ROLLUP: Bull Market? | Inflation Cools, War Heats | Robinhood Flips Base | ETH’s Fee Problem

Summary

Bankless Podcast Rollup: "Bull Market? | Inflation Cools, War Heats | Robinhood Flips Base | ETH’s Fee Problem"

Podcast: Bankless
Hosts: David & Ryan
Date: July 17, 2026
Duration: ~1 hour
Description: The hosts cover everything from market cycles and inflation to the Iran war, Robinhood chain outpacing Base, ETH's fee problem, and major shifts in DeFi/NFTs/crypto.
Note: Ads, intros, and outros have been skipped. Timestamps reflect main content only.

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Episode Theme Overview

This episode is a packed, dynamic Rollup focused on the crypto market’s mood swings, macroeconomic drivers (inflation & war), new drama in the Ethereum ecosystem (notably Robinhood Chain surpassing Base in activity), and renewed debates around Ethereum’s value accrual model. Listeners get in-depth color on cyclical thinking, L2s feeding (or not) L1, and the evolving relationship between crypto, DeFi, and TradFi.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Crypto Markets: Have We Bottomed? (00:04–07:24)

• Market Cycles & Sentiment:

  • David and Ryan analyze the historic four-year Bitcoin cycles.
  • Ryan: “Have we bottomed yet? We got some extra data to talk about.” (00:04)
  • Current chart patterns suggest “close to a bottom but have not yet bottomed.” (~03:16)
  • "It would be poetic for there to be a bottom in October… I'm in the camp of it's a grind to the right." – Ryan (04:14)
  • Twitter poll: 44% think bottom is in, 55% say not yet. (05:31)
  • Discussion of “seller exhaustion” as the marker for the end of a bear. (06:13)

• Macro Factors:

  • Inflation is cooling, with June CPI coming in well below expectations. (07:43)
  • “Inflation is coming in real cold and... everyone... basically breathed a sigh of relief.” – Ryan (08:19)

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2. Geopolitics: Iran War & Oil Market Repercussions (09:24–14:32)

• Escalating Conflict:

  • Ongoing US strikes on Iran, with Trump invoking War Powers for more free reign. (09:34–11:23)
  • Trump’s aggressive negotiation stance: “You're dealing with sleazebags. Doesn't mean much.” (10:06)
  • Iran’s leverage remains the potential to disrupt oil trade via the Strait of Hormuz.

• Energy Markets Respond:

  • Oil initially plunged but has recovered (from $66 to $78); markets adapting, less risk of spiking prices. (13:25)
  • “Market has had time to route around the Strait of Hormuz… don’t think we’re ever going up to high, high oil prices again.” – Ryan

• Domestic Unrest in Iran:

  • Small protests are breaking out, but no rapid regime change. (12:49)

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3. Cryptos Outperform—Unique ETH Strength (15:08–17:04)

• Weekly Price Action:
  • Bitcoin +2.5%, ETH +8%, ETH/BTC ratio up 16% since June.
  • “The ratio is edging at this present moment.” – Ryan (15:44)
  • Discussing whether ETH’s outperformance is due to Robinhood Chain surge. (16:21)

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4. Institutional Players—Michael Saylor & Tom Lee (17:04–22:29)

• Michael Saylor’s Moves:

  • Sold MSTR stock to raise $466 million cash, but sold no Bitcoin. Still committed to his BTC thesis. (17:50)
  • He now has 20+ months of dividend coverage—timed for the next market cycle upswing.

• Tom Lee: Mega ETH Buyer:

  • Rapid accumulation—now owns 4.8% of all ETH, nearing his 5% target. (20:36)
  • “He’s doing it during a bear market… pretty incredible.” – Ryan (21:24)
  • Hosts suggest that passing the 5% goal (raising the target) would be bullish, but warn of diminishing returns above 10%. (21:34–21:57)

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5. Robinhood Chain Flips Base: New L2 King? (23:18–29:30)

• Robinhood Chain Surges:

  • On July 10th, Robinhood Chain surpasses Base in user operations per second (117 vs. 93). (23:18)
  • Morpho protocol leads TVL at $152M; 7% yield on USDG in Robinhood app feeds DeFi.
  • Most on-chain activity is meme coin trading—current “meta” is who wins the meme coin launchpad arms race.

• Meme Coin Ecosystem Wars:

  • Cash Cat (Robinhood) and Ansem (Solana) meme coins both have $100m+ FDV, seen as a market bottoms and risk appetite indicator. (27:48)
  • Ongoing battle between ecosystems over meme coin dominance.

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6. BASE’s Pivot & Critiques (29:30–36:06)

• Jesse Pollock’s Admission:

  • Creator of Base admits pushing “social”/creator coin too hard; now pivoting back to finance/perps/trading focus (30:42).
  • “That was wrong... What we should have done instead… was focused on Internet of finance.”
  • Kobe takes over Base app; new focus on core financial products.

• Community Critique:

  • Austin Campbell calls BASE an “outright failure,” says it distracted Coinbase from competitive TradFi features. (33:38)
  • Hosts push back—Base remains a top 4 chain, too soon to call it a failure, and “the company’s big enough, you can chew gum and walk at the same time.” (~35:06)

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7. Ethereum’s Fee Problem: Who Benefits from L2s? (36:06–54:20)

• The Debate:

  • Robinhood chain pays $1,538 to ETH (out of $816k in revenue); Arbitrum takes 10%, Robinhood 90%. (36:06–37:33)
  • “If your thesis is ETH is money, then Robinhood building here is ultra bullish… If your thesis is ETH is a revenue generating asset, this is the ultra Bear case.” – Lorenzo of ARK (37:36)
  • Legendary poster Pollenia returns, admits overestimated application demand; urges Ethereum to pick between fee-based or SoV model. (38:54–40:04)

• Ryan’s Take:

  • Leans towards SoV, “ETH can afford to not care about fee revenue… it's time to be a store of value asset and not worry about fee revenue at all.” (42:11)
  • “Ethereum is actually shooting itself in the foot on the social layer by talking about fees at all.”

• David’s Position:

  • Argues maximizing L1/L2 fees is important, at least for “bootstrapping,” but sees the narrative shift happening.

Notable Quotes:

• “Eventually, for max ETH value… fees won’t and can’t matter. ETH as money implies a market cap far higher than revenue could support.” – David (41:54)

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8. United Chains or Sovereign Rollups? The Goldfedder Proposal (47:41–54:20)

• Steven Goldfedder (Arbitrum)’s Suggestion:

  • Proposes L1 should treat bugs in major L2s as L1 vulnerabilities, forking to fix and charging larger “rent” (fees) accordingly. (47:41–48:19)
  • “Ethereum should adopt its largest rollups… and trigger an L1 fork just like an L1 bug would.”

• Debate over Centralization/Security:

  • “It would give up some sovereignty... but receive higher rent from L2s.” – Unidentified Co-host (49:17)
  • Concerns that frequent L1 forks could erode ETH’s store-of-value status.
  • David sees this as Ethereum monetizing its superior decentralized governance, but: “It’s also the game Ethereum never wanted to get into.” (53:17)

• Would higher ETH fee cuts be bullish or bearish?

  • Ryan: “Bearish as hell... fees don’t matter.”
  • David: “Market would send ETH up... but maybe long-term cap upside.” (53:48)

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9. Institutional & Builder News (56:24–58:25)

• Ethereum Foundation Spinoffs:

  • New for-profit spinoff (ETH Systems) to provide privacy tools for institutions.
  • Former EF researchers, like Francesco, are moving to these new orgs, suggesting ecosystem maturation.

• DAO Funding:

  • “A lot of people are talking shit about DAOs… but for Ethereum they financed alt EFs, which I think is phenomenal.” – David (58:25)

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10. Defi Hacks & Security Update (58:50–60:57)

• Haseeb’s Data-Driven Take:

  • April marked peak of massive DeFi hacks; event severity has since decreased, even as incident numbers remain high.
  • “Hackpocalypse was a false alarm.” (59:12)
  • David comments on the psychological impact (“that was the last straw that motivated me to sell my ETH”); but improved defense tools may have reversed the tide.

• Risk Layering Remains:

  • Compounded vault risk (“vaults deposit into other vaults deposit into other vaults…”), a growing TradFi-esque problem. (61:15)

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11. Buy-and-Burn Token Model is Back (62:12–66:25)

• Why are Buy-&-Burn Models Thriving?

  • Hype, VVV, Lit, and Jito all burning a significant portion of tokens—a model that “just keeps working.”
  • “Maker had it right from the beginning all along.” – Unidentified Co-host (62:14)

• Underlying Reasons:

  • Projects that prioritize tokenholder interests via burning accrue a “trust premium.”
  • The effect is both on real revenue and the team’s social alignment.
  • Vitalik’s “legitimacy” concept and differing levels of sustainable revenue at play.

Notable Quotes:

• “Buybacks don’t actually work… it’s about the trust premium ascribed to the team.” – Anson (64:09)
• “We keep doing it. All the hot new projects... burn their token... the Buy and Burn model is undefeated.” – David (63:18)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Never fade the cycle.” — Unidentified Co-host (03:15)
• “Inflation is coming in real cold.” — Ryan (08:19)
• “Robinhood chain has now more trading volume than any other DEX… Times are changing.” — David (00:12)
• “Crypto is trading, maybe.” — David, critiquing the social-platform thesis for Base (32:33)
• “Fees don't matter. This is why I don’t—dude, the market would send Eth up if Robinhood was paying Ethereum L1 $150,000 in the first week.” — David (53:55)
• “Bankless Nation, we’ll be back in a week, but until then, Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, this frontier—it’s not for everyone.” — Ryan (66:33)

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Key Timestamps

| Time | Segment / Topic | |-----------|-------------------------------------------------------| | 00:04 | Market cycles, “Have we bottomed yet?” | | 07:43 | Inflation data beats expectations; macro impacts | | 09:34 | Iran war escalation and oil market reaction | | 15:08 | Unique ETH strength; ETH/BTC ratio moves | | 17:04 | Saylor, Tom Lee, and big institutional flows | | 23:18 | Robinhood Chain surpasses Base in L2 activity | | 30:42 | Base rethinks direction; Jesse Pollock’s “eating shit”| | 36:06 | ETH holders & L2s: Fee value or Store of Value? | | 47:41 | Goldfedder’s radical L1 adoption/fee proposal | | 56:24 | New Ethereum Foundation spinoffs | | 58:50 | DeFi hacks: The “hackpocalypse” that wasn’t | | 62:12 | Buy-and-burn tokenomics: Why now? |

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Summary for Non-Listeners

If you missed this Rollup, you missed wide-ranging, up-to-the-minute analysis of crypto’s current state, the comeback of the bull/bottoming debate, the geopolitics of inflation and oil, and the inside baseball around whether Ethereum should care about fee revenue or store-of-value status. Robinhood’s L2—against all odds—has leapfrogged Base, igniting new debates about value accrual and protocol competition. Meanwhile, industry heavyweights like Saylor and Tom Lee are doubling down, and DeFi’s security scares may be passing, with new models emerging as the “buy-and-burn” narrative regains dominance.

For the Ethereum faithful, whether you back fees or SoV, the future is being fought out on-chain and on air with strong opinions, hard data, and no lack of conviction.

Transcript

[David]

Foreign.

[Ryan]

Nation. It's the third week of July and for the third week in a row, me and Ryan go over the question, have we bottomed yet? We got some extra data to talk about. Inflation is coming in cold, but the Iran war is coming in hot. And also we've got some drama over in the Robinhood base Ethereum complex ecosystem. Uh, I think that's the big news of the week is that Robinhood chain has passed base in activity. And as a result of that, things are just. Things are changing, times are changing. It's a new. It's a new bull market. So time for some changes.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, well, I don't know if I'm ready to call it bull market, David, but there are some changes that I feel are downstream of Robinhood chain. One it might be actually, and this is somewhat bullish for eth maxis listening right now, is some movement, positive movement for eth on the ratio. There's a question of whether that is raw material induced. Maybe. Well, we'll explore in today's episode. How about that? There's also Jesse from bas, founder of base saying all first quarter.

[Ryan]

He's creator of Bass, I think is his preferred title.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Okay. Creator of Bass has been eating shit. Those are his words, not mine. Talk about what he means. But this is a base pivot. We'll talk about that. And also there's a new resurging question again in the Ethereum ecosystem, which is, are the L2s paying enough rent to ETH holders? And does this.

[Ryan]

Wait, I've never heard of this question before. Well, have we ever talked about this before?

[Unidentified Co-host]

It's kind of like the perennial question of have we bottomed yet? We're going to talk about.

[Ryan]

There's new stuff to talk about there. There's new stuff to talk.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah. Including Plenia is back. Do you remember Pollenia famous L2 bull back.

[Ryan]

They are mythological creature in Ethereum lore.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah. With a hot take. So we'll talk about all that and more.

[Ryan]

But why don't we start by looking at this chart? When you look at this chart, Ryan, what. What do you feel? What do you feel? How does this make chart make you feel for. For the listeners, we are looking at the four bull markets of old in Bitcoin. 2014-2018-2022-2026. It's sectioned off into four sections of each of those things. So you have the bear, the pre bull, first bull and second bull. And it all lines up. It all lines up pretty well. Again, this is just the cycles playing out. And if you believe in this chart what this implies. We're basically towards the end of the bear, not not at the end. There is a chunk of time left in this aligning of the seasons, aligning of the cycles for some shenanigans to happen. And so I think that's the question to be asked is like, in this remaining 2/4 of time, the rest of this year, perhaps, what do we think happens? And it's like. I think the big question is, is it a slow grind to the right, it's just a flat grind, or is there a final capitulation leg? We've just been asking this question every single week on the rollup. I'm in the camp of it's a grind to the right.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Well, I mean, I. I think, like, what you asked how this chart makes me feel, and this chart makes me feel. The thing I have been feeling for the last 12 months is that, like, I need to get this tattooed somewhere on my body. Never fade the cycle.

[Ryan]

Never fade the cycle.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Every time you want to fade the cycle in crypto, the cycle repeats. And this is just a fourth instance of the cycle repeating. That's what this chart is saying. So the clearest indication of what's going to happen is what happened the last three times. And that means we're close to a bottom but have not yet bottomed. And so I think the answer to the question is, have we bottomed yet? Almost. That would be my answer to the question.

[Ryan]

But not yet. But not yet, but not yet, not yet.

[Unidentified Co-host]

And it just follows exactly like this. This. I. I believe in this chart. I believe very much in this chart. And I think it's going to play out the exact same way. So we're talking about a bottom in probably two, three months, and then sideways for the next year, sideways up, and then we rebuild the base, and then we have a. Okay, 2027, a fantastic 2028. And then it just repeats again.

[Ryan]

Yeah, there. It would be poetic for there to be a bottom in October, like, one year after 10. 10 is like the actual pico bottom. I guess I'm trying to be a. I'm trying to negotiate my way into the cycles not being a thing. And the way that I do that,

[Unidentified Co-host]

why not just capitulate? That idea.

[Ryan]

I.

[Unidentified Co-host]

What's the.

[Ryan]

I say that instead of there being a final capitulation wick in October, we're just. We're already there. We're just grinding flat for the remainder of the year.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Why?

[Ryan]

I don't know. Because the. It's too magical for the Cycles to keep on repeating. That's too much magic.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I mean, there's. It's okay for magic to exist in the world, you know, that's why I'm seeing the Christopher Nolan movie this week, because he is a magical director. He brings magic to his movies and that's okay. I know every single movie I see from him is gonna be like, pretty solid. Magic can exist in the world.

[Ryan]

Things can exist. We were talking about the Odyssey right before we started recording. That's why Ryan is giving us I'll

[Unidentified Co-host]

see it this Friday. I just want to inject that somewhere

[Ryan]

in the world today you're seeing an imax. Of course.

[Unidentified Co-host]

That's the only way to see it. Gotta do it.

[Ryan]

All right, well, Ryan believes in magic. That's the takeaway so far.

[Unidentified Co-host]

And I believe in four year cycles. How about Brian Armstrong? So he put out, I think, a poll on this.

[Ryan]

We're looking at it right here. 31,000 votes. 44% said yes, the bottom is in. 55% said, no, the bottom is not in. Now, of course, Twitter is just a sentiment check. Pretty split, though. Pretty split. I like, I like this tweet from a, from good Alexander where he goes, bitcoin can't go down with a war. And Michael Saylor selling zcash can't go down with a day zero privacy bug discovered by AI Eth Books Robinhood after Vitalik disavows gambling as a use case. The night is darkest before dawn, bitches. He's basically saying, like, what's gonna send us lower? There's nothing. We've got nothing to send us any lower. Like it can't be done. We might as well go up.

[Unidentified Co-host]

But that, that's how cycles kind of end with seller exhaustion. Right? So this is just saying there's seller exhaustion. What's the worst that could happen? I do think some worse things could happen, though. Probably not an unwind, but if you, if you had a major stock sell off, I mean, we're seeing a little bit of a sell off today, but that's a tiny micro sell off. If we saw a 10 to 20% Nasdaq sell off from here, things could still get uglier. I mean, that could be a final capitulation bottom.

[Ryan]

Yeah, you can see. Okay, so here's the, we're looking at the charts right now. So you can see here's the Iran war conflict and then the absolute monster rally. And then we've just been kind of ranging at the highs. You can see if we were like, if we went Down, I don't know, a modest 8% from here. There's no way Bitcoin would be above $50,000.

[Unidentified Co-host]

You're talking about the Nasdaq. So if we went down to what, like, you know, 26K, something like that, below 27K.

[Ryan]

So we're at 29K right now. If you've been below 27K, which would bring us, you know, down 7%. Yeah, like, yeah, bitcoin. Bitcoin's hitting an all time low or not an all time low. A cycle low for sure. But not, but not that, that much.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, I guess we'll check in on the bottom again next week. I mean, part of the reason we're asking this question is because crypto was up a little bit and was it up partly due to inflation news? So we had some positive numbers on inflation, which means inflation was a little lower than analysts expected on the monthly data.

[Ryan]

I would say it's, it's, it's a decent chunk lower. So here's the summary. The Kobiesi Letter June CPI inflation falls to 3.5% below expectations of 3.8%. Core CPI inflation fell to 2.6 below expectations of 2.8. Month over month, inflation fell 0.4%. Biggest monthly drop since May 2020. So we started this week, we knew we were getting these numbers this week after last month. It was a little bit higher than expected. And there had been discussions about near term rate hikes happening this year, which really spooked the market. And then these numbers came in like significantly below expectations with inflation. So inflation is coming in real cold and I think everyone in the market who is positioned with risk, like myself and basically probably most of the listeners, Doll just breathed a sigh of relief. It's like, oh, phew, phew, we I can hold on to my risk on position.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Well, it's interesting though, of course this is annualized inflation and somewhat of a lagging indicator because on the other side we have cold inflation numbers, we have hot Iran news, it seems like. And since the beginning of July, oil is up 20% in July. That's going to be reflected at some point in future increases in energy prices. Right. And that will be reflected in CPI at least in some measurements. So it's sort of interesting we got lower CPI numbers, but energy prices increasing on the week and certainly the war has continued to intensify. I think last week we played a clip of Trump saying, what? Like it's over. I'm not talking to these guys anymore.

[Ryan]

What's his exact their Kooks or something? Yeah. So they're pretty, Pretty, pretty aggressive words.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah. So what's, what's the, the update on the Iran war?

[David]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Okay, so today, the time of recording, Thursday, fifth straight day of US Strikes on Iran, targeting Iranian command centers, air defense sites, missile and drone capabilities in coastal surveillance facilities, all kind of the same words that we were using last time we were doing this. All the goal is to attempt to reduce Iran's ability to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. So we're just trying to brute force Hormuz open. There's a quote from Trump that I thought was worth reading. The memor. Memorandum of an understanding with. You're dealing with sleaze bags. Doesn't mean much. And so he is positioning the MOU that they had with Iran as like, kind of a test of Iran's commitment to the Memorandum of understanding. Do we have a memorandum of understanding now? There's a quote out there that Iran's never won a lore, but they never won a war, but they never lost a negotiation. Iran's very good at negotiating. They've negotiated the hell out of their very terrible position that they're in with all the previous presidents. And now we kind of know that, and Trump knows that explicitly. And so because they were trying to overextend themselves in the negotiation phase based off of their very little leverage that they had, Trump was like, you guys have no position, so I'm going to send more bombs because I'm not listening to you. And so that's kind of, kind of where we are. Donald Trump informed Congress that we are resuming military action in Iran. So that was a part of the War Powers act that mandates the president informs lawmakers within 48 hours of launching a military attack. So according to Trump, he has now 60 more days of a free reign to have a conflict in Iran because he's not counting the last conflict in Iran as the same conflict. So now we have a new second conflict in Iran, not the. The first one is a different one. And so we'll see how that stands up. But as far as things go, that's just where it is.

[Unidentified Co-host]

How does this stop? Will this ever stop?

[Ryan]

Like, so I, like, it's a. It's two. It's an unstoppable force meets an immovable object because Iran is up against the ropes. And so, like, and again, the nuclear effort by Iran is existential. It feels existential to Iranian sovereignty. The, the, the regime sovereignty. So they cannot give that up.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Sure.

[Ryan]

But then Donald Trump is like, well, I'm not allowing you guys to have anything. And so it seems to be that we're in a. Between Iraq and a hard place of Iran needs to keep constricted the Strait of Hormuz, because that's their one defensive maneuver that they have is to increase energy prices across.

[Unidentified Co-host]

And you said they didn't have leverage, but they do have leverage there with the Strait of Hormuz, right? I mean, yeah.

[Ryan]

And we're doing our, we're doing our best. We're doing our best to like, disrupt whatever control that they have.

[Unidentified Co-host]

It's.

[Ryan]

So the US Central Command announced on Monday that it would resume the naval blockade of traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports. So oil was flowing out of Iran and into. And money was shipping into Iran since this peace deal had been signed. That was lifted on June 18 with the peace deal, but now is reinstated.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I mean, it feels like we're pretty much where we were a month ago then before the Memorandum of Understanding.

[Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. The situation, the economic situation in Iran is decaying. They, they don't have much economic.

[David]

Few.

[Ryan]

They, they're on the ropes economically. And now there are, once again protests. There are small incremental protests emerging in Iran. You know, well, tbd, if they grow into anything. But you could imagine that if you have the US Military on one side and then another wave of domestic protests on the other, like Iran's in a worse and worse position. It's just not moving quickly in any direction. But economically, they just don't have much of a lifeline.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Difficult to see, though, with like, these actions and end in sight. Like, it just feels like it could go back and forth, back and forth for some time, for weeks to come.

[Ryan]

The words forever war have been uttered frequently, more and more frequently. This week, specifically, you talked about the oil prices. So the oil prices came down from the middle of the Iran war oil price range. I'll call it $95, just kind of picking a middle of the curve. It fell down 28%, almost 30% to $66 at the very start of this month. And now since resuming conflict, we have gone up from $66 to $78. $78. Oil is still the cheapest oil during this Iran war conflict in total. And so we're below all previous oil prices for the entirety of this, like, conflict. And a part of that is just because the market has had time to route around the Strait of Hormuz. And so, you know, buyers are buying oil. United States is pumping more oil than ever. The, the Gulf countries are Shipping oil away from the strait so they can just ship it outbound elsewhere. And so the market has been, has given time to rebalance itself. And so I don't think we're ever going up to like, high, high oil prices ever again just because like, the, the time is on the United States side here.

[Unidentified Co-host]

So we are recording on a Thursday. This episode comes out on a Friday. So listeners will have already heard this, but Trump plans to address the nation tonight. So that news will already be in. And there's question, what's it going to be about? Is it going to be about the, the, the war? Is it something else? Election fraud, assassination of Lindsey Graham are in the notes. Like, I have no idea what all this is, but it's Trump, so it'll be something. David, can we check in on some of the other prices? So I know we're down a little bit at the time of recording, but other than that, I mean, bitcoin ether, they have had pretty good weeks where

[Ryan]

I would say that we had a very good week on, on the crypto side of things. I think people are, people were noticing this on Twitter this week. There was unique strength in crypto assets this week because there was, there was not strength in the stock market, not comparatively. There was definitely not strength in the memory stocks, which is like the other big speculative bubble that's happening. But there was strength in crypto. So Bitcoin was up 2 1/2% this week. ETH was up 8% this week. So not only did we have unique strength in crypto, but we had unique strength in eth as well. The ratio, the bitcoin ether ratio is up 16% since the start of June.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Wow.

[Ryan]

I'm going to call the ratio, the ratio is edging at this present moment.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Do you think the ratio bottomed?

[Ryan]

I mean, the ratio was way lower right before Tom Lee bought it. So it was at 018 back in April of 2025 in the absolute depths. And then, and then Tom Lee added 130% to the ETH BTC ratio and then we have retraced that 100 by 30%. So we're 30% lower from the Tom Lee top. But since the bottom we were up 8, 18%. We're still kind of trending post. We're trending down from the, from the Tom Lee top. But like, hey, I'm watching it.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I'm watching you think that a part of this was Robin Hood chain and some attraction. I know we'll discuss that a little bit later in the episode. But there's some energy coming from that sector of crypto and that is in the Ethereum expanded universe.

[Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. The uni Token was up 11% because Uniswap V3 and V4 are seeing very high volumes. The Athena token is up 12% because Athena is integrated into Robinhood chain. Morpho is also up in double digits. And so the Ethereum ecosystem defi tokens are definitely up. So I think. I don't know how else to explain the eth, the unique ETH price this week other than Robinhood chain. So I think that's fair. I think that's right.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Well, let's check in on Michael Saylor and you also mentioned Tom Lee, so maybe we should check on him too. So sailor on the week has purchased more cash. He has more cash reserves. Last week we were purchased. He's purchased cash? Yes, he's purchased cash.

[Ryan]

With what did he sell?

[Unidentified Co-host]

He sold his. He inflated some microstrategy. So this is at the market sales.

[Ryan]

He turned on the money printer.

[Unidentified Co-host]

He turned on the MSTR money printer printer and bought it was. Which is different from last week. So last week he was building his reserves. How much bitcoin did he sell last week? Reported a few million, right? 300, 400 million? Something like that.

[Ryan]

Yeah, yeah. It was like some single digit thousands of bitcoin he sold.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah. And this week maybe double digits.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Co-host]

This week what? Zero.

[Ryan]

Zero Bitcoin. He sold zero Bitcoin this week.

[Unidentified Co-host]

This week? This week he sold zero Bitcoin. But he managed to raise 466 million by. By. By inflating some MSCR, which is impressive. I didn't know he could still do that. We thought he was kind of out of bullets, but man, he's never out of bullets, is he?

[Ryan]

Well, he gets to do whatever he wants. So yeah. $466 million of MSCR. They now have six. $3 billion of cash. So have a $3 billion cash position. That will give them 30 months of dividend coverage in just cash. Excuse me, did I say 30? Yeah, 20. 20 months. 20 months. And so I think if we go back to this chart, Ryan.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, this chart.

[Ryan]

20 months gets him into the pre bowl section. That's early 2020. Not even. Not even.

[Unidentified Co-host]

That gets us to 2028. That gets us into the bull market fully.

[Ryan]

That gets us so. So he has until the pre bowl to first bowl section shift. You're looking at this picture. Yeah, Buys in plenty of time. So who's bigger? Michael Saylor or the cycles?

[Unidentified Co-host]

Cycles always bigger.

[Ryan]

Who's bigger, cycle's bigger.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Don't fade the cycle. Look at the tattoo, man. Don't fade the cycle. Okay, so he's fine for the cycle. We just assume that. Now there's of course a bear take on this. This Peter Schiff loves giving the bear take on anything Saylor does. By selling MSTR at a huge discount to bitcoin value per share, you needlessly destroyed shareholder value just to avoid selling bitcoin. Well, yeah, that's the point. That's.

[Ryan]

I will say that that is a, that's a bear case for mstr, not for Bitcoin. Of course he's not talking about bitcoin.

[Unidentified Co-host]

That's actually bullish for bitcoin and in a way it's not. Maybe as, as long as you increase your bitcoin per share. I'm not sure what it looks like on the week, but that, that's the end goal that MSTR holders should actually want. The bold take on this from Dylan LeClaire is stronger credit, stronger equity, more bitcoin by not selling it. So it shores up the balance sheet. On the other side of things, I feel like Tom Lee is making miracles happen. I have no idea where he's getting this cash because it's not from preferred shares right now, it's not from kind of debt based instruments. But he has increased what he made a big buy this week. You said every single day I get this notification. I don't know what you're subscribed to. I wake up Tom Lee notifications when he's.

[Ryan]

Yeah, this is a telegram. Telegram notification from. Look on Chain is just like, it's just, it's a really good like kind of feed of stuff that's happening on Chain.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And like every single day it's like in the notification I see Tom Lee's face. Like I haven't, I haven't clicked on the notification yet, but the bubble is up on my phone and I see Tom Lee's face just staring at me. So through all of these, he bought

[Unidentified Co-host]

more eth through all of these purchases Tom, Tom Lee is making every single day or like all the days that, that David is waking up and looking at it. He now has 4.8% of all ETH supply. That's 5.77 million ETH supply. That is 96% of the way to what he said he was trying to do was reach 5% of all eth supply. He did this in a year and he's doing it during a bear market. And this is a quite A quite a bear market for ETH holders in particular. Right. Because there's the feeling that ETH kind of skipped last cycle and Tom Lee is doing this and he's somehow raising the cash in order to get to his 5%. Pretty incredible.

[Ryan]

Yeah, pretty incredible. Pretty incredible. He needs to retract his 5% target.

[Unidentified Co-host]

What do you mean?

[Ryan]

He has to blow past it.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Raise that.

[Ryan]

He has to blow right past it.

[Unidentified Co-host]

You want him to get to what, 7%, 8%, as much as he can.

[Ryan]

As much. Well, unfortunately if he gets past like 33%, that's a huge problem.

[Unidentified Co-host]

He's not 33%. That's in. That's insane. That's.

[Ryan]

He did, he did five.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Can't be done.

[Ryan]

That is insane. We said five. We said 5% was insane.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I thought it was insane and he's done this. But I, I, I think it start to be diminishing returns and into negative return territory if he starts acquiring into the double digit mode. But you do think he should raise his target from 5% to something higher.

[Ryan]

It's just bearish for him to be like, okay, I'm done, I'm not buying anymore.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, I mean this, this could be an incredible investment for him, an incredible position to take if ETH does resume its ascent, which is to be determined at this point. But Tom Lee is, I mean, I

[Ryan]

don't even know if it needs to do that. I think ETH just needs to track the crypto market. And Tom Lee will do decently well.

[Unidentified Co-host]

He'll do pretty well. Yeah, he'll do pretty well. But Tom Lee of course is also a fan of Robinhood Chain, which we're going to discuss next. He said this about Robinhood Chain. One of the biggest crypto success stories of this year is the breakaway success of the Robinhood L. Two dollar volumes have exceeded $1 billion and Robinhood chain has now more trading volume than any other. Dex, I don't know about that last part. I think you did some math on that. But we'll talk about that. Want to dive into the Robinhood chain the ways it is amazing making talk about Jesse's quote of base eating shit. Talk about maybe ETH tokenomics. If ETH holders actually benefit from the success of Robinhood chain and a lot more. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible.

[Ryan]

Trading is changing. Not gradually right now. OKEx just launched trading bots directly inside the OK X app grid trading DCA arbitrage. You set your strategy once and it executes around the clock. No staring at charts all day. No manual entries, no missing moves while you're asleep. And for the first time, automated trading actually feels simple. But OkX is is thinking bigger than just trading. They also launched the Agent Payments Protocol, an open standard that lets AI agents execute full commercial transactions on chain. The Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap and AWS are already building on it. And now it's live inside the United States. And new users who deposit and trade can get up to $500 in Bitcoin through the bankless link. The link is in the Show Notes to learn more, not investment advice. Not available in New York or Texas markets. Don't move one asset at a time. One day it's Bitcoin, the next Nvidia, then Gold, and then the S and P. But most traders are still managing their portfolio across different platforms, different accounts and different pools of capital. Bitget just changed that. Their new Stocks 2.0 products lets you trade tokenized equities directly with USDT, all inside the same app you already use for crypto. This is not just another tokenized stock product. Stocks 2.0 is designed around deeper liquidity, faster execution, and the lowest fees in the market. At just point zero, 4%. And one to one economic exposure to the underlying stock dividends, stock splits and other corporate actions are reflected automatically, helping your position stay aligned with the asset you actually want. Exposure to one platform, one account, multiple markets, crypto equities, commodities and more. All accessible with USDT Bitget Trade smarter. Start trading today through the link in the Show Notes. This is not investment advice. So this week, Robinhood chain usage flipped base on July 10. So six days ago, from the time of recording user operations per second. That's like a metric, refined metric for measuring usage basically from layer 2B. 117 user operations per second on Robinhood chain. We're just 93 on base. And Robinhood chain just of course launched just a couple weeks ago. So very quick ascent by Robinhood Chain. There's just. There's just actually way more metrics that we should go into. What's the number one activity on Robinhood chain? Obviously, memes, we know this. The protocol TVL. The number one protocol TVL is Morpho at $152 million. That's because inside of the Robinhood app, you can get 7% on your dollars. And in the background it's the Defi Mullet. It's Morpho on Robinhood chain.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Is that the Robinhood app? The app or is it their wallet app? Okay.

[Ryan]

The app that is the only thing about Robinhood Chain that I know of so far that is integrated in the Robinhood app is the 7% USDG deposited into Morpho. And there's $152 million of that Athena, $110 million Uniswap $40 million and Maple Finance $30 million TVL. And so pretty cool. Pretty cool. And naturally, all of the activity, all the user operations is very dominantly going to be meme coin trading. There is currently, Ryan, a pretty fierce competition to become the leader of a token launchpad on Robinhood chain. There is this one token launchpad that had dominance. They were the kings. They had won all the market share called Noxa and they were printing like $3 million a day. But they stopped because the team had political issues and they couldn't figure out how to split the pie fairly or something, so they just shut it down.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Oh my God.

[Ryan]

And so then now. Now like the second places are. Are fighting. So now it's between pawns and Flap and Hood Fun are three contenders for number one. But the throne of who is the number one token launchpad on Robinhood, that's the current meta of who's trying to figure that out.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Does it surprise you that just an established incumbent from Solana or something like Pump doesn't just enter and kind of dominate this? Why is this spawning new token launch pads? I mean, that's tech that we have already had.

[Ryan]

Yeah, you can buy Robinhood tokens on Pump Fund, but Pump Fund is an SVM logic, so it doesn't port to the evm. But there are. There have been other token launch pads like Zora and Flare that I'm kind of like, where was the readiness? Where were you guys deploy? Where. Where were you guys? But like, also I do kind of find that like the fact that this completely organic and unprepared is for some reason bullish. Like it feels very Darwin. Darwinian. Survival of the fittest.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And somewhat equitable, I guess, in that sense. And so we have two barometers now because we have two very big meme coins that are about the same size that launch in different ecosystems. So we have, we have Ansem's meme coin. Does that tell you about Ansem's meme coin?

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, I did. We talked about it.

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Okay.

[Ryan]

We have Ansem's meme coin and we have Cash Cat. And so Cash Cat is like, has been crowned the meme coin of Robinhood chain. Cash Cat was what Robinhood was going to be named or was named before it rebranded to Robinhood back in like the early, early lore of Robinhood. So now we have Cash Cat. And what's the market cap right now? Fully diluted valuation of 104 million. And what's the Anson coin? That's at $190 million. So in the same ballpark as each other, one's a Solana meme coin, one's a Robinhood meme coin. And in addition to that is like kind of a fight between two different ecosystems. But overall we have two Meme coins about the same size that launched around the same time at the market bottom globally. And so I'm kind of using this as a barometer of like A, ecosystems, but B, risk. And so if in my mind, if these meme coins do well, it's a barometer of just like people are on, people are playing the games.

[Unidentified Co-host]

It's also a fight, isn't it, between who's going to have the Meme coin empire. Is it going to be Robinhood right now or is Solana going to retain its?

[Ryan]

Would say. I would say that's right. Yeah. Like if Robinhood dominates Solana in meme coins, you would buy cash. Catch. But if you think Solana is going to dominate Meme coins, you buy Ansem. But the ansem is a little bit different because like a, you have the one dude who's like responsible on promoting it, whereas Cash Cat's a little bit more organic. But that's kind of like the activity and just like litmus test that's going

[Unidentified Co-host]

on downstream of this, I think related downstream. This is also a long time coming. Base, which is Coinbase's L2 and a competitor comparative point to Robinhood chain, has been on a path towards pivot for at least the last six months, let's say. This tweet from Jesse Pollock, who's the creator of Base, as you called him, lays it out very starkly. And this is the quote I was alluding to earlier in the episode. He said the collateral damage, talking about this year, how things have gone, has been an exercise in eating shit. He has a whole post about this. He describes the first quarter of 2026 as a punch to the face. What I got out of this episode was Jesse admitting that the social Coin creator, Coin direction, that base was going in and promoting both, I guess, on the platform. The infrastructure level, though, that was a bit more neutral, mainly up the app stack in terms of what the base app prioritized, what he as a leader of the base ecosystem prioritized this whole creator coin direction. He's saying that was wrong.

[Ryan]

Either it was wrong web3social, web3social.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Either it was wrong because it was too early, or maybe it's like wrong because it just like won't work. But it was the wrong direction for the base app and ecosystem. So the Farcaster Zora base thing that was very popular last summer that Jesse was spearheading and that looked like it would be the next thing he's saying that was the wrong direction. What we should have done instead of was focused on Internet of finance, basically the money types of things, the defi, the perps, the trading, these sorts of money primitives instead. And so he's admitting that he was wrong also stepping back from the base app and Kobe is now running the base team. So Jesse is going to be still involved in the base chain itself and the engineering development of that. But now Kobe is taking the lead on the app side of base and is clearly going to be prioritizing perps trading, making this a very friendly environment for that sort of class of person. What did you make of this?

[Ryan]

Yeah, I mean, this is the timing of this is absolutely downstream of Robinhood chain, obviously and Robinhood wallet. And so this is the context of this is just because, well, why did Robinhood do so well so quickly? Now Robin has a gargantuan in and of itself. And so they were always wanted to have some amount of success on their chain. But like the timing of this seems to be just because it's downstream of Robinhood's success, which feels like Coinbase is like, this should have been, should have been our success. And why wasn't it our success? I, I'm Jesse. When everyone was like yelling at him to stop doing the creator coin stuff, Jesse was like, I'm going to do the creator coin stuff.

[Unidentified Co-host]

He was like, it's conviction. It's conviction.

[Ryan]

Yeah. And like, I don't know, man, you gotta respect that to some degree.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

Like, he took a swing.

[Unidentified Co-host]

It was a big swing.

[Ryan]

He, he, he took a very big swing and he didn't listen to anyone. He was like disagreeable founder, which is bullish. And so you gotta tip the hat to that level of conviction in hindsight. Now that we have hindsight, 2020 hindsight bias, hindsight privilege. It's like, dude, that was so skeuomorphic. Like social was web 2. Crypto is web 3. And crypto is not social. Crypto is trading, maybe.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I mean, Jesse would still say, hey, the future's not written. You were just talking about A thing called. What is it, Cash, Cat and Ansem Coin. What is Ansom Coin? Well, it's a creator coin. Like it's in the vicinity. It could remanifest. But I think your part point is taken. This, this was a highly risk like conviction type move and maybe would have been better in a startup, to be honest, rather than kind of coinbase. Maybe the argument would be like, Coinbase should have done the safer play, which is continue to develop the financial use cases for which it was known. In fact, friend of the show Austin Campbell has a pretty harsh critique on this. He said that Base has been an outright failure and he gives reasons why.

[Ryan]

I know about that one.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, a strong take. He gives reasons why. It's a long post. He said Base was a distraction that harmed coinbase itself. Coinbase is not fixing what matters. Yeah, he was basically saying that it's a different matter when you're competing against Robinhood and Charles Schwab and Tradfi. Right. These are bigger boys than kind of like the former exchanges, Gemini and Kraken. So you have to compete in different league. And just asking the question, is Coinbase up to the task? And so far he's saying that Base has been an outright failure. I don't. I think that's going far too far.

[Ryan]

I mean, that's too far.

[Unidentified Co-host]

The tech works.

[Ryan]

This is now Base is still like the third largest chain in crypto.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yes. And this is not.

[Ryan]

Well, now it's fourth.

[Unidentified Co-host]

It is a pivot away, but it's kind of like a pivot of the application layer. You can still use the exact same infrastructure. I mean, and keep in mind, Robinhood's only been out for like what, three weeks and we're already calling like, oh, Robinhood won and Basis fell. Like, that's way too soon. Like we're getting way over our skis on that one. So that's a take that's going around as well.

[Ryan]

I will say that when BAS was launching, everyone was very stoked about Base, the chain. And why? Because BAS was going to get distribution from Coinbase, which is not something that any chain had ever had before. Ever was a centralized exchange or a big, large retail oriented.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Well, there was Binance, there's BNB chain.

[Ryan]

True. Yeah, true. Which was also bullish. Which was also bullish. And so, yeah, that's. That's when we got bas just BNB chain for white people in North America. And so like Robinhood saw that as like a free lesson. It's like, oh, well, if you have distribution, your chain is automatically bullish and people will come build on your chain because of the distribution that you're going to put on it. And so really, it ended up being a competition between Coinbase.com and the Robinhood app. And Coinbase.com has, as an app, has lagged Robinhood. Like, they were always between crypto and Tradfi. You know, crypto lost energy in 2022. And so this was a race for Coinbase to put stocks inside of Coinbase before Robinhood put crypto inside of Robinhood. And Coinbase has been somewhat slow. And so maybe to Austin's point, like, base was maybe a distraction, but I don't know. The company's big enough. You can go. You can chew gum and walk at the same time. I don't know if that. If one was really competing for oxygen versus the other, they'll figure it out.

[Unidentified Co-host]

And the chain strategy is there. I mean, compare it to like Inc. From Kraken, right? It's doing far better than that. So I think there's a strong base, shall we say, to build on top of. There's another question, though, that was brought to the ecosystem as a result of Robinhood's success, and that is the question of, okay, ETH price is going up, but the question is why? This was a tweet I saw fired around from an analyst at Ark Invest, who of course owns a whole bunch of crypto assets, including a pretty large share of ETH assets, maybe through Bitmine, some other mechanisms as well. But he says this, this is Lorenzo. The Robinhood chain is the cleanest case study of what happened to eth's economics over time. And then he goes through some stats. Since inception, robinhood chain did 816k in revenue, thousand in revenue. Arbitrum, the tech provider middleware, takes 10%. That's 80K of that, 816K. And then Arbitrum then pays Ethereum for settlement. And so far they've paid $1,538 to Ethereum. So if you look at the margins here of, like, who Wins? Robinhood gets 90% margins, Arbitrum gets 10% and Ethereum gets 0.15% for data availability. And so he goes on, he says, if your thesis is ETH is money, then Robinhood building here is ultra bullish. More activity, more ETH collateral, more lendiness. He's talking about, look, a lot of ETH is being used in these use cases being bridged across. ETH is being used as money.

[Ryan]

ETH is the trading pair with all the meme coins.

[Unidentified Co-host]

It's all quiddity Eth or at least net net. Marginally better for ETH than not having Robinhood chain. However, he says if your thesis is ETH is a revenue generating asset, this is the ultra Bear case. Because there's an uncomfortable truth. Robinhood was already going to build on Ethereum the whole time, so you haven't actually won anything. He's basically making the case that Eth, you could look at it this, you could say ETH is not collecting enough benefit for hosting a Layer two. He said a healthier split would be at least Ethereum captures 15% of this margin. So this is a long time question. Should L2s be paying more to Ethereum? And that's where we got Pollenia coming out of retirement. This is a famous L2 bull and poster from. I mean started five or six years ago, famously bullish on layer twos.

[Ryan]

The layer two model.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, and it just kind of has gone quiet. Jaded from lack of quality applications being built in the crypto ecosystem and has fallen silent for a couple of years. And Pollenia just came out with a, I guess an updated take on where the crypto market is. What is Plenia saying here?

[Ryan]

The way I read Pollenia's take was that there was. There is a tension between the scalability of supply blockchain, space supply that exploded. Block space supply exploded while demand for crypto kind of collapsed at the same time. And that made it very hard for the ethos money like model to. To come to fruition. And mainly because. What did he say? Demand growth for applications has been negligible relative to the increase in supply for the last four to five years. Further, the demand curve has proven to be highly inelastic. And so he, he kind of stays with his original concepts and ideas. I don't think he really updates them, but he kind of gives an account of just like well, we did expand supply but just demand hasn't really kept up and that's led to the economics that Ether Ether is at.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Well, I was, I was glad to see this. Plinia did admit that he was wrong about something. He said my expectations for growth in application demand from 2021 and 2023 posts have proven to be wrong. So he was wrong on the demand.

[Ryan]

The entire industry felt that.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, the entire industry felt this. But the core of his post is there are two paths for Ethereum right now and ETH value accrual, which is you could either subsidize transaction fees and simulate application demand to better compete in the trillion dollar alternative store of value market. So ETH as a store of value asset, in which case you don't care about fee revenue from L2s at all. You just care about ETH being used as money somewhere else. Or you could reduce the capacity drastically. So capacity of L2 block space, capacity of block space in general to hike transaction fees. And you play in the shrinking billion dollar transaction fee market and accept a $100 ETH as the end game. Those are the two paths. Do you agree that those are the two paths, David, or do you think that's somewhat of a false dichotomy here?

[Ryan]

False dichotomy? Super false dichotomy. Because the whole premise and structure and pattern of the Ethereum system is always about synergies and synthesizing and collapsing paths down to the same path. ETH is money because of the fees and the fees, if you like. If you value ETH on the revenue model, then yes, ETH is worth a hundred dollars, but that doesn't mean that that's what's going to happen. In my mind, you want to maximize fees because ETH is monetized through, through the fees. And so it's a. It's a little bit of like take the two binary directions that you think are we are pointing in and put them in the same path and go down both and do both. That's my attitude.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I think though, there's some truth in that. You have to pick one or the other, right? So you have to pick one or the other to optimize for, don't you?

[Ryan]

Yeah.

[Unidentified Co-host]

And so the way you put it here is you said eventually at the end game for max ETH value, fees won't and can't matter. I agree with you there. And you said ETH is money implies a market cap far higher than revenue could support. That's what Pliny was saying. I also agree with you.

[Ryan]

There's.

[Unidentified Co-host]

And then you say, but the bootstrapping process is different than the terminal environment for eth, different than that end state, you're saying, and the bootstrapping process requires fees. That line, the bootstrapping process requires fees. Okay, I'm not sure that it does anymore, or I'll throw this out at you. Like the last 10 years have been the bootstrapping process and now ETH no longer requires fees. So I'd be more on the side of like, I question that assumption. I don't think we actually need to care about fees anymore. And certainly we shouldn't be optimizing it. We should be Optimizing for scaling Ethereum and scaling ETH as a crops store of value asset. And if block space is super cheap to do that, go do blockspace. Who cares about fee revenue? Bitcoin doesn't care about fee revenue. Gold doesn't care about fee revenue. A store value asset shouldn't care about fee revenue. We're 10 years into the project now. ETH can afford to not care about fee revenue. That would be my case. But I think you still believe that fee revenue is important and there are others like you. I think donkrad has said this, you know, previously it's been part of his case. It's like no, actually fee revenue does matter and you should be prioritizing it. But I just see a hundred dollar asset at the end of that path and I've already seen the bootstrapping being done and I'm like now it's time to be a store of value asset and not worry about fee revenue at all.

[Ryan]

This week the ETH BTC ratio as we said earlier is edging upwards and it is not because of any of the fees that were collected with Robinhood chain either on the Robinhood chain or on the, on the layer one. And so if the reason why ETH is edging this week and it's up 8%, 9% to Bitcoin's 2 and a half percent, if that is because of Robinhood chain and the positive sentiment and momentum of Robinhood Chain, that is a huge point for the ETH is money crowd, the no fee crowd. I don't know. I don't know. I think I would ascribe more than 50% probability that that is why ETH moved this week, but not 100 because Tom Lee also bought this week.

[Unidentified Co-host]

This week and it's also just one week. I mean it's pretty, it's kind of noisy.

[Ryan]

It could be a random, it could be a random walk. Of course. I take, I take the point is the, the destination of like $100 eth because you value it on the DCA doesn't strike true to me because like when, when I see like a dollar of revenue is given some sort of like 2000 like DCF analysis. It's like so like for some reason like an Ethereum dollar of revenue is weighted so much higher than like Microsoft or Amazon. When I see that I'm like yeah, yeah, we should make more dollars then because we get a 2000x premium on the dollars that we make and so we should optimize for revenue like that.

[Unidentified Co-host]

But let me Let me throw another take that you may resonate with and might actually be true. So it's the idea that the human brain can't like contain and the scalability of a store of value can't contain multiple things at the same time. And if you're saying on the one hand it's a store of value, but it's also valued from fee revenue, it's hard to memetically treat the thing as a store of value asset if you're running it on calculations. So it's better to do the bitcoin thing which is just like, fees don't matter. Yeah, tough shit. Fees don't matter. And then you get semester. I remember socially, memetically, in the store of value camp. And so Ethereum is actually shooting itself in the foot on the social layer by talking about fees at all. Fees are not the point of ether. And I think if you push that understanding of what ether the asset is, which is it's a store value asset, it has all of the properties of Bitcoin and it also has defi smart contracts and you ignore fee revenue, you'll be doing like a much better service to kind of the narrative. And this is a memetic asset. Store value assets are that by nature. So don't talk about fee revenue is what I would say.

[Ryan]

Yeah, I think the bitcoiner, the bitcoiner archetype would agree with you because there was like a early process of like trying to get utility out of the bitcoin blockchain by like timestamping startups and that's right, startups that, that, that tried to like make the bitcoin blockchain useful. And all the bitcoiners are like, we need to drive that out of the blockchain because we need to remove any sort of value capture mechanism at all and we need to trim away everything from bitcoin other than BTC the asset. So I find that, I find that argument to be highly congruous. And so yeah, I do take that point. I do take that point.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Joseph Lubin weighed in here. He said Ethereum L1 revenue fees should stay low to foster growth. That's his reason for it. And he basically says eth will make it up on becoming a store of value asset, but want to keep the fees low and supply humming in order to attract more market share. So that's another take. We could get into some more on Ethereum L2 roadmaps. I don't know if we want to do that or just keep moving on.

[Ryan]

I do want to talk about Steven Goldfedder's. Did you call it Steven Goldfedder radicalism in the notes?

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, yeah. This is the founder of Arbitrum, right. Who had an interesting proposal to this dilemma was what was his take?

[Ryan]

Okay, so his proposal, this was on Twitter is. This is downstream of this exact conversation from the ARC analysis. He says Ethereum should adopt its largest rollups in the sense that a critical bug in Arbitrum Base or Robin Hood chain should be treated as an Ethereum vulnerability and trigger an L1 fork, just like an L1 bug would. Do you remember during the Eigen layer days, Ryan, when Vitalik wrote that article, don't overload Ethereum consists.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yes. Yeah.

[Ryan]

So Stephen Goldfedder is proposing to overload Ethereum consensus.

[Unidentified Co-host]

No, he's not. He's just saying. Just Arbitrum is not overloading.

[Ryan]

It just ad Arbitrary and. And base and Robinhood chain or. I think what he's saying is like any layer two ecosystem that is of sufficient critical mass, they get to, you know, do the regulatory capture game or regulatory arbitrage game and like, well, we get the protection of Ethereum, the Ethereum layer one, because we are big enough.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, I think that is what he's saying. And he's saying in exchange for that, we as L2s would be willing to pay more rent to ETH holders instead of the 0.15% that you're getting today. Maybe we'll do 10%, maybe we'll do 20% because the service is worth more to us because we no longer need a Security Council. We accept the sovereignty of Ethereum L1 and that's a fair exchange.

[Ryan]

Big government instead of state power, less

[Unidentified Co-host]

federalism, a bigger federal government, let's say. And so we'll give you more taxes because you're giving us a higher level of service. You know, like the analogy that we've often used is right. Right now it feels like many of the L2 is like Arbitrum are in kind of this, you know, like almost like a NATO security alliance, but they have their own sovereignty. It's kind of opt in. They don't pay that much. This would bring them closer to like a state in the union of chains, right under the sovereignty of the L1. In exchange they'd pay higher taxes. This is closer to the United Chains of Ethereum vision, but it does have the trade off of wow, you are really overloading the consensus and being dependent on this third party. Do you want this chain in the union or do you just add all of that capacity into the L1, where you have kind of like full, full control and full ability to make it crops the way you want it to.

[Ryan]

So something that Lorenzo said, the original tweet that spawned all this conversation, he was, he's talking about the dichotomy between ETH is money and ETH is a revenue generating asset. He goes, this is the uncomfortable truth. Robinhood was never going to build on Solana Sui or any monolithic layer one, which what you said is like, well, what if we just put the capacity on the Ethereum layer 1. Robinhood chain was never going to build on any other, other chain. So like the $1,538 that Ethereum layer 1 burned in blob space fees from Robinhood, it was never going to get in any other way be other than the L2 model. So you do have to take that point that like there was never going to be Robinhood organic adoption of like the Ethereum layer one. Yeah. And so I, I do take that point. What, what do you think about Steven, Steven's proposal?

[Unidentified Co-host]

I think that it's interesting. I think it's part of a negotiation of moving into a tighter, more coordinated, united format of L2S. I don't know if this is the proposal Ethereum should do. Right. There's lots of alternatives out there. One of which is just native rollups. Right. Stephen would say native rollups. You have to start from scratch. Doesn't have any state. There's no Robinhood chain. There's no distribution. It'll just be a nothing chain. And what's a native rollup? But a native rollup is exactly what Steven said, which is it will fork if Ethereum L1 forks. It's of part. The block space of a native rollup is Ethereum in a way that on an Arbitrum L2, it's not quite the same, has different guarantees. So that's a competing direction. So I guess I'm not opposed to it. I just think that it'll have to develop. We'll have to, it'll take years maybe to develop a different sort of contract relationship with L2s. And I'm not sure that with Steven, like, what if there was a fork in arbitrum land? You're telling me you're gonna fork? Like you lose the store of valueness of eth if the L1 is forking a bunch. If the L1 is forking a bunch, like you lose something really important here.

[Ryan]

I'm not totally sure about that. One of Ethereum's greatest skill sets is decentralized governance and decentralized coordination. And with Steven's proposal I'm kind of seeing that skillset and product that Ethereum has to offer the world being monetized because no other ecosystem has the level of decentralized coordination that Ethereum has. And like Steven's like you guys do this thing that's really valuable for us and would solve our problems and like allow us remove our Security Council and we would pay you a bunch of money for it and so you guys can monetize decentralized coordination. But it's also the game that Ethereum it's an ecosystem never wanted to get into. Do you think Preston Van Loon and like the Prismatic team and like all the other client teams of Ethereum are be like yeah, I would like to govern whether we do state changes on the Ethereum layer 1 so that ETH can be monetized more.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I don't know.

[Ryan]

I have another point before we move on. Before we move on I have one more point. Can you pull up open the Lorenzo chart that showed the value flows of like Robinhood getting 90% Robert home yeah. Say Ethereum got a much larger number than the $1,538 so of the total paying users of 816,000 DOL dollars what if Ethereum got a hundred thousand dollars of that rather than $1,500 of that? Would that be bullish or bearish for Ether the asset?

[Unidentified Co-host]

Bearish as hell. You're talking about a hundred dollar eth price fees don't matter. This is why I don't really dude,

[Ryan]

the market would send eth up if Robinhood was paying Ethereum layer 1 $150,000 in the first week that would send ETH upwards.

[Unidentified Co-host]

It would send it up on on the week and on and the 10 year it would just cap the top. It would cap the top at you know an asset that's worth a few hundred billion dollars max max rather than multi trillion dollar store value assets.

[Ryan]

I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if that's true.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I mean I, I think you do have to choose really and I think that maximizing for fees is like a hu would be a huge mistake for Ethereum is not the way formed but the community is somewhat divided on that and you could tell the narrative somewhat divided on that. David, we got more to discuss. We got another spinoff from the Ethereum foundation also the DTCC is Tokenizing things. Are they doing it on our public chains or not? We'll talk about all that and more, but before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this possible. Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle. How to navigate it the best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nadeau. He runs the Defi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 10:10 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years and this year we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most. So let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast, search the Defi Report Wherever you get your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show Notes, there's a new episode waiting for you now.

[David]

Hey Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor both at Banking Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads or

[Ryan]

you just appreciate what we do here

[David]

and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium and there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026.

[Ryan]

Another week, another Ethereum foundation spinoff. This is Now Eat Systems. This was the Ethereum Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force. Now is Eth Systems. This is a for profit, so the other two previous ones, Eth Labs and Ethereum Institutional, were nonprofits. This is a for profit is a in for profit financed by the same investors. So bit mine sharply. Joe Lubin these Eth treasury companies that are funding this, and this is trying to provide institutional privacy tools to build on Ethereum while giving enterprises the privacy that they need to do so. So former EF talent now in ETH systems. So I think we go 4 for 4, we lost one.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I think it's gotta be. That's gotta be it. That's gotta be all of them. So we have ETH Labs, which is protocol development, nonprofit. We have Ethereum Institutional, which is commercializing ETH for institutions, also nonprofit systems, which is institutional confidential, private transactions. And this is a for profit company, probably more tools and consulting type base. There was also this. David, I don't know if you saw this. Another member of the EF is leaving the EF to go join ETH Labs. So Francesco, after five years.

[Ryan]

Yeah, Francesco, Yeah, Francesco.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Okay. Do you know him?

[Ryan]

Yep, I'm pretty sure I've met him a handful of times.

[Unidentified Co-host]

He's five years of EF research and now he's going to ETH Labs. It's just interesting that there is now a repository, almost like a refugee camp for like EF people that want to leave because they're just kind of like done with it. EF no longer fits their mission. There's places now that can receive them and it'll be interesting to see whether ETH Labs grows in that way or shrinks over time or stays even or what happens there. But it's another outlet for people who are passionate and excited about contributing to the Ethereum ecosystem other than the ef. I think that's healthy.

[Ryan]

A lot of people are talking a lot of shit about DATs, Ryan. Like DATs are just terrible, terrible innovation, fake innovation. At least for one thing. With Ethereum they financed Alt E Fs, which I think is phenomenal.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Agreed. And by the way, I'm not one of those people. I think DATs have been fantastic for Ethereum in particular.

[Ryan]

For Ethereum? Yes, for Ethereum. Then there's a bunch of other DATs. You're like, I don't know about you,

[Unidentified Co-host]

I don't know about you, David. This is a Haseeb take that I know you wanted to get into, but we had been talking earlier in the year about all of these defi hacks. It seemed like every week, every month, hacks kept getting bigger and AI was partially to blame. Haseeb has a counter take on here and it's based on some, some data. So what's the take?

[Ryan]

Yeah, the take was the month of terrible hacks, which was April of this year was the top and in fact, hacks have gotten fewer and less significant ever since then. And so he sees. Calling the defi hackpocalypse, that was a false alarm. He goes, it's more than halfway through the year. And annualized dollars of hacks in DeFi in 2026 is lower than in 2025, even though that includes April, which was a gargantuan month, and kelp dao. So the. The number of hacks. Maybe I misspoke. The number of hacks is up, but the size of hacks fell even more than the number going up, which means those hackers are picking up smaller and smaller protocols and abandon where. As he called it. Actually, I like that word. Like the, The. The existential threat that AI imposed upon DeFi was kind of like the. For me, like the last draw that motivated me to sell my eth. Because, like, well, dude, if AI is just going to hack all these damn protocols and these protocols aren't actually growing in tvl then like, that's. What am I doing?

[David]

What am I.

[Ryan]

What's my ETH for? And, but Haseeb is saying is like, well, that the worst is actually behind us. Not.

[Unidentified Co-host]

What do you think? Do you think he's right?

[Ryan]

He's pretty smart.

[Unidentified Co-host]

I mean, he's just saying, like, there's, you know, when you talk about the hacks, there's something causal there. Right. And so the attackers get this AI advantage, but so do then the defenders.

[Ryan]

So. The defenders.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, and we harden our protocols and then. You know, the thing about this is, though, this could be somewhat lumpy in that it could happen every time there's a major AI breakthrough. That's one possibility. Or he's right. I mean, this be. Could just. Could have been the top. And the. The defi. Hack. Pop. Hackpocalypse was. Was overstated.

[David]

Maybe.

[Ryan]

Yeah, maybe. Hopefully now it's. Now it's about vault permutation risk. Do you listen to the premium feed episode that I did with my friend Andrew who's vault risk? Oh, dude, there's just a growing number of spaghetti permutations of vaults depositing into other vaults. Depositing into other vaults.

[Unidentified Co-host]

That sounds like trash.

[Ryan]

What you think? Exactly. What you think is like, oh, I'm gonna get like a 6% yield on my USCC and I'm only going to deposit into this one vault. Well, that vault deposits into four vaults, which deposits into four vaults, which deposits into four vaults. And one of them is just an eoa. And it just gets so messy so quickly and then. So that has Nothing to do with AI exploits and like, security and just everything to do with risk management, which, as you were saying, is just tradfi stuff.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah, it very much is. And somewhere where we could level up for sure. David, let's end the episode on a take that you had that I wanted to ask you about. You said the Buy and Burn token model is undefeated and you point to a few popular tokens that are doing well this cycle. Hyper Liquid, VVV and Lit all talk big games about burning their token. The point of a token is to be burnt. Maker had it right from the beginning all along. Maker had it right. Who knew?

[Ryan]

Make MakerDAO. MakerDAO.

[Unidentified Co-host]

What about, what about this model works for you and is working right now, do you think? Buy and Burn?

[Ryan]

Well, it's more about the fact that in 2026, our leading projects with the most energy and attention and growth are doing the Buy and Burn model. And so, like, hype is unequivocally very successful at it. VVV still, still new. Like, there's still a lot of VVV to be burned. But Venice, the project, Venice, the company is like, yeah, we want to. They said it on my podcast. We want to burn every last VVV token lit. The Ethereum layer 2 perp DEX wants to burn all of its tokens. If you scroll down, you'll see. I add JTO from jito. Jto, they just launched a JTX this week. It's a prosumer trading interface that basically wraps up Solana liquidity and assets and gives you a trading experience. And they burn 80% of the fees that they receive with JTO. So it's just like, dude, like, we've been debating the Buy and Burn model in crypto for forever, but just, we keep doing it. All the hot new projects that are on the frontier are like, yeah, and we're going to burn our token. And so I'm just like, dude, this

[Unidentified Co-host]

seems like two things to me. This seems like, number one, all of these tokens are generating revenue. It's fee revenue. So in order to burn things, you actually have to generate fee revenue. So that's number one, that's kind of the entry criteria. And then number two, what they're doing with the fee revenue is they're actually prioritizing token holder interest and fiduciary responsibilities to return the proceeds of that capital back to token holders. And they're taking that job seriously via burnout. Yeah, it's. It's something that previous teams have not Ansem actually Had a take on this.

[Ryan]

I will say on all of those tokens. Jito, vvv, Hype lit, all of those have equity structures.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah. And that's not preventing them from doing this.

[Ryan]

Nope, nope. And they just like the way that we're aligned is we're going to burn the token.

[Unidentified Co-host]

This was a tweet that's. It's somewhat of an iteration on your take, but I think it's worth talking about. This is from Anson. He says, I have a thesis that buybacks don't actually work. Hyperliquid makes 800 million annualized revenue. Pump Fund makes 440 annualized revenue. But hype trades at 65 billion, whereas pump trades at 1.4 billion. Why the discrepancy? They're both buy and burn. Pump is just half Hyper liquid. Shouldn't it be half the valuation? And he goes on. Yes, some more detail. But what he's saying is the difference is not in actual revenue generation by the business, but instead of the trust premium ascribed to the team. He's making the point that a pump makes tons of revenue, but they've done other things. They raised a billion dollars in the ico. They promised an airdrop to users that were never delivered. Even though they have a consistent business model, they haven't shown social alignment with their holders. Whereas Hyperliquid is like no VCs from the beginning, Reward Insider didn't promise anything. Yeah. And so what he's saying is, in addition to just a buy and burn mechanic and cash flows going back to token holders, there's something to do with like, there's some kind of a trust premium that's happening with some of these assets. Like are they going to in the future care about and prioritize token holder interests above all of their other competing interests. He's making the case that Hype has that and Pump right now does not. And that's why it has such a premium.

[Ryan]

I'm reminded of Vitalik's legitimacy article that we talked about. Like Hyper Liquid is. Feels very legitimate and they've won hearts and minds about legitimacy. And so that's kind of like the squishy, squishy social thing. But like one part of an article is just like, yeah, you're talking about revenue quality, revenue durability. I think people are not saying, they're saying that pumps revenue is just not as durable as hyper liquids revenue because meme coin trading is just not as durable as the perpetual.

[Unidentified Co-host]

Yeah.

[Ryan]

And so one, one, one a little bit. This is like the squishy squissy social thing and then a little bit of just like, okay, what's the quality of the actual dollar being produced? Because did the market will ascribe a premium for dollars based on the nature of the business? Yeah.

[Unidentified Co-host]

A lot of token holders are voting with their feet, though. That's going to lead to better outcomes and higher quality tokens, I think. So. It's all a good thing.

[Ryan]

Bankless Nation. We'll be back in a week, but until then, Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But nonetheless, this frontier, it's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.