NFT to becoming a member, so it’d be like if REI tied an NFT to their membership.Um, which I think is again cool because we have a bunch of people who are super into co-ops realizing all we’re doing is really tokenizing them and bringing them on chain in this new era. And so, you know, we went that route because we wanted to be safe regardless of who’s, you know, leading the SEC or these regulators.Um, but I do think now with meme coins, having that clarity has allowed people to experiment without the constant fear. Speaking for creators in crypto who are building here in the US, it’s become a night and day relief. It’s a huge sigh of relief. It’s that, you know, you know, we worked with lawyers to do this legally.And there were NFT projects who got sued back in 22 when we were first launching.
So the regulators were not cooperative, uh, from my perspective, they weren’t cooperative to the whole crypto enterprise. Um, that has seemed, that seems to have changed, and you’re talking about ways to kind of take advantage of the the parts that might linger here that you have a chance that, all right, this is just the way it’s gonna be now instead of being rolled back in 4 years, um.Anything else along those lines, uh, I just find, I find this fascinating because I’m not really in it myself, but it’s, it’s high tech and I like, I like the idea of it
all. Well, a lot of people aren’t, and I, I would say that makes sense, right? Because like, think about when I was at Yahoo, right? We, we talked about Dogecoin sometimes on the show, right? And it’s just like this idea of like the first original meme coin. But there is a community there and said to your point, like price can fluctuate, it could go down, it can go up, but like it doesn’t necessarily change the way that community looks at the thing.And so when I talk to like probably audiences like Yahoo’s, it’s like, what does that mean for the next evolution? Like we could very well see a Dogecoin ETF. And so like all of these things are just kind of like taking some piece to your point, Jared, a piece of technology, wrapping it in a way that like institutional investors might be appropriate touching, and that’s kind of the phase that we’re in right now. Well,
that’s that’s really interesting because as soon as you put a meme coin in an ETF package, then it’s really then it’s really regulated and there’s all kinds of other.I was gonna say is that ding
to your point, the point, like the actual like we’re going to try with Hester Purse, Commissioner Purse, uh, head of the crypto task force. We’ve been interviewing her for years, um, and I mean their announcement was kind of unclear in terms of like what is a meme coin? Like what is the difference really between a meme coin and all these other tokens and you could see where people might get into trouble thinking they’re a meme coin when they’re really not.And that’s again more gray
area for. In the past, the SEC has kind of taken the viewpoint that they’re going to let people venture into these new spaces, then selectively sue them and go after them, then establish case law and then get everybody else. I mean, that was kind of how Forex was regulated back in the day. You go back 25 years, um, and that became a CFTC. That was a CFTC versus SEC battle way back then. But now Forex is mainstream and you still see it as a, as a legitimate retail trade.As instrument. So all of this, do you think all of this just, OK, it’s legitimizing crypto, it’s bringing the institutionalization because that’s what we’ve heard the drumbeat, like the magic thing should be this should become mainstream. Is that still possible?
I think so. And I think again, you’re seeing more tokens beyond just Bitcoin and Ethereum start to move in that direction. We just today got the Salon of Futures ETF potentially coming down the pike. You’ve got ETFs now being filed for Avalanche, all kinds of different crypto tokens. And so there is an interest in terms.Of owning some of these things, and now the work is on the builders in the space to build real things that show that you can actually build real businesses in this space and certainly, you know, plenty of them have existed in this space. Coinbase, all the other ones.
Uh,if, if anyone can make a meme coin though, how do you differentiate between one that’s legit and one that might not be legit? And like what do you think the best ways to go about investing in meme coins are? I don’t know.
That’s so diligence if you don’t really have a lot of rules backing it for sure.
To be honest, that’s the hardest part. It’s legitimately the hardest part. And so I think that, you know, that’s why for Coin Edge is an outlet focusing on this stuff and you know, if you want to go deeper, I think what we do is try to break down the facts. And a lot of people do look at same thing that’s happened here at the New York Stock Exchange, the idea of like depth of liquidity in markets like when you put all this on chain, you can see it. Unfortunately, as you guys point out, sometimes there’s a lot of shenanigans that still exist. We saw some of that with FTX even at like one of the largest institutions, the idea of like using.Tokens as leverage or or
you’ve interviewed SPF. You know the whole thing, yeah,
you know, and I’ve seen these trials play out, so like I know exactly where this stuff can go wrong and so it is tricky, but that’s kind of why Coinage is here trying to help people and also throwing ourselves into the arena to see from the other side how these things get launched, and it’s been very interesting to see how they get launched as we put out play button now and the idea of tokenizing a YouTube creator award to see it on day one, it just hit like a million dollar market cap. It’s like how real is that?And even I couldn’t tell you that, Jared, but like it’s real when you sell it. It’s real when you sell it. And that’s kind of the interesting thing is people are flipping these, you buy low, you sell high, not too dissimilar from stocks, but what we’re interested in is really building, uh, the idea of something that’s sustainable in the space, and I think we’re seeing more people focus on that.
Excellent. We need to take a short break. Coming up, we’re going to be delving into the magic of stablecoins, and we got a runway battle among nations for the global crypto title, can the US leverage its future on crypto?This episode is brought to you by the #1, and that is how many stablecoins should be equal to $1. So 1 stablecoin, $1. If you haven’t followed crypto and you’re not sure what a stablecoin is, Zack, just walk us through what these things are and why would you want something that’s exactly equal to $1? Yeah,
no, I mean, I’m thinking back. This is bringing up memories of me being a Yahoo.Because we shot this in the studio is like a stablecoin explainer in 201. Yeah, and it’s like, and we’ve come so far since then, and yet we really haven’t.
It’s still thesame, same question. It’s still different thanhere. No, I know, but
it’s like, OK, all stablecoins really are is just the idea of taking a dollar and putting it on chain. And why do you want to do that? It’s because, you know, the bank, the traditional banking system takes a while for settlement.You know, the Fed’s trying to shorten that, but if you can really move money for cheaper on chain instantaneously, that opens up a lot of things for a lot of different people. And here in the US it’s difficult to show that, but overseas, like when you go to a market like Argentina where you physically cannot go to a bank and buy dollars because of capital controls, if you’re in Argentina.And you’re trying to put your savings into something that’s way more stable than your local currency, suddenly stablecoins aren’t just like a nice to have, they’re like a need to have. And so when you look outside the US, stablecoins are a huge business and it’s perhaps not surprising to see the largest stablecoin issuer tether now move to El Salvador and operate there because it’s a country that hasYou know, embrace the shift, and I think Tether sees a huge opportunity there as a dollarized economy to insert their stablecoin the same way that we use cash here. Huge opportunity not just for them, but if you think about stablecoin issuers here taking on the big banks, it’s a lot of money in this battle right now, Jared, and the laws are being written and so Tether and USDC going at it in DC, the spat is getting spicy.Spat is getting quite good to watch as a reporter and so it’s you were
just you were just down there in El Salvador interviewing the CEO of Tether. What did you find? What did you find out? Well,
Tether is an interesting company just in terms of how far it’s come because you think about it. They were investigated in New York, uh, in terms of, hey, do you actually have the funds? There’s been a lot of questions and
thereare still questions that I see on X.
There’s always questions. I mean, this is crypto. Let’s not forget. It’s like, hey, show us if you got the funds. And I think what’s been really interesting is that, you know, Howard Lutnick, the former CEO of Kenor Fitzgerald, huge guy, billionaire, has attested to Tether has the money and he was doing that on the campaign trail, and now he’s commerce secretary. And so he’s in the government basically saying, look, we should embrace this technology.And that’s a huge asset to have for Tether because USDC, one of their big competitors, uh, is trying to push back on that and saying that they should be the only one. And so this battle is super, super interesting because it’s combining regulation, Trump characters with a huge battle that’s happening between companies that literally will be printing cash. That’s what they do. And so it’s got all the elements of what’s going to happen here and Congress is debating this right.Now with a with a bill called the Genius Act that will allow these companies to really start to expand. So it’s exciting to watch because the more money that moves into stablecoins historically means more money flows into crypto, which means prices go up.
Youmentioned tether, you mentioned USDC are some stablecoins kind of stabler than others, safer than others?
Yeah, I mean, if you think back to where Coinage made its big stamp was we covered.Terra, which was an algorithmic stablecoin that collapsed. It’s the largest collapse. 22, 21, it was 21, and the idea was, hey, we can have something trade algorithmically. It’ll all be fine. Douan, one of the other people that I interviewed,
I interviewed him right before things hit the fence.
Exactly. And we did the first interview ever should go check that out if they want to on coinage, but $40 billion is $0 basically instantaneously. A lot of people lost a lot of money.Including myself, wasn’t very good. And, uh, with that said your point, it shows that like people are experimenting with this stuff, but when you really want to protect people, you need to make sure that these things are safe. That’s what the government wants to do with this act. Um, and we haven’t seen too many algorithmic stablecoins since, and I think that might be a good thing, uh, to repeat some of those problems in the past and repeat collapses like that. But we’ve also seen, by the way, having dollars in the bank.USDC when when Silicon Valley bank collapsed, they de pegged, and that was another one of those instances where it was like, was it really better to say we have all of our money backing the stablecoin in this bank because tether didn’t depeg so it raises a lot of different
questions. Yeah, and that was the kind of the debate back in the global financial crisis, but back then we had money market, money market funds, and were they going to break the buck, as it’s called and uh interesting parallels there.Uh,
I have aquestion just to take a step back for a quick. How does stablecoins make money if they’re they’re worth a dollar, right? How does that work? How do they do above that, no? Yeah, but I mean the idea that they’re set up and it’s crazy to think about how much money in their company that only has like
100 employees, so it’s like one of the craziest profit.To employee ratio we’ve ever seen in the history of business, and the reason why they make so much money is because they take in a bunch of money, they park it, and they basically just collect on, I think, I don’t know the market cap of it, yeah, but they basically collect the idea of just holding this and as a stablecoin holder, you don’t really get paid that. I mean, now we’re seeing some experimentation because regulations have changed, but that’s how they make so much money and you’re right, it doesn’t, it’s not supposed to go above or below $1 but sometimes we see a little bit of movement.Um, I mean,
isit like in the insurance industry where they have something called the float, they’re taking all these premiums and they get to earn interest on that just by warehousing this stuff. Do they, is that how theymake their money?
Yeah, I mean, I mean some of these look at Teler’s attestation, they’re not fully backed by just cash. They have treasuries and so you could be making money on what you want to do with the treasuries you hold, which is why they’re working with Cant Fitzgerald, and you could hold Bitcoin as part of it too. And so it’s, it’s different depending on which stablecoin.Uh, and which stablecoin issue we’re, we’re talking about, but they find ways to make money, and again, I, I mean, yeah, they find ways to make a lot of money, I should say, but that’s kind of the interesting thing at hand here is these companies are making a lot of, a lot of cash, but they are also at the same time enabling, like I said with Argentina, the way to help people and so I think that that’s kind of, you know.You can have bad outcomes with algorithmic staple coins, but you can also have these things helping people who can’t access dollars, and that I think is kind of the interesting debate now for Americans because it’s like, do we like this because we’re exporting dollars around the world and potentially adding demand for US treasuries, which is good for our country,
which hasbeen in the news lately, and that’s a whole other thing we can get into that or we don’t have to. Um, I don’t, I had a nagging question about crypto, about uh stablecoins. I guess just getting back to the accounting and everything.At the end of the day, is this, is this something that helps people like it seems to be the bridge is between, uh, buying something and having something in crypto. So you have this, this amount of crypto funds in your wallet and it seems a lot easier, uh, just to buy that with a stablecoin than converting it to fiat, uh, which incurs all these, these other legal ramifications, but by avoiding that those legal ramifications and going to stable.Coins, does that just kind of incentivize some other kind of behavior? Is there, is that aproblem?
I don’t think it’s a problem so much. I think, you know, the idea of where stablecoins came from for the crypto industry was can I move into something that’s less volatile than the ups and downs of Bitcoin? That’s kind of where it first came from. And having that pegged to your point, shared is much more efficient.To move into a stablecoin from Bitcoin than it is to move into fiat because then you got on ramp it back into crypto and so it was kind of a necessity back then but now we are seeing people come in through stablecoins like I said, outside the US who might not be able to access dollars and then that gets them on chain and then from there they’re like, well, what else can I do with these things? And suddenly you start to see more and more people shift on chains so this this is happening and it’s happening.way quicker than I think a lot of people realize because now that you know people are waking up to how this works, how these companies are making money, you’re seeing regulators come around, you’re seeing politicians come around because they realize the size of the prize here and that can be good or it can be bad because obviously so much money into politics always I think puts people on edge, certainly puts me on edge, and so we’ll see how it plays out. But that is to me the biggest.The story of 2025 is what’s going to happen in Congress on these two bills market infrastructure and stablecoins to change the game.
The US is strutting back onto the crypto runway ready for a comeback after years of regulatory roadblocks. The Trump administration is flashing a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a bold new accessory that could cement Bitcoin in national finance. But is Uncle Sam truly shining in the crypto game or just playing a game of catch up?El Salvador, the original trendsetter, is rocking Bitcoin maximalism head to toe, uh, now home to Tether’s HQ, which we’ve been talking about. Then there’s the United Arab Emirates, draped in luxury and liquidity, pulling, pouring billions into crypto coffers, turning itself into the digital Wall Street of the Middle East, and Bhutan, the quiet disrupter, effortlessly mining Bitcoin with hydropower, proving that sustainability and crypto can share the same catwalk. So Zaxx, who iswho is wearing this crypto environment better? Is the US, can the US become a leader again, or are we just kind of catching up with the rest of the world? No,
Imean, I think that this is the most exciting thing to see play out because it’s crazy to think, and sometimes you got to step back and think about, you know, just a year ago, the idea of the US president, the president of the United States saying that we should own and his administration saying we should own as much bitcoin as we can get our hands on, but that was literally something that someone just said in his administration yesterday.Uh, it’s crazy. And so the idea of that playing out on a global scale is, at least from Bitcoiners in the community, the idea is that you have this kind of rat race, this, this game of economics where if the US is looking at it, you want to front on them, you want to get involved before. And so, you know, even if the US doesn’t go through on this, it is moving the needle in terms of people watching us as the largest economy in the world. Obviously Congress would need to approve any new money going into Bitcoin, and we’ve seen bills for that.Um, but even before we get that, we could still have accounting tricks in terms of the gold the US owns and maybe changing that around to still on a budget neutral way, buy more Bitcoin. And so a lot of people are looking at that to potentially happen even without Congress acting, which would move the markets because that’s something that a lot of people haven’t expected, uh, beyond what we’ve already seen, which is just take the Bitcoin own.Uh, the Bitcoin in the country already owns from like criminals. Again, Jared, it’s exciting. It’s something that like we haven’t, uh, not a lot of people could have expected just like a few months ago.
Iagree with that. And on that note, we got to wind things down here at Stocks and Translation. Make sure you check out all our other episodes on the Yahoo Finance site or mobile app, and we’ll see you next time on Stocks and Translation.