Ansem's argument on 25 August was not about what a coin is worth. It was about who pays the person trading it, and his answer was that the app does.
The claim
Answering a reader who objected that trading needs capital while Instagram and TikTok are free, he wrote that "onchain requires minimal capital" and that, in what he called hypergrowth mode, "successful startups will pay high costs for user acquisition because the winning outcome is being the next apple/facebook/tik tok, so you have ppl who will literally get paid to trade" [1]. The funding mechanism he named is native to the asset class: "one of the unique advantages of crypto that beats out tradfi counterparts is how easy it is to bootstrap startups with token airdrops & fee-sharing, uber did similar with discounted rides but its even more aggressive when its cash hitting retail's bank accounts" [1].
Minutes later he restated it as structural rather than tactical, "if this isn't clear to you you're not paying attention, this is a megatrend" [2], and, quoting a post arguing that each era of on-chain infrastructure has widened consumer access, added: "it is the best time to be trading crypto onchain ever in its entire history, this is not an exaggeration" [3].
The consumer-software comparison is his own. He described the position as "like being an early facebook user in 2008 but you have the upside of also making money & owning a piece of generational startups" [1]. Earlier in the same session, amplifying a post about how on-chain trading holds attention, he wrote that "social trading is going to flip instagram and tik tok" and pointed to "multi trillion dollar outcomes over the next decade for crypto apps who bridge gap between speculation and social" [4]. His compressed version pairs the speculative side with real-world assets: "memefi, you combine the speculative fervor retail has on trading memes w/ durable systems powered by that attention & connect it with RWAs", which he called the cycle's entire thesis [5].
The same mechanism, in his own accounting
The thesis and his personal ledger describe the same plumbing. "hit $2M on pump, $8M more to go," he posted, quoting his own earlier statement of intent to be the first creator to make $1M from X ad-revenue sharing and $10M from Pump.fun creator rewards inside a year [6]. He also asked which token had built something to auto-claim those creator rewards on a user's behalf [7]. Whether or not the target is met, the money in that post arrives the way the money in the thesis arrives: an app routing fees back to the people generating its activity.
The mechanism is not a forecast
It was visible elsewhere in the same day's coverage, stated by operators rather than by an analyst. Nansen's own promotional thread set out the economics in plain terms: a points system that lowers trading fees by tier, with up to 40% off cited at one tier, and referrers earning up to 47.5% of the trading fees generated by the people they bring in, plus 10% on any paid plan or API credits those people buy [8]. From the mover tier, CZ described Trust Wallet as one of the biggest user-distribution channels for perp DEXs, in both revenue and user base [9].
That is Ansem's sentence written from the other side of the counter: the scarce thing is the user, and the fee is what you spend to get one.
Prices appeared too, briefly
"solana looks good." [10] "floor it" [11] "robinhood vs solana battle is going to be one for the ages" [12]. When a post he quoted reported the highest-volume day of any Solana ETF, over $108 million in a session and more than $261 million across four, his entire comment was "bottom" [13]. The same run of posts carried a re-up of an earlier call on the memory and semiconductor trade, captioned "i dont know if i could have possibly been more clear" [14], a reminder that the feed is not confined to crypto.
One line from that session: "most bullish i have ever been on crypto in my 9 years of being on here, if you cant see whats coming you need to open your eyes" [15]. That thread is worth reading precisely. The framing that crypto's four-year cycle is broken and that the asset class is "turning into an evergreen asset class like stocks" was written by a reader in the replies, not by Ansem; what he added was agreement that many are not positioned for it [15].
The other end of the same object
The apps at the centre of the thesis drew an opposite reading the same day. CredibleCrypto wrote that he understood the appeal of social-trading apps, but that "when they are purposefully engineered to make you act on emotion (which drives up fees, engagement, and profit for the app and those posting on it) they likely do more harm than good imo." He described a notification-driven feed as making it harder for the people following him to keep long-term positions, and concluded that such an app "is not designed for HODL'ers, it's designed to make you do anything but HODL" [16]. In a video segment the same day, Trader Mayne argued that scaling requires detaching "yourself from the number on the screen", citing a poster who had become afraid to take risk after reaching seven figures [17].
Neither reading refutes the other, which is what makes the pairing worth keeping. Ansem is describing the app's income statement: fees handed back to users as the cost of acquiring them. CredibleCrypto and Trader Mayne are describing the user's behaviour once that engine is pointed at them. The same feature is a growth budget in one account and a distraction in the other, and both can hold at once.
What would settle it
The claim is testable in public. If apps that pay their users keep those users after the payouts normalise, and if the referral and creator-reward rates quoted above are still being paid when volumes are lower, then the customer-acquisition framing is doing real work and the comparison to early consumer software survives. If the payouts are what the users came for, then what is being described is a promotional budget rather than a business model, and promotional budgets end.
