Coffeezilla: For the last 48 hours I've been investigating the Argentinian meme coin disaster known as Libra. If you don't know, the president of Argentina posted publicly supporting this meme coin, and subsequently it all crashed — and people have wondered where the money is, with $100 million seeming to go missing. I've been in touch with the key players trying to get answers, and what you're about to hear is an hour-long interview with Hayden Davis, who is the main guy behind the launch and a lot of the token decisions. He currently sits with a hundred million in his possession that he's trying to figure out what to do with.
You'll discover through the course of this call that it is not the first time we've been talking. I've been trying to communicate with him for the last 24 to 48 hours. This is not the interview where I push my view, because I wanted to get information. The biggest thing we're missing is answers, so I was mostly just listening on this call. I do think we got some incredible admissions, but I wanted to say it's not my characteristic approach — like calling someone a scammer — and that was by design. The guy was very skittish from the beginning, so I didn't feel like that was appropriate. People are going to have their opinions on this guy either way based on what you hear, but I thought a more neutral approach — just letting him talk — was right.
This is the first time he's talked since he issued a statement on Twitter, which was about a minute long and wasn't received very well. I wanted to give him the chance to put all the information out at once. The interview starts abruptly because he starts with some off-the-record stuff I had to cut out, but hopefully this sheds some light on what's going on.
Hayden Davis: I can just start talking about certain things. One of the issues with Libra — I just want to know: can we consider this part on the record? I don't want to include stuff that's not really anyone's business. I appreciate you sharing that context. The Libra stuff is the meat and potatoes of what I wanted to talk about, so the Libra stuff is fine — go ahead.
One of the issues with Libra is that when you launch on Meteora and you're trying to avoid snipers, there's a whole context around what people call shitloads of insiders — but that's not what's going on. What's going on is you have these expert snipers — guys clipping $1.72 million, $800,000, $1.2 million into the charts. And then because on big launches all this volume is going to come in, at one point one of the top wallets — which for some reason still hasn't sold — had $57 million at a $4.5 billion market cap, which is what Libra was at. That's still going to crush the chart. It's not $4.5 billion in the bank.
So you have to make a real-time decision: do I pull some of the liquidity out to protect the floor, knowing that more marketing plans are coming — or do I just let the chart get crushed? That's what happens on every single one of these launches: three to ten guys get these massive chunks. They're not good snipers — they're just looking to unload their whole position. You can't track it, you can't find it; it takes forever and doesn't work even if you subpoena it.
What happened with Libra specifically — and I'm happy to share, even though Javier and his team have told me there's a substantial interview coming tomorrow live on TV where he's going to clear up both me and Libra as a project — is this: when it launched, our goal was to collect enough liquidity, because Milei was going to do another video, and there were some other high-profile people who were going to interact, post, and market it. So our goal was: can we take enough liquidity off to get the snipers out — or at least control them — so when the chart dips it doesn't crush the whole project, have Milei do a second round of videos, inject all the capital back in, and create something like a mega Trump launch.
I still don't have answers on exactly why he took the post down. I'm assuming there was extreme political pressure and he panicked — which, as somebody in his position, I would understand. He's not a crypto-native person. We've been working through what we can do from here, but people are calling this a rug pull — that's not objectively true. There's still around $60 million on the bonding curve of liquidity that's locked, at about a $300 million market cap. It's not a rug. It's a plan gone miserably wrong, with $100 million sitting in an account that I'm the custodian of — but I have no desire to keep it. I would love instruction on what to do with it. I'm not benefiting from this. My life is just in danger.
Coffeezilla: Thanks for that explanation. There are a few things I want to touch on. The $100 million — I think the view from the public is that "rug" is a word at this point which is so widely used that it has a colloquial meaning: it just means unfair value extraction. In this case, that would be taking money out with no clarity on what it was going to be used for, so people assumed it was just profits being taken. Something needs to be done with this $100 million to try to put it back in people's hands. I think that's going to be a very complicated, tough process, because it's very difficult to do without people further taking advantage of the situation.
Hayden Davis: It's also multi-sided, because it's a meme coin — and putting your whole portfolio into a meme coin is foolish. Not financial advice, but it is. I understand that. At the same time, how do you assess value when the token's not dead? The president will most likely support it, so it's probably going to go back up to some degree. You have to manage the narrative of okay, people have lost money because they chose to sell, but the token isn't dead yet. Where are those lines? Nobody can give me an answer.
Coffeezilla: Sure. I'd be surprised if Milei backtracked — I think he's going to wash his hands of this — but I could definitely be wrong. I don't know the whole situation. Quick yes or no: is Milei going to make money on this?
Hayden Davis: No.
Coffeezilla: Second question: are the two people involved in this launch Manuel and Mauricio from Tech Forum Argentina?
Hayden Davis: Yes.
Coffeezilla: And KIP Protocol was going to run the nonprofit — or whatever it was going to be, like a foundation?
Hayden Davis: Yeah, honestly they didn't have much to do with it. You were going to launch the coin but weren't going to handle distribution of the money, so yeah. I can talk a little more about that. The plan was supposed to be an experiment. Milei has a deep desire to put everything on-chain — to make all the financial transactions of the country public, to tokenize everything. I've been in talks with tons of different people and foundations about structuring what that would look like over the next couple of years. So the idea was to experiment with this and see how it goes, because he supported it but it wasn't his official meme coin — let's make that crystal clear.
Coffeezilla: A big part of this is people trying to figure out what's going on. The money gets taken out of the account, and then there's the accusation that insiders had knowledge of the contract before it went public — that KOLs, people in the know, knew about the coin prior to launch and could have either shared that fact with others (which gives unfair advantages) or benefited from the knowledge themselves. A very easy example is Dave Portnoy, who knew about the launch — I think he said two weeks before it ever came out.
Hayden Davis: Just as a quick amendment: although Dave claimed he knew it was probably coming out, he said he did not buy early or as an insider. His statement is that he bought ten minutes or so after Milei tweeted, and that he would have bought ten million if he could have — that's how he was sold on it. So just to be clear: although he knew of its existence, his statement is that he did not trade early.
Coffeezilla: He had time to put $5 million together, which he traded on this coin. He loses the money ironically, and you refund him. That's the kind of insider benefit and unfairness that a lot of people are going to look at and say this is so rigged. He traded $5 million worth of it and then even when he lost, you refunded him.
Hayden Davis: A couple of things. One, that was probably a mistake, to be honest — whatever time of night that was, I was going back and forth with him, thinking Milei is going to publicly support this, this is no big deal, I don't want Dave to lose money. I wasn't thinking from the perspective of everyone's going to get hurt — that wasn't the perspective. I probably need to have a conversation with him, and I'm sure the terms will be different.
As far as people knowing about the token, I can't say that I, or anybody that knew about that, or Manu or Mauricio haven't told a singular soul. Very few people knew. The idea of insiders has always struck me as a bit of a bullshit framing, because in every meme coin I've ever known, invested in, or been part of, the people who benefit most are the people who structure the deal — similar to any other business. People closest to it normally make the most money or lose the most money. So I think calling it insider trading is a bit much. It's just crypto people who are angry because there's always an unfair advantage if you're a genius on-chain and know how to game the system on Meteora. There are about 30 guys in the world who know how to do that better than anyone.
Coffeezilla: Wait — there are unfair games, and there's a difference. You can know everything about stocks and be Warren Buffett, but there's a difference between being Warren Buffett and being someone with insider knowledge on Pfizer Pharmaceutical and trading on that information. The frustration is not that you're good at trading — it's that you knew something the public didn't know and you traded on that, which in public markets would be illegal. It would be insider trading.
Hayden Davis: But on meme coins it's not illegal — and that's what happens on every single deal. Every KOL globally, that's how their main money gets made. They know about a deal, they agree to a deal, and they make money on the deal. If you're calling that out, you have to call out everything else.
Coffeezilla: I do think that's unbelievably shitty and bad for everyone except the insiders — which is what I always say about meme coins: they disproportionately benefit insiders.
Hayden Davis: My honest opinion is I don't actually disagree. But I think the vast majority of people betting on meme coins, especially at the beginning, know that's the game. All the bitching on socials is from people who don't get into the deals. You'll never hear them complain if they're in the deal. So what do you do? You don't launch the project? How do you make money if snipers are going to game it anyway? That's always the question.
Coffeezilla: To be clear: there's a difference between doing a deal and using information from inside the project to make trading decisions. I can get paid for a tweet — as long as I disclose that, I don't think that's necessarily a problem. But if I'm on the side buying up a million dollars of this coin because I have insider information from my position in the deal, I think that's wrong and should be rooted out, if people think these markets should operate like capital markets. That's what all the crypto people say.
Hayden Davis: I don't think people should treat them as capital markets, because they're not.
Coffeezilla: Well, you're the guy in the deals, so of course you'd say that.
Hayden Davis: Even on the deals I'm in — whether it's Barstool or whatever — if I throw money into it, I treat it like a casino, because that's what it is. This could go to zero tomorrow. I have no idea.
Coffeezilla: But the weird thing is, the people who always say there shouldn't be this regulation or that regulation are always the people tilting the table at the casino. Dave talking to people in the trenches, saying you're just mad you didn't dump on me before I dumped on you — most people in the trenches aren't getting refunded $5 million. Dave is part of what controls what people do because people are trading based on him. Of course the people inside the casino who control the most levers are going to say we don't think there should be any rules, as long as we just disclose: hey, not financial advice.
Hayden Davis: Dave is a good guy, for one. And two, Dave doesn't actually know that much about what's going on with meme coins yet — he's just figuring it out. He just realized a couple of weeks ago: if I bet on this and talk about it, the price goes up — how does this work?
Coffeezilla: I don't want to focus too much on him — in some ways I appreciate his transparency, because it reveals a lot of what goes on behind the scenes that we don't normally see. I'm just making the larger point: everybody who says we should deregulate this and not treat it like everything else tends to be the same person who has an unfair advantage in the game. The people who complain are the ones without the unfair advantage; the people who don't complain are the ones with it. That's a true statement.
I want to move on though, because a lot of this has turned to wallets being linked back to you — wallets which sniped the coins you launched. In the case of Libra, the wallet that refunded Dave, which according to him was your personal funds, was linked to an Avalanche wallet that was funded like a sniper of Libra. If you launched the coin, isn't it unfair for you to also snipe it?
Hayden Davis: I would say no, for a couple of reasons. A lot of the time when we're sniping, we're attempting to avoid other snipers getting in. And by the way, I don't personally conduct snipes — I'm not a dev. If you put me in front of a computer and asked me to snipe, I wouldn't even know how. I've never done a bot. I don't know any of that.
Coffeezilla: But you're not denying that wallets linked to you sniped Libra?
Hayden Davis: Linked to the project — I'd say linked to the project, not to me personally. The wallet that refunded Dave just happened to be where we moved money from at that moment of stress, but that was a mistake. In that particular case, the money going back into the chart would just flow through another wallet back into the chart anyway. What we consider sniping is the project money — that's how we do it. Most of the time the snipe is to deter other snipers, and if there's enough volume, we use it so the project can continue. I know that's very hard for people to understand.
Coffeezilla: I think it's going to be hard to understand because—
Hayden Davis: Let me give you a great example. Look at Trump — the snipes on that launch made zero difference because there was so much volume.
Coffeezilla: That's not true. There was a guy who sniped early for $1 million — the big crash that everyone attributed to Melania was actually that sniper selling tens of millions of dollars of coin. The one who did $84 million?
Hayden Davis: Yeah. We could argue all day. My point is that when the team is sniping, a lot of times it's to protect — and if there's enough volume, you take some off so people can have a chance to pump the chart back up. With meme coins, projects can get killed in two days, and the only hope is that you have enough in treasury to go beat the sniper. This is a conversation that goes on with everyone in Solana — everyone who knows how these launches work.
Coffeezilla: Do you think the public knows that when a project launches, the project itself is going to snipe the project? Being as charitable as possible — and assuming all this money is genuinely for the project, not profit — I think the public not knowing about these clandestine activities with side wallets is inherently kind of messed up. The project is controlling its own price. It's a weird kind of price manipulation: if it's too high, clip some off. And it makes the idea of a team treasury kind of pointless, since it seems like you also have a sniping wallet treasury. The public has zero clarity on any of this. Does this happen a lot?
Hayden Davis: This is all that happens in all meme coins, ever — unless they completely die and get CTOed and nobody messes it up. I'm being super transparent here, maybe oversharing. Because everything is on the blockchain and a certain number of people have figured out how to game it, when you're the responsible party trying to make these launches last — every team, unless they're just nefarious — is trying to figure out how to make them last.
The whole goal of coming into this — and here's the Dave story as a quick side note — was that the Milei team wanted Dave involved so they could do some cross-promotion and maybe eventually have him do an interview like he did with Trump, and create some kind of social finance collaboration between their holders. That's what I'm always trying to figure out. And what always messes that up is massive sniping. Those guys walk off with $80, $100, $200 million scot-free, and the project gets blamed.
Do I think sniping is the most ethical thing of all time? No. But has anyone figured out a better way to deter snipers — especially at launch, when only the snipers can see the CA, and they've gamed Raydium, Meteora, and probably Orca too? No.
Coffeezilla: I'll say this: the fact that you snipe your own project is insane to me. But I will agree that sniping is a massive problem for meme coins, and insider knowledge is also a huge problem. Both can be true at the same time. Part of the sniping comes from insider leaks.
Hayden Davis: I disagree that—
Coffeezilla: You can disagree, but there are alpha groups looking on-chain for stuff and looking for early contract leaks — they will pay money to get early contract addresses so they can snipe the coin. But what's the solution? You don't launch the project? What would you do philosophically?
I think meme coins are rent-seeking, zero-sum games that extract value from the majority of people who engage in them and disproportionately benefit insiders — by how the deals are structured, and by the fact that for someone to make a dollar, someone else has to lose a dollar. I think the whole thing is misguided from the outset. Obviously I focus my efforts on where there's an element of fraud or insider trading — something that colloquially people agree is wrong. If people want to engage in meme coins, fine, but the market should at least be fair. If people want to engage in stupid things, it should be fair.
This is what happened with casinos — there was fraud on top of the unfair gambling element, and they got heavily regulated. There's a reason casinos are regulated: people were getting screwed. I think the same thing can and should eventually happen here, though there's obviously a big push to deregulate everything.
I have to ask — you know this is part of my story. A lot of people have linked you to the Melania launch. Were you part of it, and was that sniped as well?
Hayden Davis: I told you beforehand this would put me in danger, but I'll answer. Yes, I was part of it. The team did want to snipe it because of how big the snipe was on Trump. We weren't the big sniper — that's what we were trying to avoid. And we didn't take any liquidity out. Zero.
Coffeezilla: Okay, that's kind of shocking. But I want to zoom in — you said you didn't take any liquidity out. One of the wallets we traced in the Portnoy situation sent money to a wallet that received $1.5 million of Melania tokens from something called "Melania D Liquidity 2.0," and then that wallet appeared to sell Melania tokens it received for free. So you said you all didn't sell any liquidity, but—
Hayden Davis: I didn't swap liquidity — I didn't swap into single-sided. I didn't say no money was sold. There's a difference between swapping the liquidity and selling tokens. Those are two different things.
Coffeezilla: So you sold but you didn't swap?
Hayden Davis: The other way around — sold but didn't swap.
Coffeezilla: Interesting. Are those the two main launches you were involved in? I've heard a few others — like Hood. Was that you?
Hayden Davis: No.
Coffeezilla: Okay. Look, let's try to get to this $100 million. Thank you for being relatively transparent — I do feel like you've been honest about this. You're sitting on $100 million.
Hayden Davis: Before I talk about the $100 million, I want to say one thing. With all of this — people ask how I ended up involved with Dave and Milei. I'm not some special person. I've pursued all this because I thought meme coins were a step toward social finance, and it's looking like I was wrong — and now everyone wants to kill me for facilitating some of these.
But I also think everyone should take a second and look at what people should actually do and how should they make money from these launches, because there's basically one way: fees, which are very nominal on big launches — and then there are the platforms that make enormous money regardless of whether there's a rug or a project goes well. I completely disagree with that. Pump Fun, Meteora, Jupiter, BullX, Photon — all of them are just making money on trading fees, and if people lose their shirts they're still cooking. I've told the owners of those platforms that it's bullshit, and that if it's a true rug or people are getting screwed, there should be some element of a refund policy.
Aside from that — what do people do? What do you do when you're in a broken system trying to fix it, figuring out different launch mechanisms, how to keep the CA to yourself, how to market it without leaking it? The best people in crypto don't have an answer. I'm constantly trying to figure out: how should we make money cleanly? Is it even possible?
Coffeezilla: I think people in crypto don't have a good answer because the real answer — which nobody wants to hear — is that you're essentially asking: what's the fair way to sell tulip bulbs? You can structure it many different ways, but anything that is by definition extracting value from the world at large is probably not a great thing.
Hayden Davis: But then every crypto project — whether VC-funded or a meme coin — is value extractive.
Coffeezilla: I think there's a difference between something with utility — something that does something, a tool that purports to do something — and things that literally have no intrinsic value at all.
Hayden Davis: But it's still value extraction, regardless of utility. Take Coca-Cola — you could say they make a lot of money for their shareholders, but they also provide a good that people pay money for, and they pay dividends. Their shareholders can buy in at a dollar and leave with a dollar, having made dividends. So it's not a zero-sum game. Coca-Cola isn't running a zero-sum game, Apple isn't running a zero-sum game. These companies in the capital markets produce things — that's what their value is based on.
The pitch for crypto was: yes, it's speculative at first, but the reason you should care is because there's something valuable behind it — some kind of financial technology. Now people will argue—
Hayden Davis: Even Bitcoin is only valuable because a lot of people said it's valuable and because it isn't controlled by anyone we know of. Even at the top, all of it is extractive to some degree or a zero-sum game. Whether it's a meme coin or a giant utility project — it's all speculation. The whole point of being here is the attempt for it not to be one day, which is going to require enormous progress.
Coffeezilla: Right, but that progress is not going to come through meme coins. Go ahead.
Hayden Davis: Just to finish — and I'm not saying I'm right, this is just my thinking — if some of these meme coins could eventually create utility, if the big names started collaborating, cross-promoting, burning tokens, adding utility, there might actually be potential for social finance. But in order to get there, there's going to be a lot of dumb shit that happens — which is the situation I'm in right now: a colossal, giant, enormous problem, which is the $100 million thing we should get back to.
Coffeezilla: You've got $100 million sitting there and you're trying to figure out what to do. You and I talked by text, and my advice — I don't know if it's perfect — is: take a snapshot, calculate PNLs, figure out who lost money and assign pro-rata shares of the losses, perhaps with an emphasis on lower amounts. For instance, you could cap the losses someone could reasonably claim at $50,000, on the assumption that if you lost more than that, you're much more likely to be a sophisticated trader. The emphasis on recovery would be on people who aren't sophisticated — someone from Argentina who saw the Milei tweet and threw money at it, or someone from America with a thousand bucks who just dumped it in. You could make a lot of people whole that way. The downside is it would take significant time and an analytics firm, but I think it's the most reasonable approach given how screwed up everything has become.
Hayden Davis: I've been given basically four options. The whole point of texting you wasn't some sob story — it was that I need someone trustworthy to help me, because I don't know what to do and I don't want to be blamed for something I had no intention of creating. And remember: this involves the government of Argentina, Milei, and KIP. I am not the team. I will say that a hundred times. I have no desire to be in this position.
The video I posted was simply to try to get people to help, and almost no one has come — no one besides Yatsu, no crypto leader, which is insane to me. Anyway, the four options:
One: no refund. Give all the money to an Argentinian nonprofit and tell everyone to move on. Horrible idea.
Two: a refund — but a refund is going to be based on a bunch of different metrics, and people are still going to be pissed. I've been advised it's a terrible idea, though I do think people should get something back. Even if meme coins are completely speculative, and even if it's horseshit that people would put their life savings into these, the losses are still real.
Three: inject all the money back into the chart. I did a calculation — even with sell pressure—
Coffeezilla: How much money do you all have sitting on the sidelines?
Hayden Davis: More or less $100 million — right around there. Plus there's probably around $11 million in tokens and $13 million in fees, so roughly $110 million total in cash — because tokens you can't inject back into a chart. If we injected all of that, the market cap would get to about $2.5 to $3 billion — roughly the all-time high — which at least gives it a chance. And I'm completely clean of that after. People can say whatever they want; the money is back in the chart. There's no world in which I'm buying this token — I want to get away from it. This has been a colossal nightmare.
Coffeezilla: Let me pitch you on why that's a mistake, because I feel very strongly about this. Starting with the most basic point: it's an inequitable solution. A pro-rata share at least tries to be equitable. But you're talking about a launch already plagued by bots and snipers taking advantage — and then the solution is to do something that lets snipers and bots take advantage again when you re-inject capital.
Even when you floated this idea to me, I thought: if you're a savvy speculator and you know this person is about to pump the price to $2 billion, you buy Libra cheap now and wait. That's already an insider trading opportunity — I could have dumped money into Libra and waited for you to re-inject. You inject $2 billion, I get a 100x. This is a disaster.
Hayden Davis: Why is it a disaster? If I announce the intention publicly, it gives everybody the chance to buy in — then it's not insider trading, it's a completely free market. Everybody knows money is coming back into the project.
Coffeezilla: Even then, the more sophisticated you are, the more you take advantage of it.
Hayden Davis: That's the same thing whether it's a launch or an injection — it doesn't matter. And whether I refund people or inject back, people are going to be mad either way.
Coffeezilla: Why would people be mad if you just give them something back? Of course they might not get all their money back, but people generally appreciate getting something.
Hayden Davis: People are saying "send me a million and a half dollars or I'll kill your family" — so I still have to deal with those people regardless of whether I refund anyone. Now I have to protect my whole family.
Coffeezilla: The first thing you should do is get the money out of your hands. Go to a reputable firm, set up a legal structure so that you, Hayden, no longer have direct access. Part of the reason you're scared is because you do have access to $100 million.
Hayden Davis: That's correct — but if I'm being extremely honest, that access is also my leverage. The fact that I have control is also what's making me a target and simultaneously protecting me. This is an international incident. This isn't some random scam — this is a plan gone very wrong at a presidential level.
If I hand custody to someone else, even a trusted third party, I lose my leverage. Until I have answers from Javier Milei — until I get an actual game plan — this is why I gave it a 48-hour window. If somebody presents a great plan, I'll do it immediately, hand over custody, I don't care. I don't want anything to do with this. But right now, my reputation is crushed, I'm a target of at least one government potentially more, and my only leverage is that I hold the money. It's a much bigger decision than just getting it into someone else's hands — it's not that type of story.
Coffeezilla: I understand. And when we talked, my first point was: this is going to be a slow fix. Don't rush. That's another reason I said dumping money into the chart doesn't solve anything — it's the equivalent of just handing the money away. You need to be methodical.
But when you mentioned that refunds would still bring threats — my point about finding a trusted third party was that it would remove the incentive for someone to kidnap your family and extort you, because you literally wouldn't have that money to give them anymore. That was a separate point.
I take your overall point though: in a weird way, the $100 million is your leverage to get answers, because Javier Milei has basically tried to distance himself from you — first confirmed he was part of the project, then reversed when the scrutiny arrived.
Hayden Davis: There's evidence of me being with him multiple times — nobody disputes that. Javier Milei knew about the project. He endorsed the project. I think he regrets it, but that doesn't change the fact that he definitely endorsed it.
What already happened is inequitable — no one disputes that. When you're trying to clean up this mess, it's tempting to look for the easy answer: dump the money back into the chart and say it's not your problem anymore. But the fairer, more responsible approach is to find a way to identify losses, get some kind of claim into people's hands, and do it slowly. Given the scale of dollars at play, I think that's the only way to do it right. But I recognize I'm not in your shoes and I don't want to be. You have to make these decisions and live with them — that's your burden to bear.
Hayden Davis: Also to be clear — it's my burden to bear because nobody has said a word to me. I'm making decisions on behalf of the government of Argentina, which has distanced itself from this. If they want to refund, that's what I would do. It's an impossible scenario.
Coffeezilla: Have they not given you any guidance? Have you asked?
Hayden Davis: Zero. Nobody said anything to me. Zero.
Coffeezilla: Milei is probably freaking out because he's going to face proceedings — maybe not impeachment, but it's definitely going to hurt him a lot.
Hayden Davis: I'm a massive Milei supporter. I think he's completely clean and not corrupt at all. I think a lot of people in Argentina want to take him down because they game the whole corrupt system. My point is: it's an impossible scenario to be in. I'm sitting here as a sitting duck — I'm not going to benefit from this at all, it's crushed any reputation I had, I'm all over the internet, and I don't know what to do. I was a facilitator. I wasn't even the deployer. I'm not the team.
Coffeezilla: When you say "the team" — who is the team?
Hayden Davis: KIP is the team. They're the ones supposed to manage this project. I was deploying the token side, but the guys who are supposed to manage the funds after are KIP.
Where I sit is as the launch strategist — making decisions on behalf of what the team wants. I'm not some mastermind trying to figure out how much money I can make. I sit between things, trying to put projects together so they cross-promote each other and build toward utility. That's the only reason I started doing this. I don't have a say in a lot of things — in most cases I'm just an executor.
Coffeezilla: We should acknowledge that you stand to make millions of dollars in most of these cases.
Hayden Davis: Yeah, I'm not doing this for free. Of course not.
Coffeezilla: I just want to make sure we're not framing you purely as the victim here. I think you're in a bad situation, but financially—
Hayden Davis: I'm absolutely the victim of this situation. I'm not going to financially make anything on this particular one. But obviously I've made money on others — I'm not going to claim otherwise.
Coffeezilla: This is sort of my core problem with project sniping. I can trace the blockchain — I'm probably in the top 1% of humans at it, because most people don't know how. But even so, if you asked me to find all the snipers who did something, it would take me forever. There are just too many transactions to analyze. So when you say you're not going to benefit, how do we know you're not just peeling off a few million for yourself? It'd be very easy to do. I'm not accusing you — but when there's this much money flowing, you have access to all these dollars, side wallets sniping and claiming it's to defend the project — how do we know it doesn't end up in your pockets?
Hayden Davis: You can make that case on different projects. On this particular one — because people are threatening my family and a president is involved — it's a very different game. I have zero desire to benefit from something that could get me or my family killed. There are multiple threats both inside and outside the US. I want nothing to do with this, and I don't want to make any money from it. You can take that for what it's worth.
Coffeezilla: You're an interesting figure in some ways. You represent the other side of the curtain — you've seen the inside of some of the biggest launches on the planet. Libra, despite everything, was a massive launch. Melania coin. What do regular people need to know? What do the back rooms actually look like? How much money is the team making? What is actually insider information? If you really think people should be educated, what is going on inside?
Hayden Davis: The best one to look at — where I know the most money was raised and made — was Trump. That's the best example, because you know that people were able to buy in at $500 million—
Coffeezilla: People sniped that coin too?
Hayden Davis: No — before it launched. At some private dinner, they gave people special access to buy in early.
Coffeezilla: Wait — what? Who gave that?
Hayden Davis: That's what I was told — there were people at some kind of crypto event in Washington, D.C. I don't know if it's true, that's just what I was told.
My point is: whether it's Trump or any of these big ones, this is an insiders' game. It's an unregulated casino. If you're a retail trader thinking you're going to make millions off meme coins, you better study your ass off. How do you think Pump Fun works? People put money in, insiders know about it first, it rips up, and it's who loses last. That's the game. Every single one is a game — the only ones that aren't are ones that have completely died and a tiny group of people decided to CTO them.
From a retail perspective: unless you have extra capital to play with, it's not a good idea. It's like going to the casino.
My game was to turn some of these meme coins into utility — into cross-promotions, partnerships, real social finance. I don't think that's happening, at least not now. I've gotten very good at being a launch strategist. Even today, with all the hate, there were twenty people asking me when we can do the next one. But it's an unregulated game. David Sacks called memes collectibles. Our president launched a meme coin two days before he took office. That team benefited. Go look at that.
Coffeezilla: Do you think it was a mistake to basically open the floodgates for all of this, given that you've basically said it's a bad idea for most people?
Hayden Davis: I have a very different perspective now than I did three days ago. I'm very pro getting things out of regulated markets — but I'm now recognizing that those markets are a different kind of insider game too. Whether it's Pelosi-style stock trading or the regular market, it's an insider game — just a different type. Capital markets are an insider game. Banks pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to do illegal things because they can make more money other ways. If you're going to die on the sword of meme coins being insider or sniped — well, every market in the world that makes serious money is like that.
Coffeezilla: If your argument is that capital markets are also rigged, that's actually an argument for more regulation against rigging, not less. You wouldn't look at a rigged game and say, let's remove all the rules we had in place to try to stop the rigging.
Hayden Davis: Right, but then you have to trust the regulators — and most of them are being paid off, and that's been proven time and again, because that's just human nature.
Coffeezilla: Once again though: when you see problems in the world, the conclusion isn't to remove all safeguards. If your brakes aren't working correctly, the answer isn't to get rid of brakes entirely. It's to methodically approach it and advocate for better regulation, better rules. Saying "it's all rigged anyway" isn't the argument against rules that people think it is. Does that make sense?
Hayden Davis: Sure, but to me that's a bit of a moot point, because it doesn't matter. The people with the most money, the most access, and the most control — insiders in any market in the world — always win. Across the board.
Coffeezilla: I can't disagree with that.
Hayden Davis: So what would I tell people about meme coins? They're unregulated, volatile, there are insiders, there's sniping, there's crazy stuff that goes on — and people at the top actually care the most. Some of the guys I talk to, which I won't name, who are trying to figure this out, aren't bad people. They're all trying hard to figure out how to make this sustainable, and nobody has gotten it right. Nobody.
I'm sure colossal fuckups like Libra will help create some structure. But my phone hasn't been called by any of those guys. They all disappear when things get hard. Which is why I said: fuck it, I'll just fight this. People told me not to talk to you, that you'd screw me over. And I thought: he's a rational person, let's talk and see what happens. The only choice I have is to fight this and face repercussions — or not fight it and be called a scammer forever, which just isn't the case.
Coffeezilla: I do think you just saying your piece — warts and all — is a lot better than everyone speculating and having your story told for you. I'm not in the position of wanting to rehab anyone's image, and I'm not looking to destroy anyone either. I'm just looking to tell the story as it is. When I air this, I'm going to put the whole thing out — minus the off-the-record parts — so people can see your side of the story. You've been a lot more transparent than a lot of people in this situation who I think are also scared. When you said people disappear — I think Javier Milei is scared for his reputation; Julian from KIP is scared for his reputation, partly because he was turned into the boogeyman first. A lot of people here are terrified. But I think getting your side of the story out and answering these questions is important. I don't think what happened here was good, but I think you being willing to speak has been helpful.
Hayden Davis: A couple of closing thoughts. First: not only do I actually believe this, but it needs to be said — Javier Milei knows jack shit about crypto. I think he's brilliant and knows a few things about blockchain, but I don't think he realized what he was doing. I fully back him, and I think he's a saving grace for one of the most corrupt countries in the world that has a real chance to become otherwise.
Second: I'm sharing this story because it's important for people to know that just because there's a narrative around KOLs — and whether you consider yourself one or not — you guys make money from sharing content or getting paid on deals. That content affects my family greatly and puts me in real danger, even though I'm not the main player here. I don't need to be treated as a victim, but I'd appreciate a little empathy, because I'm probably going to need security for the foreseeable future and I'm going to be dealing with this for a long time — for something I didn't want. I wasn't taking any money on this deal. I was acting as Milei's advisor. I wanted to further other blockchain conversations and initiatives. I didn't care about the money this particular thing could make.
Lastly: however you post this, I'd appreciate some light shed on the fact that I am not a scammer, and I don't think Libra is a dead project. I actually believe Milei will support it. We'll find out soon, but my bet is that he does — and I think he's better off supporting it than not, given his current predicament.
Coffeezilla: Just to go back: my fundamental issue — assuming the $100 million gets to the right people — is still the sniping. The clandestine sniping that you've basically said was requested of you. Is that right?
Hayden Davis: Yeah. That's a longer story.
Coffeezilla: Are you benefiting from these snipes? That's the question everyone has: are you launching projects knowing they're going to be sniped, and then benefiting from investing super early and peeling off money?
Hayden Davis: The honest answer is: I haven't benefited from them. It's considered treasury. I want to reiterate this because I think a lot of people don't understand how complex these launches are. You're competing against 100-plus of the greatest snipers in the world who are just peeling $10, $20, $30 million off these big launches and walking away — and they'll dump it in seconds, with no strategy, no regard for chart health. Nothing. They just nuke it when they want to.
One way to deter that — which you can say is messed up, fine — is to try to have the project snipe into the launch so the market cap is higher at the start, which retail never even sees anyway. Retail sees it ten minutes later when it's already at 10 or 20x. We're actually trying to protect retail, but nobody sees it that way. Every one of these project teams has the same goal: to last a year, two years. There's never a mindset of let's make a ton of money from the start and leave. I want that to be known — whether or not it's believed, that is the truth.
Coffeezilla: I just don't see why you can't structure a liquidity pool in a way that achieves the same thing without sniping. There are ways to do this, I think, where you don't need it.
Hayden Davis: They're not all single-sided, but it doesn't matter — they all get sniped. You could launch at a billion, at $500 million, at $200 million — they all get sniped.
And I've finally come up with a way to explain it: you're like a bank. You're afraid people are going to rob the vault, so you rob yourself first in order to put the money back in later. And everyone's squinting asking: are you ever actually going to put the money back in the vault? That's the weird trust game we all have to play. And honestly — that's actually a pretty accurate description of crypto.
Every one of these launches comes down to: how do we do this as fairly as possible without snipers? Do a big marketing push? Then the snipers find out. Do it stealth? Then somehow someone figures it out anyway. Nobody has given me an actual answer — which is why I just get blamed, but nobody provides a solution.
Coffeezilla: It is all on the blockchain. I've put forward my thoughts on meme coins and I have plenty of opinions — anyone who knows me knows that. But whether you think those are valid is a different story.
Listen, Hayden — I think you've covered the majority of the big topics. I want to thank you for telling your side of the story. I may not agree with all of it, but you have shed light on a lot of issues that were previously untouched and are genuinely relevant. I think this will end up being an important interview, and I appreciate it.
Hayden Davis: No worries.
Coffeezilla: Okay. Take care.
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