David Phelps
Co-founder of Jokrace
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.
Wrap-Up, Jack & Jill Ad & Sign-Off
The hosts float running a JokeRace contest so viewers can vote on future guests, then thank David Phelps and tease having him back. They read a sponsor spot for Jack & Jill job search and sign off Tuesday the 28th's stream, telling viewers they'll see them on Thursday.