David Phelps
31 Oct 2025Synthesia rejects Adobe & Meta $3B bid, Wonder $12M, Sequoia $950M fund, Icarus Robots, Ledger Gen5
David Phelps: Crypto Twitter, Monad & MegaETH
JokeRace founder David Phelps joins the show and describes crypto Twitter as an alternate country with its own politics, reminiscing about the Up Only call with SBF, Do Kwon, and Martin Shkreli. He explains the two launches everyone is watching: Monad, a parallelized EVM layer-1 that raised at a ~$3B valuation from Paradigm and is finally doing its airdrop, and MegaETH, an Ethereum L2 with roughly 10-millisecond block times built for latency-sensitive applications. He highlights MegaETH's novel apps like Noise (betting on mindshare) and World Capital Markets' delta-neutral leverage, plus its choice to sell tokens rather than airdrop to farmers.
JokeRace: Vote-to-Earn Subjective Prediction Markets
Phelps explains JokeRace as a subjective prediction market: unlike Kalshi or Polymarket's objective outcomes, users buy votes, funds go into a rewards pool, and voting for the winner earns rewards on a price curve that incentivizes early conviction. He cites Avalanche's app-bracket contest that generated over $1M in voter rewards — some voters made $40k in five minutes — and imagines bot-proof Product Hunts, reality-TV voting, and debate scoring built on top. He shares his background as a third-time founder from fintech and edtech, and the lesson from DAOs and Crypto The Game that crypto products take off when they're genuinely fun rather than farmed.
Building Crypto Community & Why Crypto Must Be Fun
Phelps likens JokeRace to a sports stadium — anyone can run contests as leagues, and participants form teams — arguing a native community depends on contests with teams that have fun and want to come back. He observes American retail is checked out after NFT losses while Korea, Japan, and China have thriving scenes, with Japanese players staying up until 3 a.m. to play. The hosts confess to paying Fiverr workers to grind NFT Discord quests before dumping the bags, and Phelps argues money should magnify fun the way it does in horse betting or a £5 poker game. The interview closes with the hosts proposing a dedicated crypto day episode.
29 Oct 2025etn. Episode 5
David Phelps on the Monad and MegaETH Launches
After connection troubleshooting, Joke Race founder David Phelps joins and explains why crypto Twitter is abuzz over the imminent Monad and MegaETH token launches. Monad is a parallelized EVM layer-1 that raised at a $3B valuation from Paradigm, with an airdrop long joked about as never shipping; MegaETH is a ~10-millisecond-latency L2 settling to Ethereum, enabling new latency-sensitive apps like Noise, Euphoria and Legend, and it's selling its token to loyal users rather than doing an airdrop. The group also reminisces about the SBF era, including his "sell me all your Solana at $3" tweet and the clip where Martin Shkreli told him jail isn't that bad.
Joke Race: The Subjective Prediction Market
David explains Joke Race as a subjective prediction market: instead of betting on objective outcomes like Polymarket, users buy votes into a rewards pool and voters who back the winner earn from it, with a price curve rewarding early conviction. He cites Avalanche's ecosystem bracket tournament, which generated over $1M in voter rewards (some players made $40,000 in five minutes), and says Joke Race will be live on both Monad and MegaETH. He traces the idea to his DAO-era lesson that financial incentives attract mercenary farmers while Crypto The Game showed people show up when it's fun — so money should magnify the fun, like poker or horse betting — and likens Joke Race to a stadium where anyone can run contests between teams. The hosts swap NFT Discord-farming stories, note his Japanese users staying up to 3 a.m. to play, and agree to explore a crypto day and a Joke Race contest on the show.